Introducing my group to Savage Worlds with Chickens!

[Yuritau]

My gaming group likes to think of themselves as having read and understood pretty much all the game systems out there (which can be annoying, by itself), so when I suggested a few weeks back that we play some Savage Worlds as a break from the 2 year Pathfinder campaign we've been running, I met some resistance.

I offered to run an intro SW game for them (I've never run anything for this group in 4 years, so that offer alone gave them pause), but still I got more indecision.

<insert a few days of searching through Pinnacle's online store>

"Guys.. I've got it. I'm running a SW game for you, and you're going to like it, even if you don't want to. Chickens in the Mist will silence you naysayers!"

Long story short.. 4.5 hours later I have created 4 new die-hard Savage Worlds fans, and I couldn't have done it without Chickens in the Mist!

I gave them 9 pre-made characters to pick from, and the 4 they picked were:

• Deputy Williams, dopey but lovable police officer (Think Andy Griffiths Show)
• Donald Smithers, wealthy businessman that moved to the sticks for the "simpler life". (entire character idea: innocent, hapless jogger, wrong place at the wrong time)
• John Servo, Grendel-Faust employee, hates Charlie O'Connor.
• Skeet, 12 year-old farm brat with a pair of over-alls and a .22 rifle, and nothing else. (hey, it's Texas after all, I'm allowed one or two stereotypes! :P )

Given the list of characters I let them pick from.. that's probably the least dysfunctional group they could have made, heh. And the best part.. the most ADD-like player in the group picked Skeet, and it was FANTASTIC! We all thought there was a 12-year old texan at the table!

Just for fun and flavor, I had Donald start play unconcious, laying on the road outside the O'Connor farm, having been grazed by one of the fancy cars leaving the farm in a hurry, and Skeet started play utterly terrified, in hiding under a floor grate in the chicken house pump room. The Deputy and John just happened to show up at the farm within a few minutes of each other and joined forces.

Once the whole party was assembled, and started investigating things, Skeet kept stirring the darkest corners of their imaginations with his incredibly specific but never-ever helpful explanations of why he was in hiding (I told him privately that he'd witnessed Artie's end). Oh man, the amount of fear and dread around the table was awesome.

By the time they finally found the BIG chicken cages and subsequent encounters, they were so primed for character death that they kept throwing everything they had at every encounter, coming up with bizarre and creative solutions. Some of the best moments of the night were:

• The Deputy trying to take his squad car down the washed-out road, and having to use the truck to pull it back out.
• The ENTIRE party becoming Shaken when discovering the track in the cabin (just used SW fear effects)
• ENTIRE party being too afraid to reach into the dark crack to pick up Charlie's eye, until Skeet finally gave in to his childlike curiosity, and made the whole party roll fear effects again!
• welding machine with an extension cord to make a limited portability impromptu tazer
• above tazer + gasoline from workshed = extra crispy recipe
• group decides to ram encounter 3 birds with truck, hoping to save bullets. Judicious application of bennies and a joker sees them pull it off with flying colors!
• I turned encounter 4 into a wild card! Such an epic fight, heh. Party was TERRIFIED, even though they came out of it un-injured (same can't be said for the truck.. big poppa chicken was within 1 wound of disabling the truck completely!).
• encounter 6.. hah. I had one of the chickens try to jump into the cab of the truck (Donald driving, Skeet in the middle, Deputy in passenger seat), cause that's where the food was! Picture a 3 foot tall chicken standing in the Deputy's lap as all 4 occupants of the cab freak out all at the same time and start trying to kill each other! Thanks to a hilarious succession of bad rolls, that one strain A chicken lasted 9 rounds in the cab of that truck!
• in above in-cab fight, Skeet tries to club chicken with butt of rifle, rolls snake eyes, accidentally tosses his rifle out the window of the truck.
• Deputy makes appropriate fighting rolls to, literally, choke his chicken.
• Skeet clambers out the back window of the cab to go fetch rifle. In subsequent round, draws Joker, yells "PULL!" and deputy tosses bird out window of cab to be blasted apart by a well-bennied shot.
• after 6 encounters, they noticed both: 1. all the chickens seemed to want was food, and 2. they NEVER tried to eat dead mutant chickens. So they got the idea to smear mutant chicken guts and carcasses ALL over the truck and see if that made the chickens ignore them. I ruled this was balls-out-hoping-for-a-miracle situation, and to all make spirit checks, with the number of raises (not successes) achieved by the group as a collective being the notice TN for the encounter 7 chickens. They spent 6 bennies on that roll as a group, and came up with 9 raises, so I let them make good on the escape. (They already had an epic strain C fight, good enough for me)

tl;dr One of the most enjoyable nights of gaming we've had in months! (our Pathfinder game tends to wax rules-lawery)

Sidenote: there is a fantastic facial expression which can be evoked on the faces of copy center girls when you hand them a flash drive and say you need a PDF printed, they ask what it's called, and you say Chickens in the Mist. It's that expression which says "I kind of want to ask.. but I'm REALLY not sure I want to know..."

[Jackson]

Thanks man. When you posted this on the PEG forums you really made my day!

Ed