Playset: Boomtown

Characters:

Reverend Isaiah Stone (Seth): A traveling con-man, currently posing as a preacher. Arrived in town a few months back taking advantage of the last preachers sudden absence. Appears to be a godly man but really, he's just in it for the money. Isaiah is partners with:

Jeddadiah Carlton (Drew): Partner in crime with Isaiah. Helps him take care of the church grounds, and of course scamming town members into donating more money to the church over their fears of damnation. Around a month or so Jeddadiah had a fling with:

Mary Colt (Sean): Wife of the Sheriff (Chester Colt), she has been around town for a while and struggles to deal with her husbands common drunken behavior. She is close friends with:

Ida Schwartz (Lizzie): Ida was happily married to Bobby Schwartz at some point after moving here. Bobby's considerable wealth has made her accustomed to a life of general leisure in a large house. But trouble arrives when she bumps into:

Lucille Schwartz (Sam): Bobby's first wife. Bobby was supposed to send for her at some point, but after a couple of years of waiting she came out to Boomtown to surprise him. After running into Ida and discovering Bobby had deceived them both, they hatched a plan to murder him and split his wealth! But now what to do with the guilt and the murder weapon... perhaps the preacher can help!

What all went down:

Lucille goes to Isaiah primarily to get rid of the murder weapons, which he agrees to hold for her but of course bleeds as much money as possible in the process. Meanwhile, Jeddadiah discovers that his one time fling in the basement of the hotel with Mary Stone has had some consequences -- Mary is pregnant! His unwillingness to sour his own reputation outweighs any feelings he might have for Mary so he responds hostilely. Also Ida doesn't really want to split the inheritance from Bobby's death with Lucille, and decides the best way to handle this is to win the favor of the sheriff (by any means necessary) and then pin the murder on Lucille.

Jeddadiah goes to talk to Mary, but is assaulted by the sheriff after refusing to an offer to have drink with Chester turns sour. This gives Jeddadiah the idea of using the sheriff's drunkenness to give Mary an excuse to leave him (and of course, a Man of God would have no choice but to shelter a pregnant woman tossed out by her husband). So when Isaiah catches wind of Lucille's plans to cross him, Jeddadiah refuses to run again instead wanting to stay and try and take care of Mary.

Lucille succeeds in planting dynamite in the church basement by pretending to be interested in starting a school there. Mary and Ida discover they have mutual interests in setting up Ida and Chester -- it'll give Mary an out and let Ida blame Isaiah for the murder (Ida also not trusting him anymore, but also wary of discussing her plans with Lucille and so unaware of Lucille's plans to blow up the church).

Jeddadiah stumbles upon Lucille trying to access the basement. After chasing her away, he and Isaiah go down to discover what Lucille was trying to do there. Meanwhile Ida and Chester go the church basement to try and find the murder weapons (and also be alone). Also Mary heads off to the church to look for Jeddadiah...

Everyone runs into each other in the basement. Shots are fired. Lucille returns to throw her Molotov Cocktail throw the basement window and blow everything up

Isaiah decides its time to leave. He shoves everyone out of his way and is soon long gone, scamming some other town. Everyone else doesn't make it out so well. The Molotov cocktail hits Jeddadiah in the face, missing the dynamite but still dealing him a serious injury. Before he can recover and leave town, both the fact he was scamming the town and that he is the father of Mary's child are discovered. Lucille is charged with the murder of Bobby, and is charged with billions of life sentences. Ida, while not charged with anything, is scarred by the events and lives out a joyless life. Mary is unable to leave the clutches of Chester and must raise her child in a drunken household.

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Five player Fiasco can always be a little tricky. The extra person means there is going to be more stuff going on. But this session still went pretty well. It helps that we sort of wound up playing fiasco by the book -- i.e. focusing on the seeded relationships rather than trying to work in scenes with the other characters. Generally when other characters were in the scene, they played small minor roles. This helped keep the information fire hose down a bit and let us really develop those seeded relationships. We also did the whole "spend pre-tilt laying out our schemes and post-tilt watching them fall apart" well. In 4-player fiasco, there is more wiggle room for focusing on the cross table relationships and what happens in the pre/post tilt scenes, but with 5, while we never intentionally set out to do everything by the book, it certainly helped that we did.

Thanks for the writeup, Drew.

The main thing I took away from this session was that I virtually switched characters - playing the oblivious, belligerent, drunken asshole sheriff was just a lot more fun than playing Lucille, who very quickly became both an outright enemy of, and vulnerable to, her principal Relationship characters, and thus had to operate by silent subterfuge.