Players:
Ron as Hans Bischoff
Adrienne as Marjory Benthem
Shuo as Julian Winterbottom


Setting: Steampunk Submarine

Relationships and Needs:
Hans protects his drunk friend Julian and they share a need to stop the ship from sinking.
Julian and Marjory are rivaling scientists who share a need to get respect from their peers (at the Academy).
Hans and Marjory built the ill-fated Automaton together and are both trying to find the missing Captain.


Plot:
The S.S. Kraken submarine is sinking and her captain is missing. Julian has been pocketing spare (and not so spare) pieces of metal from all over the ship for his alcohol-powered invention. He persuades Marjory to indulge a little, before plucking some choice materials from her new project (The Automaton, Revised). She attempts to get revenge by welding the door to his chambers shut with her pinky-torch (a mechanical hand has so many uses), but to no avail. Hans confronts Julian and manages to wrangle some of the submarine's missing parts back, but comes no closer to finding the missing captain, who is himself rumoured to be a mechanical man. Julian is making a tentacle.
Gathered to watch the rather uneventful mermaid show, Marjory confesses her true admiration for inorganic life. Hans launches an expedition into the deep to find more metal, but fails. Julian and Marjory debate science while the ship is falling to pieces around them - Hans forced to arbitrate. When a large piece of metal pins Julian to the ground, Marjory encourages him to take on more steel - become more perfect - while Hans tries desperately to free him. Later, Julian tries to suppress the pain of moving around on his new metal tentacle leg with liquor. He admits to kidnapping the captain and disassembling him for parts. The last time he saw him was in a garbage shoot. Marjory is enraged that her secret love was treated thusly and together she and Hans take off to find the man so he can help restore the ship to sea-worthiness.
Eventually Marjory is able to reconstruct Captain Winston and they flee the ship. Julian makes it to the engine-room, but steam-technology gets the better of him. Hans, who tries to rush to his old friend's aid, is clubbed down by the angry and confused engineers.

Winston eventually leaves Marjory and garners the scientific fame she never could. With her hand rusting to pieces she starts a new project. Eventually she manages to make a small and shoddy simulacrum of him, but all it does is laugh at her.

Hans doesn't make it out of the engine room. He returns to consciousness often, but each time is beset by a new hazard until eventually he is killed - by the original Automaton no less.

Julian is saved by beautiful mer-maidens and learns to use his tentacle with more dexterity. He eventually sires two charming mer-babies and lives happily under the sea, teaching his children about the beauty of mechanical acquatic life. But he never forgets his dear friend from above, Hans.


Favourite moments:
I thought some of the best bits were in the epilogue - in particular Hans' tortured death sequence. I also liked how there was a reversal of fates for Julian and Marjory in the end.
And there were a couple of really cute scenes with Julian and Marjory: when he offered to console her for Winston's loss with his his tentacle-appendage; and when he tried to steal her pinky-welder to help repair the ship.


System:
Setting up the initial relationships and needs certainly worked well. Scene interactions were great for us, but I wasn’t always certain how to handle dice-pushing. I liked the delay of need-achievement until the second half of the game a lot. I liked the post-scene dice-exchange in the first half less.


Thanks for facilitating, Shuo! I think we all had a great time with this. Wish we had more scenes so we could delve into our characters pasts a bit more. Also, speaking of Kraken, I found a picture of a dead squid in the mail when I got home last night. Next stop, the Twilight Zone.