Back to the Pulps! – Noir Revolution: Pacific Star, Episode 2

This is bouncing back to the Fate Accelerated One-Shot I GMed back in 2013!  Though with considerably fewer players (three, rather than the seven[!] of the original game).

The characters for the game were: Trixie, the pilot, Number One Sun, the gangster, and Hamish, the operative.

Opening Scene: Shanghai, at night, the river where the Piggy (a PBY flying boat) is moored.  Trixie is coming back to check on something when she sees the light of a flashlight beam inside the plane.  Approaching cautiously, Trixie slips aboard only to be revealed in the flash from a camera taking pictures of the control panel!

At the same time Sun and Hamish are arguing on their way back from the Pacific Star offices and they notice that the warehouse guard has been knocked unconscious and the warehouse gate is slightly open.  Investigating, they find a gang of thugs heaving boxes aside looking for something.

(The two scenes play out simultaneously, cutting from one to another.)  Trixie manages to steal the camera from the obviously Russian spies and escape with it, though they manage to wing her with a pistol shot.  While Sun and Hamish outwit, outmaneuver and capture the thugs.  Who, under questioning, admit they are searching for gold.  They are turned over to the Shanghai police.

The next morning they get a call from Pacific Star HQ in Los Angles, a crackly voice over the telephone tells them that the Soviets have sent a new team to Shanghai and are on the trail of some missing Czarist gold and that the teams needs to find it first.

The team splits up to try and track down information on the gold and on the new Soviet team.  Hamish manages to start (and end) a brawl in a White Russian bar but afterward finds out from Anya that her family has a story about a group of railway engineers who has smuggled gold out of Russia but were all killed when their armored train was bombed during a fight between warlords.  Trixie finds out where the Russians used to work from her mechanic friends.  While Sun talks to her contacts to learn that among the new Russians were a variety of people, including a set of three seemingly identical women.

So, the team (with Lefty along as an NPC and aspect on the scene) head to the train sheds that the White Russians used with a truck and winch.  Hamish used his stunt to have a prototype elctromagnetic metal detector handy.  They find the gold and dig it out, revealing an age darkened crate with the Imperial Double Eagle still visible.  They are just hauling it up when Senior Lieutenant of State Security Beria and his six GUGB agents show up and demand they turn the gold over to its proper owners, the Soviet State.  A fight follows.  Naturally, the team has the upper hand, creatively using their strength: Sun’s gunplay, Hamish’s lightning projector and Trixie’s knowledge of machinery (including using the aspect Trains Everywhere to reroute a train into one of the GUGB agents).  Beria knew to get out before he was captured and tossed two grenades at the hole still containing Lefty (and the gold), Sun shot one out of the air and (with an assist from Lefty) Hamish batted the other away.  They then loaded up the gold and got out of the train yard before the authorities arrived.

The credits roll over the scene of the Czarist crate being repacked into Pacific Star shipping crates and loaded aboard a freighter.

Notes: The game was a little rough as we were essentially relearning FAE again as it had been so long since the last game but overall everything worked out just fine.  We had hoped to have one more player by real life called him away.

Train photo from David Holt and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.