Ocean Blue
System: World of Darkness
Duration: 4 hours
Players: 5
Paraphrased Description: You're the crew of a modern nuclear submarine and have been assigned to retrieve a cold war era's satelite's payload -- undeveloped film.
Interesting game and enough paranoia to keep us on our toes. We had a good group of players and I think we did everything right.
I got to play the scientist in charge of developing the film payload.
After finding the payload and developing the film, we found a picture of a giant space goat-eyeball looking down on the midlands of America. The Captain of the Submarine fainted on seeing the picture and fell sick for a short time. The sub then got attacked by a strange underwater creature which got scared off by a torpedo. Then two crew members went missing. We found one dead and eaten, but his uniform was neatly folded. We found the other hiding in an empty torpedo tube with a savage bite from a Piranha-Shark-Man.
We eventually suspected the top officers in the crew and weren't sure whether it was the Captain, the XO, and/or the Master of Arms who turned into this creature. We also weren't sure if it was a conspiracy. But once we got enough evidence on the Captain, we tried to get the XO to relieve the Captain of his duties. We didn't want to be labeled as mutineers. In the lab, while showing the XO the evidence, he turned into an Ogre-ish creature and we beat him up. We stabilized his wounds and restrained him. We then took his side-arm and broke into the weapons locker, took weapons, and jammed the weapons locker closed. Once armed, we revived and questioned him and he told us about his duty to protect the Captain as he now knows his true nature and they were awaiting the arrival of the Hydra for more instructions. After the interrogation, Shannon's character shot the XO twice in the head. Through the combat and interrogation, my character had video taped everything that had transpried as evidence -- I didn't want us to be tried as mutineers. We called the Captain to the lab telling hiim it was urgent and the XO needed him. We then ambushed the Captain, he turned into the Piranha-Shark-Man, and we shot him multiple times. Once dead, he reverted back to human form, just like the XO. The good news was that I had recorded everything, so when crew members rushed in to figure out what was going on, I could play it back. We were still thrown into the brig, but once back in port, we were recruited into a secret military hunter society.
What I really liked was that for a 4 hour game, we were able to have pretty good investigation and we had doubts as to whether the Captain was really the creature or whether he was being framed. The military structure also prevented us from taking the law in to our own hands without good proof -- if we were wrong, we'd be in deep trouble. The players did a great job, everyone acted smartly. I also did my best in trying to show everyone the giant eyeball in space and everyone was a good sport and took a look even though they knew they were going to have to make a stability check -- good role players. :-)
The Guns of Cap Gris NezGM: Gil Trevizo
System: Godlike
Duration: 4 hours
Players: 4
Paraphrased Desccription: You're part of D-Day. Your mission is to silence the guns of Cap Gris Nez.
Gil at the beginning warned us that because there's only 4 hours, there won't be much complexity and it'll be pretty simple and straight forward. This game was the prequel to a game that Paul, Shannon, and I played at KublaCon. So, we were stoked to enter Gil's world of Godlike again.
Basically, we were the characters from Saving Private Ryan, except we were all slightly damaged and twisted with Talents.
When we played at KublaCon, Gil gave us a choice of getting equipment, training, or R&R where we can gain some Will Points and if you include another player, they would gain some too. Due to time constraints, Gil only let us do some R&R.
My character was Private Caparzo (played by Vin Diesel). The write up was more Riddick than Caparzo -- Hyper-body with homocidal sociopathic tendencies. I was released from a mental institution, where I was being evaluated for a Lobotomy, so I could join D-Day. So, for my R&R, I decided to return to the mental institute and kill my evaluating doctor. Gil asked me whether I wanted to take someone along, so I had to choose between Paul's sniper who God told to kill bad people (I was worried that bringing him would be a bad idea since I didn't know if I would be considered a bad person), the Rube-Goldberg guy with a Psychic Healing machine (didn't think this was good idea either as he might think I have something against doctors), so I brought Shannon's Private Reiban character with me (he had a invisible psychic dog that kills people) and he decided he'd sic his bad dog on the whole hospital staff. After killing the doctor, I found my paperwork and the whole squad's paperwork. We were all slated for Lobotomies because we were all psycho killers of one sort or another. I destroyed the paperwork by starting a large fire. Shannon had already killed the rest of the hospital staff -- way to go Shannon.
So, we were really The Dirty Dozen played by the characters from Saving Private Ryan.
D-Day was just a meat grinder as every landing boat got sunk except for ours and another. We spotted a few German talents. One exuded an oil slick and another was the human torch. We just barely stopped our landing craft in time, but the other boat became a quick flambe.
We fought for every yard of beach and after many deaths (I was on my 3rd character at the end -- Private Mellish a Jewish SpiderMan who shot spider web from his butt. I tried to web some German Talents but only succeeded in mooning them), we finally got to the cliff side at the end of the 4th hour of gaming. We never got to the guns.
My favorite bit was the R&R and finding out how messed up the whole squad was. The beach landing was such a meat grinder it showed us the horror and hopelessness of combat.
I had run my own version of D-Day before with Godlike and I put them in an almost to scale beach assault. The beach actually ran from one end of the table to the other before you get to the cliffs. In D-Day, it was 200 yards of beach during high tide and I only let the players move 10 yards (2 squares) a round. Gil was nice to us and it was only 60 yards to the nearest Germans and he let us move much further, depending on our Run result.
Below was my D-Day setup.
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| Morgan's D-Day Setup (not Gil's) And, yes, I use green plastic army men for figures in Godlike. |
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| D-Day diagram (from Morgan's D-Day game, not Gil's) |
