Attending

Clockwise starting with the Animator:

• L.B. — the Animator
• E.A. — Rachel Rabbit
• M.A. — Pete Pig
• T.A. — Chris the Chicken
• T.K.B. & D.B. — Pat the Pilgrim

Actual Play

E.A., M.A., and T.A. came over to play Thanksgiving morning to play before heading next door to the holiday meal at Grandma's.

Not long after we started D.B. arrived, looking for his cousins, and since we were playing, I bowed out and handed Pat the Pilgrim over to Dan.

The kids all seemed to be having fun, and L.B. said she enjoyed running the game, although she did say that playing was more fun.

Attending

• T.A. played Nektar
• E.A. played Betheny
• L.B. played Erica
• M.A. played Gorge (pronounced “George”)

Actual Play

The characters followed the Teleks to the Tooth Decay, where Nektar kept trying to keep them away from the ship. Luckily by the time the others caught on they were too close and got snagged by the arm. Inside they wasted no time aggravating Bob, so when Torgo told them he'd be sending troops to imprison them Bob dumped them out of the Tomato and told them they were contractually obligated to foil Torgo's fiendish plans. They went out into the corridor and were immediately run over by the robot car carrying fruits, and were riding it back to the source when a ragged dentist spotted them and jumped and grabbed Bethany off Erica's back, tucking and rolling into a nearby bubble. The others followed quickly, and soon everyone found themshelves the targets of primitive dentists. At one point everybody was being dragged by one or more dentist toward dilapidated dentist chairs of one unpleasant sort or another, but in the end only Betheny ended up in a chair and had her teeth drilled — after being anesthetized, of course! It was at this point that a terrible noise was heard in the distance and the dentists and their chairs and even some of the trees ran off.

And that's where we left them for the time being.

Aftermath

As usual I found Toon to be very tiring to run, but worth it.

Attending

• T.A.
• E.A.
• M.A.
• L.B.

Character Creation

For some reason Toon and Buggin' are the games we've done character creation in the most. (For the Savage Worlds games I've been letting them choose from pregenerated characters, probably because most of them have been one-shots.)

We spent most of the evening doing character creation, and everybody ended up with neat characters.

• T.A. created Nektar, a three foot tall blue alien with golden eyes and antennae like Shrek's who was kidnapped and forced to join the Car Blazers and who just wants to escape.
• E.A. created Betheny, a 2 inch tall mini-me with wings who always has to be in the middle of things and joined the Car Blazers because she didn't like the orphanage, and who with a Muscle of 3 ended up the strongest character!
• L.B. created Erica, a bunny with a jetpack who was in it for the carrots, belives everybody should have a special blankie, and who has the urge to defeat villans and protect friends and their possessions.
• M.A. created Gorge (pronounced “George”), an alien from the sun, a humanoid solar flare with a belt with two holsters and flame guns who joined the Car Blazers to get to burn things.

E.A. started the orphanage idea, and when every single last one of them rolled a 3+6=9 for Hit Points, I decided that they must have all been orphans from different orphanages that the routine medical workup on joining the Car Blazers proved conclusively that they were quadruplets separated at birth!

I got the kids to laugh uproariously even before character generation was over. E.A. kept going on about how horrible the orphanage had been, and everytime she did an orphanage matron would pop out of nowhere, show evidence that the orphanage had actually been a great place, and then disappear. E.A. kept making up things that were more and more difficult to disprove, and the orphanage matron would go to more and more absurd lengths to disprove them, pulling the younger Betheny out of pictures of luxury and comparing DNA from her blood to that of the older Betheny, etc. This was really fun, and helped keep character generation from dragging too much.

T.A., an alien, wanted to make sure that the Car Blazers' unbreakable 5-year contract used normal-length years — which made me laugh sinisterly.

Actual Play

After character creation we only had 45 minutes to play, but we went ahead and started on the “Car Blazers” Series Pilot. They got introduced to the Teleks and eventually blew two of their battleships to pieces, and then spotted two other Telek ships leaving the system, and that's where we left them for that evening.

Toon

First, by request, I ran a session of Toon.

Actual Play

I set it in the “Old West in Space” and the toons had to rescue the kidnapped daughter of the richest toon in town from the bandit chieftan Big Ape, the “Fastest Banana in Space”, and his bandit gang of monkeys, who were hiding out in an abandoned asteroid mine still inhabited by mining robots.

Part 1: Character Creation

On Staturday the kids made characters while I used one of the Toon Adventure Generators to generate some adventure ideas and looked for interesting NPCs in the Toon books. T.A. created a helpful ghost named Jim and took ghostbusters as his natural enemies. I'd rolled the location to be a haunted house, so I told L.B. and E.A. they were ghostbusters and gave them a ghost trap and proton guns, and told T.A. that he was one of the ghosts haunting the house, a former sailor, “Salty Jim the Ghost” [1]. T.A. was worried that L.B. and E.A. would spend the whole time ganing up on him [2], so I told him that they would initially be at odds, but later they would have to cooperate. E.A. created Tanny the Ballet Bunny and took gardeners as her natural enemy, so I added a garden and gardener/caretaker to the haunted mansion, although they didn't get used very much. L.B. created Nicole the Chameleon. I decided they be facing an alien invasion and the Dough Boys would be the minions of the aliens.

Part 2: The Haunted Mansion

On Sunday we actually got to play. The ghost and the ghost busters spent some time trying to make each other fall down, destroying much of the foyer of the haunted mansion and turning up a plaque holding the spirit of Prof Winterbottom, the missing owner of the mansion, who in the course of a world spanning career had collected an enormous collection of weird items from all over the globe and then disappeared mysteriously. Once the initial player-vs-player slapstick had wound down I had a delivery truck crash through the front porch [3] and dump a load of cylinders of bread dough through the front door of the house, which burst and combined into Dough Boys from the Toon rulebook. The PCs then fled down a long corridor (on roller skates?) and crashed down the steps into the basement. I decided that the aliens would be extra-dimensional octopus-faced Cthulhuoid monsters called “pluggoths” named for their odd special effect of squeezing through any aperture (doors, mystic portals, etc.) as if it were a plughole only an inch in diameter. The pluggoths were using The Dough Boys to open a portal to to Earth in the basement of Winterbottom's mansion, since it was the only building with the necessary density of weirdness, and planning to launch their invasion using the house as a base. Luckily the PCs were hiding in the basement, and after the aliens did their inevitable gloating and explanation of there plans to conquer the world and suck out everybody's brains, it was up to the PCs to foil their schemes and save the world. After some entertaining efforts by T.A.'s Salty Jim using bottles from the wine cellar as simultaneously triggered cork-guns and playing on the octopus-faced pluggoths' fear of fishermen things moved on to a climax. E.A.'s Tanny the Ballet Bunny had, unbeknownst to me, taken dynamite one of her possessions and in a move echoing all those desperate Call of Cthulhu characters proceeded to set an explosive trap for the pluggoths and the Dough Boys. Unfortunately, she failed her Set/Disarm Trap roll and the resulting explosion completely destroyed the entire mansion, flinging the PCs and Prof. Winterbottom's plaque high into the air. Luckily the pluggoths and their extra-dimensional portal did not survive the blast. All the PCs Fell Down, and Tanny fell down out of the sky through the Gardener's chimney and right into his stewpot. The End.

Remarks

I find Toon to be difficult to run: I feel a lot of pressure to keep up the wacky slapstick humor we're familiar with from Bugs Bunny, the Roadrunner, or Tom and Jerry, and frankly that's hard. Moreover, I find it hard to think up things to do. Thank goodness Toon has a number of “Adventure Generators”; they really help me come up with ideas. In any case, this episode became more and more a slapstick Bugs Bunny cartoon Call of Cthulhu episode as it went on, with creepy voices and noises and villains whose ambitions were only overmatched by their slapstick weaknesses: I worked hard to keep things at a Scooby Doo [4] level of creepiness, saving only that the monsters weren't people in disguise but silly cartoon creatures. I was aiming at Bugs Bunny visuals and Scooby Doo creepyness factor, but not forgetting the Tom and Jerry slapstick and the Scooby Doo chase scene goofiness.

I wonder if Toon would be easier or harder with adult players?