The final session is done.
The first hour or so was a bit painful as I went through the book keeping of which pillars of the ceremony had been disrupted, which subverted and which would only come into play later.
I also had to employ a bit of Gumshoe style "Your knowledge of geomancy tells you that if you mess with the linear bonfire prior to the ceremony it will be disrupted." They eventually twigged to burning the thing down at lunchtime. Luckily we had our archer and their flaming arrows and our sorcerer with Jerry can of petrol purloined from the art cars and a lighter.
While investigating the dragon earlier our sorcerer had removed one of the alters from it but it didn't occur to anyone to change the names. So despite being burned down 3 of the 4 "bad ghosts" were still in the mix.
Eventually we got to the fight and once again I was left managing a lot of tokens on the initiative tracker. If you aren't using one you are likely to struggle. As it is the nice die-cut card one from the kickstarter wasn't quite big enough for everything going on.
I discounted any of the "old foes" turning up because it was just going to be too much work. So it was just Wu, his immediate support gang and the two gangs of mooks.
On the players side I counted Mongolian Brian Blessed, Undercover Hong-Kong Copper and the Equestrian Twins.
Of course Orchid Whisper have been talking to Ganbaatar so give the correct version of events in their song. The players realised that the lead singer was cursed and broke that but it was not clear that had any effect on the final result.
Wu descends invoking the various pillars of his ritual all of which have been at least disrupted by the PCs. He then comes to the sacrifices. Amy gets it straight away because there's no real way that she can not be there however all the subsidiary sacrifices have been freed.
In lue of them I decided one of the other members of Orchid Whisper was a woman so she was auto-killed next. Remember these unpreventable deaths are happening every 2 shots. The audience is being shepherded away by the twins so the next available woman is Jessica. So it has to be instant death for her and the PCs are now left looking very silly due to something they had no control over.
It's at this point the thief decides to steal the Red Jade Dragon from Wu and I'm happy for an "Real Tough" Intrusion roll to allow that. Eventually everyone is killed to death and the adventure is over.
As a last piece our sorcerer asks the ghost of Lilly Ma if she can do something about the death of her descendant, Jessica. Simply resurrecting her seems out of keeping with the melodrama which is a plank of Hong-Kong cinema so I had her brought back as a ghost.
So what is my conclusion having now run it all the way through?
It was a bold move to make the first of the new subscription adventure such a departure from a normal Feng Shui adventure style. Or maybe it isn't, maybe this is how most people play and the games I've played which are a series of fights connected by intermissions is the outlier.
The style of writing and presentation is very visual which befits a game based on films but leads to some problems. For instance, the twins are described as finishing each others sentences which is a lovely character note for two actors but not so useful to a single GM.
In general there are a lot of interesting GMCs and plenty of things going on but maybe not quite enough guidance on how to bring all that to the table. If I am to run this again I would likely have to spend a couple of weeks taking it apart and putting it back together with many more notes on how to bring things to light for the players.
