Shadow Scar – Never Mind The UFO, What About The Taxmen?

This is a game where the secretive Shadow Scar Detective Agency tries to keep multiple universes free of the malign influences of Demonic Yokai. It is extremely Anime.

I played a one-hour demo of it last year, and enjoyed it, so decided to try a longer scenario. As it turns out, after a quick table-swap because the Sunday flake-rate is very high & nobody else showed up for my table, the chap running this session recognised me as someone who’d played the game before, and we figured out he’d run the demo last year.
( It was a fun demo – My character, who had absolutely no business being anywhere near a firearm, got to fire a Tommy-Gun, because she really wanted to and it was a target-rich environment. Don’t think she hit anything though )

For this one, a ‘UFO’ had crashed in a backwoods town in a 1920’s sort of world where things tend towards the dramatic. The locals were selling tickets to see the UFO, we suspected it was something to do with Yokai, and went in to clean up.

Yeah, crashed spaceship from a more Sci-Fi dimension.
Most of us masqueraded as FBI, I went with the ‘interested visitor’ angle, and we were able to figure out that the escaped Yokai was sufficiently dog-like that the town vet had taken it in to treat its injuries. We even came up with a plan to lure it out, but then the real FBI turned up.

My clever plan to distract the FBI and the locals by spreading the rumour that the ‘FBI’ were actually the Revenue sort of backfired. Badly.
This particular ‘world’ has a poorly-understood but very real Narrative to it; Events tend towards the most dramatic they can be.
If there’s a car chase, there will be someone crossing the narrow alley with a barrow of vegetables, or two people with a pane of glass.
If there’s a case of guns, they will be shipped fully loaded.
And if you spread rumors about The Revenue in a small backwoods town, they will get together and try to run them out at gunpoint.

So, while the Townfolk & FBI shot at each other, we dealt to the Yokai, then destroyed the crashed ship.
Not, by any means, the subtle and delicate solution that we could have gone with, but in our defense, we didn’t know it’d escalate that quickly.

This was a fun game, and I’d like to play more of it. Or maybe run it.