Morgan's Illusion Horror Con 2023 Adventures

I got unlucky and didn't get into any games through the shuffler, but was able to get into A Chill in Abishiri through the waitlist and A Dish Best Served Cold through an announced opening on Discord.

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12/2 Sat, 10am-2pm (game took 3.5 hrs)

A Dish Best Served Cold

System: Kult: Divinity Lost

GM: Cameron Smith (cameronthetall)

3 Players: Yashtruna (Aiden Burnham - assassin), Automeris_io (Dean Lithian - hacker), Morgan Hua (General T - soldier)

In-game character creation.

Content Warnings: Violence, language, drug abuse, mental illness, possible child harm

No VTT - Theater of the Mind only.

You awaken in darkness sprawled out on a cold, plastic floor. As you push yourself onto your knees, you see red text on a terminal. “Emergency alert! Multiple system failure. Power and life support at critical levels. Shield systems down. Radiation will reach lethal limits in 30 minutes.” This improv-heavy scenario is set up by initial choices made by the players, with conversation driving the development of the characters and the story that unfolds.

I wanted to try Kult because I had watched some of the videos on it by Seth Skorkowsky and he was really positive on it. I also just bought a few Kult books from Mödiphius during the Black Friday sale a few weeks ago. But the default Kult setting is modern urban.

1-1/4 hrs character creation. The scenario took 2-1/4 hrs.

Kult's system is PbtA, but uses 2d10 instead of 2d6. In our game, as a quick generation method, we were given a +3 and -1 in two Attributes and a +1 in all remaining Attributes. Setting these Attributes took 10 seconds. I noticed that a +1 on 2d10 really didn't move the needle that much compared to 2d6. A 15+ is needed for a success. 10-14 a partial success with generally a minor set back. 9- a failure with a major setback. I spoke to someone afterwards and he told me that Kult's philosophy is really fail forward and set backs is how the GM adds intrusions and tension. Ok, this makes more sense then.

I thought the scenario was ok, but we spent a lot of time making the characters for a short one-shot. The Players were asked a lot of questions to flesh out our characters' backstories. The GM took our answers and wove it into the scenario.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Automeris said this was a space version of the scenario: The Driver.
The GM confirmed this.

The long Q&A and the pacing for the rest of the game was too slow for me. I'm glad we had only 3 Players. If we had 6, it could have taken 3 hrs to just create the characters.

We're out in a small spaceship and it's failing. The GM then asks a lot of background questions to flesh out our backstories and the situation. I wound up being a failed coup leader. Aiden a student environmentalist that tried to assassinate a person in power. Dean a hacker who modified his commanding officer's AI. We escaped from a labor camp on a mining asteroid. On our ship is the warden's daughter (NPC), Sina. We crash land on a mining planet.

We found the mining colony is in cold storage and there's only one maintenance guy, Dyson, who gets drops of supplies every 6 months. He's repairing the facility and keeping out marauders, who he first mistook us for.

We make friends and drop the injured and unconscious (from the crash) Sina into a stasis medical pod.

In order to try to make a call off planet, we get Dyson to shunt power to Central Command. Dyson disappears and when power comes back on, the computer restarts and the console says Dyson 3.0. Then Dyson reappears. He's a hologram of some sort. (Which explained why when I shot him earlier, I destroyed the wall behind him. -- I thought I might have missed.) The comms failed to go online.

The marauders show up and they're the natives of the planet whose ecosystem was destroyed by mining. The marauders periodically take what's valuable from the facility. Dyson protects it.

We try to cut a deal with the marauders.

A fleet of arresting ships show up for us, ready to bombard the facility.

The marauders flee, we think with Sina. Dyson offers to save us if we give him Sina. We accept the deal and he disappears in a flash of light. We go after the marauders, I shoot down their craft and Sina isn't on their craft. We return to Dyson and find that Dyson is now possessing the body of Sina. Dyson had also vanished the fleet as fulfillment of our deal. He also let us call off planet, so I can contact my people, so we can leave. We think Dyson is either some sort of hyperintelligent computer program or an alien superbeing.

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12/3 Sun, 10am-2pm (4 hrs)

A Chill in Abashiri - A 1920s Taisho-Era Japan Scenario

System: CoC 7e

GM: Michael Reid (mjrrpg)

4 Players: 

Will - sirponcenby377 (Gen Kiyoshi - Tokko - Special Police),

Andy - RandomAnswer (Yoshioka Masao - Doctor of Medicine),

Fab - sweet_fhtagns (Kitamura Chiyoko - Journalist),

Morgan Hua (Ishihara Aiko - Zaibatsu Exec).

Pregens Provided.

Content Warnings: Political/Colonial Oppression

December 1922, Abashiri, Northern Japan. Abashiri Prison, located on the northern shore of Hokkaido, houses ‘dangerous’ criminals and political dissidents, and is no stranger to death and cold. But when a guard dies under suspicious circumstances, and amidst an unprecedented cold snap, a team of mixed professionals is sent to investigate the facility and its occupants, both staff and imprisoned. Amidst the Taisho-era empire’s political maelstrom, the investigators must navigate suspicious guards and uncooperative prisoners to uncover a plot that threatens not just Abashiri Prison, but the future of their changing nation.

At MRCon, I played in Unseasonal Blooming and Minuet run by Michael and I knew this would be a good game and it was. Michael GMed the scenario he wrote and we also had a fantastic table of Players.

I highly recommend the scenario (and GM).

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

An odd group of PCs get called to investigate the death of a prison guard. All the PCs have secondary secret agendas, though not necessarily in conflict with each other. So it's not PvP, it's just that we have plot B side quests.

GM did admit that the scenario is longer than our 4 hour time slot and he'll try to do a speed run through it. At the end, GM had to hand wave a few things and we ended about 7 mins over time. Still, I really enjoyed this game and recommend the scenario. Though I wouldn't run it in 4 hours.

Though the dead guard was covered in soot, he was actually frozen to death, supernaturally so. His still frozen body continued to emanate cold. Icicles of blood had burst through his body. Where the body lay, a snowflake design etched in ice fractured stone, marked the ground.

Our investigation uncovered a cult in the prison consisting of prison guards and prisoners. They were sacrificing prisoners for rituals.

In the end, Gen faced the cult leaders, killed them and was overwhelmed by cultists. Kitamura led a prison escape. Yoshioka and Ishihara fled the area in a car. Bitter cold descended everywhere.

I did complete my side quest. I faked the death certificate for my uncle and left clothing and supplies for him under a bridge for him to get. And he had escaped the prison with Kitamura.

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