Help me pulp up my adventure!

[DeadManSleeping]

I run a "meet-when-we-can" Spirit of the Century "campaign". Or, I hope I do. We've only done one adventure so far. I've got another one sort-of done, but I want your help making it better!

The basic outline is as follows

Intro - The heroes are at an open-house for New York's largest anti-prohibition organization (which also happens to be a prominent feminist organization). They meet the two most prominent members, M. Louise Gross and Ann Richter. Ms. Gross is the official leader, and Ann is an up-and-coming popular member of the group. After they're introduced to those two ladies, they're mobbed by club members who are attempting to garner support for their cause in the form of every penny the heroes may have. The heroes must defend their wallets with social grace!
A dark turn - Ann and Gross begin having a loud argument in the middle of the gathering. Ann seems to be advocating that the organization get more active, by going on a march through the streets of New York. Gross is having none of it, but Ann's words seem to be swaying everyone else in the room. It's clear, however, from what Gross says, that an unplanned march will just turn into a riot. It's up to the heroes to stop this!
No dice - When the heroes make too much headway against Ann, she drops all pretense of civility and leads her remaining followers in a riot. The local police chief, an anti-feminist and all-around unlikable fellow, brings out his boys to oppose the riot. In the midst of property destruction and police brutality, the heroes must find some way to end it all.
The villain revealed - After all is quieted down, Ann drops all pretense and reveals her intentions to bring down not only New York, but the entire U.S. She disappears into the New York crowd, and the heroes must catch her before she boards a boat out of the country!

That's a basic outline. I have some more supporting details, but I can't help but feel that the basic structure needs some punching up. Help me out?

[WinWin]

A socialist front for a deeper communist/fascist conspiracy?

A noble cause undermined by a foreign agent masquerading as the leader of a benign group that is out to destabilise the nation in order to prevent them from effectively engaging on the world stage...perhaps even a prelude to an invasion.

Perhaps include a few suspicious interested parties that attend the rallies or that are a part of Richter's entourage. Richter sounds German...Cue feminazi references.

Can lead in to all sorts of plotlines...perhaps this may help you flesh out your current story by thinking about how you want to direct the campaign.

[DeadManSleeping]

The campaign direction isn't the issue. It's basically a bunch of one-shots with a consistent cast. The current adventure is the concern.

Ann already has a backstory (Richter is also not her real name). She's a hell-raiser for the sake of it, and hates pretty much all government ever (she's a bit crazy). She also has ties to a campaign-spanning evil organization, but that won't do too much.

How can I make this particular session more action-packed and exciting?

[Kiero]

To quote Raymond Chandler:


Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

Emphasis mine.

[DeadManSleeping]

If I had players who were willing to go along with stuff and not nitpick the logic of any happenstance, that might work. However, with these guys, I need to have random action be justified. Unfortunately, I don't have any more room for random action with the current plot, as far as I can tell.

Really, I am perfectly aware of the Send In The Ninjas rule. If I weren't, I wouldn't be running Spirit of the Century.

[Kiero]

Sounds like your players haven't actually bought into the tropes of pulp, if they don't think random happenstance has a place.

[potatocubed]

I'm seeing two holes here:

1. No physical conflict. Pulp, at its core, is about winning by punching things. The adventure you've got set up has little of that - there'll be some violence in the riot, but you can't stop a mob by punching out the leader. Unless you can... perhaps Richter has seeded an otherwise harmless crowd with rabble-rousers who are driving them to riot. Take out the rabble-rousers and you defuse the riot.

Or failing that introduce some sort of non-fight physical challenge for the characters to face - a rooftop pursuit, a car chase, six bombs to disarm in six different locations, that sort of thing.

2. No character involvement. The characters, as I see it, have no reason to care what happens here. Nothing they care about is under direct threat, and even if it was it's a better deal for them to stay home and direct rioters away from their loved ones than it is for them to pursue Richter.

To combat this, tie the storyline more strongly to the characters' aspects. Pull in things they care about and have Richter bomb them.

Or have Richter get a special hate on for the characters: perhaps one of them exemplifies stability and Big Government; perhaps one stole an old boyfriend and she still bears a grudge. She sees them at the fundraiser and decides to make it personal. The rioting mob becomes a sort of background for the characters' own stories as they race to protect what they hold dear from Richter's chaotic influence.

Helpful?

[DeadManSleeping]

Number one is all good ideas and I'll use it (the mob was supposed to be a physical encounter, but you gave me a good way of structuring it).

Number two is...difficult. I have a hard time of knowing who's going to be at any given session before I run it, because these guys are incredibly awful at RSVPing and all RSVPing-related activities. It really gets on my nerves, but I can't do a thing about it.

[mint]

Could you give us their character creation blurbs and book titles and their more interesting aspects?
Pulp is all about random happenstance that turns out to be interconnected when it is at its most juicy.
Clearly, Ann is has a past with the Chief of Police, they had a brief tryst in Marakesh during the war and her suffragette ways left him a heartbroken and penniless man on the Djemaa el Fna. Since then he's has no truck with feminists.
Gross meanwhile roused the suffrage movement on her return to New York after many years in Berlin. She has secret sapphic tendencies and she knows she must conceal her love (for Ann?) or risk discrediting the suffrage movement.
She is torn between eloping back to Berlin with her sweetheart and standing up for the cause of all womenkind.
Maybe Ann is an anarchofeminist? Maybe her goal is to literally crush the patriarchy with force and not just crush the idea. She could be aiming to assassinate prominent men of industry. Bombing select gentlemen's clubs and leaving the ship of progress without captain!

[DeadManSleeping]

Characters: Like I said, I won't know who's coming very far in advance. I'll do what I can for that (which is why I set up a database for all the characters), but for now, I have no advance warning.
Ann: Since she's secretly an infiltrator into the feminist movement who serves a different organization, it'd be a bit difficult to insert her into the backstory of stuff. On the plus side, she doesn't need to be an anarchofeminist because she's already an anarchist. Quite a bit more psychotic!

At this point, I'm considering adding in a plot that seems entirely separate (like the theft of some significant piece of art or maybe even an item with a mystic legend), but when the heroes go to thwart it, they realize that its timing with the seemingly random riot is far too coincidental. The badguys were informed about it in advance by a shadowy figure. The plot thickens! And these guys can have guns.

I just hope that I can fit all that into one session easily.

[mint]

Can't hurt though right? (Also, I am angling to hear about your characters :P)
What I'd do is make a redundancy in the connections to the plot from the characters using their aspects.
As for Ann, even if she is working for another master, she can still have a past right? I am not sure I understand the problem.
Do add a plot that is seemingly unconnected. Or add three. Three works too. But one will do.
Maybe do something with competing anti-prohibitionist mobsters. They might even have tommy guns.

[DeadManSleeping]

I will totally add in the mobsters. I love mobsters. And tommy guns.

Ann is going to be a recurring character whose past will be revealed through a number of adventures (at least, that's the idea). She's a master of social infiltration, and none of the Centurions in my group has a Rapport even at the level of her Deceit. I'll drop hints, but if they want to be using her Aspects as weapons, they are going to have to do some legwork (as opposed to simple dice-tossing). Ideally, her consistency throughout adventures will make that easier to do (there is a system in the book for making reasonably guesses on Aspects even if you're not rolling a damn thing).

I'll write up some descriptions of the current Centurions, but I can't link you to the database. We're an RL group, and some of my friends like their privacy.

Frank Sly: Agent of the US government. Loves his country, hates commies, hates ghosts. Top skills: varying fighting skills and Stealth
Kay Colby: Social sort of character whose player hasn't uploaded his dang sheet to the dang database :smallannoyed:
Ref Milkeye: Monster hunter from Iceland. Somewhat uncivilized by any standard, he can also track by scent. Top skills: Mysteries
Jane Derringer [Retired?]: Thief, plain and simple. Top Skills: Sleight of Hand, Burglary, Deceit
Jenny Glass [Retired?]: Scientist whose experiments crossed over into the world of spooks and craziness. Has science/magic goggles. Top Skills: Science, Mysteries, Guns
The Mighty Thog [Retired?]: A version of Tarzan who ate his Wheaties. Smarter than he looks, but that's mostly because of the low bar. Top Skills: Might, Survival
Adrian Lovelock [Unplayed]: Wealthy businessman and veteran. Top Skills: Leadership, Endurance, Weapons
The Ferryman [Unplayed]: Part of a mystical society with connections to the Underworld (and not the criminal kind). Top Skills: Mysteries, Weapons, Stealth
Nellie Strange [Unplayed]: A dwarf acrobat. Top Skills: Weapons, Athletics, Resolve

Notice the three retired and three unplayed characters? Yeah, three people decided to switch characters after the first adventure. They all had different reasons, but it does mean three new characters to get used to. :smallsigh: