I ran two GASLIGHT games at Historicon 2013 set in my representation of the town of Granville, IL. The first was a Pulp game in the continuing saga of Duke Morrison and his companions thwarting the plans of the evil Venusian invaders and their gangster minions.
The town of Granville is composed of several Litko buildings, some “scratch built” buildings made of something called War Foam, and Plasticville buildings. The overall effect is good. I wanted something that actually looked like a town. Litko just released six new Pulp buildings. I picked up three of them at Historicon and intend to pick up the last three by Christmas. There are a half dozen Plasticville buildings that I need to put together and paint, like the school, church, fruit stand, etc. I also need to cut some MDF into sidewalks. The ones pictured above are made of grey craft foam.
This is another view of the town, focusing on the gas station. I’m looking for a small brontosaurus to either go on top of the station or set out front as something for kids to play on, but I haven’t found just the right thing yet.
I used the rules from The GASLIGHT Compendium that were originally published in To Be Continued… by GASLIGHT. Each player had about four or five figures, usually two Main Characters and one or two extras. The sides consisted of:
- Player 1: Cpt. Duke Morrison and soldiers
- Player 2: Sgt. “Wrench” Web and soldiers
- Player 3: Lieutenant “Boats” Morgan and sailors
- Player 4: Crash Corrigan and his rocket infantry
- Player 5: MacDuff, Hallihan, and the rest of the Granville police
- Players 6 – 9: Venusians with either ray pistols or ray rifles
- Player 10: Horseface Harry, Smilin’ Jack, and his minions
- Player 11: Big Hans and his bruisers
- Player 12: Sky Masterson, Nathan Detroit, and his minions
- Player 13: Torpedo Brooks, Society Max, and his minions
- Player 14: The Slasher, Angie the Ox, and his minions
- Player 15: Bonnie, Baltimore Bennie, and her dolls
- Player 16: Professor Nannini, Gianna Nannini, and some lab workers
While it may look like the good guys are hopelessly outnumbered, in this scenario the gangsters were wild cards. While they’ve been doing the Venusians’ dirty work through six previous convention scenarios, the Venusians have refused to pay them. In this scenario, the gangsters begin scattered around town and are trying to find loot in compensation for services rendered. Only one gangster faction, consisting of two players’ worth of gangsters, can win, so they are competing with each other for the most loot. This puts the gangsters at odds with each other and creates opportunities for Venusians to trade any loot they find while searching for lab equipment for help.
The good guys have to stop both the gangsters and the Venusians.
The game was the typical GASLIGHT Pulp rollicking affair, which was enjoyed by all the players. There was lots of shooting, a big melee in the lab, and some use of cars as weapons. It’s never a good idea to stand in the street in Granville!
The second GASLIGHT game in Granville also involved many of the usual suspects. In this case, the Venusians, tired of their plans being disrupted by Duke Morrison, Boats Morgan, Wrench Webb and the rest of the gang have created a ray that turns humans into zombies. Duke and his buddies must get into Granville, rescue as many of the townspeople as possible, and gather up Professor Nannini’s equipment to be used to figure out how to defeat the zombie ray.
I used the rules from the free Zombies by GASLIGHT supplement that can be downloaded from gaslightrules.com and RPGNow.
In the first turn, there were only a few zombies on the table. The humans/survivors thought they could easily knock them out with well placed gunfire. The problem is that whenever humans make noise, a noise marker is placed on the table. At the end of each turn, zombies are generated at each noise marker. After the first turn of shooting, the town was swarming with zombies. I didn’t tell the players what I was doing, and it took them a couple of turns to figure it out and act more quietly.
One of the players found a truck and quietly loaded supplies on it inside a well-protected garage (bottom right of picture above). While he was doing this, the other players were busy in hand-to-hand combat with zombies and trying to rescue civilians. Several of the rescuers were infected and became zombies. When he broke out of the garage and headed to town, he had his men fire small arms out the back of the truck. This generated lots of zombies in his wake that ensured that few other humans would make it off the table behind him, so he won the game by a large margin. Victory was determined by 2 points for each human and 1 point for each unit of supplies take off the table.
In the end, I think both games were successful and that the players had a good time.
