Savage Worlds / Savage Showdown Game

I hosted a small Savage Worlds / Showdown game last Saturday as part of my birthday. We had three heroes (wildcards in Savage parlance) looking for their friend, Dr. Zachariah Smith an eccentric inventor. Dr. Smith had moved his lab to the outskirts of town after his last experiment heavily damaged the Little Italy part of town. No one had heard from the good doctor for several weeks, so his closest friends set out to check up on him.

Unfortunately for our heroes, Archon Voss had heard of the doctor's accomplishments & decided to recruit the doctor to the Third Reich's cause. Archon Voss & his party arrived at the north end of the factory complex just as the heroes arrived to the South. A bloody gun battle ensued. Robots ran amuck. Heros dived through windows. Tennessee Buck & Archon Voss held a long pugilist competition, which ended with the Archon being shot & captured by our intrepid heroes.

It was a fun game. I learned a few lessons.

1. Massed rifle fire can be very nasty.

2. Cover is very important.

3. I need to remember to have heroes use their wild die when needed.

4. Bennies work nicely to correct problems.

5. I need to remember to do morale checks starting when a unit goes under 25% casualties.

6.  I need to read through the weird science & spell rules a bit more.

My overall impression of the game is that it plays well & pretty quickly. Aron & I were the only two who had ever played. Al & Carl had never played & picked it up very quickly.

I had two sides & one rogue force with a total of 20 models on a 30" x 30" board. The game felt like it moved pretty well & by the end it was really humming along. Now that I have a better feel for the rules, I'm pretty sure I could have more models on the board & not have the game bog down. All in all, I think I'm going to stay with Savage for now as it seems to meet what I'm looking for in pulp rules.

I have picked up a copy of Thrilling Tales, which has even more pulp goodness that I'm going to inflict. I also have some Mayan/Aztec paper buildings that are going to come in handy soon. I'm looking for some appropriate cars & trucks to round things out.

I'm going to work on a combat summary doc & rework the character & unit cards as well as plan the next episode.