Editing SGA 2007 Archive (section)

=The Terror of the Polywampus=
; Game System
: Homebrew
; Pitch
: Gather round young'uns and listen to me tale, the tale of mutants and science gone wrong. Up the river from here is the Hanford Nuclear Plant, where they made the atomic bomb and other devices of nuclear devastation!

:In the early days of Hanford, they were nay concerned with the toxic waste they created and much of it was dumped into a leach pond. Into this pond some ducks settled, but most died horribly from the radiation.

:But two of these ducks survived and mated. They laid a clutch of eggs, eggs that glowed at night. All but one of these eggs failed, but the last one, it hatched an abomination. It hatched the monster known as the…

:Polywampus!

:This foul beast was nay a duck, but a throwback to great beasts that once roamed the Earth's prehistory! It was born hungry and it et it's parents, then anything else it could corner: Jack rabbits, coyotes, and other critters. It grew and grew to an enormous size, bigger than a Clydesdale! It's bill is lined with sharp pointed teeth, and it's body is covered with green and brown feathers.

:It can chase you into the Columbia river and hunt you down, it can climb the sides of the valley snap your legs off! It can run faster than you can, and it will eat you whole! The only warning you'll get is it's cry:

:Wauuugh! Wauuugh!

:You hear that lads, it's too late…

:Wauuugh!

:What's that? Did you make that noise?

:Wauuugh! **Thoom** **Thoom**

:It canna be!

:WAUUGH!

:It's the Polywampus! Run! Run! Aieeee!

:'''**CRUNCH**'''

:You're a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout, and a giant, mutant Duck Monster just ate your Scout Leader. Can you defeat the Polywampus?
; Game Master
: John Reiher, AKA [[User:Kedamono|Kedamono]]
; Players
: Wanted 6, got 2, but they proved to be enough.
; Characters
::Friedrich Von Trapp: James
::The Barrio Kid: Cain
; Date
: February 10, 2007
; Technical Notes
: This is also a playtest of John's new RPG rules, the Pulp RPG System, so it's double the fun and double the pleasure. There's room for 6 players of all ages, and you'll be creating your characters at the game, just remember, they are kids, between 10 and 15 years old, out in the great outdoors!
; Recaps
:
::As playtests go, this one was success... it was the game that came up short. The two testers, Cain and his friend James did a thorough job of questioning my assumptions on how things work in my game. Since this was an alpha test, not a full blown playtest, that was to be expected. The system I used for doing task resolution was, well, clunky. What sounds good on paper, absolutely fails in an actual game play.
:
::First thing was that the supposedly unkillable monster, the muntant duck, the Polywampus, was dead easy to kill in two rounds of combat, with weapons such as a pellet pistol and even more deadly, a slingslot. That was a shocker, the slingshot was far more deadlier than the pellet gun, in fact, it was deadlier than a heavy pistol that I had defined.
:
::The fact that it was so simple for the players to kill the critter, points to a major flaw in the rules. It should have been more of a challenge, not a boys day out killing a duck. Even my red shirt NPCs were invulnerable! The polywampus bit one with a critical bite, and then the red shirt made a critical toughness roll and took no damage!
:
::So in closing, the rules did do what they were supposed to do, but they had unexpected side effects that made the game both deadly and hard to kill people with. I have to redo the rules and change the playtest so that it checks more things from the rules. 
:
::Thanks again to my playtesters!
:
; Player Thoughts
: 
; Additional GM Thoughts
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