The second game we played at FusonCon was the fourth installment of my Duke Morrison “story arc.”
I have run episode three several times. The “consensus” outcome of these several iterations was that part of Professor Naninni’s anti-gravity ray device was stolen and his daughter Gianna Naninni captured by the Venusians and their minions. In episode four, Duke Morrison and his buddies have traced the daughter and the equipment to a small Middle Eastern town in the desert.
The laboratory was on the second story of one of the buildings where Dr. Zillion was attempting to get the device working. Gianna was being “interviewed” on the second floor of another building. Finally, the safe in which the Venusians hold the money they use to pay their gangster minions is in a third building. These locations were unknown to the good guys. The bad guys were deployed within the town. Most of the good guys came from outside the town, on the other side of the wall, across broken ground.
There was a wrinkle for the Venusians. The gangsters decided that instead of working for the money that the Venusians doled out to them in small doses, that they could just steal the safe with all the money. A secondary objective for the gangsters, therefore, was to find and steal the safe.
Getting wind that an attack was imminent, the Venusians deployed on the rooftops. From that vantage they could see the advancing good guys. Now in previous instances of Duke Morrison games, the Venusians, with their Shoot number of 7, have done little damage. I was therefore surprised — and worried — when the Venusians began picking off “Boats” Morgan and his sailors. Boats and his team never reached the wall.
GASLIGHT, however, has a way of evening things out over time.
Meanwhile, Duke and a couple of his men raced to the wall of the town, where the found a conveniently-placed ladder. There were several entry points along the wall, but Duke determined to scale the wall to approach from an unexpected path.
At about the same time, Crash Corrigan and his rocket commandos landed on the roof of one of the buildings. After a quick melee with some female Venusians — which Crash and his folks may well have enjoyed, given the shapeliness of the average Venusian female’s figure — they rushed downstairs. During the melee, a Venusian woman threw one of the rocket men over the lip of the building. When he hit the ground, his rocket pack exploded, damaging the Model T that another group of Venusians had just gotten started.
Crash lost his two troopers in the roof scuffle, but he found Dr. Zillion inside the building, deeply involved in his experiments to recreate Professor Naninni’s anti-gravity ray. Crash dispatched the traitorous Dr. Zillion by throwing him into the machinery. He was incinerated, but so was Crash.
It was about this time that it seemed everyone who tried to fire jammed their weapons, including a Venusian woman who melted herself when her ray rifle exploded.
As the battle was raging at the town wall and inside Zillion’s lab, some of the thugs found and stole the safe. They didn’t want to take time to open it, so four of them carried it to a waiting Model T. The Venusians meanwhile suspected the gangsters were not being forthright and after several attempts melted the engine of the car. “Wrench” web had scaled the wall. Seeing the gangsters getting ready to drive off, he leapt on top of the car, fell through the canvass, killed the driver, threw him out the windshield, and then followed him out the broken window. The gangsters then became desperate to get the money, so they set a grenade near the safe and ran. The grenade didn’t blow up the safe, but it made a mess of the upholstery.
Some Turkish constabulary arrived to restore order. Earlier in the game, Brooks’ minions (minions of Torpedo Brooks) had stolen the gasoline truck from the small airstrip. They had been driving around the town, enjoying the Spring weather, just looking for a target for a dastardly and nefarious act. Just as the turks had eliminated Ugati (Zillion’s sidekick) and Wrench Web was on the verge of finding Gianna Naninni, Brooks ran his truck at the Turkish squad. He ran over a Turkish soldier and left from the vehicle just before it crashed into the wall and exploded, killing two more Turks.
While all this was going on, Duke Morrison had been run over and shot by another group of Venusian, then dragged into a building. Morrison’s loyal troops attempted to rescue him. They were aided by an errant shot from a Venusian female, which missed one of Morrison’s soldiers and hit one of he Venusians guarding Morrison’s limp body.
At this point, I judged the game has hit its culminating point. Morrison had been captured. Boats was knocked out. Crash Corrigan was hiding. Most of the Venusians were dead. I called the game a minor Venusians victory. They retained Gianna Naninni as a hostage and captured Duke Morrison, but their lab and Dr. Zillion had been destroyed.
I think everyone had a great time.