It's been a while. You haven't seen your crew in AGES. Not since the Catastrophe. But something needs your attention: a problem only you and your former team can solve. Looks like it's time to set the record straight in One Last Job!

One Last Job, by Grant Howitt, is a collaborative story game about the action genre. The setting and period are interchangeable, but the mechanics of the game pivot around this genre and setup: we are all characters who have worked together in the past to do something and that something ended up BAAADDDDDD. Betrayals, Deaths, Scars, Scorn, etc. You know-- your classic action movie setup. And you know what? It kills.

What's really cool and great about One Last Job is that character creation is done in play AND the players will describe one another's characters. After choosing a setting and a little background, the "boss" of our team begins to assemble the team. One by One. The "thing we're setting off to do" will have a "problem" and this "problem" can only be solved by the one man/woman with the skills to do it: Player 1. So Player 1 will then describe what they're doing when the boss shows up to recruit him or her. After they catch up and agree to do the mission, Player 1 recruits the next player doing exactly what the boss did last time.. and so forth.

Our group wanted Fantasy and we went with stopping a Demon Lord's rise to power. The big twist that we went with this evening was that we were doing Suicide Squad style. We were all major villains taking on a larger threat! We discovered that our group assembled to defeat the Demon Lord before, but it didn't all go to plan. A character betrayed the party during their last showdown.

I started off by playing the former betraying party member: Magherri the Succubus. Magherri controlled a palantir like device and contacted our first character, Carthak the barbarian in his shadowy castle made of thick stone. Carthak was warned by Magherri that Ogrim has returned and is gathering power and must meet at the stables outside a remote inn. The Demon Lord Ogrim's skeletal armies block the way and it's only by his strategic cunning can we dare assault his fortress! So, following after was gathering Vul'adan Ghul the Necromancer for her ability to handle the magical wards and traps, Sasha the occultist for only her insane god could grant her the vision to navigate the hallways of madness, and Tarion the thief for unlocking the relics of power which will disable Ogrim to be destroyed!

The game started off a little janky as I shook off the rust of playing this game and realizing I must explain both player AND GM parts to people. It's a dice pool game and we are trying to get X successful ticks to beat the obstacle of this scene. Success relies on getting other players to tell anecdotes about your character and their past to give them equipment, legendary tales of prowess, or scars from before.

Given the hard start of the game, things were running smoothly by the second GM and we're all understanding the flow of Grit, anecdotes, and throwing d10s around. Ogrim was finally killed.