A few weeks ago, I ran octaNe for some friends -- the first role-playing game I’d GM’d in a looong time.  Here's my lengthy and detailed recap of how War Zeppelin of the Iron Man went!

(Cross-posted to RPG.net's actual play forums.)

Setting
The adventure I created, entitled "War Zeppelin of the Iron Man", runs octaNe's post-apocalyptic setting through the grinder of 1970s and 80s heavy metal: Black Sabbath, Dio, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, etc.

It takes place in the aftermath of the Hell Wars, when Satan made war upon the nations of the Earth. Now all lands east of the Mississippi are the domain of Hell, ruled by the Beast. In the Lands of the West, humans and mutants struggle to survive amid the desolation wrought by war. Many gather in the ruins of towns and cities, now turned to fortress-states protected by bands of Warriors. Others live a precarious existence in the radioactive Wastelands, where monsters, demons and war robots still roam, and eldritch sorcery warps space and time. It is a savage, hostile world, where uneasy truces are frequently broken by raiding and warfare.

Also, there are ninjas.

Over the past year the armies of the Beast have begun to venture West. Led by an armored general known as the Iron Man, legions of demonic War Pigs have laid waste to dozens of settlements and enslaved their citizens. The attack is heralded by a massive War Zeppelin that rains destruction on the human defenses, smashing them entirely. With the War Zeppelin at his command, the Iron Man cannot be stopped.

Now, a mystical figure known only as the Prophet calls the warriors of the West to a gathering on neutral ground. He has gone from settlement to settlement preaching a message of unity and hope; some say that he has come to deliver humanity from its torment, and overthrow the rule of the Beast...

Before we started I told my players that I considered this world to exist in the mind of "Todd", a pot-addled teenage Black Sabbath fan in the 1980s. One of the players suggested that Todd was sitting in the back of math class drawing all this stuff in his notebook, which turned out to be the perfect way to get people's heads around how octaNe works: the goal of the game is to create snapshots of characters doing something that Todd would think is awesome.

Cast
The Warriors of the fortress-state of Los Angeles:

• Erich Von Shadowcaster, a Metallurgist guitar wizard who wields darke magick (Aaron)
• Oraqle Goldwolf, a Witchy Chick from the mists of Avalon, Utah (Deleva)
• Bambi, a Frazetta Babe who roams the savage Wastelands with her chainmail bikini and really, really huge sword, challenging any who dare test her steel (Stephanie)
• Wally, a Crazed Aviator who can fly or fix anything, man (Eric)
• A nameless Ninja who walks the Earth in silence (Kelly)
• Karl, a Demon Biker and badass refugee of the Hell Wars (Ryan)

Rules Interpretations
Reading about the experiences of others, I was aware of some of octaNe's potential pitfalls. I decided on some rules interpretations that I hoped would keep the game from getting bogged down and non-fun.

Order of Action: I chose a literalist interpretation in which characters would act in order of Styles used: Characters using Daring go first, then Ingenuity, Craft, Charm, Might and Magic last. Totally weird and arbitrary, yes; but I didn't want the players to spend a lot of game time figuring out the order in which things should happen in a Scene. It worked just fine. Only once was a Magic-using character (the Ninja) left at the end of a Scene with nothing obvious to do, and I quickly offered her a solution (use your Ninja magic to teleport the party to the next Scene.)

Might and Magic: I kept Might and Magic as two separate Styles, but at the very end saw the error of my ways and combined them. Per Jared Sorenson's recommendation I allowed the players to either roll three dice on them as normal without spending Plot Points, or use them to reduce Hazards without requiring a roll.

Die Results: In octaNe, die results determine how much control the player has over the outcome of the Scene. Higher numbers mean the player has total control. Mid-range numbers divide control between player and Referee. Low numbers put all control in the Referee’s hands. In some cases, more than one player will have total control over a Scene. Per Ron Edwards’ recommendation, I decided to treat die results as a pass-the-conch consensual storytelling mechanism. Not "How much control over this Scene do I get vs. the Referee?" but "Which of us has control over the story now?" This worked fantastically well for us.

Plot Points: Plot Points were referred to as Rock Points. They could be gained as normal by dice results, or by doing something so great that I was compelled to throw the Horns of Rock.

Before starting I asked Deleva (the Witchy Chick) if she'd ever owned any books by V.C. Andrews. She said yes, and I gave her an extra Rock Point. I asked Aaron (the Metallurgist) if he'd ever owned any albums by Yngwie Malmsteen. He went to his CD rack and GOT THE CD OUT. He received two extra Rock Points.

Main Events

Prologue - As the Prophet tells the assembled delegates from the Cities of the West that he’s discovered an artifact from the Before Times that can break the power of the Iron Man, he is fatally shot and the PCs framed for the murder by their hated enemies, the Warriors of Bakersfield. The Iron Man attacks the assembly with his War Zeppelin and War Pigs, but the Prophet teleports the PCs away. With his dying breath sends them north across the Wastelands with his far-seeing Mystic Orb (locked onto the War Zeppelin’s location) to find the Hellion.

The Mob Rules - The PCs encounter a gang of mutant bikers in the Wastelands. Will they defeat the gang, be enslaved...or worse?

We Were Just Outside Barstow... - The PCs defeat a flock of fire-breathing devil bats attacking the town of Barstow, and learn the location of the Hellion.

Where Eagles Dare - The Crazed Aviator flies a rickety old plane through storm winds and lightning to the mountaintop where the Hellion lies entombed.

The Sentinels - The PCs must out-rock the stone guardians of the Hellion’s tomb to gain access.

The Hellion - The PCs activate the Hellion through technological and sorcerous means..but who dares fly it?

Screaming For Vengeance - With the Hellion under their control, the PCs must destroy the War Zeppelin, defeat the Warriors of Bakersfield and an army of War Pigs, and prevent the Iron Man from opening a Gateway to Hell over Los Angeles!

How We Played It
Telling the players that the first Scene was a low-consequence Prologue -- sort of an introductory cut-scene -- helped ease them into an unfamiliar game that operated on very different principles than the ones they were used to. I immediately threw hundreds of warriors at them coming from all sides, but they quickly sussed that their characters could do anything in this game, as long as it was awesome. The Ninja ran on top of people’s heads, striking with her katana; the Frazetta Babe with her mighty sword and the Crazed Aviator with his toolbox charged through the crowd, swinging with abandon; and the Witchy Chick conjured a flock of flesh-eating doves from her cloak. The Demon Biker seized a member of the Bakersfield crew and the Metallurgist cast a truth spell on him revealing that their leader, Squick, was behind the assassination.

The first three players to roll got die results of 6-6-6. I threw the Horns of Rock and all three got an extra Plot Point.

The PCs made short work of the bikers, but during combat I got partial control of the Scene and the Ninja lost an arm. This was a pretty shocking "yes, but" on my part, especially so early in the game. The Ninja's player was clearly taken aback, but thankfully she was willing to roll with it. I knew the Crazed Aviator's player pretty well, and was confident that when I gave him an opportunity he would build her an awesome robot arm with interchangeable tools and weapons.

Which he did, once the players saved the town of Barstow from an attack of fire-breathing Devil Bats. "Could the Devil Bats be ridden?" was the players' first question. Hell yes, I decided. Which led to the scene of a one-armed Ninja riding a fire-breathing Devil Bat across the sky, steering it with her nunchucks. I threw TWO Horns of Rock for that one.

Getting the party to tell the villagers of Barstow why they were there proved surprisingly difficult: the suspicious PCs didn't want to tell them anything. I was trying to figure out a Plan B to get them pointed in the Hellion's direction, but eventually they gave up just enough information to Summer’s Eve (a Comely Maiden) that she took them to meet the town’s ruler, Mayor McCheese: an ancient gent who sounded like Catherwood from the Firesign Theater, and whose head was completely encased in a giant googly-eyed plastic cheeseburger head with a top hat. Mayor McCheese told of seeing a storm-wreathed mountaintop in his youth that could only be accessed by air, and offered them the use of a rickety old plane called the Widowmaker to get there.

The Mayor McCheese sequence was like a rest break for me as GM. For a few minutes I could abandon my role as referee and relax into an entertaining infodump. I'll have the remember to build those types of fun NPCs in to future adventures. (I kept it short, remembering past games where the GM used scenes like this to monologue for 30 minutes about their campaign's backstory. Zzzzz.)

The Crazed Aviator successfully piloted the Widowmaker through the storm winds around the mountain's peak, but took me completely by surprise by flying the plane through the stone portal to the Hellion’s tomb, bypassing the encounter with the stone guardians entirely. I threw a crapload of Hazard points at him, but he made it! This act of derring-do was so fantastic that I decided there wasn’t a wall on the other side of the portal after all, and mentally redrew the map of the tomb.

I’d established that as long as the War Zep existed, the Iron Man couldn’t be beaten; so once they had the Hellion (activated by mechanical repair and magic) the PCs made it their first priority. The Aviator dropped the party onto the top of the Zeppelin. The Ninja cut a hole in the hull with her chainsaw katana arm attachment. As the Frazetta Babe bailed out of the Hellion, Stephanie rolled poorly so Bambi's treasured sword fell into the hole. She dove in after it, and as the Motley Crue song "Looks That Kill" blared from our boombox, she began to massacre the startled War Pigs within. The party fought their way through the Zeppelin as the Aviator destroyed its bomb bay with the Hellion’s guns. The Metallurgist immobilized the Zeppelin by conjuring two giant phantom bouncers in the sky, and the Witchy Chick destroyed the craft's control center. The party bailed out of the burning Zeppelin and descended to the ground using bat-winged jet packs they’d gotten from the Hellion. The phantom bouncers tossed the Zeppelin into the growing portal to Hell.

They mowed through hordes of War Pigs and destroyed their treacherous enemies the Warriors of Bakersfield at the entrance to the theater, killing their craven leader Squick in a most hideous and satisfying fashion. The Ninja teleported them to the theater's roof where the Iron Man had nearly completed the spell to open a Hell portal. The Ninja and her Devil Bat steed attacked the Iron Man, with a roll that gave me control over the outcome. I told Kelly that the attack would succeed, but she had to choose whether she or the Devil Bat would be wounded - maybe mortally. She reluctantly chose to sacrifice the Devil Bat, which flew between her and a necrotic blast from the gauntlet of the Iron Man.

After a pitched battle the Frazetta Babe impaled the Iron Man on her sword (wresting his sword out of his gauntleted hand), the Demon Biker used his Might to tear open the hole in his breastplate, and the Metallurgist shot a fireball into the gaping hole. The Iron Man exploded in a ball of violet fire, screaming, “Dark Father! I return to Thee!”

But meanwhile, the portal had opened, and demons were pouring out! In a suicidal move the Crazed Aviator flew the Hellion into the portal, guns blazing; but the Witchy Chick was also in control of the Scene, and said she would use sorcery to pull him back out. Here was the thing I was bracing myself for: two players with conflicting desires in control of the same event. Because Eric had gone first ,I left the outcome up to him. He allowed Deleva to negate his action and pull the Aviator out of Hell.

Merging Might with Magic, the Frazetta Babe used the Iron Man's sword and the sorcerous powers of the Metallurgist and Witchy Chick to close the portal. A moment before it closed the Crazed Aviator instructed the Heillion's AI to find the headquarters of Hell and destroy it. "Target acquired!" it shrieked, and disappeared into the void.

The citizens of Los Angeles poured into the street to cheer our heroes. Meanwhile, in the depths of Hell, a dark figure sat on a throne of skulls in the midst of a smashed and burning palace and vowed revenge...

The game ran for about six hours including a couple of 15-minute breaks, and we all had a fantastic time. As one of my players summed it up, "A+. Would play again."