Pulp Alley - Gang War AAR

Fresh from the recently ended Perilous Island campaign, we looked towards our next campaign, Vice Alley. (New episodes at this blog in 2017)

As a test game we were looking at two items, the scenery(buildings & roads), and possible leagues.
I have talked about the scenery elsewhere, so this will be the leagues as revealed by the AAR.

The scenario is an all out fight between 4 factions, in this game it was a Duo,  a League of Legends, a Company of Heroes, and finally a League of Companions. These are leagues that we do not use that often, so we figured it would be fun to test them out all at once.

As per the set up rules each league placed a bystander and then deployed their leagues, each one picking a corner to set up in. The centre of the table was kept clear to facilitate the climax of the scenario the Circle of Slaughter.

Looking north along Delancy street

Aggressive tong

Lady of the night

The four bystanders.

Ace crime beat  photographer

Loitering miscreants

Companions in Adventure 

League of Legends with Bing tagging along

The Leagues

The Companions set up in the northwest, while the Legendary Heroes in the northeast.

The Duo

Company of Heroes

The duo set up in the southwest corner, and the Company of heroes in the southeast.

With the exception of the Duo, the leagues fanned out to encounter the various bystanders in an attempt to recruit new allies. The Tong worked out to be too aggressive and unwilling to help out, so the leader of the Companions, after giving them a stern talking to, sent them packing.
 

Meanwhile the legends made advances towards the lady, and convinced her to join up.




The Company of heroes decided to remain on the roof while their minion prowled the streets.
The Duo advanced down the alley way near the theater where they were surprised by the flash of a photographers camera. Being camera shy they did not initially engage the photographer and instead advanced to the centre of the table.

The legends moved to take up defensive positions, in anticipation of possible trouble.
















The Companions advanced in force along the street, with Winston and his nurse taking sneaking down an alley.

The company of heroes, safe on their rooftop perch, began to take action. They sent their minion, a local flat foot, to deal with the street gang, convincing them that it would be in their best interest to help out. They also sent in a sailor, Engineer Holman to deal with the nurse and Winston. (courtesy of a Fortune card) He scared the nurse off and then engaged Winston for a few rounds of fisticuffs.

 

Finally the Duo annoyed by the endless picture taking, moved on the photographer, but only scared him off they could not drive him away.

 

While the Duo was busy the Company of heroes opened fire on them, that and the presence of the gang, saw the Duo decide to reconsider their actions, and ultimately drove them north along Delancy.

 

 All out war broke out in the north. The gang found themselves out in the open, their enemies in concealed positions, blasting away at them.

 

 

The gang quickly disappeared, and both sides maneuvered closer to the centre of the board.

Through a miscalculation the Company of Heroes failed to advance quick enough and were unable to get into the 'circle' in time and were eliminated.

The streets ran red with the blood of the remaining three leagues. The league of Companions were at a disadvantage in this match, not having enough health to endure the gun fire. The legendary Heroes had enough health, and enough extra people that they could stay in the fight by rotating characters out of the Circle of Slaughter. However it was the Duo, surprising everyone present, who lasted the longest.

 

In the end we went well beyond 6 turns before finally declaring the Duo the winner.
The Duo did much better than anyone expected, they do have challenges, but the ability to absorb damage cannot be ignored. Still not certain why the player did not try to pick up any bystanders until well into the game, but hard to argue with success.

The Legends performed well. I still do not like the idea of forming a league without perks, but in a one shot game it did not matter. Good health, and good dice values are a significant asset in any game.

The Companions are weak due to health, but with an extra ability for allies this can be nicely offset.  They do not always do well in a stand up fight, but they do have a potentially high volume of fire, they just have to take advantage of cover. They also can be quite a versatile team due to numbers. 

Company of Heroes started with three good characters. They had the Overlord perk and rolled well on the minion chart to pick up a level 3 minion, so essentially were a slightly more powerful version of the league of legends. Sadly they missed out on the final fight so we can only speculate on how they would have performed.

Overall we had a lot of fun, and were inspired to revisit the league rules and rework some of our ideas about how to build characters and leagues!

This is our marker to keep track of who has the initiative, just a painted dollar store toy.