Morgan's Dead of Winter 2014 Excellent Adventures

Again, due to weather and time, I didn't get to visit the Foresthill Bridge, but I got to visit the Haggin Museum in Stockton and see the Alex Ross exhibit.  The Haggin Museum is a small museum situated in a nice park.  It contains some historical displays about the early days of Stockton and a fine art collection.  I was in there for about two hours.

I used to read comics when I was a little kid, but stopped.  Only later as an adult, I noticed the excellent photo-realistic art of Alex Ross in Kingdom Come and that had gotten me back into reading select stories such as The Dark Knight Returns, Aliens vs Predator, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Requiem: Vampire Knight.

The art of Alex Ross was very interesting and the museum included Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker pieces that influenced his work.  And the Haggin collection has over 50 Leyendeckers, the largest of any museum.

Shannon M. and I went through the museum and Frank F., uninterested in comic book art, decided to skip "The Jewel of Stockton" and visit a Starbucks instead.  So much for getting some culture.  :-)

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Sunday 11am
Game System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition
Scenario Title: The Woebegone Winter
GM: Josh Clark & John Castillo
Variations: Modified sanity rules
Power Level: Plain ol’ Humans
Number of Players: 6
Characters Provided: Yes
Description: A family treks across the 1850′s American frontier to lay claim to a plot of land bursting with gold, but what they find once the snow starts to fall should have stayed buried.

Players:  Badger M.  Dovi A.  Gil T.  Jack Y.  Matt A.  Morgan H.

An amazing game.  I guess I'm becoming jaded by CoC games that follow the template of follow the clue trails, figure out how to kill the big bad, and then confronting the big bad.  Well, this game was way different.  

The players were excellent and we picked the right scenes to highlight and pulled in the right PCs at the right time.  It was one of those games where everything clicked and worked out.

The game was full of surprises brought on by the players.  Some gems were:

Dovi wrapping his fleece jacket into swaddling and playing a crying baby audio from his cell phone as he rocked the "baby."

Gil started as the most hated PC and wound up being a favorite and the only survivor.

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This game was more Donner Party than The Waltons.  There has been a trend of resource management games, maybe brought on by Euro-gaming.  For RPGs, Trail of Cthulhu and Torchbearer come to mind.  I found the record keeping in Torchbearer a bit mind numbing -- I mean if I wanted to keep track of supplies, I'd play Be An Accountant, The LARP,  The endless record keeping and grind of Torchbearer becomes more tedious than fun.

In this game, as supplies ran low, we didn't keep track of any supplies, but we felt the unrelenting cold and lack of food.  So, what I'm saying is that you don't need recording keeping mechanics to simulate starvation and despair. 

One interesting conceit was that there was no supernatural agency in this whole game.  We saw things that might have been supernatural, but we didn't get attacked by strange creatures or find magic spells or face a big bad.  We faced our own wants and desires, our own hearts of darkness, and a very, very cold winter.

My favorite bits were:
1.  We were attacked by wolves and we wound up hitting none of them because of a string of bad die rolls.
2.  Jack shot at a wolf and caused an avalanche that started a chain reaction that was exciting and horribly tragic.  The avalanche caused the river we were crossing to flash flood and it flipped our wagon. We lost an ox, our wagon, most of our supplies and most tragically, a baby who's head was bashed against a rock.  Dovi's character also broke her ankle.
3. Finding that the gold was a scam and that I (I played the patriarch) had brought tragedy to my whole family.  The trip also revealed horrible truths about my family.  When I found that I had been had, I rolled 2d10 and got a 20 point san loss -- how appropriate was that?
4. After finding the baby was dead and that my son was having an affair with my wife (and the baby was theirs), I wanted to reconcile with my son who understandably was avoiding me.  I said, "We need to talk, but I know this is not the time.  We should sit in prayer and contemplate why this has happened."  My son (played by Badger) then punched me.
5. I was allowed to save one item after the wagon was destroyed with all our supplies.  Some people picked some useful items.  I picked the family bible.
6. Gil played the only non-family member, an ex-soldier and drunken guide.  Everybody hated him, but he did save some of us and he was saved twice by Patience (Matt's character) during the flash flood.  He wound up returning to Placerville to get some supplies, but when he returned to the mining camp, everyone else was dead.

Because the players were so good and the GMs were flexible, we were allowed to create scenes where we interacted with each other.  Each scene we invented seemed real and were real gems.

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Saturday 7pm

Game System: Call of Cthulhu 6th ed
Scenario Title: Pale Harvest
GM: Badger McInnes
Variations: Maybe
Power Level: Competent Officers
Number of Players: 6
Characters Provided: Yes

Description: Los Angeles, 1950. In the late 40s, the Los Angeles Police Department created what became to be known as the “Gangster Squad”- an elite group of police officers, reporting directly to Chief of Police William Parker. Their job: to combat organized crime in LA, and to eradicate mob boss Mickey Cohen. Given wide latitude, you and other members of the Gangster Squad were able to use any means necessary to stamp out the mob.

That’s your official duty, anyway. But Chief Parker has called you and a few of your fellow officers in with an assignment that he says he needs to bury in the books of the Squad (which itself is buried in the LAPD’s finances). Seems some teenage girls have been gone missing. One body has been found. The press hasn’t gotten a hold of it yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they do. And the last thing the department needs is another Black Dahlia PR disaster. Your assignment: find the girls. Find out who’s kidnapping them. Bring them to justice. By any means necessary.

Note: This Call of Cthulhu scenario deals with sensitive topics of an adult nature. Strong investigative elements and role playing emphasized. Mature players only.
Players:  Anthony B.  Morgan H.  Shannon M.  Jill S.  Gil T.  Jack Y.

Another great game with great players.  I'd seen the movie "Gangster Squad," and enjoyed it.  We basically played the characters from the movie, but instead of busting Mickey Cohen, we were solving a CoC mystery.

I was entirely immersed in the police procedural and loved it:  multiple clue trails, red herrings, dead ends, interrogations, bribery and murder.  What was there to not like?

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The beginning was a bit slow because we broke up into three teams of two and as two PCs followed a clue trail, the other four players had to sit it out, so we would have to wait a fair bit before we could have our turn at a potential clue.  This game did fit the standard CoC template, but it emphasized the following of the clue trails.  In most games, the big finale was the big bad confrontation.   This game was more front-loaded and de-emphasized the other two parts of the CoC template.  So, this game felt very different for me and was refreshing.

If we were playing ToC, we would have just spent some Resource points and gotten our clues, but I think we would have missed out really trying to solve the mystery by using our own brains instead of simple point spends. 

Early on, we found one of the girls at a home for wayward youths and thought the clue was a dead end.  In a nice twist, we actually had to face the mastermind at that place.

At another point, we busted a brothel (like the one in the movie) and found one of the missing girls there and found that the other missing girls were "bought" by a farmer.  Taking down the brothel was where we showed that we were bad asses and could kick butt.

We caught the farmer and was able to find his farm and another twist was that the farmer and his father were killing girls who were infected.  The only way to remove the infection was chopping off their hands and head.

Then we found out that the home for wayward youths were infecting the children and sending them out into the world.  At the home, we confronted the matron who came with us quietly -- which is another nice twist.  There was no big fight.  But when we put her into a restraining chair and started a ritual, we had a moment of panic as she started transforming and we had a string of bad luck as we failed to chop off her head and hands -- critical fails all around -- for maybe about 6 die rolls.

Once that was done, the question of what to do with the children came up.  Luckily, Jack's character went insane and without telling us, got a school bus, loaded up the children and drove them off a cliff.

There was some discussion as to having the players make a hard moral choice at the end as the finale.  But by then, I understood my character and I would have chosen to just put the children into an institution.  So, having Jack get rid of the children did not bother me.  I had already made up my mind at that point.

So, an interesting and different game.  I enjoyed it a lot.

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Sunday 11am

Game System: Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition
Scenario Title: Thirty-Five Miles to Jalalabad
GM: Gil Trevizo
Variations: None
Power Level: Wives and Daughters
Number of Players: 6
Characters Provided: Yes
Description: It’s been five days and three thousand dead since the column left Kabul, where not long ago you were drinking madeira wine and watching the men play cricket amidst what then seemed a bastion of the British Empire. The men had taken Afghanistan back in 1839, all for Queen, country, and the greater profit of the British East India Company. Now, just three years later, the men had lost Afghanistan, lost your homes in Kabul, and perhaps lost all your lives. As the snows deepen and the tribesmen snipe from the mountaintops, rumors have spread that the women and children will be allowed to surrender. Nonetheless, your husbands and fathers have spoken and it will not be: a proper Englishman would never allow their woman to fall into the hands of these rapacious savages, not when the column is so close, just thirty-five miles left to go before safety awaits at the garrison in Jalalabad.
Players: Marcus F.  Janaki S.  Shannon M.  Morgan H.  Skylar W.  Scott M. 

Another really good game.  This time Gil has taken some mechanics from independent storytelling games and put them in CoC.  Given the historical context, Gil gave us scene cards where we read out the historical event and we made up a scene with our characters.  This added or subtracted points from our bonds.

More great players and the incredible Gil, who ran this game again right afterwards to replace Dovi's game (who had gotten very sick with the flu).  Gil was also sick and I would be surprised if he still had his voice the next day.

Kudos to Skylar who played an amazing Grand Dame, the epitome of British stiff upper lip, unperturbed by almost everything: from a starving death march to gunfire by Afghan savages.

The game was unrelenting and grim.  Perfect for DoW.

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In this game, Gil treated our Con points and Hit points as resources.  As we did the death march, we continued to get worn down by losing Con points; once those were gone, we'd lose Hit points.  San points were also lost as we watched the horror of war and attrition remove all the hope that we had left.

My favorite bits were scenes of Skylar's character:

• While we ran for cover, she walked nobly as bullets flew by, none hitting her.
• As Afghan boys told their mothers and sisters to stone us, she stared them down and they failed to throw a rock at her.
• When the German solider and his Afghans threatened to kill us, she stood her ground as we all fled.  The Afghans pulled out their swords and cut her down.

In our game, we decided the cult was a better world than the outside world.  Half the characters were already insane.  So, it was no surprise that all but Shannon's character joined the cult.  My backup character was Wendy who thought she was in fairy land, so she didn't technically join the cult, but she was happy running around the underground complex and some horrible fate probably awaited her.  Technically, the game was a TPK.

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Sunday 7pm

Game System: CASTE

Scenario Title: The Dust Lust Bust
GM: Arthur Stone Wallis

Variations: Historical
Number of Players: 5
Characters Provided: Yes
Description: San Francisco, 1849. The discovery of GOLD at Sutter's Mill has created a worldwide panic of immigration. Once a backwater Spanish missionary village of less than a thousand, the City by the Bay as become a vibrant boom town...more than a quarter of a million souls have arrived in less than a year. Abandoned clipper ships choke the harbors, their crews running to the gold fields along with their passengers...only to return scant weeks later, wealthy or penniless. Crusty West Virginia miners rub elbows with East Coast industry magnates in the saloons, risking fortunes on the turn of a card.

In mere days, a disaster of terrible proportions will befall this fledgling city. 

Far from the diggings on the American River, where Christ is Lord and men pull wealth from the earth, a war of commerce is being fought in the boardwalk-lined streets of San Francisco. What little law there is must be swift and brutal, as the rules of warfare have not yet been written here. 

Players will take on the role of various immigrant personalities in this tumultuous time and place, just before the famous disaster. With a level playing field, a certain saloon is out earning its rivals to a vast degree. Chinamen, former slaves, and other unscrupulous types have been seen coming and going in the night. Solving this mystery would be worth a lot of money to the waterfront saloon league...but don't expect any help, and steer clear of the law.

CASTE is a system of merciless chance, and deep humanity. Easy to learn because it is so hard to forget. Bring your love of character development, history, storytelling, and at the bottom of the bag pack your blackest cruelty. Just in case...

Players:  Morgan H.  John C.  Marcus F.  Andy V.  Basil B.

CASTE is an interesting system.  It uses tarot cards instead of dice.  Character classes fall into suits of the tarot deck.  If you draw your suit, you get a bonus.  Face cards and Major Arcane cards have special meaning.  The only flaw is that you use a standard tarot deck and for the cards with special meaning, you still need a lookup chart.

Another fun game with great character interaction.

Marcus played a great Chinese character and had the best bits.

The mystery did keep us guessing until I figured out which movie we were in.  But it was the character interactions that were fun.

A good end to DoW.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Our group was hired to figure out how the bad guy was making a lot of gold.  We started to put the pieces together and realized the scheme was taken from the movie "Paint Your Wagon."

The scheme wasn't really illegal.  The only problem is when the bull (from the bull-and-bear fight) comes crashing down into the tunnels and ruins the town.

Near the end, we were being chased by some unknown assailant in the tunnels underneath San Francisco.  My character and Marcus's tried to escape through the top of a tunnel whereas the other three players kept on running.  We wound up making the assailant flee (I got knocked unconscious, I probably died, but Arthur was nice and let me live), but the other three characters made it out of the tunnels.  We all had grabbed bags of gold dust, so two of the three decided to leave San Francisco with their bonanza, so in effect they exited the game.  I had actually hoped that they were going to exit into the bear and bull cages, but that didn't happen.

Without the two players, the rest of us were enlisted by the sheriff into capturing the bad guy -- the guy who was chasing us in the tunnels -- at the bull-and-bear fight.  Once we grabbed the bad guy, the bull ran into the tunnels and did its damage off screen.  I think the ending was foreshortened as a fair number of us had seen the movie (we're old folks, maybe some young-ins haven't seen this movie), so there wasn't any reason to do an extensive description of the bull crashing through the tunnels.

As an epilogue, my character decided to follow Marcus's character to Deadwood, since he saved my life.  What could go wrong?

Overall, a fun game.

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