Memorial Day weekend at KublaCon. Most of the RPGs I was in or running had to do with war -- sort of appropriate for Memorial Day, huh?
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All’s Well That Ends Well: Blood of The Gods
Thursday 6pm, invite-only pre-convention game, 6 hours
GM: Nick "The Orange Duke" Szczech
System: Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition
My Version of a Colin Dimock classic. Our heroes have just returned from
a deadly but successful mission. They are tired, wounded and in some
cases dead. At least it is over, or is it? Play one of the Men in Black
as you battle a horrible beast inside the confines of your own secret
base. What is going on? What went wrong? Who can you trust? Only time
will tell. It’s character against character in an all out battle to the
death, but be sure you kill the right ones!
Hyle Hooper – ex FBI, dream warrior
Black Basil Thorn – world Traveler
Shannon Mac – navy seal, black ops agent
Clarice Scully – Bio/forensic expert
Kurt Salu – Computer expert, hacker
Madame Rotunda – power psychic
Arthur C. Carter –archeologist, dreamer
Eddie Dane – Killer, Stake Team leader
I got invited to a game before the convention started. This is great. No shuffler, no loss of weight for getting into games. Also the Atrium is pretty quiet before the convention starts and is a great place to play a game.
This was an interesting game. My only complaint is that this game needs 2 GMs. When players were doing secret things (which was most of the time), the rest of the players wind up sitting at the table without anything to do.
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The game is basically Player vs Player, but we didn't know that, so all the secret conferences were Players that were infected doing nefarious things to other players. The players basically didn't have a chance, so this game was mainly a survival horror game.
I actually made it to the end of the game with my original character, locked in the lower level with another character. I assume we would eventually escape through the incinerator flue, but then it would be too late to stop the infection of the rest of the world which we didn't know was at stake since we thought the facility was completely locked down.
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Death From A Jeep
Friday 7pm, 6 hours
GM: Thomas Vallejos
System: GURPS 4th Edition
January 1944: You are members of an Allied Team of special ops who
operate behind enemy lines. Your methods include the use of heavily
armed jeeps, explosives, knives... Just about everything you will need
to convince "Jerry” that starting this war was a bad idea.
You come back from Christmas leave only to find your next assignment is waiting for you. Destination: Somewhere in France.
Tom had lots of technical details and info. It's been a long time since I played GURPS and I love the bell curve that comes with 3d6 vs straight percentile die rolls. Glad that Tom had pre-generated characters since there was a lot of crunch on the character sheets. The mission was pretty straight forward, but we had a lot of fun in this game due to character interactions.
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We're dropped behind enemy lines in gliders with our Death Jeeps. We meet up with the French Resistance and are given several possible targets: Radar installation, Gestapo HQ, and extraction of a Nazi Rocket Scientist. Well, being the overachievers that we were, we extracted the Nazi Scientist and attacked the Gestapo HQ. Given enough time, I think we would have invaded Berlin too.
We had a great group of role players and that was where all the fun was. We also killed a lot of Nazis: at a castle, at Gestapo HQ, at a check point, at our extraction point.
The extraction plane didn't have enough seats, so a number of the PCs decided to stay, to kill more Nazis.
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Super Train
Saturday 10am, 4 hours
GM: Morgan Hua
System: Godlike
Allied Talents, WWII soldiers with superpowers, are notified by the
French Resistance that a Nazi Super Train is loading secret cargo. Your
mission, stop whatever the Germans are doing.
Godlike is a
brutal WWII system where one lucky bullet can kill a PC. Not only do
you have to deal with trained soldiers, but the Germans have their own
supermen too.
This game is short and pretty straight forward. I took two of the highlights from my Godlike campaign and created two standalone scenarios. The other scenario is Eagle's Nest.
I got some Godlike veterans in my game: Jack Y., Gil T., Jason F., etc. I think only one player didn't know the system. To my amazement, no PCs were harmed in this game.
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I think it shows that if a group of soldiers know what they're doing and do things smartly, they can survive the chaos of war. The players did smart things and did things right. It was slaughter-fest of Nazis.
In my campaign, the players deliberately blew up the cargo thinking that if the Nazis want it, we should deny it to them. Well, the cargo contained France's national treasures. I had a print out of the Mona Lisa. I tore out a piece that contained her head and told a player that wood chips, plaster, and dust rain down with the explosion and this fluttered in the air and dropped at your feet.
In this game, the players were smarter and actually saved the art work.
Allied Talents, WWII soldiers with superpowers, are sent to capture the Eagle's Nest, one of Hitler's retreats.
Godlike
is a brutal WWII system where one lucky bullet can kill a PC. Not only
do you have to deal with trained soldiers, but the Germans have their
own supermen too.
This time, due to a tactical mistake on the players part, two PCs died. But I think I'll change the talent on one of the PCs, being able to do two things at once isn't much of an advantage.
One PC kept on getting the killing shot and racked up massive will points even though the other players helped in knocking the enemy NPCs down. Didn't know you could be a Godlike Will Hog by getting the killing shot.
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I got a lot of crashers for my game, unfortunately, everyone who signed up for the game showed up. I guess people who can read between the lines want a chance to kill Hitler.
One of the best moments was when a player did a Precog during combat and everyone had rolled their dice. By looking at the dice, we can tell that Hitler was going to go through a portal to Argentina and right afterwards, another player would kill the enemy Talent that had opened the portal and in effect would close the portal and save Hitler. The Precog PC threw himself infront of the friendly fire, taking the bullets that would have killed the enemy Talent, so the portal would stay open -- and in effect sacrificed himself. This allowed the other players to chase after Hitler in Argentina and finish him off.
What's better than killing Hitler? Killing him twice. This happened in my campaign and in this scenario too -- lucky Will Hog.
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The Treaty Worlds
Sunday, 10am, 6 hours
GM: Jeff Yin
System: Dark Heresy
Inquisitorial Acolytes are dispatched to conduct a diplomatically sensitive investigation.
Jeff is a very under-rated GM. He does great NPCs and has their nuances down. Their actions and dialog tells the players oh-so-very-much without having to explain to us what is going on.
I've never played Dark Heresy and got a good introduction to the world and enjoyed the game very much.
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Jeff put us in a very interesting situation. Most Inquisitors have absolute power, but on Treaty World, we would be in the instigator of a War if we over-stepped, so we weren't allowed to do our bad-ass Inquisitor stuff until near the end of the game. It was an exercise in restraint as we investigated without torturing and killing our way through the planet.
In the past, the Imperium did have a War with the Treaty Worlds and after hundreds of years and many lives and material lost, the treaty was signed. The Imperium allowed the Treaty Worlds to stand because it provided ancient technology that couldn't be replicated elsewhere.
Due to the War, the inhabitants of the Treaty Worlds hated the Imperium and protested our presence.
Inquistors aren't very subtle, so we marched around with large cloaks thrown over our power armor as we investigated stuff and got into bad situations of our own making. Lots of fun.
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Oh, The Unspeakable Things
Sunday, 5pm. 7 hours
GM: Matt Steele
System: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition
27 June 1918, the Canadian Hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle is bound
from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Liverpool, England to pick up soldiers
wounded in The Great War. In theory, hospital ships are immune from
attack by ship, by air, or even by U-boat. In practice, the Germans have
been known to fire at hospital ships, even though it’s against
international law and standing orders of the Imperial German Navy.
But the dangers don’t end there. Mines drift unseen around the British
Isles. Spies and saboteurs are everywhere. And on the high seas, one
never knows what nightmares might rise from the deep – or what horrors
of war might be found drifting in the current.
My favorite game of the convention. Definitely creepy and I definitely felt threatened throughout the whole game.
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Matt started off the game by torpedoing the ship and machine gunning survivors in the water. Yeah, it's that type of game.
We wound up on a mysterious island and only slowly did we discover that the island wasn't what it seemed. That it wasn't normal in any sense and that some characters flickered back-and-forth between the eerie safety of the island and drowning at sea.
We eventually found that a powerful magician was trying to sacrifice us for great power and we had to stop him.
A great conceit of the game was that the characters had names of people who survived the sinking of the HMHS Llandovery Castle. So, if we survived the game, we would know what had really happened at that tragic event.
