>>18208330
The party started in an amusement park, with a recently crashed Ferris Wheel bringing them together. Banjo Bear found himself where he would naturally be, inside “Hill-Bunny Billy’s Countryside Revue,” playing his somewhat grating hour-long show when the wheel came down.

The band was already in disrepair when the Countryside Revue exploded under the weight of the collapsing wheel, but fortunately it occurred during Barry Banjo’s Banjo Bear Solo and he was front and center stage, away from the rest of the band. After the dust cleared, the only surviving member of the band was the head of Hill-Bunny Billy himself.

The Banjo Bear reached down, scooped up the head, and swore an oath by his banjo that he would rebuild his fallen friend.

So began the party’s quest, to find salvageable parts to rebuild Hill-Bunny Billy, and by proxy find out what happened to humanity because humans would probably know where salvageable parts were.

And that’s, more or less, where the first session ended. Oh, but that’s not the weird, terrible stuff. That’s just the preamble.

>>18208340
So as the session was winding down, one of the players posed the question as to what kind of theme park it was they were exiting from. We all decided that it was a Disneyland-of-Appalachia sort of park, with Hill-Bunny Billy as its Mickey Mouse. We fleshed it out as a Hanna-Barbera style cartoon, never as popular as things like Disney, incredibly dated, but still with a strong camp following. We came up with the characters of Hill-Bunny Billy and Banjo Bear, of course, followed by Hugsy the Snake, Shelly the Turtle, and a possum, I believe. The theme park of course was decided to already in be decline when the humanity-destroying disaster hit.

In retrospect I can’t say for certain the next idea was mine, but I’ll bear the shame of it – as we sat back and milled over the events a little bit, we thought, and someone, probably me, uttered a fateful phrase:

“You know, it was probably an incredibly, alarmingly racist cartoon.”

And then the whole thing went to hell.

The ideas flowed like water after that: The cartoon was racist in that endearing, unaware-of-political-correctness way that things like the Disney crows and Song of the South were. And with that in mind, we drafted up the two main antagonists for the assembled cast.

Jimminy Crow, and Wraskley Coon.

They were, it was decided, moving into the cartoon’s Appalachia and causing a ruckus, Jimminy Crow and his family keeping up poor Barry Banjo all night with their cawing, consuming all of Shelly the Turtle’s prized watermelon patch. Wraskley Coon, for his part, would sneak into the houses at night and steal things in an effort to make the trash heap he lived on look livable.

A deluge of bit, side villains came after that: Dotty the Indian Elephant, Chupacabra the Chihuahua (who would hop the fence outside Hill-Bunny Billy’s house and terrorize the locals with his incomprehensible speech), and the yellow terror, Chinky Skink. The cymbal-clapping monkey in the party was retconned to be from the show as well, a well-meaning, bumbling butler that talked in ebonics and just wanted to be as fine and proper as the rest of Hill-Bunny Billy’s cast.

Shelly became the vehicle for female jokes in the show. She would bring up silly, adorable ideas that the rest of the cast would laugh off good-naturedly. She even had a kitchen inside her shell so she was never technically out of the kitchen – in fact, the kitchen the butcher robot worked in the back room of was “Shelly’s Kitchen,” and he had a small, Shelly sticker on the front of his chassis.

We all knew it was bad – shit, we knew it was horrible. We could watch ourselves slowly sliding down towards hell, but we couldn’t stop. It all made too much sense, it all fit.

>>18208399
As our saving grace, we eventually decided that the racism is mostly covered up in modern days. Not entirely gone, due to the creator, who looked like a cross between Walt Disney and Dick Cheney with an eyepatch (for the eye he lost in THE WAR), still being very much alive up until the disaster and in partial control of his studio, and probably a quasi-secret Nazi sympathizer in the vein of, of course, Walt Disney.

But I still had, well, HAVE a problem.

Now the players of Barry Banjo and the cymbal monkey are convinced that, in addition to the former’s hatred of children, they both have a deep, ingrained, hardwired yet subtle dislike of the “lesser races.”

My party now has a racist, animatronic Chuck E. Cheese robot and cymbal monkey.

What do I do with this, /tg/?

Well, as long as you make it more tongue-in-cheek, it should work fine.

If you feel a line is being crossed, talk to the players.

First off, a screencap because that scenario is worth remembering.

Second, as for what to do, maybe have them find robotic copies of the antagonists. I've never played Engine Heart, but it seems like the groundwork's already there.

Maybe Crow and crew have robotic copies that could have found clips of the old show. Say they identified with the roles, and have begun to try and recreate that in the world of Engine Heart. If your want to go for that extra bit of tongue-in-cheek, say that the old clips activated some of their hidden Nazi programming or some nonsense.

Another idea would be to start edition wars between different types of machines. One type is harvesting the other for replacement parts, which leaves the roles that the harvested machines filled unattended. The players, who want to find parts to rebuild Billy, have to realize that there are a limited amount of parts and eventually the cannibalization will lead to instability. If anything, maybe they can try trading for newer parts?

Maybe the party wants to start rebuilding the amusement park, acting as a beacon for other robots and perhaps humans to congregate to. Robotic racism can come in forms of extra costs, lower rating jobs or simply rejection of entry into the park.

I don't know if this'll be much help, but I'm not very familiar with the setting.

Yeah this isn't going to end up being a campaign you're proud of, or can talk about in public. Or at all.
But who knows? It might be fun.

What's the disaster, OP? Or do your players browse /tg/? Either way, please keep us updated.

>>18208459
Should be fine on that front, no one's offended or anything. The big problem is that now that I've opened this pandora's box I'm afraid to see what the hell else will come out of it.

>>18208714
Yeah, considering that Barry's goal is pretty much to "get the band back together" at this point, it'd be silly not to have at least a cameo by the "villains."

>>18208946
Two of them do, but I can type up the second session, if you'd like.

It involves destroying city hall, emancipating a paper shredder, going full Vietcong on an actual Chuck E. Cheese band, and attempting and nearly succeeding at nuking everything.

Altogether, a very productive session.

>>18209107
Yes please.

>>18209277
Alright, give me a little bit to type it up.

>>18209289
So, second session.

The players come across a small, foggy town imaginatively named “Hayestown.” They had found clues in the amusement park via a missive intended for an employee that there had been some people hiding out in the town hall a long time back, and they figured that was the best place to look.

As they rolled into town, Barry Banjo picked up his namesake in his bear hands and began to strum a tune. In response to Barry’s tinny crooning, a dog barked and whined in the distance.

Of course, the butcher robot, deprived of fresh meat after so many years, shot off after the bark like a bolt of lightning. This’d be the last they’d see of him for half the session.

The crew headed towards the town hall, having a rudimentary map, stopping to help repair an automated house system along the way. Barry propped up Hill-Bunny Billy’s head strummed a tune on the porch while they did so, and the cymbal monkey found a cleaver in the kitchen and took an immediate shine to it.

This will be both important and terrifying later.

>>18209360
They all proceed to the town hall, finding the town covered both in mist and vegetation. The lights were on but dim in the town hall, indicating emergency power.

As they entered they heard chatter in high-density binary and found a trio of robots loitering in the ruined lobby: a water-cooler robot made for portable liquid dispensation, an eight-armed filing robot, and a large-sized paper shredder/copier on wheels, looking anxiously and pleadingly at the “In/out” paper boxes stuffed with papers affixed to the filing robot’s chest.

Immediately the filing robot accosted the crew, asking the lot of them to register for mandatory service in restoring the town. The party manages to convince the filing bot that they’re registered to a private corporation, and it slinks off, dejected. They ask it where they can find humans, and it mentions that the city hall is being run by “The Inspector,” and he’s trying to find humans too. They should go talk to him.

And, like all great quest hooks, I knew this one was going to end in horrible disaster.

>>18209433
As they opened the large courthouse doors at the back of the town hall, a gust blew through, sending a shower of papers into the hall behind them.

The room beyond the door was wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with books and papers. The party steps/rolls in, taking a good look around at the filing robots scanning, transcribing, and filing the enormous amounts of paper and what appear to be piles of library books.

The cymbal monkey turns around and notices the paper shredder robot stuck at the door. It rolls nervously in, then jerks and shoots itself into reverse for about a foot, then creeps back toward the door, only to shoot backward again. The monkey, for whatever reason possessing an acute understanding of digital systems (he claims he was a CIA spy device repackaged as a toy and I’m gradually, begrudgingly accepting this) realizes that the shredder, affectionately named “Shreddy” by the party, has been reprogrammed so he can no longer go through the door.

The Shredder, for his part, looks very depressed about this fact.

So the party finds the robot dubbed “The Inspector,” a small toy with “Sherlock!” printed on the side and a moldering Burger King crown taped to its head. They talk to Sherlock for a bit, and he keeps answering their more esoteric questions (“What are you doing?” “Where are the people?”) with “VISIT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARAH” in a faux-British accent different from his normal voice. The party figures out that he’s been hard-coded to see the library as the solution to all problems, in an effort to promote child literacy.

After just a few minutes of trying to extract information from the be-crowned inspector Cymbal Monkey has had enough of his shit.

>>18209566
Cymbal Monkey tells Barry Banjo to hold down Sherlock, and Cymbal Monkey then attempts to reprogram the struggling inspector. The filing robots see this, of course, but this conveniently falls under their “Violence? Clearly none of my business” programming parameters.

The flailing, desperate Sherlock eventually gets away un-reprogrammed and rouses the alarm, which puts all sixty-odd filing robots on “Actually, this IS my business” alert, attempting to swarm poor Barry Banjo and his compatriots.

Now, Barry Banjo may just be a poor, robotic bear from the backwoods, but he’s an AMERICAN bear from the backwoods. Meaning, of course, that he enjoys a good old-timey game of baseball.

Barry picks up the monkey, tosses him hard as he can at Shreddy, and the monkey lands atop the anxious paper shredder. One successful reprogramming attempt later, Shreddy BURSTS into the courtroom filled with papers, kicking them into the air, and attempting to limblessly snatch them out of the air with his tiny shredding mouth, bowling over flimsy filing robots left and right.

Benny Hill music playing mentally, the party decides that this would be an excellent time for an exit, and heads back out the way they came to the sound of screeches in binary, loud clangs, and a whirring, contented paper shredder.

>>18209620
The crew decides to look for clues elsewhere in town, and fans out.

The maintenance robots, being logical, decide to check the local library.

Barry and Cymbal Monkey, having no ulterior motives whatsoever, decide to check out the local Chuck E. Cheese.

The maintenance droids manage, after some melodrama involving the butcher bot showing up once more chasing a Chihuahua, to access the library computers and download some choice bits of info before leaving to regroup at the Chuck E. Cheese.

After shoving their way past a pushy customer service robot, they find Barry Banjo and his trusty Cymbal Monkey sitting on a chair, center stage on the animatronic band stage, faux-tuning his banjo, waiting for the next show to start. The robots hunker down, plug themselves into one of the maintenance robots that acts as a recharger, and wait for the morning show.

This thread has not only made my day, but also my week. Thank you, OP

>>18209782
The show starts at 10 AM sharp, the curtain rising and Barry attempting to drone out the still mostly-operable Chuck E. Cheese band with his olde tyme country vocals. On the chair next to him sits the head of his best friend, still cold and lifeless no matter how many times Barry instinctively gestures to him during his show with a hearty, folksy “TAKE IT AWAY, BUDDEH.”

Barry Banjo keeps rolling his HumanComprehension stat as a sort of proxy for how well he’s playing, and is failing abjectly. No matter how much he’s backed up by the Cymbal Monkey on percussion, the Chuck E. Cheese band is barely beating him in all their tinny, animatronic glory.

And for the second time that session, the Cymbal Monkey just snaps.

He readies his looted cleaver, lunges from the banjo bear’s shoulder where he was perched, and takes off Chuck E.’s head with one deft swing. The sparking body falls (mostly) lifeless to the ground, and shit hits the fan.

Now, Chuck E.’s band isn’t comprised of proper robots, but cheap-o animatronic Small-World dummies that really can’t fight back against, say, the welding lasers employed by both the maintenance bots, being used to carve holes in the chassises of Chuck E.’s band-mates. The robot monkey continues to hack at the rival band’s ankles, and the maintenance robots put on the “Best ol’ laser light show” Barry Banjo has ever seen.

This is amazing.

Alternating between this and Record of Lodoss War. This is the way to unwind, folks.

>>18209798
After the dust from the most one-sided fight in post-apocalyptic robo-history settles, Barry declares himself the unchallenged winner of the “Battle of the Backwoods Bear Bands.”

Eyeing the wreckage, he asks one of the maintenance droids if they could help him with something. He’s just an old, clumsy country bear, after all, and he needs help soldering his friend’s severed head onto Chuck E.’s decapitated body.

I roughly explain to the player of the maintenance droid that doing so would be like welding an Intel processor to a Macintosh toaster and expecting them to communicate meaningfully, but she figures she might as well try anyway.

Now, the word “abomination” gets bandied about a lot in roleplaying, but the sight of Hill-Bunny Billy’s head sitting askew, welded onto Chuck E.’s shoulders, droning a slowed down, partially reversed songs from Billy’s repertoire at random due to his damaged internal clock as it staggers half-blind around the room following Barry Banjo pretty much fits it to a “T.”

Barry was, of course, delighted, and thanked the little maintenance droid for their help in “Bringing his bes’ friend in the whole, wide world back to ‘em. Mostly.”

But still, the Monkey was unsatisfied. The Chuck E. Cheese was still standing, and therefore their victory wasn’t absolute.

Something would have to be done.

Wait, I think I know who this is. Good to see this actually get posted.

I am in fucking awe. I can only dream of one day running a game this awesome. Please continue.

>>18209896
The company follows the monkey to the basement. The power was on, the monkey figured, and that meant that the place had a generator.

And so it did. An AlwaysSafe ™ personal Nuclear Power generator.

The monkey was, naturally, overjoyed. He couldn’t ask for more, and practically begs the maintenance robots to rig up the generator to blow.

One of them straight up fails knowing anything about nuclear physics – it’s an amusement park repair robot, after all – and the other knows just enough to make the thing explode.

So the smaller maintenance robot, the same that soddered Hill-Bunny’s head, got to work.

After a few rolls at increasing difficulty, she managed to set the reactor to have a 100% chance to explode, but only a 90% chance of going off in two days, when she wanted it to. Her layman’s grasp of amusement park nuclear physics told her that, if done properly, this thing could take out the whole town.

I asked the party if I should roll to see if it would go off now. One of the players, the guy who played the other maintenance droid, joked, “No, you should probably roll hourly.”

Sounds fair, I told him with a smile, and picked up a d10 and rolled it behind my screen. On a one, I said, it’d go off.

4. Well, so far so good for the first hour. I wouldn’t tell them, but they were safe for an hour. I decided to roll for hour two.

1. Well. Shit. Maybe that was a fluke, let’s just reroll that.
1. Okaaaaay. Definitely a fluke. One more reroll.
1. Okay, fuck, dice. You win. They die in two hours.
I looked up at them with a poker face.
“So how about that nuclear reactor?”

>>18210006
Oh shit.

>>18210006
>"So how about that nuclear reactor?"

POST FASTER PLZ

The only way this could get better was if Barry got a kazoo-playing smartass crow welded to his back.

Damn it man, at least walk the dinosaur! The suspense is killing me!

>>18210006
The smaller maintenance robot calculated odds, and chirped to the other robots that they only have a 10% chance of nuclear death.

The other robots convened, bickered, and, eventually to the monkey’s vociferous objections, decided that a 10% chance of nuclear death was REALLY HIGH.

The small maintenance droid began dutifully working on disarming the bomb she set, and I whipped out my trusty d10 with a deathwish for the party.

She rolled successfully. Good, that meant that there was only a 10% chance the bomb would go off anyway.

Closed my eyes, rolled the single d10, cupped my hand and pressed it down on the table.

2. Oh, thank fucking God. No nuclear TPK on session two.

The reactor slowly shut down, and the lights dimmed. The robots found their way out of the basement and onto the main level, where the monkey was already fast at work rolling and carefully positioning barrels of propane it found in the kitchen.

The Hill-Bunny abomination began to drone its backwards, slow monotone song as they slowly walked away from the Chuck E. Cheese, pausing only long enough for the larger of the two maintenance droids to fire its welding laser at a carefully placed propane tank, starting a chain reaction with the others and the ambient propane gas inside Chuck E.’s, igniting the building in an instant torrent of chemical hellfire.

And that, to my recollection, is where session two ended. Barry has vowed to get not just Hill-Bunny, but the rest of the entire band back together. The maintenance droids have the sneakingest suspicion that something is horribly wrong with the situation, but don’t have the comprehension to put a finger on it.

And the monkey?

He discovered, for the first time in his robotic monkey life, that he loves setting things on fire.

I can’t wait for session three.

>>18210006
Is that it? Oh, say it isn't so!

>>18210164
It's like The Brave Little Toaster Goes Off His Bolts, where can I get this system?

>>18210164
FUCK, YOU'RE REALLY SETTING US UP WITH A CLIFFHANGER?! SHIT FUCK ASS DAMN HELL CUNT DICK AS SHIT FUCK GOD DAMN MOTHERCOCK

>>18210177
Right here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?vtj0d1ooopo9iof

The guy who made it is a /tg/ resident, and asks people to share it freely. It's also on Amazon if you want a hardcopy.

>>18210180
If there was more to tell, I'd tell it!

Sorry to leave you hanging, I promise I'll write up the rest of it next week.

>>18210177
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Engine_Heart
It looks quite interesting. Shame I don't have a devoted gaming group or the GMing skill to do it proper

Someone please screencap this.

Somebody please archive this, it's brilliant.

>>18210201
Does Viral still float around here in one form or another? I can't say I've seen him for a while, but I might just be unobservant. Did hey disappear, go anonymous, cross over to tgchan or something else?

>>18210311
http://archive.foolz.us/tg/thread/18179510/

Viral is the creator and/or biggest figure behind the F-Zero RPG.

>>18208330
This thread's been archived for future generations.

>>18210408

Excellent. This thread, if any, deserves it.

Capped the thread, if people still want.

>>18211387
Thank you, sir.

Bamp.