Musings about the world, life, and everything in it.
Tuesday, September 08, 2015
Morgan's CelestiCon 2015 Adventures
Special guest of CelestiCon this year was Sandy Petersen, game designer of Call of Cthulhu.
They also had a special drawing to see who would get into a game run by Sandy.
I didn't win a seat, but Shannon M. and William L. did get into the game. Funny thing was that William L. played in my Eagle's Nest game instead of Sandy's game. Mic DROP. :-)
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Fifty Shades of Earl Grey
GM: Jeff Yin Friday Noon for 4 hours Type: RPG System: Fading Suns Edition: 2nd Ed Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Game Content: Mature Themes A
Questing Knight is charged with investigating the death of the
Emperor's cousin. Fading Suns is a game of science fantasy, with a
medieval Europe in space feel. Beginners welcome!
Interesting setting with a very good table of players. We wound up f**king around so much doing side things that we didn't get into the murder mystery until the last half hour, so we poked around the crime scene for a bit and then stopped the game. This means we can play this game all over again. Yay!
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Shannon sent Frank's character as a messenger, an alien that is very looked down upon by the human populace, to tell the Emperor's cousin that we have arrived. Frank's character was also our lawyer. Well, he wound up beaten up and his family relic was stolen (in addition to everything else).
So, we wound up hunting down the muggers and also investigated an issue of refugees from "Viking" space raiders.
We also got snubbed by the Emperor's cousin and we were trying to figure out if the guy was snubbing us deliberately or whether he was in some dire situation. We decided on the former.
The Emperor's cousin also had this odd history of picking one of the loveliest women each year during a festival to keep for a while. His own wife vanished mysteriously and his son hasn't left the castle for decades (and maybe not seen). He also collected odd curios.
In the last half hour of the game, the Emperor's cousin wound up dead in a kinky torture room. We knew we didn't have time to solve the murder mystery, so we just looked at the murder scene and stopped the game.
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It's a magical place
GM: David Weinstein Friday 4 PM for 6 hours Type: RPG System: All Flesh Must Be Eaten Edition: First Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Power Level: Norms Game Content: Mature Themes It's
summer, and that means vacation! People of all stripes are packing
themselves into the amusement park for summer fun and adventure! This
year, however, some folks are going to get more of an adventure than
they bargained for...
My two favorite games this CelestiCon was this game and Hamel's Cthulhu Azorian.
Pacing was great in this game. No dead spots and the tension was kept up until the end. A very fun game -- or at least I enjoyed it immensely for the fear and terror.
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In Disneyland, there's no access to weapons. It's pretty bad when a fast spreading disease causes the park to lockdown and shutdown. Worse when people turn into fast moving zombies with infectious projectile vomiting.
What was great and an interesting level of misdirection was that a number of characters had weapon skills, but no access to weapons. We kept on looking for guns and stuff to no avail.
We kept running and running and trying to survive as we got overwhelmed and either got turned or killed by the military sent to contain the infection.
Best two scenes:
My character was a LARPer and nerd with every Disney item possible. He had a plastic light saber which came in handy to light up some dark areas. At one point, we rescued some teenagers, but as the PCs ran they stood there immobile as the horde of zombies came after us. My character turned and attacked the zombies with the light saber. The light saber shattered on the first attack and four zombies tore him apart, giving the rest of the PCs and the teenagers time to escape.
One character decided to climb down some rungs of a support structure for the monorail to escape some zombies. Below were soldiers shooting and flamethrowering zombies, so it wasn't safe to go all the way to the ground. Above, the zombies couldn't reach him, but they then projectile vomited on him. His goofy hat saved him, but now the rungs were coated in slime, so he hunkered down and pretended he wasn't there. The soldiers fired at the commotion above and took out the zombies and also hit the character. The character continued to pretend he wasn't there. He got shot again and died.
Yeah, this game was harsh, as it should have been in the "Happiest place on earth."
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High and Dry
GM: Jeff Dee Saturday 9 AM for 4 hours Type: RPG System: Bethorm: the Plane of Tekumel Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Power Level: beginning characters Game Content: Mainstream Grain
shipments from the town of Mishábar, near an ancient ruined castle, to
the Temple of Hnálla in the city of Katalál have inexplicably ceased. As
priests of Hnálla, Lord of Light, you are sent to discover the reasons
for this lapse and set things aright!
Jeff Dee, one of the writers of Tekumel, ran this game. He had in depth knowledge of the world and this game had great NPC motivations and gave the PCs hard choices.
My main complaint is that the combat system seemed unnecessarily drawn out -- very old school. I picked a sorcerer of light and wound up being a more effective combat character than our four-armed insectoid warrior (due to a lot of bad rolls). I can create fighting phantasms and my quarterstaff seemed to do as much damage as the insectoid's weapons. The only difference was the insectoid had natural armor.
After one and a half combats, we ran out of time, so we rushed through the ending and hand-waved through the remaining combats.
Overall, I liked the world and enjoyed the game, but I didn't like the mechanics and the long drawn out combats.
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The first combat was with giant spiders and it was touch and go for a moment when it looked like we wouldn't be able to beat them due to a long series of bad die rolls. The spiders seemed like a warm-up introductory combat that didn't have anything to do with the scenario. The main issue is that this took time away from the later combat that was more key to the scenario.
The next combat was in an underground section of an ancient castle against undead. We got half-way through the combat and it looked like we might win, but we cut the combat short in order to finish the game. Thus my above comment about having more time for key combats.
Then when we returned to the local lord with his missing wife, we told him (without thinking since we were already running over in time) that his wife was infected and turning undead and we cured her. Well, he worshiped a Death deity and got really angry at us and there was a non-combat by GM fiat, where we beat him and we resolved the scenario -- he might have kicked our ass as we would have been sorely hurt by the undead.
Under the local lord were several underlings who mainly favored removing their lord -- we had found this out through earlier role playing. They seemed more reasonable than the local lord, so they were willing to stand up for us after we killed him.
Due to the social hierarchy, we were probably in deep trouble for killing the lord since he was five societal levels above us; so high that we were not even allowed to speak to him directly, but had to speak to him through an intermediary in the same audience chamber. It was the society and the social interactions that I found interesting. The combat less so.
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Reunification III
GM: Andrew Davis Saturday 2 PM for 6 hours Type: RPG System: Star Trek RPG Edition: Decipher Players: 8 Provided: All characters provided by GM Power Level: Enterprise Officers. Characters provided. Game Content: Mainstream Ambassador
Spock and his party have been working with Romulan dissidents for the
past 20 years on Romulus in the hope of forwarding an eventual
reunification of Vulcan and Romulus. Ambassador Spock and his two
Vulcan aides have been kidnapped on Romulus. Unknown agents are at work.
The Enterprise must investigate his disappearance, recover Spock and
his Vulcan aides and escort them to safety in Federation Space, and
bring his kidnappers to justice.
I loved the props and toys the GM brought. It required a hotel handcart to bring everything into the room.
It's clear that the GM had in-depth knowledge of the world of Star Trek and was a great fan.
I had fun because I was able to play Jean-Luc Picard, but there were several issues with the game:
1. We had seats for 8 players, but only 6 were filled, so a lot of people showed up trying to fill the empty seats. The GM let 11 players into the game and even said 12 would be ok. IMHO, I think the ideal game should have been 6 players, not 12. During play, I felt guilty that I had a lot of screen time and it seemed like the extra players had nothing to do. So, I asked Riker to pick the away team members to give him something to do. At some point, I started asking Riker to pick people who didn't have enough screen time, so they would have something to do. I felt I was making a balancing act that the GM should have designed into the scenario.
2. If certain players made specific rolls, or needed plot nudges, they were given 3x5 cards to read out loud. I understand what that was for, to give us clues and Trek-speak, but it also felt like giving lines for the players to read instead of letting them role play.
3. The plot was very complicated, but the solution was very A to B to C, so although what was going on had a fair amount of complexity, the solution felt like it was on rails. We did finish the game early, so maybe we were better or luckier than expected. Not sure about that, but events seem to gallop by and on auto pilot. At one point, I asked the officers to gather in the ready room to discuss what was going on, just to get other player's impressions and input because things were just happening so fast without us being able to decide if what was happening was some elaborate deceptive plot or whether what was happening should be taken at face value.
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I felt like we were playing scripted parts in a well-written fanfic. I got a major part, so it was fun, but the game lacked player choice. I assume if we didn't play our parts as intended, according to the cannon character profiles, bad things might have happened. So, maybe we played our parts too well.
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Eagle's Nest
GM: Morgan Hua Saturday 9 PM for 4 hours Type: RPG System: Godlike Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Game Content: Mainstream 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.
William L. got into Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu game, but he didn't know he did, so he signed up for two other games that overlapped with Sandy's game. One of those games was this one, so I get to brag that someone picked my game over Sandy's. :-)
Actually, the game pacing felt a little flat to me as the GM; when I ran it at KublaCon, there were more ups and downs and more excitement. The players finished the game early. When I ran this game at KublaCon, it took 5 hours. The players this time finished an hour early. Only one player wasn't familiar with the ORE system and I was short two players, so maybe not having to take time to explain the system in detail and having less players shortened the play time. See spoiler section for more musings on this.
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The players didn't do much investigation and actually just killed their way into the Eagle's Nest and whacked Hitler. Which leads to an interesting idea: I didn't intend to design a game that can be solved through brute force only, but it appears that this game could be done that way or with more careful investigation. So, it means that a game can be designed to run with or without investigation; it can be tailored or designed to be run to match the style of varying players.
Another factor for the shortened game time may have been the lack of investigation. If the players spent more time talking to NPCs it would have made the assault on Eagle's Nest easier.
I also forgot to put two NPC Talents in Hitler's room which would have extended the final fight. But then I was short two players, so leaving out two NPC talents was probably fair. By the time they reached Hitler's room, they were down to three PCs and one was missing a leg.
The players were pretty smart in that in the end, facing a room full of Talents, they just opened fire without using their talents, so there were no contest of Wills.
In this game Gil wound up killing Hitler twice. This is like three for three; the same PC kills both the fake Hitler and the real Hitler.
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Cthulhu Azorian
GM: Richard Hamel Sunday 4 PM for 8 hours Type: RPG System: Call of Cthulhu Edition:7 Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Game Content: Mature Themes June
1974. The CIA has assembled your team to assist with the covert
recovery of the K-129 submarine that mysteriously sunk in the Pacific
Ocean in 1968. What forgotten horrors lie on the ocean floor?
My two favorite games this CelestiCon was this game and Weinstein's It's a Magical Place.
The setup and plot had enough twists and turns to keep us on our toes. I really enjoyed this game.
There were some issues with pacing and division of labor between PCs. More in the spoiler section below.
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It was clear Rich did a lot of research for this game. The start was like the beginning of a James Bond movie where every starts in media res. We're all setup and ready to see what's going on and the action starts. I think this took maybe 30 minutes to complete -- I didn't time it, but it felt like that.
Where the pacing lagged was after this great action scene, Rich then goes into a long description of the special boat we're on and the mission. The mission briefing didn't stop until 2 hours into the game (I looked at my watch at that time), so the briefing took more than one hour. Ugh. I would have just told us to get the code books, the nukes, and the submarine and dropped us on the special subraising boat and let the players explore the boat and ask questions of the engineers instead of explaining everything about the boat before hand.
One issue was the division of labor. We had two add-on players. So, we had 8 players: 4 navy seals and 4 CIA operatives. The seals were the muscle and had nothing to do when the CIA operatives did investigations. That also happened in the James Bond intro -- the seals waited for the CIA to give the go ahead.
When the action started, the seals then got stuff to do, but even in that instance the CIA operatives got into the action by shooting guns. I'm not sure whether the issue is that we had a team of 4 and 4 (with two extra seals) or whether the game would have been served better with just a team of CIA operatives (though not realistic, but maybe a better game dynamic).
Our game ended in a TPK as one of the add-on navy seals (Frank) detonated the nukes we had recovered -- on orders of the CIA lead.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Super Train
GM: Morgan Hua Monday 9 AM for 4 hours Type: RPG System: Godlike Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Game Content: Mainstream 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 went well and took exactly 4 hours. The players were less tactical than the group of players I had at KublaCon.
It seems like the less tactical the group, the more foobar happens and actually the more ups and downs during the game with more interesting and unexpected things happening.
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In this game, Clyde, Eastwood's invisible monkey flipped the Rabbit (an advance train that checks the rail before the Super Train). This alerted the Super Train, so troops were deployed.
The players advanced on the Super Train and actually hit the Gizmo turret with a rocket propelled grenade and got a lucky roll and knocked out the Nazi Talent in the train.
So, it was an easy cleanup at that point.
An interesting scene was how the players rescued the three French Resistance members from the Nazi HQ. Lots of sneaking around, punching Nazis through helmets, and then lots of shooting.
It's a magical place
High and Dry
Reunification III
Eagle's Nest
Cthulhu Azorian
Super Train
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