Morgan's Dead of Winter 2017 Adventures

Another interesting Dead of Winter with some old faces and some new. This time I'm going to talk about GM choices and how that affects a game.

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Saturday, 11am - 5pm
Game System: Bedlam Hall
Scenario Title: ‘Twas a Very Dreary Christmas
GM: William Lee
Variations: N/A
Power Level: Rather Low
Number of Players: 6 (Alicia H, Arthur W, Colin F,  Laurel H, Lis H, Morgan H)
Characters Provided: Yes
Description:

Ah, Christmas, that most magical time of the year. By magical, I mean, of course, the alignment of the stars in the Winter Solstice sky makes the walls between dimensions, uh, a bit porous. Eldritch energies and inconceivable horrors from beyond can easily toddle on over to our world for a cup of tea. (They may even stay for supper…) 

This is certainly true here at Bedlam Hall. As the holiday nears, the Blackwood family becomes wrapped up (even smothered) in the spirit of Christmas. Lord Blackwood wants to try his hand a summoning Yog-Sothoth, again, despite the unfortunate incident with Aunt Agatha last year. Lady Blackwood begins a regimen of bathing in blood to look her best for visiting friends and family. And young Matilda, well, she seems to have broken out of the dungeon again! How festive! 

And you, my lucky friends, are the hapless servant staff of the Blackwood Family, tasked with maintaining a semblance of order within the House while vying for prestige and privilege among yourselves. Jolly good fun, isn’t it?

This was an interesting game. I played in a similar game set in Downton Abbey in DoW 2013, run by Gil, so I had a data point to compare games with. The Bedlam Hall game engine is Powered by the Apocalypse. The issue I ran into was that when a character gets a partial success or failure, there's a menu item to choose advantages and disadvantages from. The menu is supposed to add to the storytelling, but game designers forget and put various +1/-1 to the menu item, so instead of helping with storytelling, there's a bit of analysis paralysis when confronted with meta-choices such as +1 Prestige to you, -1 Prestige to target, +1 advantage to you, -1 disadvantage to target, etc.. So, what happens is that you decide to make a move on a PC, then you roll, then you have to pick something from the menu and figure out what that means story-wise. During this time, the whole games comes to a screeching halt. Then the next PC or NPC does a move, and you rinse and repeat. It makes the game feel like a car with an engine that's about to stall. It lurches forward to a stop, lurches forward, stops, etc..

The game is setup so that each servant was given a different task to complete, so my issue was that each player got 5 mins of screen time as we round robin-ed through the PCs. So, in the first third of the game, we were all separate. Later, we started to get together, but we never got more than 3 PCs together at the same time. This led to a lot of down time for the players. The GM did a great job playing all the NPCs, so he got a lot of screen time, but not the players. In Gil's game, the PCs started all together and a major event happened as we all watched, so we all got involved early. I think that worked much better.

Lesson to be learned: get all the PCs involved early on and don't give different tasks to every PC, best to have a common goal at the beginning.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

In the game, each NPC household member had various tasks they wanted to accomplish. The Lady wanted to bathe in the blood of virgins. The Lord, perform a ritual at a standing stones. One son, eat human flesh. And of course, all this happening during the chaos of setting everything up for a Christmas celebration.

The problem was that when one PC was given a task that PC would order an underling PC to help perform part of the task, so that other PC would try to complete a part of that task alone, so there was a lot of PCs acting alone.

I must have done something right because in the end several PCs ganged up on me and murdered my character. Mine was the only character death.

Part of the game was gaining Prestige, in order to change your pecking order in the household. I think this would work better in a longer campaign vs a one-shot.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Saturday, 7pm - 1am
Scenario Title: Three Nights of the Magdalene
Game System: Call of Cthulhu 7th ed.
GM: Josh Clark & John Castillo
Variations: Slight alterations to 7th ed.
Power Level: Terrified Schoolgirls
Number of Players: 6 (Andrew W, Bryanna H, Dovi A, Jack Y, Morgan H, Shannon M)
Characters Provided: Yes
Description: It’s a hard-knock life for the girls at the Magdalene Laundry.

Josh and John spent two years building out this game and it showed. The game is based on real life Magdalene Laundries which weren't shutdown until 1996.

This was a great game. And everyone got their Irish accent on. The role playing was excellent which added a great realism to the game.

Lesson learned: Fully bake your game before running it. Half-baked games aren't as good.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game starts off with one NPC, a friend of all the other PCs, put into "The Box" for misbehaving. The issue is that the PCs have already put together a plan to escape the Laundry and the escape was to be this night. The NPC in the box had already arranged with a handyman to leave the keys to a truck in the industrial laundry part of the premises. The PCs sneak a coded note during mass to the handyman hoping that the note would be given to the NPC.

The PCs try to escape during an evening thunderstorm and find that the NPC is missing from the box. Their escape is curtailed and they wind up following the ghost of the missing NPC to an underground feasting hall. The PCs are given the choice of eternal happiness (and death) or returning to the land of the living and pain and suffering.

The PCs decide to return to the land of the living and found the feasting hall is actually a charnel house with the bodies and bones of missing girls and babies. The nuns of the Laundry (and their bullies) attack and capture the PCs. The charnel house was directly beneath the box, connected by a sewer grate.

The PCs are locked up in their dormitory again, but are sent one-by-one to confession with the new head priest. The PCs learn during the confession that the head priest is not what he seems to be.

The PCs escape onto the grounds again and perform a ritual to banish Nyarlathotep (the new head priest) who was behind all the evil in the Laundries throughout Ireland.

The plot is very straight forward, but what was rich were the PCs, the bad situations, and the choices we had to make.

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Sunday, 11am - 5pm
Scenario Title: Family Feud
Game System: Kult: Divinity Lost
GM: Colin Fahrion
Variations: N/A
Power Level: Family Members with a Dark Secret
Number of Players: 6 (Alicia H, Laurel H, Matt G, Matt R, Matt S, Morgan H)
Characters Provided: Yes
Description:

“It’s time for the Family Feud! Introducing the Thurston Family and the Undercliffe Family! On your marks, let’s start the Family Feud! We have a special episode for you today as we hear that each of these two families have a dark secret! There’s no telling what will happen today folks!”

I heard great things about Kult and wanted to try it. Unfortunately, this was the newest version which switched to a new game engine, Powered by the Apocalypse. Again we ran into the same problems as Bedlam Hall, but less so, because there were less choices, but it still happened. I'm beginning to dislike the Apocalypse World system.

Colin did a great job of bringing to us Family Feud (other than a few tech hiccups). The PCs were interesting and special in their own special way.

My only issue was that we had split the party and one half was in a fight for their lives, whereas the other half were in a very boring elevator ride. And the GM intercut between the two groups, and the elevator people didn't get much screen time since there wasn't much to do in the elevator. I felt that was a bad GM choice. Either there should have been no intercutting or we should have had something to do in the elevator.

Lesson learned: Intercutting between an action scene and a non-action scene works in a movie, but probably not too well in a RPG. The main criteria is to keep the players from being bored and to give them equal screen time.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game started with 3 players in one family and 3 players in another. As we played Family Feud, strange things started happening and the questions started to get more and more personal to each family. I liked this aspect of the game and it would have been more fun if the questions had gotten really personal, but the game show fell apart pretty quickly as the veil around the world lifted and we saw the hell we were in.

Since we were split into two families, the game did lend itself to a split party working against each other.

At the end, we wound up trusting each other and working together in defeating the big bad. And we also found out that we were actually related and were actually one family and not two.

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Sunday, 7pm - 1am
Scenario Title: Deep Sleep of Dread
Game System: Call of Cthulhu 7th ed.
GM: Dave Sokolowski
Variations: None
Power Level: Modern
Number of Players: 6 (Aaron T, Anthony B, Leon G, Matt S, Morgan H)
Characters Provided: Yes
Description:

Washington DC – Today. Congresswoman Denise Grey (D-NY) has fallen into a coma just three days before her speech to the UN on human rights. From this coma she continues to perspire saltwater, which covers her body, soaks the bedsheets and fills her lungs. At this rate, the doctors say she’ll be dead in less than a week, but missing the speech will also be a serious blow to the oppressed people she has promised to represent. She has many enemies and time is short. 

You are a member of the Advocacy — a team of supernatural fixers, soldiers and researchers who work discretely to solve problems in and around the home of the world’s largest bureaucracies. You have the best technology and resources in the world at your hand, which is important because your adversaries don’t play by the rules and often don’t even come from this world.

Dave told us at the beginning that this was a playtest for his scenario and it was supposed to fit in a 4 hour time slot. Matt S. immediately reminded Dave that we had a 6 hour time slot. Dave then told us that there's an hour of background material and PC info to go over, and a wrap up after the game session, so it'll take the 6 hours. I think we did take something like 5 hours for the scenario.

It didn't help that this was the last game session and an hour of background material didn't help me stay awake.

The Advocacy which is the group our PCs belonged to was mainly a modern Delta Green-like group, private instead of governmental and given various rules that makes it a more gentler and nicer Delta Green. One of the rules was to be wary of magic and not to use it.

The investigation wound up very difficult to solve. At one point Dave asked if we wanted hints and we all said, "Yes."

Aaron did a great job as an occult practitioner. Oddly enough, if he didn't use magic, we probably would have never solved the mystery.

Lesson learned: Don't run a complicated investigation game on the last day / time slot of a gaming convention.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

In the game, the Congresswoman, suffering from "Breath of the Deep," was dumped by an unmarked van in front of her condo,  We also learn that she was attacked several times earlier by unmarked motorcycles by Asians with swords and crossbows.

None of the vehicles had license plates and CCTV gave us no IDs. Checking the Congresswoman's home we find a self-recorded video tape and mummified dog. CCTV from the condo complex shows a suspicious blonde woman enter the building.

Following the Congresswoman's cellphone GPS has her disappearing after visiting two Asian embassies.

The Congresswoman was working with a co-sponsor on a bill about Asian sex-slave trade, targeting three Asian countries.

We researched what components were needed to cast the spell on the Congresswoman (her hair) and then Aaron's character created a magical detector to find the fetish used to cast the spell on the Congresswoman. We followed the detector to the home of the co-sponsor of the bill, we confronted him and defeated him in combat.

Without that magical detector we would have SOL.

We learned that the co-sponsor was working with one of the Asian embassies who supplied the muscle. The co-sponsor was a spell caster who also shape changed to appear as the blonde woman.

Overall, the mystery was difficult and in retrospect, it didn't make any sense. Why abduct this woman and throw a spell on her? Why not just kill her and dump her body somewhere? Why the shape change-foo. We actually thought the blonde woman was a paid amateur spy.

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