Ice Cream in Hell's Kitchen

I ran a pick-up game of In a Wicked Age on Sunday - mostly regular players, plus one new addition.

We used one of the oracles from Abulafia - in this case Demon City Blues. I think the cast of characters tells half the story.

• Jude - Leader of a gang of eternally young rebel angel kids in Hell's Kitchen. Leading a crusade against the Smiling Man. Knows every rathole in existence, and a few not.
• Stick and Stone - Inseparable brothers and the sometimes rebellious muscle of Jude's gang. Once the Rod of Aaron and the stone that slayed Goliath, respectively, they have assumed human form.. They want souls so they can be "real boys", and they'll break the legs of anyone who stands in their way.
  
• Lucius Hobb - Eternally harried salesman. Drives a broken down Pinto and wields a wicked straight razor. Also known as Satan. Played by Jack Lemmon a'la Glengarry Glen Ross.
• Sister Gabrielle - Matron of the local orphanage, wielder of the Golden Rule. Also known as the Archangel Gabriel.
• Sir Roderick Sinjin-Smythe - The man who can find anything. Owner of the Cabinet of Curiosities, a run-down shop dealing in items infernal and mundane.
• The Smiling Man - Ice cream truck driver and upstart lord of Darkness. Wants to "trade up" and take Lucius' job. Never stops smiling, but never shares the joke.

3 PCs and 3 NPCs seemed to work really well this time. I think I managed to get them all into each other's scenes at one time or another. We all seemed to have fun narrating in details, and our new player really shook things up with an awesome and unexpected characterization of the Devil as a harried salesman who's not above cutting the throat of his competition with a straight razor and kissing nuns in truly creepy fashion.

I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow, because I really think games like these are "you have to be there" things, but I will say we had great fun. There was a *lot* of detail narrated in by players - one of my favorite was Satan trying to use the Smiling Man's ice cream scoop to steam Sister Gabrielle's soul. The NPCs did a lot of unexpected stuff too - Stick and Stone were unstoppable thorns in *everyone's* sides in their quest for souls, until they got beat down by just about all the players at once.

Of my own narration, I've got to say I was pretty proud of the moment when Sinjin-Smythe crushed a miniaturized Smiling Man - his face never stopped smiling as his head blew up like a balloon and popped, his empty skin finally gooshing out through Smythe's fingers like melting ice cream. I've got to say that this is one of my favorite parts of gaming, when the narrative flows with little chance of breaking narrative or structure. It just *happens*.

Anyway, what prompted me to write this is one of my players contacted me today by IM just to tell me how "on" I was during the game, and how the scenes and conflicts flowed smoothly. I'm sure I only played a small part in that, as all the players were great, and we had a good setup. Still, it feels really good when my scene-framing and narrative skills have improved enough to prompt such praise.