"You owe us money."

"You owe us money."

In many ways, it was through those four simple words that our shakedown mission got a lot more complicated...

So, as you might recall from my previous post, I was part of a Savage Worlds game a while ago. My character, a mutant with transparent skin and hair who can pull out bones to use as weapons (think Ransik from Power Rangers Time Force), is named Remini. The other party members were, as Remini came to learn, a detective/professor (the only "normal" human in the group); a bone golem armed with a cannon; a crab person; a subtly racist ghost, who repeatedly called Remini "Skinny"; and a person who was constantly uttering oaths to Thor. We were employed as low-level enforcers for a mafia family run by Top Hat Thomas, in the futuristic year of 192X.

Our first mission (which would end up being the only one we accomplished for that session) was to collect some debts from a man living in a run-down residential area. I had the highest driving skill in the party (d6, on a scale of d4 to d12... and my character was the best driver out of six people). As such, I drove them to the house, using some cream makeup and sunglasses to hide my rather frightening appearance, and tagging along in the back when the party walked up to the door. The bone golem knocked, and the door opened; just the man we were looking for.

"You owe us money," said the bone golem.

The man immediately closed the door and locked it. This made the bone golem very unhappy... to the point that he (it?) pulled out the aforementioned cannon, and blasted the door down. The cannonball tore through the house, splintering several pieces of furniture and finally embedding itself in the entryway floor. Some of the party entered the house, and found the man hurriedly loading a rifle; he attempted to shoot the golem, but didn't even cause a scratch.

While this was going on, the detective/professor was busy sneaking upstairs, checking for any sign that our debtor had some of his funds stashed in the house. She succeeded only in finding a piggy bank with about $30 in cash.

Meanwhile, the man fled through the rear door into the back yard. As he raced through his neighbor's yard, the ghost summoned a spectral steed and gave chase; I hopped on the horse's back behind him. The jockey, however, had failed to make either himself or his horse visible, so to all outside observers I looked like I was floating through the air, bow-legged. We caught up to the man, and I hit him in the back with a sword pulled from my leg; the blow would have killed him violently (at 5d6 damage, with exploding dice!) if I hadn't spent a Bennie to change it into a non-lethal blow. Our quarry was knocked out, and the ghost took the opportunity to possess him and dig through his mind.

There, he found the man's bank account information, and learned that said account contained at least twice the amount that he owed Top Hat Thomas. Unfortunately, the police were on their way, as we inferred from the distant sound of sirens. The devotee of Thor started praying, and a storm started brewing that delayed the cops; he was nowhere to be found when we were hurriedly trying to eliminate the evidence of our assault on the house. I hopped into the driver's seat of the car, and everyone except for the ghost (who was still possessing the man) piled in as we quickly drove away, narrowly avoiding the arrival of the police.

The ghost stayed behind, and repeatedly failed to convince the police that the loud gunfire was the result of an accident while cleaning his rifle. They took him away in the squad car, where the man succeeded in ejecting his ethereal guest from his body, and began freaking out when he realized that he was in the back of a police interceptor. Worried that he might talk, the ghost made a last desperate shot with a spectral pistol... and succeeded. The man's head exploded, along with the rear windshield, and the neighbors were too frightened to say anything about what they saw. (It also helped that said debtor was not well liked by his neighbors in the first place.)

Needless to say, a grand time was had by all. And all of the players and the GM involved did a great job of including me, and my first time playing in about two years went very smoothly.

(Note: I'll be going back and adding some tags to all of my past blog posts, and I'll be using them going forward.)