Signs and Portents - The Starchild - help wanted

[IanBruntlett]

Hi,

I'm looking to run "The Starchild", a Signs and Portents Traveller two-part scenario.

Having read it, it seems to me to be heavy on referee-based explanations / exposition and light on activity.

Have you run this adventure? Could you give me some hints and tips on how to go about it? So far I've run Prison Planet (the preview of the book) and Signs and Portents "The Rescue".

TIA


Ian

 

[alex_greene]

If all else fails, throw in chase scenes and gratuitous combat and action scenes, where the characters are going all Vin Diesel or Jason Statham / The Transporter on the bad guys.

If the characters have a gifted child to protect, they've got to adopt a different set of tactics to the usual hairy balls kill them all bravado; they have to consider defensive tactics, keeping themselves between the child and harm until they can reach safety, then regrouping again.

To move the action along, have dead thugs happen to leave behind vital clues that will lead the characters' investigations onwards. And give them an immediate goal, e.g. a building on top of a ridge, or a cave a kilometre away, or something like that, which can give everyone a goal to move towards, fighting every inch of the way.

As long as you keep them rolling dice and scoring hits on bad guys, doing daring things like stealing the grav belts off them and taking to the air for aerial combat in and out of mist clouds and fog banks, they'll never care about the fact that you're not advancing the plot one little bit.

 

[IanBruntlett]

Thanks for the suggestions. Did some of your recommendations today and we had a good time and the adventure stopped at the point where the players were just about to enter the Rainbow Sun.

 

[simonh]

As Raymond Chandler famously said, if he was at a loss how to progress the plot or thought it was geting a bit boring, he just had two thugs with guns in their hands burst into the room.

Works like a charm.

One things that occurred to me recently was how Chinese cinema wire-fu martial arts could realy work with grav belts.

Simon Hibbs

 

[alex_greene]

I think I mentioned Jason Statham from The Transporter.

Works just as well for Jet Li or Chow - Yun Fat, too ...