Uncle Joe's Quizzical Murder Mystery

It is the dead of night in frozen Stretford, part of the communist super state, and comerade Joseph Stalin lies dead in a greenhouse of the Stretford Hydroponic Research Centre...

I asked each of my four players (sans the absent Hair Dave) for an genre, an object, an authority figure and a place, in some kind of off the cuff mad-lib session and the results were... Well...

Giz decided that it should be a murder mystery.
Amanda decided it should be set in Stretford.
Medium Dave decided it should involve Joseph Stalin.
Rachael decided is should include a dart board.

Hence our steam-punk communist dystopia was born. I decided the party should be KRU agents sent as investigators into Comerade Stalin's death and they arrived via their zeppelin (The Red Oktober) and were wisked away to the scene of the crime.

What followed was a couple of hours of some of the most interesting roleplaying I've seen. We barely touched the dice as Giz and Rachel went off performing interrogations and Dave and Amanda went to Stalin's holiday home (in Stretford) and ended up involved in a Steam-Car chase (oh yes) in a blizzard, at the end of which they found Stalin's Steam Car and his driver slumped over the wheel having been shot in the head.

It was a delight to see the characters who emerged from this session and the quirkyness that emerged; Amanda's character wore a Cosmonaut's outfit because she dislikes contact and Giz's M-U had all 'psychic' powers and wore a gas mask alá Psycho Mantis.

In the end through a series of interrogations and a raid on a suspects house they discovered that Stalin in fact wasn't dead and that the body in the Greenhouse was a double killed to fake Stalin's death so that he could escape an assassination by the KRU. What I thought was a simple enough switch turned out to be quite difficult and in the end whilst the party found out what happened I had to fill in the 'why' which I had made a wee bit too difficult to uncover.

All in all despite the fact that it was entirely ad-libbed and much of the stuff I prepped in the 5 minutes the players were making their characters never got into the session, (Zombie Stalin!) including all the possible combat encounters, it worked quite well. Microlite sat unobtrusively in the back during all this and it was nice to know it was there but that we didn't feel obliged to use it but that it was there in case I needed it.

Some players are clamouring for a sequel knowing Stalin is now heading back to Russia via Zeppelin (The Stalingrad) and that they have their own Zeppelin with which to chase him down. This may not be the last we've seen of our communist steam-punk world!