Psi*Run Saturday

The Italian edition of Meguey Baker's Psi*Run has a much cooler cover (a box?) than the U.S. edition, but our edition is just as much fun to play! My friend Peter came to town this past weekend, and took the game for a first test drive with a group of four players. Psi*Run is aptly named. It's an RPG in which you play a psion of some sort; you create your PC's specific power at the beginning of the game. Psi*Run is also a chase game: the players are the survivors of a crash of some kind, and they are on the run from "the chasers".

The aim of your group of psions is to get away from the crash and from the chasers who will soon begin pursuing you. The crash can be of any sort: an airship, prison bus, black 'copter, flying saucer or something else entirely. That's something the table decides. The players help build the world with this choice, and how the player characters go about answering questions about their circumstances, their personal history, and their powers helps build the world further.

The PCs aren't entirely sure why they are being pursued. But each PC starts with a series of questions, blanks in their memory, that get filled-in as a result of actions that trigger memories during the course of play. Each player creates a list of questions in the character generation process, and the action mechanics create opportunities for players to answer each other's questions.

The game uses D6s. How many get rolled depend on the action. Any time you are using psi powers you will be rolling a good number of dice. Results from the roll are allocated to several different kinds of outcomes, including getting answers to one's memories. As in the *World games, each die result falls in one of three ranges of scores, determining the quality of the result. For example, a particular score range may determine that people get hurt in a conflict. Allocating die to memories has produces different results because the three score ranges determine whether the player, the other players, or the GM determine the answer to a memory question.

Overall Psi*Run felt more free form and less structured or hyper-procedural than many storygames I have played. I would play this one again!