Fiasco! is a table-top role-playing game in which the players generate story elements, create characters, and act out a story in the vein of Office Space, Fargo, and The Ice Harvest. Played over the Setup, Act I, the Tilt, Act II, and the Aftermath, Fiasco sessions devolve into the madcap misadventures of people with grand ambition and poor impulse control.
During the setup, players roll a pool of dice to randomly generate story elements, including character relationships, details, locations, and needs. During Act I and Act II, dice are assigned to indicate positive and negative outcomes. In between the two Acts, the Tilt elements are chosen, which introduce chaos, obstacles, or left-turns to further drive the story into nonsense. The Aftermath closes, which outlines each character in a short montage, and ends the story.
The playset for this session was Mission to Mercury, which is set on a scientific observation colony atop the surface of the planet Mercury. Here's what happened:
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Bernard Kilganon - Xenoarchaeologist Director, Bernie is fairly no-nonsense and resents being assigned to this rock. At best he'd hoped he would find his way onto the Satellite station to avoid having to deal with the stress of Mercury's surface. His department's recently discovered a potentially-sculpted obelisk on the planet, and the possibility of Mercurial life is exciting!
Quinoa Rover - Child of earth hippies, Quinoa took the chance to escape her parents by becoming Chief Robotechnician on Mercury Base. Also fairly no-nonsense, Quinoa finds herself over-worked and under-appreciated.
Aldo Smith - Custodial engineer and volunteer handy-man, Aldo is confident in his competence, despite his relative lack thereof. As part of the more blue-collar workforce aboard the base, Aldo often finds himself embroiled in shenanigans.
Martian Luther - Another custodian, Martian Luther was struck by Mercury's stark beauty and soon grew involved in the burgeoning religious presence on Mercury Base. He and Aldo have been close friends for some time, to the irritation of the rest of the station.
ACT I
Scene I - A disaster recently struck Mercury Base: part of the rover garage located at the Chao Meng Fu Crater has collapsed. Bernie Kilganon and Quinoa Rover are taking a vehicle across the surface to see what they can salvage or repair. The conversation is occupied by Bernie trying to convince her one of the custodians - Martian Luther - has been sneaking into his office and taking things. She's not convinced.
Scene II - After arriving at the garage, Rover meets with the base's handyman, Aldo Smith, and attempts to diagnose what caused the issue. It seems there's an issue with the robot software, but she can't quite figure out what it might be.
Scene III - Later on, Aldo and Luther are shirking their duties in the custodial break room. The two discuss the garage collapse; Luther is convinced it's a sign their search is going well- the planet is reacting to their presence. They just need to keep probing.
Scene IV - Kilganon returns to his office to find Luther rifling through his things. The custodian doesn't put forth a convincing excuse, so the director calls up a security guard who takes Luther and puts him in the clink for a bit to think about personal space.
Scene V - Kilganon talks to the security chief, who's concerned about this cult which the staff has started taking seriously. Out of the 250ish folk on Mercury Base, maybe 50 have been seen filtering in and out of their sermons, with half of that making regular attendance. The chief says he'll keep an eye on it, and when Kilganon goes to check his desk, he finds that something very important is missing.
Scene VI - Rover finds Kilganon in his office and tells him there's something drastically wrong with the base's robots. They're all coding out with little >:-( faces on their displays. Kilganon, who isn't a techie, says it's corresponding strangely with how the crew's getting into this new star cult.
Scene VII - Aldo Smith is checking on the crashed rover and makes sure no one else is around...then he reaches into the engine compartment and removes a janitorial robot which has been retrofitted to resemble a human female. Out of nowhere appears Martian Luther, who laments that Aldo crashed the rover while using the department sexbot. He also tells Aldo he believes he's found proof that Jesus arrived on Mercury, and gets Aldo to come with him to church.
Scene VIII - Luther's not only taking him to church, he's leading the service. There are about thirty people in attendance, and the message is pretty clear: there's going to be a rapture in a week, and Mercury used to be Heaven, so everybody's going to show up on the planet, after which it will turn into a paradise.
THE TILT
The Tilt elements were decided by Kilganon and Rover, and they were:
Guilt: Greed leads to killing...
Paranoia: What you stole has been stolen...
ACT II
Scene I - Kilganon decides he should probably help with the robots, so he uses his Director Line to contact Corporate aboard the Satellite Office. He talks to the boss's dad, who says that they'll send down some CorpoTechs to see what they can do.
Scene II - Rover is in her office when she gets a call from Corporate. Thanks to her ineptitude, productivity has dropped drastically, and she's going to be audited. Whoops.
Scene III - Aldo's intrigued by the cult, though he's still a little skeptical. He meets up with Luther, who's carrying the item he stole from Kilganon's office: it's a piece of cloth, which he's convinced is the Mercurial equivalent to the Shroud of Turin, proving Jesus's presence on the planet. They take a rover and embark onto the surface in order to go see this strange obelisk which has everybody talking.
Scene IV - As Aldo drives, Luther outlines his plan: once the rapture brings everyone to Mercury, he's going to be the new Space Pope. As they drive further out, the box containing the blanket starts to vibrate slightly, and they believe it's reacting to the nearness of the Obelisk. Excited, Luther opens the box to reveal...not the blanket, but the malfunctioning sexbot! Someone's tricked them!.
Scene V - Kilganon's also in a rover. He's been following the two custodians and doesn't like how they stole the blanket out from his desk. It was important to him. He pulls up to find the two dragging a malfunctioning sexbot across the planet's surface towards the obelisk. After a bit of a physical confrontation, Kilganon convinces the two to return to the base with him.
Scene VI - Aldo visits Rover as she's performing system maintenance on the station robots. He discovered the source of the bug, which doesn't make Rover very happy. After he leaves, she snaps a bit and breaks out the Robotic Override Codes. When they're uploaded they'll fix the robots...by wiping their programming entirely and leaving blank slates. She does this.
Scene VII - Somehow Aldo wound up with the blanket, and he and Luther are scanning it in the Custodial Supply Room. The blacklight shows an outline of a human person on it...which Luther takes as a sign of it being the Shroud, and despite Aldo thinking it's probably just Kilganon's personal blanket, he takes it as a religious sign. He admits to collapsing the garage, and agrees to accompany Luther to church.
Scene VIII - The impending corporate visit and presence of thieves causes something in Kilganon to snap. He'd just gotten his blanket back, and then it vanished once more. With corporate on the way and a cult burgeoning, it's really gotten to him. He goes to where Luther is delivering his sermon, storms the stage, and pushes the man. Luther lands awkwardly and snaps his neck, just as the corporate reps arrive.
THE AFTERMATH
This is Bernard Kilganon. After murdering a man in front of a crowd of witnesses, there's a speedy trial. Kilganon is replaced as Director of Xenoarchaeology, and spends the rest of his life in space prison.
This is Quinoa Rover. The reset robots go haywire after she programs them to disrupt the Corporate visit. In the chaos she makes off with a vac-ship and the blanket, which she's convinced holds the secret to alien DNA.
This is Aldo Smith. With the death of his one friend and destruction of his work, he takes the malfunctioning sexbot and gets himself an earthside apartment. From the comfort of his couch he watches as a new space religion takes off.
This is Martian Luther. His martyring in front of his followers has secured his spot as the head of a new space religion. The crowd takes away his body and places it in a reliquary, which serves as the focal point as they spread his beliefs across the stars.
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