Fiasco!
On Wednesday night, Sarah, John, Chris and I playtested Jason Morningstar’s beta game Fiasco, which he describes as being about “big ambition and poor impulse control.” It’s a state-of-the-art, GM-less game where the players build situations where crisis is just around the corner: think Fargo, Burn After Reading, Blood Simple, Double Indemnity. Then they wind up this tragedy engine and let it go, playing characters in an improv drama whose situation they’ve just specified. There’s usually going a simple plan, and then some complications, some backstabbing and betrayal, probably some murder. Characters often will ruefully remember that at one time, whatever they did seemed like a good idea, often as a guy with a sniffle and an extravagant collection of facial tattoos force-feeds them Ex-Lax after chaining their ankles to either side of a well-used concrete trough. Happy endings are rare.
Our game never quite got that dire — just a little pâté of murder in a tart betrayal aspic. I started up a discussion at Story Games, where there’s a summary. But I also wrote a detailed, scene-by-scene report and figured that this would be a better place for that. So, check after the jump for a story of armed foolishness on the Gulf Coast, a story of unknown paternity, unexpected tenderness, greed, revenge, and running over a guy in a wheelchair who had already been gut-shot and had his fingers broken. Fun times!
Our characters were (played by me, John, Chris, and Sarah): Drug dealer, fence, and all-around local criminal mastermind Spencer “Spider” Parrish. Manipulative, unlucky Sheriff Beauregard “Bo” Tannen, the man with the plan. Scatterbrained, greedy Deputy Jimmie Thornton IV (”the four-oh”). Cheerleader with a heart of gold (or something about as dense) Heidi Jo Summers.
Our setting: Hillview, LA, just north of New Orleans. Population 4000, elev. 2. Those were two very important feet – Hillview had water in the streets after Katrina, but not the kitchens.
We opened up with Spider and Sheriff Bo coming to terms over fencing the ill-gotten gains of Bo and Jimmie’s looting in New Orleans. I decided Spider wanted to split up the Sheriff and the Deupty – not sure why yet – and had him try to agree to a 45-50-5 split, with 45% to Spider, 50% to Bo and Jimmie, and that 5% as a soupçle;on to Bo. Bo browbeat Spider into a smaller share but took the extra share. I announced that Spider would be cheating.
Then, Heidi Jo came to Spider looking to get him to take a paternity test, the kind you can buy in a drug store. She told him that she had Deputy Jimmie waiting outside the hotel, so he had better cooperate. She succeeded and he took the test without raising a fuss, as we worked toward having Spider have actual tender feelings develop for Heidi Jo and her baby daughter.
Deputy Jimmie and Sheriff Bo headed down to New Orleans to enact the Sheriff’s plan. But one of the houses they thought would be empty… wasn’t. An old lady with a shotgun, Ms Parkins, not only greeted them but knew who they were! While Jimmie thought up a plan to try to extract them without trouble, Bo decided it would be safer not to leave a witness and shot poor old Ms Parkins. They looted her house, taking her gun with them. Sarah prepared an unnamed NPC to be upstairs as the scene began to drag, but the principals got the cue and finished up. That said, we didn’t forget that NPC later.
Then, in the next scene, we flashed back to Sheriff Bo proposing his plan to Deputy Jimmie at Martha’s Watering Hole (I grabbed the NPC and it became funny that Martha was a man who kept his prison nickname on the outside), just across the street from the Rose Village and equally convenient to the Interstate. Deputy Jimmie was complaining that he was due a raise after four years – this would become a running joke. Bo convinced him that with money being as tight as it was, a life of victimless crime seemed like their best way out, seeing as how any legitimate income Jimmie made would be subject to his crushing alimony situation (he was living in a U-Store-It locker at this point). Why not use their official cars to dispel suspcion while they drive on down to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans and do a little looting? No violence, no victims, no way it could go wrong.
Spider and Heidi Jo met again to talk over the results of the paternity test a few days later. Spider wasn’t the father. At first, he was angry at Heidi Jo, but then he got seriously mad when she told him the story of how Deupty Jimmie had taken advantage of her in a drunken stupor at around the appropriate time. He decided to confront Jimmie and make him do right.
Heidi Jo got Jimmie to come to the Rose Village for a talk, but the Sheriff was trying, at the same time, to get him down to New Orleans for a job on some newly-identified empty, rich houses. The end result was that Spider and Heidi Jo wound up in his green-and-white on a trip down the Interstate. Taking Heidi Jo’s lead, Spider threatened Jimmie, made him take a paternity test too (out of her bag), and then when Jimmie mentioned having been swabbed earlier for an STD, wound up making him stop the car and put a beating on him, since he had gotten it too, presumably through Heidi Jo. As for Heidi Jo, she had what she wanted, but had to stop the only person protecting her and her baby from killing that baby’s likely father. Her moderating influence, starting here, would have a pretty strong effect on the game’s outcome.
Once they got to New Orleans, Spider and Jimmie went into the empty house. A Mexican standoff ensued, broken when Heidi Jo called on the phone to find out what was going on, breaking the tension just enough that guns could go down. Spider, to make peace, decided to let Jimmie know that Bo was screwing him out of money from the sales of their loot, and backed it up with his meticulous account Filofax, always in his pocket. “The left column, that’s Bo. Right column, that’s you. Right column’s smaller.” Jimmie decided he needed another raise.
That night, Jimmie called Bo to Martha’s for a talk. He had Martha close the bar and leave the two officers of the law a little privacy. Jimmie wrote two numbers on a napkin, and asked Bo which one was smaller… They had an argument; Jimmie pulled his gun on Bo, who didn’t think his deupty had the guts to shoot. We closed Act 1 with Jimmie plugging Bo right in the gut.
At the tilt we got “Failure/A tiny mistake leads to ruin” and “Mayhem/Cold-blooded score settling”. Ideas began to flow.
Scene 9 established, via flashback, that Spider had been acting to settle scores with the peace officers all along. A few years previous, they had come to serve him with an arrest warrant for possession with intent (fair enough, of course). He had a rival in prison named Roscoe, whom he had informed on in a desparate attempt to keep out of jail himself, and offered Bo and Jimmie his cash, drugs, and gun as a bribe to let him escape. They took everything from Spider, laughed at him, and effectively sent him off to jail where he served four years.
In another flashback, this one to a year or so previous, Heidi Jo was put into a compromising position when Sheriff Bo pulled her over while she was transporting Spider’s drugs. To avoid trouble, she came onto him and wound up in the backseat. Nine or so months before her baby was born. It was a busy time for her. Flashing forward, she realizes that she may have to keep that bastard alive, at least a little longer. (Scene note by Sarah: “3 fathers o jesus!”)
Next, back to Martha’s, where Sheriff Bo’s immense gut has kept him alive long enough for a confrontation. Jimmie extracts an 80% share from Bo – his raise, finally – and they agree to keep their secret. Jimmie calls a “special” and an ambulance arrives. No questions are asked, yet. Bo will survive, but he’s going to need a colostomy and a wheelchair, maybe forever. He figures out that Spider sold him out to his own deputy.
A while later, Bo decides to call in Spider for a confrontation in the empty sheriff’s office. He’s in a wheelchair, a blanket over his legs, pistol in hand. Spider has the baby, and therefore no gun (this is Heidi Jo’s rule). He show up with the bottle of poorly mixed formula propped against the car seat in the infant’s mouth, but has the sense to put the carseat behind the sheriff’s heavy steel desk. Bo goes to punish Spider for his perfidy, but Spider gets the drop, disarms Bo, and then breaks seven of the bad sheriff’s fingers getting the key to the storage locker full of loot, plus his cash. But there isn’t enough there, and Spider decides he’ll make Bo go to an ATM and withdraw as much cash as possible, not really sure what will happen after that. (John was collecting black dice at any cost, it goes without saying.)
On the way out the door, Bo gets the panic button, which summons Deputy Jimmie. Spider doesn’t notice because he’s called Heidi Jo to pick up the whole group in her truck. They go to a bank a half-block away, where Bo reveals that his bank balance is $32 – he’s got the money somewhere else, of course. Jimmie gets to the office, realizes Bo is gone, puts two and two together for the first time in his entire life, and gets to the scene. Spider, frustrated about his incomplete revenge on Bo but unarmed, takes the wheel of Heidi Jo’s truck and runs over the wheelchair-bound, colostomy-bagged, broken-fingered, gutshot sheriff, to her horror. Jimmie puts six rounds into the driver’s side door as Spider, Heidi Jo, and the baby speed away.
Spider is hit in the leg, not fatally but painfully, and after a short chase, aided by Heidi Jo distracting Jimmie by flashing him, Spider slams on the brakes so that the deupty’s car violently rear-ends the truck. Mostly unhurt, Heidi Jo drives the still-operable truck to her father’s cabin in the woods. The baby also took at least part of a bullet, but she made it to the hospital just in time (we decided that the fallout would determine her fate). Heidi Jo swears revenge.
In Scene 15, with the cover-up appearing to work and the old sheriff out on permanent disability, Deputy Jimmie is promoted to Sheriff, complete with a raise. He signs a background check form, figuring it will be handled within the Blue Wall. He thinks he’s free, clear, and a winner. Instead, the investigation is done by the FBI. They’ll have some help…
Finally, Spider is spending a little spell in prison after the action is over (we never wound up specifying which particular thing led to this… but seriously, take your pick). He gets a visit from the former sheriff, Bo, who wants to mend things between them before Spider is loose again and hungry for more revenge. He proposes that he will take care of Heidi Jo and her girl (who was, in the end, Jimmie’s, but Spider still sees them as his only chance at a family and a way out), and that they will be even. Spider puts a fist to the glass for a bump, and Bo answers with his twisted claw against the glass.
Aftermath: Spider and Heidi Jo were both white 10 (!). Bo was black 14 (!!!). Jimmie was black 3. Note that this wasn’t for lack of trying – Spider only had two dice, and Heidi Jo was split 2-2. Bo had four black dice, the only “successful” collector in the group. Jimmie had three of each, since he wound up being the focus of the storm.
The baby made a full recovery, and Spider and Heidi Jo left Hillview, LA to move to Texas and start over. They had enough money – Spider had, of course, cheated on paying Bo and Jimmie, plus had other ill-gotten gains from his drug operation – to open the Honest Cajun Ford dealership. Heidi Jo found the gun from Ms Patterson’s house and made sure that it made its way into the hands of the FBI.
Sheriff Bo had cash to burn, a sweet permanent disability deal going, and forgiveness. He’d never walk again, he’d be pooping in a bag for the rest of his life, but he had somehow made it clear of the burning wreckage of his simple plan, alive and doing OK, all things considered. He wouldn’t even face justice, since he had a patsy…
The new Sheriff, Jimmie? Everything seemed great at first. Promotion, raise. Then investigation, disgrace, and finally, as he was being perp-walked, a bullet to put him out of his misery, probably fired by Ms Parkins’ mystery friend. Because he was, ironically, being investigated for the murder of someone he didn’t kill… because of her gun showing up with prints all over it and a note, and because of evidence planted in the locker by the departing Sheriff Bo. Score settling, and also a little mistake, indeed.
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