Morgan's KublaCon 2016 Adventures

This year, KublaCon was a bit odd.  I felt there were more shared rooms with overlapping games.  It would have been better if we had private rooms, but even if the rooms were shared, it would have been better to put similar games together.  I was in Jack's horror game and next to us was a table of 10 players playing a 10 hour Star Wars game.  They were loud and it was hard to hear Jack and it ruined the atmosphere a bit.

There were a lot of no shows for games.  One game I showed up for, three players and the GM didn't show up.  The game was going to be in a room with 3 other games.  Luckily for them, our game didn't happen.  

For each game, there's an analysis of average play time per player. Dividing up the game duration by player isn't very scientific as time is spent in groups.  The worst case is when all the players split up and each do their own thing. If the players hang together, then more than one player gets to share the spotlight.  So, dividing game duration by player number is a worse case calculation.

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GOTTERDAMERUNG
System: Call of Cthulhu
GM: The Orange Duke Nick Szczech
Players: 7
Date/Time: Thurs 5/26, 6pm (6 hrs duration, completed in 2-1/2 play hrs)
Characters: Provided,

It is 1945, Germany is losing the war, and Hitler has retreated to his bunker in Berlin to fight out a final battle with the Russian Marxist foe. As the war is coming to a close, the allies close in on what little is left of Germany, is there no hope? Hitler has promised that super weapons will save the Third Reich and that even know they are being developed. You know this is true, you are stationed in a secret underground base in Germany where scientists and occultists are developing the weapon to save the Reich, but can they do it before the world ends?

This was an invite-only pre-convention game.  Last year, Nick also invited me to play in his pre-convention game.  I liked the setting, the PCs and the NPCs.  From what I can tell, Nick likes to run controlled chaos games where PCs have cross purposes, which I do like, but the issue with that is that there are a lot of break out sessions and the table is left alone to entertain themselves.

The problems I ran into was the same as last year.  This time since the game only ran for 2-1/2 hours, if you do the math:  2.5 hrs * 60 mins / 7 players = 22 mins play time per player.  To get to KublaCon before 6pm, you have to brave rush hour or go even earlier.  I chose to brave rush hour and it took me 1-1/2 hours to get to KublaCon, then we waited 1 hr for some players who arrived late (we started playing at 7pm).  So, 1.5 hr commute + 1 hr waiting for people + 2.5 hrs play time + 0.5 hr drive home = 5.5 hrs of time, I only really got to role play for 22 mins.  That didn't seem like it was worth it.

We did stop the "big bad" with a mostly TPK.  And other plays of this game ran longer, so maybe we were just too efficient in getting to the end.

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There were a lot of similarities with last years game.  An underground bunker, a lab, PCs with cross purposes.  We mainly needed to destroy what was in the lab, an alien creature making Vampires, before it escaped and it was slowly but surely converting PCs to its side either by mesmerizing them or vamping them.

One PC called in for a missile strike without the other players knowing.  Later, another PC called HQ and learned about the missile strike and ordered everyone out of the bunker.  Other players were already outside and were determined to not let anything or anyone exit the bunker.  As the PCs gunned each other down outside the bunker, the missile strike came down and killed everyone and everything in the vicinity.  The only PC that lived was a crazed Jewish scientist who had run off into the woods.

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The Houndsditch Resurrectionists
System: Nemesis/The One Roll Engine
GM: Jack Young
Players: 6
Date/Time:  Fri 5/27, 6pm (6 hrs duration)
Characters: Provided,
Levels: Shrewd but impoverished kids

London: 1872. In the wake of industrial revolution, the most prosperous society in history is also a sprawling calamity of crime, squalor and unimaginable poverty. Life is so dire you’ve had to resort to grave robbery and body thieving to just maybe get by. It’s good to have mates to watch your back for this job tonight, because no other soul in this city cares if you live or die.
Mature themes.

Another really good game by Jack Y.  Loads of fun, lots of hi-jinks with adolescent kids in a graveyard.

6 hr game / 6 players = 1 hour role playing per player.

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Jack started the PCs in 3 groups, so getting into the scenario was easy with less down time between groups of players.

While digging up a grave, my character took a hit of insanity from seeing a Ghoul trying to steal the same body as us.  My character was an ex-chimney sweep, so he was supposed to be the sneaky small non-combat character.  I had a choice of Fight, Flight, of Freeze.  Freeze felt boring and running through the graveyard didn't seem like a good idea and also boring, so I picked Fight. So, I jumped into the grave and stabbed the Ghoul in the head.  After a round of combat, the Ghoul decided to tunnel away.  Well, still insane, I decided to go after it.  Luckily, my buddy, another PC decided to grab me and pull me off the Ghoul as it disappeared underground. Suddenly, my PC became Belkar from Order of the Stick.

I also had a pet weasel that understood my commands and I befriended an enemy NPC's bloodhound.

In the graveyard, we rescued a girl who had escaped from a Workhouse.  She was the daughter of a rich man, but she and her brother were kidnapped and ransom was paid, but they were never returned.

We then proceeded to the Workhouse (with it's mass graves in the backyard) and faced the terrors inside (killer dogs, men with shotguns slaughtering children, and a crazy syphilitic ax murderer) and rescued not only her brother but the other unfortunate children inside.  Unfortunately, the evil head mistress escaped with 1000 gold crowns.

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The Buffalo, the Pirate, and the Consulting Detective
System: TimeWatch
GM: Morgan Hua
Players: 5 (played with 6)
Date/Time: Sat 5/28, 10am (6 hrs duration)
Characters: Provided.

You are an elite TimeWatch agent trained to stop saboteurs from ripping history apart.
During Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1887, London, several historical figures are shot and killed, including Queen Victoria’s grandson George Albert (later King George V) and Kaiser Wilhelm II. And oddly, Sherlock Holmes is helping the police with their investigation.
Scenario written by Michael Rees.

I wanted to run TimeWatch because I was a KickStarter supporter and one of the first scenarios (written by Michael Rees) I ran for my local gaming group was amazing to me and I wanted to share it. Michael Rees wrote this scenario with a beta version of the Kickstarter rules, but his work was so well regarded that he got invited to write additional content for the Kickstarter.

What's interesting about TimeWatch is that it makes you think differently on how to solve problems. Like a lot of independent games, the setting is very white room and you have to bring your imagination to the table and fill the room with things that progresses the story and plot.

In running this game, I felt the pacing was a little slow, but I ran into some of the players a day later and they all said they had a great time.  It's weird to experience the game from the inside and then getting feedback from the outside that didn't match.

6 hrs / 6 players = 1 hour role playing per player.

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Link to Scenario.  In addition to this scenario, you can check Michael Rees website for other scenarios.

Highlights of the game were:

• Devon A. running an intelligent Neanderthal who understood language, but could only speak 12 words (Ouch Existentialism!).  And other players riffing off of his vocabulary.
• I had the Ezeru replace Queen Victoria as part of the plot. Well, they killed the Ezeru, and decided to put a Time Agent in her place temporarily. So, Skegg, the Sophosaur Time Agent got to be Queen of England for awhile.
• Karen T. trying to hide that she was a liquid metal android (from Terminator 2) from the party when at least half of the party knew or suspected she wasn't human.
• The anti-social mad scientist and all her attitude towards everything.

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Spirit of 77 - Bicentennial Blues
System: Apocalypse World Engine
GM: Charles Picard
Players: 7
Date/Time: Sat 5/28, 6pm (6 hrs duration)
Characters: Created at table.

Last year was the Bicentennial, and all Uncle Sam has to show for it is a giant-sized hangover. What guitar-waving, car-exploding, street-fighting, Snake River Canyon-jumping insanity will birthday numero 201 bring? Can.. You…DIG IT?

I ran into Charles in line and he told me he was running this game.  I met Charles last year in Death from a Jeep and he and his buddies were what made that game really fun.  They were excellent role players.  So, I changed my shuffler priorities to get into his game.  Something new.

I had reservations about Apocalypse World, I've played it twice and I disliked the Sex moves especially in the Monster Hearts version of the game.  The great thing is that this version of the system has no Sex movies.  It's all about over the top action and big hair.

The character generation took about 1-1/2 hours.  The templates and backstories were fine, but with 7 players, we had to generate hooks 5 hooks per PC, so that's 35 hooks that you have to make between characters and they have to agree on it.  That took more time than it was worth and during play it had minimal impact.

My character was named Reverend Total Peace and he looked like Kojak and he had a gang of Hare Krishnas that he called his Peaceniks.  He had political Connections and was greedy for money.

Anyway, once the game started, the game ran fine.  Charles is a really good GM, but I think allowing 7 players into this game was over ambitious.  I think making-characters-at-the-table games should have 4 to 5 players.  When you get up to seven, it's exponentially too much to handle.  I could see Charles trying to hook the individual story lines together and giving players enough stuff to do.  But what could have been easily handled with 4 to 5 players becomes an extraordinary chore.  Also with so many characters to juggle, the story winds up suffering.

(6 hrs - 1.5 hrs char creation) / 7 players = 38 mins of screen time per player.

I enjoyed the game, liked the system, but I felt there were too many players.  Also, I didn't quite feel the seventies vibe.  Not enough Seventies, baby!

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The game started with one of the players having a vision of something dire heading to San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.

The year is 1977, a year after the bicentennial.  SF China Town is going to have a parade / celebration and all the characters figure out how they get into the celebration.

During the parade, a vaporous dragon appears and injures and panics a large number of people. The players investigate and discover that ancient Chinese magics, long forgotten have accidentally activated.  The dragons were used to wipe out Chinese foes.  Now a spirit dragon has hatched and it plans on wiping out the SF Bay Area.  We figure out that we have to kill the dragon by either/or:
  Stab the dragon with a jade spear.
  Marry it.
  Remove its eyes.
In the end we discover we could only kill it by stabbing it in its eyes with jade.

The dragon's lair was an ancient Chinese junk buried under Alcatraz Island.

The spirit of the dragon can also possess people, so one of the PCs got possessed, later it possessed another who we stabbed with a jade spear and then force fed LSD to him, and then forced him out of the PCs body.  The LSD tainted spirit merged back into it's geode egg haphazardly and was destroyed, so we were able to save the possessed PC and SF.  The dragon's plan was to animate the Golden Gate Bridge and rampage through San Francisco.

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DRIVE INTO DARKNESS
System: Night’s Black Agents
GM: Gene Lancaster
Players: 5 (played with 3)
Date/Time: Sun 5/29, 12 noon (4 hrs duration, completed play in 3 hrs)
Characters: Provided

1950’s Memphis, Tennessee. 5 Criminals with guns and a plan. A bank robbery gone wrong. All hell breaks loose!
For most people, problems can be solved with money. Your problems, are solved with violence.
You are slayers of the undead... and the living.
See oldheroesneverdie.com for pics
Adults Only. New Players welcomed! A Vampire Crime-Thriller.
Take a psychobilly drive into darkness!

I heard great things about The Dracula Dossier and was thinking about running it.  I've only played Night's Black Agents once and thought it was an okay experience, but not great.  I wanted to try it again before deciding on running The Dracula Dossier.

Even though the game was full, only one person who signed up showed up for the game and there were two crashers (I was a crasher), but the other crasher had to leave after 3 hours.  What is up with people who crash, but can't stay the whole duration?  "Oh, yeah, I just need to kill a few hours, but I got something better to do later.  Is that okay?"  Seems a bit rude.

Gene has a lot of props and has been play testing this game for a while.  The issue is that the game is longer than the time slot, so he's been removing parts and starting the game in media res which is fine.  With only 3 players, we actually finished the game early enough so the crasher that had to leave could just leave without missing much.

It was interesting seeing a total different way of GMing a game.  Gene definitely likes more of the action aspects of Gumshoe than the investigation.  The game ran more like an action movie than what I expected from a Gumshoe game.  But up front, Gene set our expectations with what the game was and what it wasn't.  He said the game was a B movie, some things have logic holes, there will be continuity errors, it will be violent, but not abusive.  He said it was Jason Bourne with Vampires.

So, I enjoyed the game for what it was.

3 hrs / 3 players = 1 hour per player.

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I loved that he gave us the floor plan for the bank we were going to heist.  Instead of going in blind, we did the smart thing and he started us off with a complete floor plan.

Since the game would run long, he started us on the 2nd floor.  He did put dead bodies all over the 1st floor and half of the 2nd floor.  He tells us we killed all those people, but we haven't cleared the other half of the 2nd floor.  So, we proceed to do that.  (He says this is where he gets problems from some players.  Some players would have rather just sneak around.)  I bought into his setup though.

We kill a couple of guards and then we find the bank manager who's a Vampire.  We stake her (it took some effort) which immobilized her.  Then we needed to get her to open up the vault which we didn't have the combination to.  We did note that she could mesmerize the male characters, but our one female character had already resisted her charms.  So, we chopped off the Vampire's limbs and had the female character interrogate the Vampire.  Promising to let her go if she gave us the combination.  Of course, once we opened the vault, we killed her permanently.  There were two vaults and found coffins in both.  One was empty, the other had a vampire in it which we dispatched.

Once we did that, the dead bodies animated and we had to fight our way out of the bank.

Of course, the GM then told us we never got the money from the vault downstairs.  So we went back into the bank and found stairs leading down into ancient graveyard that the bank was built upon.  We also found the money vault.

So we descended and found a Underwold-like vault for vampires and started dispatching them. While we were doing that, an elder Vampire attacked us and after a fight that did hurt us, we dispatched it.

At some points, he would ask if we wanted to spend our Vampire Lore points and what I liked was that we had only 3 Vampire Lore points among the three PCs, but we found more than 3 things where we could spend the points on.  It made us pause.  For some things, we decided to just pick up the items in question and save our points until later.  That wound up being the right move.

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At the Hands of an Angry God
System: At the Hands of an Angry God
GM: Wilson Zorn
Players: 6 (played with 3)
Date/Time: Sun 5/29, 5pm (6 hrs duration, completed play in 3 hrs due to players having to leave)
Characters: Created at table.

Your family is leaving the rotten old world and establishing a principled colony on the frontier with like-minded families/tight-knit factions. Play includes setting and family/faction generation, families battle “fate” and compete with each other to establish the community and their own positions.

Interesting system, but a bit fiddly.  I enjoyed it, but the other two players (crashers who had to leave 3 hours early) seemed a bit lost.  Again?  Or did they dislike the game and wanted an excuse to leave?  Again my rant about crashers who can't commit to the full game.  WTF.  But Wilson told us that the game needed 3 players and was better with 4.  So, 2 crashers that can't stay the whole time was better than no game at all.  At least one of the crashers told us after Wilson explained the game that he couldn't stay the full time, so Wilson gave us a truncated game instead of being told at the last minute that the player had to leave..

The whole premise of the game is that the players represent their family (much like King Arthur Pendragon where players represent the whole history of their household including individual knights).  The families come up with founding precepts for a utopian colony trying to establish itself. The GM represents the other NPC families and outside forces (The Angry God).  The Players represent the major families in the colony.

The world and setting is determined by the players.  I suggested a better Waterworld.  So, we wound up being colonists finding a piece of land out in nowhere surrounded by water after catastrophic global warming.

We came up with 8 precepts for our utopian colony.  It was free form, so came up with something socialist.  All resources are shared.  Everyone has a voice. No violence within the community. Punishment is based on withholding resources.  Resource usage must be sustainable.  No religion, but we must respect the spirit of the land.

The GM has a supply of tokens and the Colonists have a supply of shared tokens and each family has their own supply of tokens.  During game play, tokens are shuffled between supplies based on play.

In each round the players and GM can bring up challenges and tokens are put forward to confront the challenge.  The dynamics of families helping each other added bonus tokens from the community's supply.  Dice (d6's) are rolled based on the number of tokens put forward and depending on the results, either the challenge is met with success or failure and 1's and 6's determine setbacks or benefits to the family being challenged.  After a full round, tokens are returned to their token banks with benefits adding tokens to various families and setbacks removing tokens from those families.

The game ends when either the GM or the shared supply is emptied.  If the GM supply is empty, the colony survives and becomes established.  If the community's shared supply is empty, the colony fails and dies out.

In our game, the three families were the Watchers (my family), the Fixers, and the Stables.

In our mini-game, the Stables defeated the island's big bad, killing the local natives's god (a giant human eating octopus) which allowed the Watchers to convert the locals to our founding precepts of no religion.  The colonists won establishing a stable colony, but the Fixers gained so many tokens they created an oligarchy. My Watchers wound up intermixing with the locals on the island and became a majority of the underclass, ready to start a rebellion.  And that's how we ended the game, ready for a sequel.

I enjoyed the game, but the other two players were a little lost on how the tokens worked.  I've played enough resource games and indie games to figure it out pretty fast.  I think by the end, one other player finally figured it out.

Overall, I liked the world building and how it played out.

3 hrs / 3 players = 1 hour per player.

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And Some Fell on Stony Ground
System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition
GM: Morgan Hua
Players: 6
Date/Time: Mon 5/30, 5pm (4 hrs duration)
Characters: Provided

Life in Stowell, an American small-town in 1923, is idyllic and safe. Family and friends are behaving strangely and then it all begins to descend into madness.
This is a published scenario by Paul Fricker from the Chaosium book “Nameless Horrors.”

A week before the GM submissions deadline, Chaosium reached out to me and asked me to run a game at KublaCon.  I was already running TimeWatch and I didn't want to run a long game and not be able to play in other games during the convention, so I thought I would run a 4 hour game on Monday.  I didn't have a short scenario written up and they recommended that I run a scenario from their "Nameless Horrors" book.  Unfamiliar with any of the scenarios, they recommended "An Amaranthine Desire" or "And Some Fell on Stony Ground" as something that can be run in 4 hours.  I read the summaries for both games, but "An Amaranthine Desire" was very close in plot device to "Gatsby and the Great Race" which was being run in 4 rooms with 6 players each at the same convention, so I didn't want to run something that similar. I was told that "And Some Fell on Stony Ground" might be longer than 4 hours, but it can be run in that time frame.  My schedule had been busy, so I wasn't able to play test the game beforehand to work out any timing issues.  Into the breach, my dear friends, into the breach.

4 hrs / 6 players = 40 mins role playing time per player.  Due to the setup of the scenario and pre-gens, most of the players wanted to do their own things, so there was a lot of wait time between players.  Eventually, they got together to work as a team.  Not an ideal setup for a convention game.

Someone posted on Facebook that they greatly enjoyed the game and I was lucky enough to read his comment.

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I really like the beginning of the scenario.  There's two parts to it.  The first part is where the players explore the building oddness to their home town.  This is the really fun part of the game.

The 2nd part is as how one of the players put it: "Zombie Apocalypse."  where the players escape the rampaging hordes of kill krazy townies.  That was less interesting and the mechanism used luck instead of the CoC 7th chase rules.

Another thing I found odd was that the pre-gens for the scenario lacked in spot hidden and various other general skills PCs usually load up on.  So, I was surprised that the PCs failed most of their rolls.

I also decided on a new home grown rule, instead of making each player roll Stealth and usually one player always fails and that seemed unfair, I asked for a group stealth roll (just like a group luck roll), having the player with the lowest stealth roll for the whole group sneaking around. That seemed to work fine. Let's say you have 3 people with 80% Stealth. Then if all three have to roll, the chance of failure is really 60% ((100% - 80%) * 3 = 60%).  That's crazy bad.  Sucks to be a team of navy seals, someone is bound to step on a branch, and that isn't the case.  So, I think a 20% failure for the group is more reasonable.

One of the telling signs in the game were either fading black eyes or irritated eyes.  I asked the players to make spot hidden rolls and they failed them all.  Later, they finally made one and then I let them realize that they didn't notice the other anomalies in people they spoke with.  In retrospect, I don't think this clue actually gives anything away.  So, maybe if I ran this again, I would create a random chart for eye aliments with adjustments based on time since infection.

By the 3-1/2 hour mark, the players were still exploring the town and I didn't even get a chance to fully ratchet up the oddness.  So, I think this game could go more than 8 hours, so definitely not a scenario for a convention game.  Also, the solution to the scenario is the destruction of a telescope.  Finding it was really hard.  And upon the destruction, there was no player satisfaction that they had done the right deed.  Not only that, the next night, the town goes crazy.  Which is pretty funny in retrospect.  The PCs do the right thing and it gets worse.

In my game, one player looked into the telescope, so when the town went crazy, that PC knew what was going on and could tell the other players that destroying the telescope was the right thing, but it still felt anti-climatic.

Overall, an interesting scenario and with some adjustments, it can be much better.

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