Actual Play: ULTRAVIOLET RPG (NANOSWORDS!!)

November 13th, 2008

Ultraviolet is a terrible action movie. Ultraviolet: The RPG maybe have been a forum joke about how bad that movie was. But my crew at StoryGames Boston... We don’t do things half-way. Yes, we played it.

[Quick game review: it took a half-hour, reflected the source material, matched our over-sugerated sensitivities. Had realistic combat, mature thematic storytelling. Insert other lies here.]

I present to you:

NANOSWORDS

Characters: – Blade-knockoff with blood-colored hair (played by Enri) – White-coated dude with ultraviolet hair (played by Dean) – Woman in an evening dress with polka-dotted hair (played by Aara)

I GM’d which was a lot of work. I dutifully asked the players not to tell me the characters’ names so as not to ruin my Suspension Of Disbelief. We found some unused scenery from the wargamers’ table, so we just used fragments of that to set our scenes.

OPENING: The three of them are seeking an Artifact at an Ancient Ruined Temple. They pick up a transponder, which turns on ominously. Then: NINJAS! Enri kills 3 of them by hurling the obviously-about-to-explode-yep-it-explodes transponder at them, while the rest of them are killed by the use of swords and swords. Then Aara finds motorcycles for the team. We rolled an eleven, so that meant there were eleven motorcycles that the three of them would sorta ride in tandem, somehow, yeah.

SCENE: So they’re riding down this apocalyptic highway around this pool of bright green acid when they are assailed by MORE NINJAS! Who are clearly riding bikes and who are completely surrounding htem from behind. The crew begins to fight the mooks.

SCENE: Ninjas are dead. Dean’s bike is sinking into the acid and is stranded; Enri is trying to help him out. When suddenly a boss appears: a man wrapped in black silk. He makes a bold offer: he will allow Enri to save his friend, but only if they duel. Enri accepts, but with Aara dueling in his stead. (Sure.) She quickly rolls doubles after only four or five rolls, by changing her costume: she rips off her evening dress, utterly shocking the bad guy, but this merely reveals Aara’s three-piece suit underneath. And her hair is acid-green. And the bad guy falls in and Dean rides his bike over him to escape.

SCENE: The Man In The Wheelchair, at The Farm, is scheming, because everything is going according to plan.

SCENE: Back at the highway/acid-pool, the crew is trying to dilute the acid pool. Except Aara decides “fuck it” so she lights the pool on fire. The whole pool. But then the Man In The Tricked Out Cyberchair appears on the highway, some distance away, and tells Dean that their trapped now, because he has his cousin (!!) dangling above the acid pool, which is now a flaming acid pool, and he’s going to make him jump by talking at him, and now actually the scene cuts to Man In Chair being on top of that high dangling height too, whispering salty language into the innocent kid’s ear. (Continuity errors? I prefer to call it artistic license.)

But yeah the kid gets thrown in and Dean is like “NOOOO” except – here’s a twist – The Man In The Cyberchair reveals that in fact that this kid wasn’t Dean’s cousin—in fact, it was DEAN who was the cousin after all! Dean is crushed by the weight of this truth. Enri figures out what must have happened: “Your memory has been messed up. Only the power of the nanoswords can do that.”

SCENE: So there’s some VR-style CGI scene and there’s a really, truly, gorgeous idyllic farm that is deep in Dean’s memory and there’s some imagery with water and mothers and stuff. So that’s where they have to go.

SCENE: Except they go to where the farm is, and… Dean was just leading them to the original temple all along. There’s no Farm. It was all an illusion.

SCENE: So now they’re at the ruins, and they’re really disheartened by what has happened. Except I roll on the plot table again and now they’re actually really heartened, and they realize that the Nanoswords Have Always Been Inside Them! Like Swords Swallowers. So they reach deep inside, their throats, and pull out their swords. (Except for Enri, who pulls his swords out of Dean’s throat.) Except I roll on the table again, and the swords dissolve into keys. (Nanokeys??) Aara correctly (?) figures out that she needs a door, and finds a garage door, leading to a garage.

SCENE: Garage. They are in a garage… but a big Truck, with a Face, and this is like the Mammoth Car but repainted, is trying to run them down. It takes a long time for someone for someone to roll doubles so this is like the truck is zooming back and forth, threateningly, past the heroes, like about twelve times. (Gameplay note: I got really tired of saying “ZOOM”.) Then Enri defeated the truck by whistling for the motorcylces (!!) to jump in and sacrifice themseles to destroy the truck. Enri is now in biker garb with bald-colored hair.

BUT: the Man In The Stylish Hoverchair appears, and laughs at their folly! He starts to talk about a hospital where many turtles are being tenuously kept safe, and describes their science. “You see, what you don’t understand, you cannot understand, is turtles – that are the fundamental element of our society. Few people know but these turtles are special. They inhale our Carb-On-Di-Oxide of the air and covert it, through these turtles, into a certain kind of Oxygen…”

Aara blessedly rolls doubles right away, and appears behind the Boss with a bazooka. No more boss, but Aara is now in a one-piece bathing suit and blonde.

BUT: Two twin villains now appear, dressed in black silk like the original villain from the beginning. Speaking in unison, they explain: only the power of a Platinum Blonde will unlock the power of the NANO SWORDS! which they now draw and are awesome. Also there are now ninjas.

Aara kills half of them by bending time via her own nanosword and/or doing a hadoken. Enri kills the over half and actually killed more than enough that he turns the two bosses into undead – it was just that hard a punch or something. Which was cool because there were a lot of 9’s rolled and I decided any 9 that got rolled means Bad Things Happen—that is, I could change the haircolor and costume of any target player or boss!

So the bosses simultaneously where now in white coats and had long white hair (but were undead), and as the heroes failed to roll doubles (but rolled 9’s anyway), one by one their hair became white and their clothing matched that of the villains. Enri called out a grave warning: “The power of the nanoswords! It is corrupting us!”

Also there were more ninjas appearing, cutting off Dean (who must face off against the Bosses) from Enri and Aara, who had the first techno-montage of the game, as they gunned down the ninjas and clearly “Requiem For A Tower” was playing because obviously.

Dean couldn’t roll doubles, so they clearly gloated. One quickly drew a Gun from his side and the other drew a Box With A Kitten In It and well it did not end well for the kitten.

But then Dean rolled doubles so he summoned a Farm House (FROM HIS MEMORIES) to fall upon one of the bosses. The remaining boss cursed aloud, and all these cute puppies starting running from the farmhouse towards he. Said boss just scowled and backhanded them into the horizon. Dean is now totally like looking the same but in black (black hair, black coat).

Dean tried a few more times to take down the last boss. Someone rolled a 9, so the last boss became like two-tone black & white stripes.

SCENE: Back at the temple, they discuss how they took down the last boss off-screen.

Aara: “Who knew he would be allergic to bees?”

They respectfully put the transponder back in it’s rightful place, but as they’re walking away, it beeps and comes back on, and they all jump away from the explosion towards the screen as it explodes, and FREEZE FRAME.

THE END.
NANOSWORDS!

I’m done with RPGs.

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