THE DEVIL'S COCAINE
octaNe Playtest notes
July 2002
Well, I played octaNe yesterday with two friends. One made an Outlaw Biker, the other a High Plains Drifter, and we started the game out in New Texaco. I told the players my inspirational sources before we started the adventure, and I used a number of behind-the-scenes cuts as well. It was a blast. We tried to invoke all the rules, including the Rule of Rock and Roll and the Rule of Snacks (for playtesting purposes, of course). We decided to keep it pretty Psychotronic. Here’s an overview of the adventure:
The adventure seed came from two Reverend Horton Heat songs: “Bales of Cocaine” and “The Devil’s Chasin’ Me.” We played a Rockabilly/Psychobilly mix in the background. Of course, we started with "The Devil's Chasin' Me" and "Bales of Cocaine."
The game opened with a behind-the-scenes scene of a beautiful redhead in an azure gown, choking the life out of one of her henchmen in a Columbian drug plantation while threatening her other cowering subordinates that the loss of another shipment would be unacceptable. Of course, she was the devil, and the players knew it because they knew that those two songs were the adventure seed.
Cut to the players: the Outlaw Biker, Mike McGregor was cruisin’ down the highway under the hot sun. Somewhere in the distance, the lone figure of the High Plains Drifter, Johnny Gringo, was walking up the road, heading in the opposite direction. Then, a screaming plane with black smoke pouring out of it crashed into the road between them, kicking up dust. And bales of the cocaine spilled out. The devil’s cocaine.
They freed the co-pilot, who ran off, but only after being
stopped and interrogated by Johnny Gringo (“Where do you think you’re goin’,
Sally?”). As he ran off, the co-pilot cursed Johnny (“At Midnight the Devil
will come for your soul!” screamed in a bad Spanish accent at the top of my
lungs). I won’t go into all the details,
but there were some great lines and great narration, as the characters met,
decided to take the coke to
Meanwhile, as they headed toward
Cut: A dim, gritty bar. A man in a black suit sat at the bar drinking whiskey. The devil's messenger slid up and whispered quietly to him. The man nodded, looked at the messenger with his one red eye, and walked out of the bar. He came from the East.
Cut: An old, rusted-out cargo train being used as a passenger train. Inside, wandering back and forth collecting donations, a tall, thin, old organ grinder and his fat little monkey entertained the crowd. The monkey was carrying a long curved knife. They came from the West.
Cut: A long white hearse with a dead man at the wheel, rotting. The messenger approached, whispering in through the passenger window. The hearse's metallic robot voice accepted the mission (the corpse was really just a corpse, no undead here). The hearse was a smartcar assassin. He came from the North.
Nobody came from the South. The devil herself was down there.
At the climax, they had an encounter with the black-suit killer with the one red eye, which happened in a honky-tonk roadhouse on the highway. At the start of the fight, Johnny Gringo's player was able to incorporate his image of his character: sitting at the bar drinking, he shoots with his off hand without even pausing from his drink. The fight was wild: I’d given the antagonist a 3 hazard rating and the players spent all the (numerous) plot points they had collected throughout the adventure without managing to ever get Total Control (more on this in a minute). Some of the narration the players included to justify Plot Point spending were great, including narrating a little old Mexican woman praying with rosaries in the corner (help against the devil). Also, Mike McGregor's player described a plot point use through a flashback. The devil’s assassin was an the floor and on fire at this point, so the player of the Outlaw Biker narrated a flashback to a time his bike had caught fire, and he’d stamped it out… then he proceeded to stamp the burning assassin right into the floor.
In the end, however, they ran out of Plot points because we had overlooked the teamwork rules for splitting a hazard rating among characters, so when they ran out and were basically reduced to automatic results of 1, I narrated that Johnny Gringo was snatched up by the devil’s assassin (it was midnight, of course) and taken to the devil’s Columbian drug plantation in a cliffhanger ending.
Cut
to Mike McGregor driving his hog south under the hot sun through old