The Road To Perilous Island: Soerabaja!

For this week's tale of adventure, Bryan and I were joined by my wife Grace and our friend Jenn. Grace was in charge of The Rocketeam, a band of jetpack-wearing daredevils, and Jenn had a rough-and-ready group of Western types called the Bill Hillies, named for their leader, Banjo Bill. Rather than a free-for-all, we decided to create informal teams: the Rocketeam joined the Okkulten Forschungabteilung, while the Bill Hillies teamed up with The Shadow and his cronies.

Grace, Jenn and Bryan preparing to explore the (much more ruinous than you might have thought) city of Soerabaja.

The scenario takes place in Soerabaja, Indonesia, and is the final step in our quest to find the location of Perilous Island. Our main objective was to find an old sailor who could tell us where the island lies, but before we could find him, we had to do some legwork around the town and collect other clues.

Deployment had our characters scattered all over the board, which meant we were getting into fights right from the first turn.

The Extremely Perilous Bridge. I started with 3 figures on the bridge; one died right away (you can see him on the ground at the far end), one spent the game getting knocked down and getting back up again, never moving from her starting position, and the third managed to reach the plot point in the center of the bridge, but could never pass the challenge.

The Shadow, with Elyssia of the Bill Hillies, fight for possession of one of the plot points against two rocketeers.

In the far corner, Mr. Wu and one of the Shadow's mooks race towards another plot point, while Gertie from the She-Wolves chases them to try and beat them up.

We each placed one plot point at the start of the game, and I was the only person who decided to put their plot point in perilous terrain, while everybody else opted to just have them in the middle of the street. Here we see Bertie (no relation to Gertie) picking up a plot point, while a rocketeer lands to punch her up.

Ilse of the She-Wolves continues getting up and falling down, the German trooper continues to try and get the plot point, and Shabby from the Bill Hillies stumbles his way to the top of bridge, while a rocketeer hovers over all of them.

Black Sascha, the leader of the Okkulten Forschungabteilung, rushes Banjo Bill for what she hopes will be an old-fashioned, down-home ass kicking, but despite wielding Weapon X against the banjoist, the combat is inconclusive, with nobody injured on either side.

Gertie manages to brain one of The Shadow's minions and traps Mr. Wu in an alley, with one of the She-Wolves and a German trooper at the other end!

Unfortunately, Gertie was never able to give Mr. Wu the fate that was approaching from both directions, because we had to call the game at the end of that turn - it was past 10:30, and Jenn and I both had to work the next (Sunday) morning.

The Shadow was the overall winner, with 2 plot points. We never did find The Old Sailor, so the Reputation rewards were minimal for everyone.

This scenario felt quite a bit more chaotic (not in a good way) and lacking in focus than the other ones we have done in the campaign. I don't think it's a function of the scenario design, but probably entirely attributable to the fact that we had 4 people playing this time, two of whom had never played the rules before.

Also, there was a Red Herring mechanic built in, where you never knew if the Plot Point you were collecting was real or a decoy until you drew the reward card for it, but the Red Herring card never came out of the deck. It might have made things a bit better if we were chasing plot points around the board a bit more. As it was, everybody (except me) put their PPs out where they were easy to grab, so the PPs were in peoples' possession basically from the first turn, which turned the game into a "kill the other guy" scenario rather than an objective-based scenario.

All that said, we had fun, and we finally know where to find Perilous Island. To the ships!