Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Fiasco + Mythic Part Two

Read Part One where I explain what parts of Mythic I’ll be using as well as the character set-up for this game.

The heat beats down on Ginette LaFever as she sits in the pitiful shade of the dugout, shadows but not much cooler than the sun-blazed field she watches her players on. Her eye is on one particular player at the moment, Yu Kim. The girl has only been in Poppleton for about six months, and Ginette doesn’t like her attitude. If you were to ask Ginette to articulate what she didn’t like about Yu, the softball coach would probably stammer and search for the words, likely dropping the phrase, “I’m not racist, but…” The girl just “has a bad vibe” is Ginette’s go-to when she tries to justify the disdain in her own head.

“Hustle Yu! Move yer ass!” she bellows before taking another long draw off her iced coffee. After the girls do their drills, Ginette calls them into the dugout (she’s certainly not going out into that summer sun to speak with them), where she delivers a rambling monologue pieced together from motivational phrases she’s come across in books, bumper stickers, and Facebook memes. “The best strategy is to envision yourself already in the winner’s circle,” she spouts.

At some point, Yu intentionally knocks over a bat so that it will be directly in Ginette’s path when she leaves the dugout.

Mythic Oracle Question: Does Ginette avoid tripping over the bat? Odds: 50/50. Answer: Yes. (Positive outcome for Ginette)

Ginette pretends to catch herself while stumbling, looking down at the bat, and then laser-focused on Yu, like an exaggerated pantomime. “Girl, you almost made me bust mah ass!” she bellows. “I know you are new here (she puts a weight on that word), but we like to keep things organized so people stay safe. Comprende?” Yu says nothing but picks up the bat and returns it with the others. Practice is adjourned.
Yu pedals her bike down Chatham Street, seeing Tweedy across the street washing down his baby, his Ducati. He looks up, cigarette hanging from his lip, filthy tank top on, sneers, and returns to his precious. Ditching the bike in the front yard, Yu stomps into the house, hearing her mother’s voice before she sees her.

“Shoes! Mat!” Mom orders and the girl turns around to take them off and then resumes her journey to the fridge. Mom comes into view, sitting at the kitchen table, clipping coupons, which she meticulously sorts into a small coupon-sized plastic box complete with file tabs.

The Poppleton Trumpet sits on the table, the front page announcing that weekend’s protest of the Hezekiah Poppelton statue. Yu had befriended the “weird” kids after moving here, the ones who spoke up about the bad things adults did and who spoke back to the teachers and principal. They’d told her about the statue, how the man it depicted had been a slave owner, and there was a growing movement to take down the thing. There was also an angry group of people pushing back, many peppered throughout the city’s political institutions. The “weird” kids had invited Yu to the protest, and she was considering whether she could get there without her parents knowing.

Grabbing a cold drink from the fridge, Yu stepped out on the front porch. Tweedy rolled his baby into the garage, turning around and glaring at the neighborhood. He rolled the door down and carefully punched in the security code on the outside. Yu pulled her phone from her pocket and wanted to test something.

Mythic Oracle Question: Does Yu get a clear video of the security code? 50/50 odds. Answer: Yes (Positive outcome for Yu).

She plays back the recording after Tweedy disappears inside his house. There it is, the security code to his garage and that stupid bike. When the Kim family moved onto Chatham Street, they were subject to Tweedy’s loud proclamations about the neighborhood “turning into Chinatown.”” He’d quieted after calls were placed to the police department, and they stopped by. Yu put it together and realized Tweedy was an ex-cop, so the officer that came by spoke to him like you would a child you were trying to carefully calm down without upsetting him. Tweedy’s mouth had shut up, but he’d been sure to come outside when the Kims got home or cast glares if he was outside and they stumbled upon him.
Tweedy pulled into the parking lot of Larry’s, a greasy spoon the guys from the force would hang out at for coffee and something to stick to their ribs. Stepping out of the truck, he found Clifton McLean had just arrived a few minutes earlier. The men shook hands and went inside, plopping down in a booth with a good view of the front parking lot. A waitress took their orders, and two cups of coffee and plates of biscuits and hash browns appeared shortly after.

The men thumbed through that day’s paper in mutual silence when the small talk ran dry. After a beat, Tweedy slammed the front page on the table, grumbling, “Look at this shit!” His dirty fingernail pointed to the image of the Hezekiah Poppleton statue and the headline: “Protest planned for Saturday.”

“Stinkin’ Commies” Biscuit flecks spatter across the newsprint. “I don’t know why you boys aren’t out there cracking skulls all day tomorrow.”

Clifton takes another sip of coffee. “I’m doing what the department has asked: to be there to keep the peace. I don’t like it either, Tweedy, but you need to calm down.”

Tweedy huffs and snorts, unable to find a comfortable position in that bench seat. “I got a really good idea, buddy boy,” he starts up again. “I say we go around and slash the tires of all these woke pussies showing up to bitch & whine about the statue. Are you up for it?”

Oracle question: Does Tweedy convince Clifton to join him in tire slashing? 50/50 odds. Answer: No (Negative outcome for Tweedy).

Clifton puts down the sports page and looks Tweedy square in the eye. “Shut the fuck up, Tweedy. If I see you doing that or hear tires have been slashed now, I have to arrest your ass for suspicion. This is why you got your ass kicked off the force in the first place. Keep your mouth shut so I don’t have to hear what you’re thinking in that fucking head.”

Tweedy is silent for the rest of their time at Larry’s.
Saturday morning, Clifton finds himself loading boxes into his car for his sister Ginette. She’s opening her new store at the Poppleton Shopping Center next week. Scents, she calls it. Clifton has spent many hours over a year at various family get-togethers, hearing his older sister talk about her guaranteed money-making plan.

“Smells are in this year,” she would say. “And I’m not talking about the perfume counter.” She’d gotten caught up in some multi-level marketing scheme where you sold people bottoms of smells. It was everything from lavender to rose to chocolate chip cookies and cinnamon rolls. The idea, she claimed, was that a very trustworthy non-licensed “psychologist” had explained at a seminar Ginette attended that people’s health improves when they smell things that make them happy. No need for those pesky vaccines or check-ups with the “deep state” doctors. You just smell something you like long enough, and you’ll be fine.

Today, Ginette was moving the boxes of product that had been accumulating in her home office to the storefront across town. She needed a bit more seed money, which had been the conversation topic all morning. Clifton got the gist; she wanted money from him with a promise of big returns. He could use it; some bad bets over the last six months had left his bank account sparser than he’d wanted. This was why he was currently single, the precipitous drop in cash leading Darlene to leave and move back with her folks in St. Louis. But this smells thing was too frou-frou for Clifton. Also, the department did not look well on officers moonlighting, but Ginette assured him there was big money in scents.

Oracle question: Can Clifton convince Ginette to let him invest without attaching his name to any legal paperwork? 50/50 odds. (Positive Outcome for Clifton).

Ginette thinks about it and agrees. Clifton transfers her money as a “gift,” which she thanks him profusely. He checks his watch. “Shit. I am on duty in about an hour. After playing security for this fuckin’ protest thing.” Ginette excuses him, happy to have her money, and continues loading up boxes and bringing them to the store.
Ginette brakes at the stop light and waits as a group of teenagers crosses the street. They hold placards & signs with phrases like “No Slave Owners in Our City” and “Bring That Statue Down.” She simmers with anger; these young people just have no respect, unlike she did in high school. They all think they know so much. It’s that damn social media, she tells herself, ignoring how many hours she spends in bed every night scrolling through Facebook and Instagram. One of the teenagers catches her eye. Yu Kim. The anger burns hotter.

Instead of continuing straight ahead, Ginette takes a right, trying to follow the group without being noticed. They chatter, seemingly oblivious to the woman slowly following them in the red PT cruiser. She wants to do something; she wants to ruin their time. Glancing around her car, Ginette notices the ice coffee cup from the store, less coffee now than murky melted ice. She has an idea.

Rolling down the passenger window and speeding up just a bit, she brings herself parallel to the group on the sidewalk. Yu doesn’t even look her way, talking with a girl in the group and getting lost in that conversation. Ginette chucks the ice coffee cup squarely at the girl and then floors the gas, peeling away, checking her rearview mirror to see the group frozen, and likely some of them drenched.

Oracle question: Is Ginette able to get away unrecognized? 50/50 odds. (Negative outcome for Ginette)

“What the fuck?” someone in the group says, breaking the moment of stunned silence.

“I know her,” Yu says.

“Who is she?” a girl asks.

Yu clenches her jaw, not wanting to explode in rage in front of her friends. “She’s my fucking softball coach.”

Yu slams the front door shut, something she would only ever do with the assurance that her parents were not home. Her oversized t-shirt was soaked with stale coffee and melted ice, which meant she had to turn around, come home, and change, promising her friends she would catch up with them at the town square in just a while. Clothes were switched out, and Yu bounded out the front door, ready to meet with her friends, when she noticed Tweedy’s truck was not parked in the driveway. The garage was reserved for his precious motorcycle, so the truck kept a permanent home outside.
This was her chance. Yu pulled out her phone and watched the video, whispering the combination to herself. Glancing down the street, she saw most people weren’t home; it was a Saturday. Many of them were in the town square for the protest or up to other late summer activities. This was her chance.

Oracle question: Does Yu steal Tweedy’s motorcycle without being caught? 50/50 (Negative outcome).

The code works, no alarms. Yu sees the fire engine red Ducati leaning on its kickstand. After some awkward maneuvering, she gets the thing rolling down the driveway. But where to put it? She remembers the unused shed in her family’s backyard. It was there when they moved, and neither of her parents are into gardening or landscaping, so it has remained untouched since they looked at it after moving in. It will be the perfect spot to hide this thing, and Yu already anticipates the joy of watching Tweedy fume from the safety of her front porch. She doesn’t notice the security camera peeking out from the corner of the house pointed at the driveway.
“Tear that statue down!” the protestors chant against a sea of boos from the beet-red-white faces on the other side of the police cordon. Tweedy sits in his truck across the street, eating a fast food hamburger in both an aggressive and dangerous way. Choking hazard. He wants to do something, but Clifton scared him off the tire-slashing idea. Wiping bits of bun and sauce from his lower lip, Tweedy speeds through his brain’s minuscule Rolodex of ideas.

“Bomb threat” comes to mind. He will call in a bomb threat, making them forcibly clear the park. “No protest for you bitches.” He celebrates gleefully in his mind.

Oracle question: Will Tweedy successfully clear the square with a bomb threat? 50/50 (Positive outcome for Tweedy).

Popping open the glove box, Tweedy pulls out a pay-as-you-go burner phone he kept around when doing things he didn’t want to be traced back to him, especially when he was on the force. The police are called and told three bombs have been planted around the town square and will go off if the crowds remain. A handful of minutes later, the cops standing by watching started making announcements and threats of arrest if people didn’t start packing up and leaving.

Clifton rolls into a parking space in front of Scents around 6 p.m. that night. The square has been cleared, and no bombs have been found. He knows who he suspects but doesn’t have solid proof, so he can claim ignorance and go on with his day. Inside the store, Clifton finds Ginette in her office acting manic, freaking out. He can decipher something about a girl on her softball team between the endless string of words. Every few minutes, she charges out to the front of the store, staring out the windows, looking to see if someone has followed her.

While Ginette is distracted, Clifton can’t help but notice his big sister has left a lockbox of cash open on her desk. He recalls last Saturday when some men kicked down his door, men who worked for the even nastier guy he’d borrowed money from. The sight of that cash Ginette had pooled together gets Clifton thinking he could relieve the tension of when they would come knocking again.

Oracle question: Does Clifton swipe cash for debts without Ginette noticing right away? 50/50 (Positive outcome).

Clifton exits the office and starts a fight with Ginette, claiming she always does this. She’s stunned, thinking he would have backed her up, but her little brother storms out of the store, peeling away in his car. He drives with a smile, ready to drop this money off at an unassuming office downtown and then enjoy his weekend in peace.
The Tilt – quite different from a game with multiple people; I simply choose the two options I think would be the most interesting and fitting for this story.

Mayhem: An out-of-control rampage
Failure: Something precious is on fire.

For the second half, I use the Chaos Factor to determine whether the scenes are Expected, Altered, or Interrupt
Altered Scene: Increase an Activity

Softball practice comes on Monday, and Ginette notices Yu is absent for the first time. This increases her paranoia. Some of the kids Yu was walking with to the protest show up at the ball field and start shouting at Ginette. The players are confused, but Ginette tells them everything is fine and walks over to tell the interlopers to leave.

I chose a Negative outcome.

One of the girls keeps asking if the PT cruiser is Ginette’s car while others hurl accusations of what happened with the iced coffee. A physical altercation occurs between Ginette and a couple of the teenagers. The coach doesn’t seem to realize she brought a bat over with her and will claim later that she had no idea what she was doing as it made contact with one girl’s face. A tooth hurtles through the air.

In a panic, Ginette rushes to the car and guns the engine, leaving behind one of Yu’s friends bleeding from her mouth and profoundly confusing the girls’ softball team.

Altered Scene: Remove an Object

Yu gets home before her parents. She decides to skip practice until she’s chosen how to handle Ginette. Just as the girl sits down to enjoy a freshly toasted Pop-Tart, there’s a frantic knock at the door. She answers and finds a seething Tweedy standing there.

“I know you took it!” he screams. “You don’t have momma and daddy to hide behind, little girl. Give me back my fucking bike!”

Yu responds coldly. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

A handgun emerges at waist level. “Don’t fuck with me, kid,” he spits.

Negative outcome.

“I put it in the shed out back,” Yu says, terrified at this man threatening her. She leads him into the backyard and opens the shed to find nothing. “I swear I left it here. That was it!”

“You fucked up, girl!” Tweedy leads Yu across the street to his house. She’d never seen so many Bloatburger wrappers and bags in one place that wasn’t the restaurant itself. Tweedy puts her in his basement; she notes the deadbolts outside the door and hears them slide into place.

He speaks to her through the door: “You ain’t going nowhere until that fucking bike shows up again!”

Altered Scene: Add an Object

A bomb goes off early Monday evening in the square. It completely destroys the Hezekiah Poppleton statue. As Tweedy stews about what to do, the sudden realization that he has imprisoned a minor in his basement, there’s a knock at the door. He opens the door and finds Clifton there with a couple more officers. Lights flash. Clifton finally told his superiors about Tweedy rambling on about doing something to mess up the protests, and they listened back to the bomb threat call from Saturday, multiple officers IDing Tweedy’s voice without having to listen too hard.

Negative outcome.

“We’re bringing you down to the station for questioning, Tweedy. Get your wallet, and let’s go.”

Tweedy doesn’t tell them about Yu and goes along, assured he will be let go.

Altered Scene: Increase an Activity

As Clifton is headed to the station, dispatch comes over the radio and tells him he needs to respond to a call about an assault at the softball field. “Ginette,” Clifton thinks, remembering her strange behavior on Saturday and how she mentioned one of his players. After talking to the kids, he knows it is her but doesn’t let anyone know. Instead, he drives to Scents and finds Ginette hiding in her office with a loaded handgun.

Positive outcome

Clifton snatches the gun away from her and pulls out the magazine. He tells her he must bring her in because she clearly hurt the girl at the field. While she’s not looking, he takes more cash from the lockbox.
Interrupt Scene: PC Negative

We start with a tight close-up of CCTV footage from the park, showing Ginette connecting the bat with the teenage girl’s face. Moments later, Ginette runs out of frame to her car. We pull back as the footage plays until we see two detectives sitting on one side of a table, Ginette on the other. They look at the TV, then at her. She looks at the TV, then at them.

We see Ginette being put in a cell for the night.
Altered Scene: Remove an Activity & Remove a Character

Glass shatters. Yu chucks whatever she can find at the locked basement window in Tweedy’s house. She removes the broken glass and carefully squeezes herself through the window. Good. Mom and Dad are still out. Her attention is pulled away by a plume of smoke from one street over. She can’t help her curiosity and tries to calmly walk around the corner while her heart beats like crazy. Tweedy’s truck is still in the driveway. She had seen the flashing police lights through the window and guessed they must have arrested him. For what? Likely tons to choose from.

On the next street is the Ducati, which crashed against a light pole; a trail of blood leads away from the scene. Yu reasons whoever stole it might have thought her family owned the bike? She heads back home and settles down, ensuring her parents suspect nothing when they return from work.

Altered Scene: Oracle roll: “Hinder Defiantly”

Tweedy sits with arms crossed, looking straight ahead in an interrogation room. We’re watching him through a two-way mirror. The older chief of police tells a younger officer to go on break while he goes to speak with Tweedy. The chief comes in and sits down, shuts off the recorder, and smiles at his prisoner.

I chose a Negative outcome.

“You really fucked shit up for us, Tweedy,” he begins. “We had this planned, and you had to fuck it all up, huh?”

Tweedy, stern demeanor drops into one of confusion.

“We planted the bomb, the boys. We would make it look like one of those little lib shits did it. Then Clifton tells me you were having diarrhea of the mouth talking about slashing tires and the fake bomb threat on Saturday.”

Tweedy’s shoulders slump, he stares off, his brain finally processing how absolutely screwed he is.

“You’re going away for a long time, boy. Bombing gets the feds involved. Tell ’em whatever bullshit you want to, try telling ’em it was me. We have a personnel file and firing that trashes what reputation you had to begin with. You done fucked up, Tweedy.”

Altered Scene: Add an Object

Clifton goes back to the Scents store, knowing the lease will have to be terminated, and he’ll likely have to help Ginette move the shit out of her and into a storage shelter in town. He’s been surprised with the amount of cash he’s found here and is curious. Clifton pokes around in the office, not seeing much more than the lockbox.

I choose a Positive outcome as it is all I have left.

Clifton notices a slightly askew ceiling tile and brings a step ladder from the supply closet. He pushes the panel aside and finds a duffle bag. Pulled down and opened up on the desk reveals thousands in cash. He starts to wonder if this was a front for drugs, but that doesn’t seem like Ginette. People must really like all these stupid little bottles of stinky oil. He’s not sure what she’d hide in the ceiling. Perhaps paranoia after hitting that teenage girl in the face, hiding cash so it couldn’t be taken from her. It’s definitely Clifton’s payment for the trouble he’s been through.

He hides it where his spare tire would go in the back of his car. There are some big games this weekend, and this cash could become much more.
Aftermath Scores

Ginette -3, Yu -3, Tweedy 0, Clifton +3

Ginette – She gets eight months for assault in the county lock-up. No more softball coaching, to say the least. Her store is leased to a pet supply company while the leftover product is returned to Smell Co. Years later and two states over, Ginette works as a waitress at a popular Southern-themed food chain selling tons of cheap chintzy shit in their gift shop. She realizes a college-aged Yu Kim is sitting in her section. Ginette is caught by her manager spitting in Yu’s food and is fired on the spot.

Yu – The new softball coach is no better than Ginette, so Yu decides she doesn’t want to play anymore. Eventually, the Kim family moves because there’s so much theft happening in the neighborhood. Over time, Yu finds the robbery of the Ducati and the subsequent getting away with it has awakened a kleptomania in her. On her way out of a popular Southern-themed food chain that also sells tons of cheap chintzy shit in their gift shop, for example, Yu swipes a small rustic wooden sign that reads “God Don’t Make No Trash.” She gets caught stealing a car in a campus parking garage during college and is expelled. Her parents are very disappointed, and Yu moves back in, never quite able to leave the nest.

Tweedy – Federal prison is rough for Tweedy, though he seems to “find his people.” He gets a decade sentence and never realizes that the Aryan Brotherhood’s friendliness is a ruse. On his last night in the joint, Tweedy is shanked by his “buddies.”

Clifton – With the stolen cash, Clifton buys himself a jet ski. He rides on the lake every other weekend in the summer. He continues to be single. He never grows or learns anything from any of this.

So that was an experiment with Fiasco & Mythic. It did provide me with a framework that kept me on my toes. This will never replace how fun Fiasco plays with a group of people. I would be interested to try this out with other playsets in the future and see what comes from it. This particular story has moments I really liked, but there were some places where I felt I could have had better ideas. If anyone out there has done Fiasco as a solo game, I’d love to see and try their methods.