RPGaDay 2023, Day 29

Misty Watercolour Memories ...

I’m going to pitch a book here - Ben Riggs’ Encounter Theory. Published by Plot Points Publishing, there is no game book like it on the market.

Bearing that in mind, there was that one time I got to roleplay a modern setting. It used the DoubleZero system, set in the modern world.

My character, Chip Nixon, had been abducted off the street. They were investigating the death of an old friend. They’d stirred up a hornet’s nest, and an unmarked black van had ridden up beside my character and whisked Chip Nixon off the street. Black bag, dart in arm, blackout.

Chip woke up chained to a metal chair which was bolted to the concrete floor of a windowless room, with a dull blue overhead light.

A woman was interrogating Chip. She kept asking them questions - how had they known the old friend? (We’d been friends for fifteen years). Was Chip a cop? (No, quite the opposite). And so on.

And then things got weird, and by “weird” I mean “sexual.” I asked the woman how she had come to know the old friend. It turned out that she had been his lover. She, too, was eager to find out who’d killed her old man.

Somehow, I leveraged that into getting her to let me loose so we could find her old man’s killer together. But it went further than that. For some reason, it ended up with her getting naked and having me on that steel framework chair.

I did not expect the encounter to turn into a sexual one, but when it was over I found myself looking down at my character sheet, then looking at my GM and asking “How the hell did that encounter go down that road so quickly?”

It beats an encounter where a character slaughters some poor creature.