Morgan's A Weekend with Good Friends Jan 2021 Most Excellent Adventures

A free online convention run by The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast.

This was a great online gaming convention. This is their second and they didn't quite get the new shuffler code ironed out yet, but the convention staff worked really hard managing signups with an electronic spreadsheet and discord messaging.

After the shuffler was done, I got into 3 games; all in the first two days. Not bad. Then people found out that they were double booked (I was too) and dropped out of games. And I think most people were top heavy in getting into games and as the days rolled on, more and more people dropped out of games. Some also didn't account for time zone conversions as players were from all over the world. In the end, I played in 7 games! (And I had 3 other non-convention games the same week, for a total of 10 games in 6 days).

I found the quality of the GMs and Players to be excellent.

I think I'll talk a little about GM style in this article. There are a variety of GM styles and depending on personal preferences, Players may like a specific GM style over another. There is no good or bad style, just different.

I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked.

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Game Name: On a Wild and Savage Hillside

Game System: Trail of Cthulhu

GM: Scott Dorward#6426

Number of Players: 3-5 (diesel680, domjallen, P. Troilus, sodmikail, Morgan Hua)

Newbie Friendly: Yes

Age Minimum: 18+

Character Creation: Pre-generated characters will be provided. 

Time slot: Slot 1, Jan 14 8am PST (4 hrs)

Description: Rural Carmarthenshire, Wales, 1690. 

The Beddoe family keep to themselves, tending their farm peacefully. Of course, they have their secrets, but who doesn’t? A few eyebrows were raised when Griffith left the church, and loose tongues wag about Gwenllian being a foundling, but these are minor vexations. And now Margaret has a child on the way, after many years of disappointment. This is a happy time.

At least it should be happy. Events are conspiring to make the Beddoes confront the secrets of the land on which they live and the blood that runs through their veins. Is their family strong enough to survive, and will anything ever be the same again?

This self-contained scenario forms the opening of the upcoming campaign, A Poison Tree.

Content Warnings: Pregnancy, peril to children, body horror

Safety Tools: X-Card, Lines and Veils, Pre-game discussion

Due to the nature of Trail of Cthulhu, there was minimal die rolling, so most of the game dealt with storytelling and choices by PCs. The story is driven by events, external pressure, inter-party conflict and mystery, and character choices.

GM had the right balance of everything, getting the setting established early and the external pressures defined, so the PCs just have to react and have interplay with each other and the environment.

This was my favorite game of the convention.

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PCs all belong to the same family; All with some secret or suspected dark background or secret. I played Agnes Beddoe, the family Matriarch. Agnes is a very good healer and midwife, but some in town accuse her of being unchristian. Her husband, Griffith, used to be a vicar, but why he resigned is a mystery. Son-in-law, Rowland, married to daughter Margaret, is a cagey about his past. Daughter-in-law, Gwenllian, is a foundling with no known family. Owen, her son, married to Gwenllian, with seemingly no secrets.

The story starts with her daughter (NPC), Margaret's difficult birth. Baby is albino white, eyeless, and has two rows of shark-like teeth, with no appetite for milk, but an appetite for fresh blood. After the birth, their farmstead is watched by shapes in the snow and gifted with a bloody present at the door.

The family then has to deal with the baby, the strange watchers, and a non-tolerant village.

Strangely enough, none of the PCs tried to kill the baby. After the game, the GM told us that usually, at least one PC does try to do that and finds out the baby is impossible to kill.

In the end, the PCs head to the fairy mound and plead for assistance from the fae, but hands erupt from the dirt and try to drag us into the hill. Owen, the son, was dragged under, but everyone else escaped. Then Griffith lured the rioting mob, villagers with pitchforks and torches who had burned our farm to the ground, to the mound and they were in turn sacrificed.

The surviving PCs left the village to start a new life elsewhere. Agnus leaves the cryptic message, "Carmarthen" on the barn door to tell Griffith where the family had gone to.

Meanwhile, underneath the hill, both Owen and Griffith are melded into a flesh wall with the villagers.

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Game Name: YKRPG - A Doll's House

Game System: Gumshoe Quickshock

GM: The Liar from Beyond#9621 (Daniel)

Number of Players: 3-5

Newbie Friendly: Yes

Age Minimum: 18

Character Creation: Characters will be created during play. https://theblackbook.io/

Time slot: Slot 2, Jan 14 12:30pm PST (4 hrs)

Description: You are French soldiers on the frontlines of an alternate continental war in the 1940's. Stationed in Dijon, the squad are called out to the area of Strasbourg to gather intel on the Castaignist forces that withdrew from a desolate farm area. 

Low on combat and fueled with reality horror and paranoia, this scenario welcomes a different kind of haunted house experience.

Content Warnings: Violence, gore, psychological horror, intensity.

Safety Tools: X-Card, Lines and Veils, Pre-game discussion

I have YKRPG, but have only read, played, run the first book, Paris, and I really wanted to try out the other settings. This is the second book, set in an alternate history WWI.

YKRPG hands out Red (Injury) and Yellow (Shock) Condition cards. If you rack up 3 of one color, you're either dead or insane. Each card describes the injury or shock and how to discard the card. See my review of YKRPG for details. So, injury and shock are descriptive with some mechanical aspects.

This game was very atmospheric. The GM was very good at intersplicing game mechanics with description. This worked really well for this game.

I enjoyed the game and game play, we had excellent Players, but I felt that random things were just thrown at us to react to and to hammer the PCs until we reached the climatic ending.

I've played in several WWI trench warfare Cthulhu-esque games before and they all seem to have random encounters that don't have a cohesive storyline. They wind up being a tour of the horrors of trench warfare. Even the movie 1917 had a plot of trying to get the message through to save the lives of others, especially a brother.

p.s. The Black Book website let us create Gumshoe PCs very quickly and is highly recommended.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Our mission was to enter a deserted village in a valley, occupy a specific farm for four days, observe, and report back. Possible POWs were also present. If so, we were to rescue them. 

From a distance, we noticed the whole village was bombed out and burned down except for the one farm. I was the Lt, so I decided that we'd skirt the town and observe from a hill above the farm. From there we can see enemy movement. One PC came from this town and wanted to check an old wood pile near his home. The wood there was fully stocked. This set us on alert because that meant that people were about.

Then we started having hallucinations. The GM did a great job interweaving what was real and what was imagined. Some save throws showed us illusions, some reality, and we were kept unbalanced, not knowing which was which.

At different points, we shot at each other (PCs saw enemy soldiers, but it was others in the party), saw maggots and worms everywhere, saw advancing enemy soldiers, encountered mines, etc..

In the end, two PCs entered the farm (one had actually shot the other earlier). The one that was shot (saw a place of worms), shot the other PC while in the farm. My Lt and another PC got away as far as possible when in the distance we see the farm and the village be devoured by a giant sinkhole filled with maggots and worms.

Afterwards, the GM did tell us if we went into the village we would find it would suddenly be inhabited with Victorian era people and other strangeness. 

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Game Name: Cursed

Game System: Call of Cthulhu 7e

GM: diesel680#9263 (Al S)

Number of Players: 2-4 (John F, Matt R, Shannon M, Morgan Hua)

Newbie Friendly: No

Age Minimum: 18

Character Creation: Pre-generated characters will be provided.

Time slot: Slot 3, Jan 14 5pm PST (4 hrs)

Description: In modern Aylesbury, Massachusetts, a group of military veterans have built a good life for themselves and even found love and children. An encounter with a strange woman connected to their past threatens to take everything they hold dear from them. Players will be able to explore modern Lovecraft Country as they search for answers and their investigation presents them with difficult choices.

Content Warnings: Harm to children. Romantic relationships between player characters.

Safety Tools: X-Card, Lines and Veils, Pre-game discussion

GM set up everything early with daily chores, setting us in modern day pre-Covid with minimal descriptions. The game was about making hard choices. The decision making process was what made this game really interesting.

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Two pair of PCs are married to each other, and all are friends. We each have two kids, dogs, and a stable life. The story starts with us at brunch and we spot a wanted criminal. Two of the PCs are cops, so we give chase and arrest him. At the arrest, a strange woman approaches us and tells us we were responsible for the death of her father, who she names, and then disappears.

The PC's kids have problems sleeping that night.

The PCs start investigating and discover who the woman is and decides to visit her house. Inside, the cop PCs find the dead body of the woman's mother, stabbed to death. They also find Mythos related manuscript pages. PCs have the woman arrested and question her.

She tells us we were responsible for the death of her father, so she has cursed us and our children will die unless we tell her which one of our children we want to live. We would have to sacrifice either a parent or child in exchange for that one life. A sequence of haunting events ratchet up the ticking clock as we only have 10 days left to decide.

More research and after reading parts of the Necronomicon, we decide to cut a deal to save our children.

In the end, we go to a haunted mound, contact a Mythos creature and have the curse lifted in exchange for one of us being a "mother." I loved that all this was so nebulous, that we cut a deal without really knowing the consequence. 

My PC's wife volunteered. I watch my wife for 9 months, with paranoia, preparing to evacuate my two kids. After 9 months, our door bell rings and two babies are left on our doorstep: one goat-like, the other monstrous.

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Game Name: Hope’s Last Day

Game System: Alien: The RPG

GM: iPwnedMSCS#8795 (Chris B)

Number of Players: 4-5 (Katonic, Shane M, Tristan N, Morgan Hua)

Newbie Friendly: Yes

Age Minimum: 18+

Character Creation: Pre-generated characters will be provided. 

Time slot: Slot 7, Jan 15 11am PST (4 hrs)

Description: Hadley’s Hope, jointly funded by Weyland-Yutani and the United Americas, has a “them and us” feel to it, with any visiting corporate folk looking down their noses at the colony’s laborers. Despite this, the colony has been developing well. There’s opportunity aplenty—and risk aplenty, too.  

Four days ago, a wildcatter named Russ Jorden was brought back, infected with something. He died, and some snake-like parasite disappeared into the guts of the base. Security has had no luck catching the thing, and somehow more people were infected. Rumor has it that some of them have died, and that there are more of these snake-things than Supervisor Simpson is admitting to. Simpson spoke over the intercoms, calling for calm.

Safety Tools: X-Card, Pre-game discussion.

This is the scenario in the revised edition of the core book. It's actually the final act of a 3 act scenario, so that it can be run in a convention timeslot. The game is set in the time period before Ripley and the Colonial Marines land on Hadley's Hope and find Newt.

This game is very cinematic and delivers Alien in spades. I think it helps that all the players have watched Aliens and are familiar with the setting. So, only minimal descriptions by the GM were necessary.

The GM had a good sense of pacing and knew when to throw things at us with enough foreshadowing that it wasn't a jump scare. Things ran organically.

My only issue was with the system. The type of Alien attack is determined by a random 1d6 chart. On extended combats, the limitation of this starts to show itself. Ineffective attacks repeat themselves a little too much on long combats. There needs to be a way to fairly escalate the combat on both sides, to end the combat sooner.

Overall, a fun cinematic Alien game that delivered what it promised.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game starts with the PCs outside of an airlock door entering Hadley's Hope. Inside, an emergency message is on repeat, telling people to go to the basement level housing. We soon find signs of violence. Our key concern is getting a priority card key, so we'll have access to the armory and to the shuttle, and finding survivors.

While exploring we get intercom calls. One from the bar and another from medical bay. We run into an Alien trying to get into the bar. We shoot it up and rescue a survivor. We find a stack of bodies in the casino and one comatose woman. I got attacked by one of the snake-things and get dragged into the morgue before another PC saves me. We get to the medical bay and get the priority card key from the WY employee in quarantine.

While some PCs are examining the comatose woman in medbay, the others are in comcenter. We change the message to tell all survivors to go to the shuttle for evac. We check all the CCTV and spot no survivors. Meanwhile, a chest-buster comes out of the comatose woman and the PCs re-quarantine the WY employee.

Just as we get to the shuttle, we get attacked by 2 Aliens. This combat goes for about 10 rounds. This is where the combat went too long. Some of the Alien attacks were ineffective against our Synthetic PC. And at high stress, my PC kept panicking before being able to attack. At one point, even the GM asked if we should just call it. In the end, it was a TPK.

GM told us afterwards, that if we entered the shuttle, we'll actually get attacked by face-huggers.

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Game Name: The Victim’s Ball

Game System: Call of Cthulhu 7E

GM: minauril#4994

Number of Players: 4-8

Newbie Friendly: Yes

Age Minimum: 16+

Character Creation: Pre-generated characters will be provided. 

Time slot: Slot 8, Jan 15, 3:30pm PST (4 hrs)

Description: The year is 1794. You're lucky to be alive after the Reign of Terror. Not that many were as lucky as you. You are invited to the house of Comte De Rochforte, where you've heard rumors that he has been holding the most scandalous parties, should the rumors be true. Tales of dancing, drinking, gluttony and... other unseemly things, too unseemly to be speaking about in public or private. Your invitation was quite specific on arriving in the most strange and scandalous attire. Come and join the Victim's Ball... if you dare.

Content Warnings: Existential horror, body horror and gore

Safety Tools: Safeword: Kiwi. Players can use this to pause or leave as needed for their health.

I enjoyed this game for what it was. The GM was monologuing about half the time. With 8 players, that left us with about 15 mins of play per PC.

I thought this was great entertainment and we ran the gamut of horrible outcomes. It felt like a radio play with a few choices made by the PCs, sort of like choose your own adventure with only a few choices, since we didn't have much screen time.

The GM kept track of the 8 PCs very well and we each got our outcomes. For a convention game, this is fine and dandy. Something completely different. But my personal preference would be more character interaction and more player agency. The PCs didn't know each other, so we're basically involved with our own goals and stories and nobody else's.

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To get to the party, the PCs must relinquish their coats and shoes in the middle of winter. We discover the guests must wear a red ribbon. The servants black ribbons. The noble house women green ribbons.

There's a party game where the Sorcerer is picked, and the Sacrifice is picked later. None of the rules are explained, but we figure out the Sorcerer is picked by the majority of the women and the Sorcerer picks the Sacrifice from the women. The Sacrifice gets her head guillotined off and reattached with a green ribbon.

As the party runs through the night, the dancing and music drive the guests to a mosh-pit like frenzy. Guests start to die of exhaustion. Eventually, Nyarlathotep is summoned and the dead continue to dance.

One PC got her head chopped off, eventually losing her identity over time. One PC joined as a servant, to wear a black ribbon. One PC went through a gate to another planet. Several PCs escaped by hitching a hay wagon to horses in the stable. My character froze to death outside clutching a decapitated head.

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Game Name: Little Land of Ba'al

Game System: Call of Cthulhu 7E 

GM: daupo #8153

Number of Players: 3-5 (Island Boy, MissMoogle, Syd, Morgan Hua)

Newbie Friendly: Yes

Age Minimum: 18

Character Creation: Pre-generated characters will be provided.

Intend to record or stream: Yes, if players are interested in doing so

Time slot: Slot 14, Jan 16 6:30pm PST (4 hrs)

Description: In the early 1920s, a handful of intrepids respond to the last few letters of an acclaimed archaeologist who has fallen silent, following an exotic dig on an ancient island. 

Content Warnings: Dark and violent themes, possible sexual themes, religious themes, psychological horror

Safety Tools: X-Card, Pre-game discussion

The historical background for this game is fascinating. The exact location is revealed in the spoiler section.

I liked that the PCs were experts in their fields and were there to do a job. Also various odd things could be explained as either scientific or supernatural, so they could be taken either way.

Overall, a good game. One I wouldn't mind running myself.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The setting was the island of Menorca.

We're sent as a rescue / second team. So, we're allowed to inventory necessary supplies. Which was ok, except the GM then damages our boat and we lose most of our supplies which made the supply run a waste of time. For a convention game, this is a big no-no. GM also made a big deal of wreaking our radio. We had repair it several times before it worked. A bit of plot armor there which I disliked. If I ran the game I'd let the radio get repaired; it didn't matter to the plot.

The GM wrote this scenario and told us afterwards that it was designed to work against expectations. It was flexible in that if we trusted X, then Y would be the insane cultist; and if we trusted Y, then X would be the insane cultist. I think that's pretty clever. Also NPCs were experts in their field, so when the Geologist tells us that our boat ran into an unexpected shoal, it was because of the earlier earthquakes. So, I liked how a lot of unexplained things were explained, so it kept the PCs guessing.

So, we find the dig site and we get shot at. It's the famed archaeologist, alone at the dig site, slightly deranged. We calm him down and bring our surviving supplies in. He tells us that 3 of his members went to the south village and never returned. Then another member, Jeremy, went to the northwest village and never returned. So, the last member, Terry, also went to the northwest village. We found no evidence of foul play at the dig site. Terry eventually returns and tells us the villagers weren't willing to help.

The archaeologist shows us an underground complex with a Phoenician stone stela which translates to a warning that those being worshipped were not who they seemed. Walled up sections seem to block off tunnels out of the cave like spokes on a wheel. The archaeologist thinks that one leads to a Taula to the east. One of the walled off sections has partially collapsed and we can smell decay. After digging it out, we find the body of Jeremy, body crushed by either rockfall or someone smashing his body with a stone, but there is no evidence of either. We take his body out and bury him. We then unblock the tunnel which we think goes to the Taula and follow it. At some point, it veers away from the Taula and we find another chamber with goat sacrifices. Obviously done by villagers.

We find a breach in the tunnel that goes into a well with stairs that rise up into a basement. Terry confirms that either this is the church or the mill in the village. We go up and at that time, both the archaeologist and our linguist starts chanting, the blackness in the well starts moving, and we flee upstairs into the church -- full of villager cultists.

In the end, two of the PCs (I had one of them) escaped, returned to call for help on the radio, then hid in the jungle until they were picked up. The rest of the PCs were lost.

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Game Name: Waiting for the Hurricane

Game System: Pulp Cthulhu

GM: TenSoon's Shadow#6436

Number of Players: 3-6

Newbie Friendly: Yes

Age Minimum: None

Character Creation: Characters will be created during play.

Time slot: Slot 18, Jan 17 12:30pm PST

Description: A group trapped on an island off the coast of Florida during a storm.  People get kidnapped, a cult is at work, and all might be at stake if the investigators don't intervene!  Tired of investigations?  Looking for some good old fashioned shooting and explosions?  Then boy do I have the game for you! With absolutely no brain power involved this will be a great way to wrap up the weekend with some good pulpy action. 

Content Warnings: None

Safety Tools: Pre-game discussion

The GM told us to either pick pre-gens from dholeshouse.org or roll our own. So, I wanted to play a grown up version of Short-Round from Indiana Jones and I built a fast talking, dodgy, driving, hand-to-hand maneuver expert. Well, the GM didn't like most of our characters and made us pick pre-gens from Dholeshouse. We wasted 1/2 hour because the GM didn't quite get that Pulp is PULP and over-the-top. So, I picked Richard Fizzlebottom, a stuntman who was almost exactly like my rolled up PC except he had no social skills. So, I decided Fizzlebottom was more of a NYC type of guy, chatty like Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

Our GM was pretty dedicated to railroading us and car tires had plot armor, and we got to the big ending. The GM seemed sleep deprived and a bit frazzled. His grasp of CoC 7th rules were a bit loose, loose enough for him to shoehorn us into the plot.

We had a great table of Players and they brought the fun to the game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We're vacationing in a hotel as a hurricane approaches our island. The bridge is out, so we're stuck until the storm blows over. Meanwhile, men in black enter the hotel and start killing guests. Our intrepid vacationers then take it upon ourselves to stop those men.  

We save a few guests and stop a few of the men in black. As the surviving men in black push hostages into a van and drive off, one of the PCs shoots out its tire, after numerous penalties, but the van still drives away. Yeah, plot armor for the tire. We try to help some cops that were shot and were told to get to the police station which they can't raise. We go there and find the aftermath of a massacre. A phone call comes from someone at the graveyard needing help. We grab guns and go there. We knock off the men in black there and the guy we rescue tells us there's a horrible ceremony going on on a secret island that will wipe out the coast. We go there and blow up the ceremony building. Then a giant Mythos creature rises out of the depths.

In the end, my PC tried to ram our boat into Cthulhu, but failed. Cthulhu just picked up the boat and threw it away. I guess he learned from Call of Cthulhu.

The photographer (PC) died protecting his camera with photos. The journalist, our pacifist scout, saw the ritual and went temp insane and fled. She found the camera afterwards. When she ran, we decided to just blow up the building. The journalist and another PC survived. The rest of us died or were never found.

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