Still more thoughts about Crisis at Crusader Citadel

Icons

Yeah. So I ran the first half last night, and I have more thoughts. There are tons of spoilers here for a forty-year-old adventure, so be warned.

The session had its ups and down. It dragged. One of the players even talked about the AD&D mindset: plan what you're going to do, down to the number of torches! Do it, but the dice rolls will introduce complications. I think that just kills momentum. It was fine when we had all Saturday to play, but that's not the case for me anymore.

A thing I sometimes do is map an adventure onto the time available and say, “Okay, this is the halfway point and if we’re not here by this point, I have to make adjustments on the fly.” If I had done that, I think it would have been better; I should have said, “It’s really about two fights, we have three-and-a-half hours, we need to be starting the first fight within an hour.” I didn’t do that, so we got through part one in a little over three-and-a-half hours.

(I suppose that’s a kind of railroading, but given the purpose of the session, I think that’s acceptable. In an on-going campaign, I would find some other way that’s less choo-choo.)

We'll skip the real-world stuff that I had no control over, except that sometimes uncontrollable stuff happens.

I don't feel a need to run the second part as-is. I might run the whole thing again some day to try out ideas to streamline it.

I should have realized the setups for the fights drag because I found just that such a slog in solo play. Yes, the adventure seems to be basically a premise for two big fights, but getting the pieces in place is a hassle, and there has to be a better way to do that for 2022 gamers.

Let's briefly re-cap the scenes and what I think they bring to the adventure:

1. Part One:
   • Meet at the Harmon Building. (Get a clue that TEACHER is on the fritz.)
   • Get everything recapped by the reporter in the lobby, plus a bit of additional information. (Info: the name of the detective in charge of the task force, more info about the Crushers.)

   • Maybe be interviewed by the reporter. (Possible plot twist that doesn't pay off anywhere. You could maybe make it pay off; as it is, it gets negated, so it's just a colour point that might eat up a lot of time.)
   • Get to the police station (again, in both solo play and with people, this turned out to be a problem) and meet the detective. (Essentially: “Yes, we'll let you help! Why don't you take over?”) That gets you into the next part...
   • Get maps of Manning Enterprises and plan the ambush (setup).
   • Have a longish fight in the ambush.
2. Part Two:
   • Meet Dr. Patrovich and hear what the real plan is. (Informs you of your next goal.)
   • Meet escaped Crusaders, if any, an plan assault. (More planning.)
   • Fight.

Looking at that, getting to the police station is a hang-up. Both times I've played it, it was a problem: at least one character didn't have real movement powers. In a comic, we'd skip over it (“Minutes later, at the precinct…”) but with players at the table, you have to figure it out.

In retrospect, I might put Broyko, the police detective, at the Harmon Building, being interviewed by the reporter. How do we get to the police station then? Pfft; he’s got a car.

(Okay, in a modern interpretation, I wouldn’t even be in the lobby: I’d have the Crusaders have a website that’s acting weirdly, but the PCs figure out where the next theft will be — it’s not hard — and put the SWAT teams in the mix as plants in the building, and the reporter nearby. Adding more people is not going to make the Manning Enterprises fight crowded: it's already crowded AF, and that gives heroes someone to save. Use the stock characters from the rulebook.)

In a similar way, the fight in the second half rewards a lot of planning, but do you need that with a system like Icons? Retcons can carry a lot of weight here, and I'd give them a temporary Quality like “Intensive planning session” that they can activate for a retcon. (“Ah, we covered this...”)

There are at least two ways to get into the Citadel without being detected. If they need to brute force it, they can. Once they're in the headquarters, that second fight can start.

The storm is never explained, or made evident, besides the possiblity that an escaped Crusader might be dripping wet. If the player character powersets permit, I might even dramatize the storm by having lightning strike Patrovich’s plane and the PCs have to rescue him. It would give them a chance to do something else heroic, introduce the storm, and introduce Dr. Patrovich. It's a thought.

Anyway. Give the players ten minutes to plan. Execute the plan. Anything that they would reasonably have thought of is an Intellect test or an Advantage on the way. Do you remember that or did you think of it? Leave it to chance. Do you really want it to have happened? It’s a retcon.

So maybe it becomes something like:

1. Everybody tries to contact the Crusaders website; all fail to leave a message, so they know something's wrong. You out and out tell them; maybe there's a test in there for people with an appropriate specialty that gives them more information. Everybody gets five minutes of spotlight and they can use computer skills they happen to have.
2. Everybody figures out that the Crushers are probably going to attack the Manning Enterprises that night; you can do that as an Intellect test, or guide them to the info some other way. Maybe one of the heroes is listening to the police band radio; maybe they've researched the thefts; maybe they get the information off a conspiracy website. If some character really doesn't have a way to figure it out, they meet another character who drags them along.
   • Maybe the Crushers aren't hiding that they're going to show up.
   • Heck, maybe the Crushers sent a note: “You haven't been able to stop us yet. Tonight. Manning Enterprises, midnight.” Of course, they show up at ten p.m.
3. At Manning Enterprises, the Crushers show up. You have the fight, along with SWAT teams, Jessica Anderson, and J. B. Curtis, who get to actually show up in this version.
4. Part Two starts with rescuing Dr. Patrovich from some weather-related problem. He tells the heroes the problem...and that there's a deadline: The governor is sending in the military tomorrow at dawn.
5. Ten player minutes to plan, but in story it's half a day of intensive planning. Use retcons at outlined.
6. Fight.

Anyway, it's an idea. (Now that I've started thinking about it, no doubt I'll have ideas about what the various Crushers should actually be doing when the heroes break in. And the issue of how many Crushers versus how many PCs should be addressed.)

I wouldn't necessarily do things like this if it were an adventure about a mystery or one of the characters making a life choice or something like that. But this is an adventure about two big fights.