Night Witches: Actual Play – Page 3 – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

After missing a session, my Monday crew were back at Pashkovskaya today.

After missing a session, my Monday crew were back at Pashkovskaya today. We had a few disasters, had to perform in a talent show (it was a total disaster), and finished off the duty station with mission C.

This week our daytime misadventures went from bad to worse, and only scrambling for that final mission saved us from facing some nasty consequences. My pilot Galya blew up her hand with some illicit munitions (she didn’t know about them – spoils of previous scrounging), Vera was malingering in the infirmary and ran into a keen young doctor with lots of treatments he wanted to try out. Everyone else was working on this stupid show we had to put on. Then we screwed that up, in front of the Lt General too.

Galya also saved the life of our mechanic, hit by debris from a failed wheels down roll. That was a bit of a turning point for her, from “everything is fucked and we’re all going to die” to “maybe some of us will make it through”. I guess time will tell if that’s optimism or pessimism.

We lost Captain Liza Vorapeyeva to flak on that last mission, although it was otherwise successful. She’d been there from the beginning, and from being hated by the others had finally gotten some respect from those under her command, so it was quite a loss.

Our replacements have all hardened into natural-born Soviet airwomen now, although rather fatalistic and traumatized with it. I’m looking forward to seeing how our new squadron commander handles things (in fact, one character might take the promotion to Major advance, which would be… interesting).

We’re also switching GM again, to Liza’s player now that she’s no longer with us.

Here are some guys who played a bunch of Night Witches and recorded it.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?action_edit=1&list=PLOTilBK2SqLPzEy-oS-vmOM5VbKI1RRTo

I had my first Night Witches game last night.

I had my first Night Witches game last night. I’m running a one-shot at a local convention in November, and wanted to get a feel for the rules before I subjected five players to my fumbling. I was lucky in that my four players last night had all played AW or MonsterHearts, and so had a pretty good grounding on flow and how the moves worked, and when the best time was to use the moves.

Coming from a diceless, heavy RP gaming background, this was quite different. Fun, but different. While I find all RP to be community storytelling, Night Witches really rewards narrative in a much greater way than I am used to. It also requires openness for the players, which is challenging to many of my extended gaming group. For them, you make a character, and you have sole control over that character. Night Witches asks them to have faith in the unspooling of the narrative and to incorporate that narrative into their character. The goal isn’t to “win”, it’s to tell a good story together.

We had 5.5 hours to play. The creating of characters took 1.5 hours instead of .5 hours, and while we had a few side conversations, they were brief and we didn’t dawdle over most of it. But we were all pretty happy with the characters, and as GM, I was happy with the various hooks they’d given me to run with. I gave them 5 advancements instead of 4, and encouraged them to take regard as advancement. Three of them did, and it added quite a bit to the initial storytelling.

We ran Paskovskaya, and made it through three night runs. They skated on one run, pulled another run out of their collective tuckuses by a daring use of Tempt Fate, and had a horrible middle run. The Section Leader took personal responsibility for the three lives lost over the course of two days (all NPCS), the one PC crew woman who was severely harmed (they used moves to heal her up enough to fly the next night), and the fiery wreck of one of their planes. She’s now in serious trouble with the Brass and the NKVD. I challenged them with lack of materiel to fix the planes, the visit of the Lieutenant General, zealot Olga, and the 218th taking credit as well as using seniority to impose unwelcome attention on their fellow airwomen.

At the end of the evening, I felt as if I was getting a solid handle on the flow and how to push the players, and they all said they wanted to play more, and loved the story they were weaving together. I call that a successful night of gaming!

Next game is at the end of the month. I’ll let you know how it goes.

My Monday crew just finished our second session at Pashkoskaya.

My Monday crew just finished our second session at Pashkoskaya. It was a pretty smooth time overall, with a few difficult (mainly interpersonal) moments.

My new airwoman Galya has made the crucial realisation that she can cope with this after all, although she needed to be humiliated by our fierce armorer on the way.

The rivalry between our two highest ranked airwomen came to a head when the acting leader (Valya M) passed over command back to the Leza (who had been delayed arriving at the station). Leza immediately laid all the blame for the two MIA and presumed dead aircrew on Valya, and most of the section beat a hasty retreat as the two of them had that out. A tense truce was the outcome, but I;m not sure how long it will last.

Other dealings around the airfield were fraught as well – several of us are now having to live with the consequences of bad calls with people over the past few sessions/game months.

We had a bit of a discussion about plans for the Monday crew after we finished, and everyone is pretty keen to play through the war before we try anything else. Cool!

I started a campaign with a new group using the structured introduction and it went pretty well, until the second…

I started a campaign with a new group using the structured introduction and it went pretty well, until the second training mission, which turned out to be an utter disaster.

The lead plane, already damaged, barely made the wayfind roll and choose enemy fire as a consequence. The pilot then failed which placed them in pretty bad shape. Nevertheless, they decided to do the attack run, the pilot rolling a two before tempting fate and taking all the mission pool to succeed. The second plane’s navigator had a great roll, but the attack run turned out to be another failure. Tempting fate also proved to be a failure, which led to a plane on fire with one airwoman leaping to her death and another dying in burning wreck. After which the first planed attempted its wheels down, the pilot rolling another two, resulting in both airwomen dying in the crash.

At that point I was afraid they would not want to continue, but they took it in good cheer and we are gearing up for Duty Station 2.

This evening’s game was grim.

This evening’s game was grim. Our first airwoman dead, my pilot Hanna. She went down in a shootout with Nazis rather than be captured. Her navigator is still lost behind lines.

That followed some fairly crazy hijinks as we tried to fit in to the new airfield, making it hit a bit harder.

As the rest of the section tried to deal with the loss, the two of us with missing characters made up new airwomen – totally green pilots just out of training. The veterans gave them a tough introduction to the unit.

I forgot to do a writeup for our last game, oops.

We’re done with Trud Gornyaka now. Our last two missions there (including one of the nasty ones) went super well, it was totally unexpected and awesome.

Of course, without planes to repair during the day we got ourselves into plenty of other trouble. There were mechanics to be calmed down after the wrecked and damaged planes of the last session, an informal interview (with the character concerned suddenly “called away” – player will be GM for the next duty station).

We had time to do the initial setup for Pashkovskaya. Looks like that is going to be crazy, we’ve set ourselves up for a lot of conflict with the 218th, beyond the already significant baseline anger.

After the success of playing a one-off set in Trud Gornyaka, we decided to “reboot” and go back to training.

After the success of playing a one-off set in Trud Gornyaka, we decided to “reboot” and go back to training. We did the Engels Aerodrome duty station, with all three training missions in one 3-hour session (so I could deliberately set the pace very fast) with four players and me as GM.

Training was punctuated by encounters with a psychotic, goat-kicking officer trainee scarred by her experiences in Soviet orphanages and with a sleazy boiled-egg eating military police who was sitting on a stash of vodka.

The highlight was when it turned out that the Raven Adventurer was a former ballet dancer from Moscow, forced to retire through injury and now living only to fly. The Owl Zealot wrote a letter to the editor of the Red Army Gazetta praising her comrade and this caught the attention of the 218th brass who demanded that she perform for the men. Although accompanied by the conservatory-trained Hawk Misanthrope on piano, the performance was a disaster (miss on a Tempt Fate roll) leading to further injury and resounding humiliation from the men.

The session was called “Black Swan Down”.

Last Monday we played another session at Trud Gornyaka.

The first mission had some very bad rolls and ended up with two airwomen hospitalised and lots of damaged planes. It felt like the rest of the session was catch up from that – there wasn’t much socialising beyond what was needed to get the airwomen and planes back in action (although this did lead to lots of confessions as part of reaching out moves).

As we prepared for the final mission of the session, our section leader went to ask a favour from Major Roskova – and missed the act up roll totally. As a reward for the section’s keen attitude, they got to fly one of the especially tough missions that night (the rail crossing). This mission went much better than the first, with a successful hit on the target. We lost a plane coming back (failed wheels down on a damaged crate) but the characters are all okay.

Next time, I think the squadron commander may have a little something to say about the section’s rather bad record losing planes…

So, we had our first run of Night Witches last Friday.

So, we had our first run of Night Witches last Friday. I had 5 players and it was our first “powered by the apocalypse” game for 5 of us.

Unfortunately, it didn’t go as smoothly as I expected. I had difficulties to suggest “living scenes” for the daytime. But the night phase was fun.

We played the first Duty Station (Engels) and the second mission (the real one) was deadly: they had an awesome result for Wayfind and Attack run (15 and 12). But they wanted more : so, two more attack runs.

Casualties: 2 dead (one PC, one NPC), and a second plane down : pilot had been captured and the other one survived and made to the airfield.

It was the first time in our 4 years of weekly playing that a PC died. Well done, Night Witches 😉

Do you have tips for using agenda, principles and threats as a gm?

Furthermore, my PCs and I aren’t used to narrative mechanics.

Example: I began to ask the questions suggested in the guided creation:

Me: Where do you lie in your enlisment quizz?

PC: I didn’t lie.

Me:… (mind: ok, what do I do now?)

Fortunately, it went a little better with the others players after that, but it was a tough start.

One remark: infos in the play aids are not consistent: the guided creation suggests two missions but the Duty Station 1 have 3, and they don’t exactly match. There are some minor problems with names of the regimental staff (don’t remember exactly which one but I can look for them if needed)

All in all, it was an interesting evening, and I look forward for a second try