Primetime Adventures at Stabcon

In my Stabcon review, I promised a full writeup of the Primetime Adventures game run by Micheal Cule on the Sunday of Stabcon.

Primetime Adventures is one of the new breed of 'indie games' coming out of The Forge. As the name suggests, the game is supposed to be an imaginary TV series. My previous experiences with Forgite-Narrativist games was limited to one game of Dogs in the Vineyard at Consternation last August, which I felt was decidedly so-so; neither the setting nor the system did a lot for me. I hoped Primetime Adventures would be better. And it was.

A game of Primetime Adventures starts with a completely blank sheet. It starts with the players playing the roles of the team of TV scriptwriters pitching ideas for a new series. Someone suggested a reality show about interdimensional interior decorators, but we eventually ended up with 'Knights of the Eternal Table', interdimensional do-gooders formed from the remnants of King Arthur's Knights, operating from a Camelot outside of space and time.

We then made up the following five characters:

• Sir Kay, cynical and curmudgeonly, the last survivor of the original Knights


• Arthur's Jester (can't remember the name), the other surviving knight, with a mystical connection to The Grail


• A Chinese master thief with a serious case of kleptomania


• My character, Rudi von Leibnitz, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot of aristocratic blood shot down in the Battle of Britain, who wants to atone for his guilt of having fought on the wrong side.


• 'The new guy', an Olympic athlete and family man.

The system is very bare-bones, no lengthy skill or equipment lists, just a couple of very broad one-line 'edges' (abilities) and 'connections' (I had "Fighter Pilot" and "Noble Family"). The game mechanics involve both parties in a conflict drawing cards, with your relevant Edges and Connections affecting how many cards you can draw.

The episode we ran was set in 1914, with the Knights sent to Arabia to retrieve a vial of a lethal virus which had been stolen from a German lab by Lawrence of Arabia. To add complications, a German agent sent to recover the vial turned out to be my character's own father. Since Rudi hadn't been conceived in 1914, whatever happened could not result in his death!

Most of us were more used to traditional-style games, and had trouble initially with scene framing and setting conflicts. This left us leaning more on the GM than perhaps we should have done. I felt that I needed to play a few more sessions to get the hang of it.

Overall, my impressions were positive, much more so than my earlier experience with "Dogs in the Vineyard". The initial brainstorming and on-the-fly group character generation proved to be a key part of the game; It probably wouldn't have occurred to me to make my character German rather than British, for example, but that made him a lot less one-dimensional.

The game left me wanting to play more episodes with the setting and characters, which I think is a good sign.