Fiasco

We played Fiasco as a quick pick-up game at Magpie Night after the planned session of My Life With Master sort of melted down due to GM burn out. I totally understand how that happens as it's what happened to me with the last session of our Dresden Files mini-arc.

I have to say that Fiasco pretty much works as advertised, which is a GM-less storytelling game that takes around two hours to play. We had four players with myself as the only one that had read the book and the session took just a little over the advertised two hours.

We used the Lucky Strike playset and created a story involving a hulking goldbricking bully, a fresh faced recruit with a gambling addiction, a conniving supply sergeant and a French prostitute. We basically ended up with two parallel scams going on, one involving the supply sergeant and the recruit trying to steal from the locals and the other involving the bully and the prostitute attempting to recover a cache of stolen goods hidden behind enemy lines. Connecting the two threads were a case of cognac and a truck that was needed to pull off both scams.

Of course, both plans ended in near disaster, but somewhat surprisingly everyone made it out alive. The bully ended up getting a medal after nearly getting shot to death while going after the cache. The prostitute ended up marrying the bully and moving to the states after having managed to secret away part of the cache, something she never bothered to tell her new husband. The fresh raced recruit also got shot up, but survived and went on with his life neither better off nor worse off than he began the story. Only the supply sergeant ended up with a bad ending. A final twist at the end revealed him as a German agent, but it turned out that his superiors weren't happy with his performance and threw him in prison where he stayed until "liberated" by Americans, one of which recognized him as the "supply sergeant" allowing him to go free, albeit without job or prospects.

This is definitely a storytelling game more than an RPG, but everyone enjoyed it so I'm sure we'll play it again before too long. One player has expressed interest in using "The Ice" playset included in the book, while another player is already working on their own playset!