For Story Game Sunday this afternoon, we played the terrific game Hollowpoint. Thanks to Daniel Lewis for running the game, and Rob Ferguson , Daniel Fowler and Dustin Fowler for playing.
As for the game itself, it was set in the Jazz Age and we played the clean-up crew for the Continental Detective Agency (a Pinkerton-style outfit). Our mission was to find out what happened to one of our operatives, who went missing, and then to punish those responsible for his disappearance.
The search led us to the mining town of Midas, NV, where they were doing a little more than mining. In fact, the whole town was basically a front for a gin distillery run by the mob. Our guy was killed (on the orders of Al Capone himself) when he got too close to the truth about what was going on in Midas.
The second part of our mission was to punish Al Capone. We went to Chicago, with the idea of punishing the big guy by shutting down some of his rackets (with as much explosive violence as possible, of course).
In the end, we ended up overreaching on the Capone thing, and our paymasters in Kansas City told us to call it quits. The problem is we had destroyed a warehouse used to store some of Capone’s booze, and this gave an opening to an Irish mobster, Stanley O’Doyle, to exploit the hole in the market. O’Doyle used his new found revenue stream to fund his nephew, Tommy, in Kansas City, which made problems for our clients in that town.
Our mission then changed to killing Stanley O’Doyle (at an Irish seafood restaurant called O Danny Buoy) which we did. The game ended with the nephew, Tommy, trying to exact revenge on us while we rode the train back to San Francisco (our base of operations). There was lots of cinematic fighting and shooting on the train, but we managed to repel the attack.
It was a lot of fun. The system reminded me quite a bit of Dogs in the Vineyard in that it used dice pools and narrated actions. I’d love to try it again, especially now that I understand the rules better.
