This is a summary of our group's monthly Astounding Pulp Adventure! session. For previous month's battle reports, click here TMP link or here TMP link
This month's theme featured a massive graveyard and more zombies than you can shake a slightly gnawed femur at. After last month's highly structured storyline, we felt that a looser plot was in order. Players were encouraged to show up with any sort of faction idea they wanted, and the Director's task was to improvise a script that would best accomodate the particular mix involved. Several old favorites from our "playtesting" period re-emerged, along with some new factions.
The Zamboni gang had not been faring well within the city, having suffered significant losses to Shadowy Avengers, Keystone Cops, Irish Communist Mobsters, and little old ladies with shopping carts. But Boss Zamboni was not about to throw in the towel. He was moving into a new neighborhood which was relatively crime-free (no competition), except for the occasional band of hooligans. Even better, the sprawling, nearby cemetary possessed huge mauseleums, some of which had underground tunnels and could be used for hidden storage areas and/or exchange points for illegal goods. So he sets up temporary headquarters in a nearby insane assylum, and sends out some muscle squads to take over a mauseleum or two.
Little did the Zamboni's realise that they were actually moving in on the "protected turf" of the Bayside Boys, a group of scrappy yet good-hearted, teenaged hooligans, who sometimes ended up in mischief, but always ended up thwarting the plans truly evil bad guys. The Bayside Boys were a little concerned about the Zamboni's, but were currently more focused on zombies, which had been showing up at the nearby, sprawling, cemetary and terrorizing the neighborhood. Their current focus was to get to the bottom of this zombie thing, and put an end to it.
Meanwhile, The Shadowy Avenger and his two masked sidekicks (Daphne and Cato) had also started investigating the neighborhood. Reports of zombies, werewolves, cultists, and Zamboni's had been trickling in through his network of informants. Though he generally tolerated the Bayside Boys, he suspected that this was perhaps too much for them to handle alone. Perhaps they had skirted the thin line between good and evil for too long and truly gone over to the dark side. The Shadow's focus, as always, was to eradicate evil in all of its forms.
Meanwhile,…. Several months earlier, a team of British secret agents had thwarted the plans of proto-nazi scientists in Alsace-Lorraine, who had been developing a serum to transform soldiers into werewolves. While these agents had been mostly successful in assaulting the compound, destroying the formula, and apprehending the scientists, one of the werewolves had escaped, with plans of starting his own army of lycanthropic soldiers. This proto-nazi werewolf had managed to inflict his curse on two unsuspecting American tourists. The two new, American werewolves were now on a quest to lift their curse and return to normal society. Living life on the run, they had heard of an holy church within the grounds of a vast cemetary, where-in might lie the answers to their problems.
Unbeknownst to eveyone else involved, Evelyn (the spunky reporter) had been followed back to America from the Belgian Congo (where she had been ditched by Jungle Jim the archeoligist) by cultists of the ancient serpent god Yig. Once in America, these worshipers of the snake god were able to establish a coven within the grounds of cemetary, abduct poor Evelyn, and begin practicing dark rites and ceremonies. Normally, they would have faced stiff competition for cultist followers from the local Cthulhu worshipers, but Ebon Marsh (the Cthulhu cult leader) had expired recently in Belin, and his followers were in dissaray. It was the dark rites of Yig which had animated the dead of the cemetary, causing the current zombie difficulty. The ceremony had yet to reach it's zenith, where poor Evelyn would be sacraficed to the snake god. That was to occur tonight.
Fast forward through a couple hours of good fun play and the end results are as follows: The Bayside Boys and the American Werewolves team up to reach the church, disrupt the cult, and rescue Evelyn from the sacraficial altar. This noble act might have been sufficient to lift the curse from the werewolves, but unfortunately it really wasn't. What had become of the holy priest who had resided in the church before the cult had arrived? The Bowery Boys certainly put an end to their zombie problem, but had left their home base unprotected. The Zamboni's had not only established their desired mauseleum base of operations, but also had finally thwarted the Masked Avenger (taking him captive??!!) and had kidnapped the Bayside Boys' chearleader girlfriends, who had been hiding in terror in the malt shop. All of this amidst the mangled corpses of hundreds of zombies.
What will happen in the next exciting episode…..
takes pics to show how the Halo figures compare, size-wise.
