Saturday, January 04, 2014

Morgan's Dead of Winter 2013 Adventures

Dead of Winter was held again at the Carey House in Placerville.  I found that the Foresthill Bridge is the tallest bridge in California and is a few miles from Placerville.  One plan was to go early and do a little bit of site seeing, but due to work schedules and such, I decided to go after work and carpool with Jack Y. and Shannon M.  Maybe next year?

On Saturday morning, I met a few people who are guests of the Cary House each year.  One guy belonged to a group of tree researchers who measure the trees in the Placerville area annually -- who would have guessed that was a job.  Another guy visited each year but I didn't ask what he did because he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Placerville.  He told me that the new owners of the Cary House was better at increasing the occupancy rate, so it'll probably be full all the time.

Interesting tidbits about Placerville (could be true or this guy is a real good spinner of tales):
1.  The hanged man was taken by a couple of kids as a prank.  They cut him down and hid him, but the hanged man was found.  The kids had climbed up the scaffolding around the renovations, but to prevent possible injury in the future, the hanged man has been put away.  Unfortunately, a lot of tourists come by to take a photo of the hanged man and they'll be disappointed.
2.  There are about 1500 historical markers around town.
3.  Here's the story of hanging as told to me (but different from the official history):  Four men lost their money gambling and decided in the evening to rob the owner of the hotel they were staying at.  In the morning, a posse caught 3 of the 4 men.  The 4th man got away.  They held a trial out in the open with the towns folk and it was presided by Judge Lynch.  The sentence was something like 39 lashings each. After they were bleeding and lying on the ground, a sheriff from a different town dropped by and said that the 3 men were wanted for murder.  Another swift trial occurred and they were found guilty and were hung on one of the only trees in town.  Not long after, the tree was chopped down to expand the building next door.  The original stump from the old tree remains in the cellar of "The Hangman’s Tree" tavern on Historic Main Street.  At one time it was covered in glass to show case the stump.
4.  The 3 hanged men were buried near the freeway and there's a marker there.
5.  Ancient pilings have been found around Placerville.
6.  Another hanging happened in Placerville.  One man accused another man of cheating and the accusee pulled out a knife and stabbed the accuser.  The accuser died.  The murderer was found guilty.  Further outside of town was another tree.  The murderer offered to save them the trouble and to climb the tree and hang himself, but the town refused and hung him instead.
7.  Nearby was a community of Japanese samurai.  A trader brought a clan of Japanese samurai to the area to escape the Japanese civil war.  They brought with them silk worms and plants for the silk worms.  Unfortunately a drought killed all the plants.  The ship captain who had brought them here promised to return to Japan and return with more plants.  He never returned.  Each day, a young Japanese girl stood on a hill each day to watch for the returning ship that never came.  Either the captain had a mishap or lied and never intended to go to Japan again and just left the area.  In the Placerville museum are some artifacts from this Japanese colony.

So much for Placerville, onto the games of Dead of Winter.

Overall, I had a really good experience, almost rivaling the first year at DoW.  Having the bathrooms locked at 10pm isn't the same as a missing urinal at the Brookdale Lodge, but we have to make due with what we have.

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Saturday, December 14, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Call of Cthulhu 6th edition
Scenario Title:
Upton Abbey
GM:
Gil Trevizo
Variations:
None
Power Level:
Incompetent Upper Class Twats and Sniveling Lower Class Morons
Number of Players:
6
Characters Provided:
Yes.
Description:
The manor house is in an uproar as the Earl of Groantham invites his new heir presumptive, the callow Mr. Crowley, to a weekend of shooting and dining, where he might vie for the hand of his eldest daughter Mary and thus secure the shaky family fortune… but the arrival of a strange Turkish diplomat and the revival of long-dead customs brings a darker chaos for those that serve Upton Abbey.

I had a great time playing in this game.  This was my favorite game at DoW, it only beat out Matt Garu's game The Block by an insignificant margin.  Definitely a game for those who are fans of Downton Abbey.  We play all the servants of Upton Abbey and the Upper Class characters are all NPCs.

I decided that since the Family was going to be evil, I didn't want to play any of the evil Machiavellian characters (O'Brien or Thomas) -- evil vs evil isn't that fun.  The good characters (Bates or Anna) were not that interesting to me either. So, I decided I wanted to play Daisy, dumber than cardboard and the ability to make horrible mistakes without being accused of plotting.

My favorite part of the character sheet was the back:
My favorite bit from the sheet:  "Thomas is dreamy. (...) Mrs. Fatmore claims that Thomas is a Sodomite but you know he's really from Manchester.  You want to have his babies."

Gil gave out prizes too and I won this.
One of the cool things Gil did that worked really well was that he let you burn San points to flip-flop a percentile die roll (1d6 san loss) or re-roll a die roll (1d20 san loss).  This represented your character becoming unstably obsessive with succeeding.

It was great fun, I think we went through the whole first season of Downton Abbey in the 6 hours of play.



Saturday, December 14, 7PM – 1AM
Game System: Unknown Armies.
Scenario Title:
Night Shift
GM:
Duane O’Brien
Variations:
Some House Rules
Power Level:
Regular Joes
Number of Players:
6
Characters Provided:
Yes.
Description: Normally the night shift at this institution is pretty quiet. Occasionally the police will bring someone over for an involuntary hold, but for the most part nothing really happens. But tonight, a series of unexplained attacks will leave everyone praying for the dawn.
 We're all staff at a mental institution, except for one PC that was a patient.  To help determine which players played which character, Duane showed us ink blots and asked us what we saw.

I got to play the doctor and select the patients and their disorders.  The time period was late 1800's.  So, knowing some history of that time period, I picked some pretty unacceptable diagnoses (by our standards).  My favorite was the woman who was "1/8 Black who claimed that she was White" -- yeah, WTF.  And we're going to try to cure her by making her accept that she's Black.

I've been in a couple of Duane's games and they're always excellent.  Most of them are epic in scale; this time this game was more of a locked room mystery and very different in flavor.

I did enjoy the game, but it wasn't on the same epic scope as some of his other games.




Sunday, December 15, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: The Veil (Diceless/Narrative)
Scenario Title
: The Block
GM
: Matthew Grau
Variations
: Base-Level Convicted Felons
Power Level
: Mortal Humans
Number of Players
: 6
Characters Provided
: Yes
Description
: You’re just trying to do your time. Felons don’t have it easy at San Quentin. Yeah, they built on so that you and your fellow cons weren’t living on top of each other. Yeah, they built that new medical facility. That when things got weird – weirder than the usual race fights, gang BS, and crap from the CO’s. Word on the block is that they’ve opened up one of the oldest wings again, trying to renovate it. They say that place has been closed down for more than a hundred years. Nothing feels right in prison, but something that really ain’t right seems like it’s coming.

Matt had great maps and info about San Quentin.  We were all inmates in San Quentin.  

This was my character sheet:

I had a really good time being a depraved homicidal Mexican Gang Hitman.   One of the other choices was someone that looked like a serial killer.  That was my other choice, but Jill S. took that character.  Well, after seeing Jill in action, I bow to her genius.  I don't think I could have played the serial killer as masterful as she did.  She was an artist.  It was great seeing her in action.

One of the best moments was at the end.  Martin H. wound up in a car chase and gun fight with Jim M., Nik G., and Dovi A. across the Golden Gate Bridge.  Jill and I just drove by, but then Martin decided to hold a innocent girl hostage by dangling her over the water -- that was the last straw and Jill decided that Martin's Skinhead character wasn't a good protege and turned our car around. Jill then saved the girl and dumped Martin's body over the bridge.

Good times.




Sunday, December 15, 7PM – 1AM
Game System: CoC 7e
Scenario Title:
Psychopaths on a Plane
GM:
Morgan Hua
Variations:
Delta Green and PvP
Power Level:
Abnormal People
Number of Players:
5
Characters Provided:
Yes.
Description:
You’re at 35,000 feet, cruising at 590 mph on Asianic Airline Flight 313, flying across the Pacific Ocean on a Boeing 777.  Your seemingly ordinary flight goes horribly strange and horribly wrong. The inflight meal was a live octopus and a boiled fish head. In the bathroom, your warped reflection winked at you. All the passengers look a bit tense and unhappy. Then your flight gets hijacked. Who will survive Flight 313 on the night of Friday the 13th, 12/13/2013?

I had originally designed the game for six players, but by the time we got to the late session, I was down to 4 players (one of my 5 players volunteered to play in Karen's game) as Karen badly needed a 3rd player for a missing seat. For a PvP game, the more players the better, so having 4 players severely limited the character interactions.

I had 25 character portraits made up of fictional serial and cold blooded killers from various movies.  I emailed my players the portraits and asked them which PCs were they interested in and asked them to fill out a questionnaire.  I used the questionnaire to customize their first character sheets.

I felt the game went ok, but it didn't go great.  Also Jason F.'s die rolls were amazing and I didn't want to penalize the players for great die rolls.  I had assumed the plane would go down and I had another act set up for that eventuality.  But due to good role playing and amazing die rolls, the plane landed safely.

Of course, if I run this again, I got suggestions for how to guarantee that the plane would go down, so we could proceed to the optional last act.

In the spoiler section is a breakdown of how the game was constructed.