Morgan's Celesticon 2014 Adventures

Kris and Lisa run a great convention and each year it gets better and better.  They give you a feedback form when you pickup your badge and they actively want you to give them feedback and they act on your requests.

I love how they do signups.  They open a few seats in each game for early signups and then the remaining seats are through a shuffler.  They look at the statistics for who gets in which game and found that anybody that signed up for multiple games in a time slot always got into a game.  And only people who put only one choice for a slot was SoL, but most people got into their 1st or 2nd choice games.  That is great since in other conventions, people keep on complaining about the shuffler.

This time my experience at the con highlighted a theme for me:  Failure is an option.

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Desert Places
Friday 6 PM in Carneros for 6 hours (ran for 6 hrs)
GM: Scott MacPherson
Type: RPG
System: Cthulhu Dark
Edition: 1st
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM

'They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.'

Years after a horrible event, old friends and enemies reunite to solve a mystery. The answers they find will either save - or doom - the world. Heavy roleplaying.

Cthulhu Dark is a rules-light system that fits on one sheet of paper.

I was amazed by the props that Scott used.  Almost all of the props were found items.  He took booklets, videos, and other items that were authentic and created a game from them.  The clue trails were organic and made a good mystery.  Throughout the game, Scott had either period music or various snippets of special effects audio.

If Scott is running this game, you should signup for it.

More in the spoiler section, but player success or failure in the first scene sets up the 2nd and 3rd acts.  So, failure was an option.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game started with some high school buddies looking for UFOs in Sonora.  A storm and a horrible auto accident later, several PCs went to prison and others went scott free.  What was cool was that Scott found either high school yearbook pictures of actors or pictures of them as child actors.  He then picked pictures of them 20 years later in either "clean" roles or "hardened criminal" roles.  Depending on whether you went to prison or not, you got either the "clean" version or the "hardened" version.

During the introductory scene, I was wondering where the game was going, which was pretty rare.

The 20 years later choices were a very nice surprise.  I loved it.

The game resumed at the 20th year high school reunion.  In our game, two PCs went to prison.  One for 6 years, another for 10.  My character saw on a telephone pole a "missing persons" flyer of the man our van ran over 20 years ago, but the flyer says he was missing since January -- which was impossible.

I brought the flyer to the reunion and we go to solve the mystery.  We called the number on the flyer and meet the man's wife and we stole an envelope of clues.  The envelope contained various items (all authentic from various time periods).  We returned to Sonora and we got maps of Vortex Tours (real tri-folds for these), a new age temple (and a real video introduction).  As I said before, the props were amazing.

As we followed the clue trail, we got more and more authentic props.  One of the props that Scott made was just a well-worn folded sheet of paper with a phone number on it.  But when you unfolded the sheet of scratch paper,  inside was a printed email with a clue in it.  Very nice.

The climax of the game was the end of the world.  I unfortunately got eaten, but the other players, using the vortices and other clues we found changed the timeline and saved the world.

One interesting bit, the PCs who "failed" and went to prison had skills that were more appropriate to the 2nd and 3rd acts than the ones that avoided prison.  So, failure was an option.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Dead of Winter : A Crossroads Game
Saturday 10 AM in BG Foyer for 4 hours (ran for 2 hrs)
GM: Tyson Fultz
Type: Board
System: Dead of Winter
Players: 5
Provided: All characters provided by GM

Play the new Dead of Winter game by Plaid Hat Games.

It's a cooperative resource management game with a zombie theme.  The theme integration is great.  The flavor text on cards reminded me of The Walking Dead.  Each player has a hidden agenda.  Someone may also be a traitor who's agenda is to tank the colony.

The flaw of the game is that you roll your dice and you decide whether to scrounge for items or kill zombies.  Since the die roll is already made, you know you'll kill some zombies, but you risk getting injured or infected.  I prefer a more visceral zombie game where you gun down zombies on a tactical map.

In this game, we failed and died just as we were about to meet our victory conditions, so it was a nail biter.

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Acthung Cthulhu! - Alien Transmissions
Saturday 7 PM in Salon 6 for 8 hours (ran for 6 hrs)
GM: William Lee
Type: RPG
System: Call of Cthulhu
Edition: 7th Edition - Quick Play
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM

February, 1942. The Second World War rages across the globe. The Axis Powers are at their zenith. Hitler's empire stretches from France through Ukraine. Night time bomber raids by the RAF are the only way the Allies can strike at the heart of Germany. But the Germans have constructed an advanced radar at Bruneval, France, directly in the path of RAF's bombers. The British Special Operations Executive plans a daring operation to send paratroopers to destroy the radar with the help of the French Resistance. But mere moments before their drop, the instruments on the transport plane go haywire. Strange transmissions come unbidden over the radio. Could there be something more dangerous than German soldiers waiting for our heroes at Bruneval? Acthung Cthulhu is a pulp-action World War II supplement for Call of Cthulhu. It invokes the feel of classic Hollywood war movies like Kelly's Heroes, the Dirty Dozen, and the Devil's Brigade, while mashing it up with Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Although no experience with the rules are necessary, a love for the genre is required.

The first thing we did was pick characters.  There were about 6 Canadian Commandos and 2 female French Resistance Fighters.  Since the whole table was male, I thought I would be different and picked the French Resistance Fighter with the least sanity points.  To my surprise, the other French Resistance Fighter was picked and two other non-combat heavy Commandos: one technician, one ex-lord, and the Capt who lead the Canadian team.  So, we were light on fire power.

The game was interesting enough, but overall, I felt like I'd seen the movie before.  There's something about WWII games that fall into certain tropes.  I guess I'm waiting for something completely different.

There were some genuinely creepy stuff in the game.  So, that was a plus.

Anyway, the game was very entertaining as our Capt made a lot of mistakes and we wound up almost with a TPK.  We lost 4 out of 5 PCs and completed 4 out of 5 objectives.  The survivor was the Capt, but he became permanently insane; locked up somewhere in a Canadian Asylum.

Without the failures we had, I think the game wouldn't a have been as interesting.  So, failure was the best option.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

One thing I noticed was this game and Badger's game at KublaCon involved a villa with dead Germans in it.  Is this the new cliche for WWII Cthulhu games?  In CoC, the tired trope is the haunted house that investigators explore due to an inheritance or being hired to do so.  In WWII games, soldiers are ordered to enter an enemy villa with Germans in it and we find Germans dead in bizarre and grotesque ways.

We also had a botched parachute drop.  This also matches several other WWII games I've played.  Another over used trope?

Also what's with this green glow in the dark stuff?  Almost every game has this radium glow =  unearthly menace.

I picked the female with the least San points hoping that I would have some Cthulhu Mythos or some spells.  Well, the character had none of those.  Oops.  My dark secret was that I was actually a French Communist and I had a Russian handler that wasn't in the game.  My secret mission was actually very close to the mission we were on so there was no real conflict of interest.  But if I could, I was supposed to interrogate one of the Radar operators and to steal any important papers.

My favorite bits from the game were:

• Having both female French characters hanging off the arms of one of the Commandos (wearing a captured German uniform) and staggering towards a machine nest, distracting the sentries as the rest of the commandos sneaked in from behind to kill them silently.
• Finding a dried out body underneath a blanket and then throwing the blanket back on the body to save the rest of the party from making San checks, but then finding that the hallway had 3 more bodies that couldn't be avoided.
• Having one character deciding to put a German out of his misery by suffocating him with a pillow and accidentally pulverizing his half-dessicated head with the pillow.  Ugh.
• The Captain throwing a grenade into the room in front of us and hitting the monster with 10 pts of damage and 5 pts to everybody except for the Captain.  Everybody else basically went to about half hit points with that move.  Then one person in the rear went insane, unloaded his whole clip of ammo and hit my character in the back of the head with a machine gun burst, killing her instantly.  Then after the monster tears the ex-Lord in half, the Captain throws another grenade and yells, "Duck."  Well, in this system, that doesn't really work.  The Captain had the highest initiative and the grenade would have just gone off and killed everyone else.  This was when we all broke out laughing.  OMG, he had just killed us all. After we stopped laughing, the GM was nice and allowed the rest of the PCs to try to dive down a stairwell.  Everyone made it, but took fall damage.  This resulted in the other French Fighter falling unconscious.  Above them the creature looked down the stairwell.
• The technician decided he had to save the unconscious female French Resistance Fighter.  He spent all his "hero" point in order to fireman carry her out of the villa.  At this point, the Captain went insane and fled to the pickup point at the beach.  The technician ran to the beach, but not in time to catch the departing boats.  The GM gave the technician a choice.  He could abandon the Resistance Fighter and get another chance to get on the boats, or stay as an eldritch glow started to engulf the beach.  The Captain on a boat watched as the technician still carrying the French Resistance Fighter was swallowed by the green glow.

If we did a better job, we would have made it to the boats with few if no casualties.  But I don't think this game would have been as fun.  In the end we had the perfect CoC game: one character in an insane asylum and everyone else dead.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Tomb of Paranoia
Sunday 2 PM in Napa for 6 hours (ran for 4 hrs)
GM: Morgan Hua
Type: RPG
System: Paranoia
Edition: 2nd Edition
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM

Tomb of Horrors vs Paranoia. I’ll be running Tomb of Horrors, but we’ll be sending in clones from Paranoia. Welcome troubleshooters, The Computer has found an anomaly. You will be outfitted to explore a strange region in Alpha Complex -- most likely the headquarters of Commie Mutant Traitors. Due to the dangerous nature of this threat, you have been granted more than your standard allotment of clones.

When I created this game, I thought it would be funny to send clones without magic and appropriate skills to defeat the Tomb of Horrors.  Their only tool was clones and unlimited lives, so I wondered how long this joke could go before the players would get tired of it.  When I ran this at KublaCon, the players wanted to finish the Tomb and had a great time.  The energy was up until the defeat of the demi-lich.  That game took the full 6 hours.

This time, I had several Paranoia veterans with high energy plus two newbies to Paranoia.  At the end, one of the newbies got into the spirit, but the other was more focused on solving the Tomb and was relatively quiet.  Near the 4 hour mark, the players only got through four rooms in the Tomb.  But I could tell their energy was flagging -- earlier I couldn't get a word in edgewise with all the laughter, now it was dead quiet --  and I asked if they just wanted to skip to the end.  They said, "Yes."  So, I fast-forwarded them to the last two rooms to face the demi-lich.  Though this group laughed louder than the KublaCon group, I felt everyone in the KublaCon group had a good time and they were more creative.

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Problems, But a Witch Ain't One
Monday 10 AM in Carneros for 4 hours
GM: Jeff Yin
Type: RPG
System: Fading Suns
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM

While on a survey of Imperial lands, a Questing Knight and their companions must adjudicated conflicting claims of witchcraft.

The game was full according to the signup sheet, but only Jeff Yin, Jason F. and I showed up.  Jeff said he needed 4 players (out of 6) for the game to go.  This is the danger of a morning game on the last day of the con.  So, instead Jason F. pulled out his Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures Game and we played for two hours.

I've only played this game once.  Jeff never, and Jason owned the game.  I played the Rebels and they played the Empire.  Each side had 100 build points and we met on a field of battle in the midst of an asteroid field.  After a few rounds, my 3 rebel X-Wings shot down 3 (out of 6) Imperial Tie fighters and had them at a great disadvantage.  Jeff and Jason conceded.  The Empire failed.

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Cold Dead Hand 
Saturday 6 PM in 217 for 10 hours
GM: Shannon Mac
Type: RPG
System: Delta Green
Edition: 6E Call of Cthulhu
Players: 5
Power Level: Experienced yet mortal Spetsnaz (not heroic)

1991: The hard-liners of the Communist Party have ousted Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev from power. As a result the Soviet Union is in disarray and many fear that the return of the Old Regime has increased the possibility of a nuclear war.

Don't worry. It gets worse.

Mother Russia has lost contact with Site 6, an ICBM silo far to the wintery north on the Taymyr Peninsula (Siberia) and needs politically reliable yet capable soldiers to investigate the matter.

The worst storm in years has hit Site 6.

You are all veteran Spetsnaz. Most of you have served together multiple times and on average the typical Spetsnaz has served at least two years in Afghanistan. Yours is a tight brotherhood with a distinctive chain of command (though that may not be fun at the gaming table so it will be likely loosely recognized unless we have a very hardcore group).

This Spetsnaz company is led by a Kapitan Kozlov, a senior LT named Babenko and a handful of Warrant Officers. Included are Strategic Rocket Forces technical advisors. The total size of the company is in the fifties so if your first character dies don't worry about a replacement.

I played in Shannon's playtest, so I didn't play in this game at Celesticon, but since the Acthung Cthulhu game ended early, I decided to drop by and say hello.  Andy W. was DJ taking care of Shannon's ambient music and sound effects.  Andy and I quietly snickered as this group totally F*ed up everything.

When we played in this game, we were very tactical and set up choke points and kill zones.  This group made a lot of mistakes and died left and right, top and center.

So, the question is, is it better to play a game effectively with few screw ups or totally F* everything up and have more interesting situations and massive death and destruction?  In the game I played in, I felt like we were Spetsnaz.  Watching these guys, it was like an episode of Gomer Pyle.  But it did look like they had a lot of fun.

So, failure is an option.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

At the beginning of the game, the GM gave the players a portable nuke and three nuclear technicians (one main character and two backups).  Though it was a secret, the rest of the party found out about it.  

At one point, the players set the timer on their portable nuke and left it upstairs and unguarded in an armored car -- where terrible intelligent creatures roamed.  An earlier encounter with several creatures had them rip open one of the vehicles.  So what makes you think the nuke'll still be upstairs when you need it?

Later, they decided to detonate the nuke earlier, so almost everyone went back upstairs to retrieve the nuke.  Well, guess what?  Yep, it wasn't there.  Not only that, a massive Cthulhu creature showed up and drove most of them insane.  The survivors scrambled back downstairs.

Later, a PC who was clearly unstable was allowed free movement.  That PC had clearly killed at least three of the backup PCs and the other PCs bought his excuses repeatedly.  Finally, that PC gunned down a key NPC right in front of them.  The response was swift, but the quote of the day was, "I should have killed him way back when."

Another funny failure was when the creatures opened up the armored vehicle, one PC open fired with a rocket launcher at point blank and it exploded inside their armored vehicle.  The back blast would have ignited the ammo, Molotov cocktails, and loose fuel inside anyway.  This killed everyone inside the vehicle.

So, lots of horrible failure, but plenty of fun situations.

In this game, I think the Spetsnaz team had 50 PCs.  Six main PCs and the rest were backups.
Shannon said only six survived at the end and I have a feeling that he was being nice.

Hey, Shannon, you didn't know you were running a Paranoia game, did ya?

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Drive-Thru Armageddon
Sunday 7 PM in Sonoma for 5 hours (game ran 6 hrs)
GM: Micheal Garcia
Type: RPG
System: Apocalypse World
Players: 4

Twenty years ago, the bombs fell, society collapsed, and we now live in the smoldering ruin. The radiation has made us all sterile, and humanity is doomed to extinction. Except now there is hope in the form of the first pregnant mother in twenty years. Too bad she is in the heart of an enemy hardhold. You have been tasked to get her out and bring her back so we as a species have a fighting chance. Load your guns, get in your car, and save the day. The fate of the whole human race is riding with you.
Take Children of Men, the Road Warrior, and Escape from New York, and put in a gasoline powered blender and hit frappe. The result: this game. You've got shootouts, car chases, and good old fashioned melodrama powered by the Apocalypse.

My Paranoia game ended early, so I dropped by hoping to pick up an empty seat, but no luck, so I stayed and watched the game.  I fell asleep twice and I hope I didn't snore (sorry Mike).  But I woke up in time to see the climax.

In the end, there was a very tense scene and almost everything went wrong.  Earlier in the game I watched the players roll success after success; finally, their luck caught up with them and they got a long string of bad luck, but then the tension level kept on rising as it looked like a TPK.  But Mike was nice and the players squeaked through the situation.

So, looming failure was a great option.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Near the end of the game, a driver (PC), action gun guy (PC), and madam (PC) were in the front seat of a Lincoln Town car.  In the back seat was a mind-control psychic (enemy NPC), gun guy (enemy NPC), pregnant lady (neutral NPC and MacGuffin), and a healer (PC).

At one point everybody knew it was going to go to a head and all hell would break loose.  The nurse tried to slap a knock out patch on the psychic, but the psychic reached out and ordered the nurse to do that to the PC action gun guy instead, if she refuses the order, she would loose 75% of her hit points due to a brain hemorrhage.   In the front seat, the madam was already suffering from massive bleeding when she had disobeyed an order from the psychic earlier.  The psychic whispers into the gun guy's (NPC) ear.  The driver sees the gun guy (NPC) start to shift his gun from pointing at the driver to pointing at the action gun guy (PC).  The driver jerks the steering wheel and fails to make the gun guy (NPC) point at no one.  The gun goes off and the driver loses 75% of his hit points as the gun shot goes through his chest and splatters the windshield.  Not wanting to hit the pregnant woman, the action gun guy (PC) pulls out his machete to kill the psychic.  The madam rolls an assist.  The action gun guy (PC) fails badly and in Apocalypse world, not only does something bad happen, but to people assisting too.  The machete kills the madam and since the psychic had armor, the machete only cuts off the psychic's hand.  The nurse is given the choice of trying to save the dying madam or slapping a knock out patch on the action gun guy (PC).  She decides to save the madam and takes the 75% damage.  She botches her roll and winds up mentally bound to the dying madam.The driver grabs his gun and shoots blindly behind his seat and takes out the gun guy (NPC).  The psychic then grabs the action gun guy (PC) pulls him to her and impales herself on his machete.  She then kisses him and transfers her consciousness into him and takes him over.

At this point, two PCs are dying, the action gun guy (PC) is now inhabited by the psychic and the driver is sorely hurt.

The psychic only needed to touch the driver to command him and the game would be over.  But Mike was nice and let them get out of this pickle.  From the depths of despair, the PCs survived and actually had one more big action scene.

But without teeterring on the brink of failure, the tension level wouldn't have been so great and the scene wouldn't have sizzled so much.

It was a great scene.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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