Morgan's KublaCon 2013 Excellent Adventures

Again another very good year for me at KublaCon.  The shuffler gods were very good to me and all the games I was in were excellent.

This time I'm going to talk about Great GMs and one of their particular strengths and what that brings to the table.

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D-Day, the Fifth of June

Game system	Godlike	Start time:	FRI, 6:00 PM
Category	RPG	Duration	8 Hours
Event ID	02007	Location	2071-A
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Gil Trevizo
Description	June 5, 1944: This day the soldiers of the First United States Army Group set upon a mighty endeavor, to storm the beaches of Calais, liberate occupied France from the yoke of Nazi tyranny, and begin the Allied invasion of Western Europe. As the main amphibious force crosses the narrow straits between Dover and Calais, you, the men and women of the Third Talent Assault Group are to join the American 9th and 21st Airborne Divisions to parachute deep behind enemy lines, take key positions, and hold them against the onslaught of German infantry, panzer, and SS-Überkommandogruppe that is certain to follow. History will forever remember this place and this moment: Calais, the Fifth of June. GODLIKE is a game of super-powered role-playing set during the Second World War. After the first superhuman appeared in 1936, over 150,000 “Talents” have since manifested across the globe by 1944. With their abilities, the Talents can overwhelm mundane enemy soldiers, but those same abilities make them vulnerable to other Talents, and even the most powerful Talent can be killed by a single lucky bullet. In GODLIKE, you play characters that are larger than life, but the war is always larger than you.

The amount of prep work and attention to detail for this game was amazing.  The combat system in Godlike is very deadly, so Gil pre-generated over 20 characters (I think he said 40). I've run Godlike before and I had to generate various NPCs with powers; It was a lot of work and requires a spreadsheet to keep track of the build points.  Well, in addition to that, Gil also photoshopped pictures for all the PCs and NPCs.  In my games, I just grab appropriate pictures from the internet for the character portraits.  Gil actually matched up period clothing to the correct portrait angles and color corrected the pictures.  That lead to a seamless portrait with nothing out of place.  I had run "Castle Bravo" and that didn't include character portraits, so I decided I wanted John Wayne, Peter Lorrie, Danny Kaye, Spencer Tracy, and Basil Rathbone in my game as PCs.  Well, I didn't find any with them in Navel uniform, so I had to photoshop them myself -- that took hours and I did a passing job; I found I could hide imperfections by zooming in and cropping out my errors.  Also no one noticed I mainly used the same navel hat several times.  Knowing this, I know that Gil spent days just doing the portraits.

Gil gave us period maps, complete list of equipment, and command hierarchy.   He had also done a lot of research on the D-Day invasion.

All this prep work immersed us in the time period.  What this buys the GM is the authority to tell the players, "Yes this is possible, No that is not possible."  The verisimilitude gives the GM the authority to dictate various things without argument from the players.

I really enjoyed the game.  My two favorite set pieces were the Sniper and the Beach where we had to make very difficult moral decisions.  "That's some really f*cked up shit." and that's a quote from my character.

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I think another hallmark of a good GM are the little deceptions and mental kickers they build into their game.  In Gil's game, we were only given choices between black characters and female characters.  This was not revealed in the game description.  I got to play Samuel L. Jackson, a veteran of WWI with 38 previous kills.

The Jackson character was a Zed, probably one of the least useful abilities in Godlike.  I wanted to play a Zed just to see how useful he would be.  In Godlike, Zeds can nullify another Talent's effect.  The only thing is that it is only useful after the Zed can see what the other Talent's ability is.  So if a Zed runs into a stranger Talent, he's going to get fried if the Talent decides to target the Zed first, since the Zed can't nullify the first use of the Talent.  The good news was that we ran into German fliers that were strafing civilians on the road.  Guess what happens when you nullify Flight?  Splat! and Splat! "That's 42 and 43, you Hun Motherf*ckers!"

In the Sniper scene, it was a Friendly that had gone crazy that was killing a French village, one person at a time.  We killed the Sniper, but then the Germans were coming and we had to decide if we were to help defend the French village or leave to complete our mission.  Volunteers stayed as a holding action as the rest of the team left to complete the mission.

On the Beach, we found that a little boy was holding off the German army with illusionary toy soldiers, but it was clear that we were doomed.  So, do you go against orders and save the boy, or hold out as long as you can? 

My favorite moment was when two characters grabbed the boy (after some Player vs Player conflict over the fate of the boy) and started swimming from Calais to Dover.  My character, torn between joining them and staying behind, stood on the beach and watched them swim away.  The good news was that the remaining group of characters were surrounded by Germans and needed saving, so I got back into the action because some Hun Motherf*ckers needed killin'.

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Fallen Sons

Game system	Unknown Armies	Start time:	SAT, 9:00 AM
Category	RPG	Duration	4 Hours
Event ID	22008	Location	2013-A
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Todd Furler
Description	This event is for mature players. A much-loved citizen of a small Kansas town has lost his life in the War on Terror. The players are townspeople who must, among other things, determine how to respond when a hate group announces that they will picket the soldier's funeral. Please note that players will be exposed to the rhetoric of a real-world hate group for part of this adventure.

Again amazing prep work.  Todd knows his characters backwards and forwards and sideways.  He gave us  pages of background information for our characters and a relationship map to show how we were connected to the other people in the town.  He also gave us real newsletters from the hate group.

But I'd like to focus on Todd's control over the game.  I've heard a lot of good things about Todd's GMing and I wanted to experience it firsthand.  First, he gives a very strong explanation of how he runs a game like a movie production.  This explanation really sets the tone and his authority as producer and director of the game, so when he decides to cut a scene and move on, there is no argument.  This is a great method to control pacing and game time.

It took about an hour to go over the game rules and our characters.  Though that left 3 hours of game time, we had a very satisfying and enjoyable game.  The reason for that was the tight control of scenes by Todd.

In another first, Todd was able to do a flash forward and then a flashback.  It takes a lot of finesse to do that as most players may have an issue with fait accompli.  With the flash forward, the fate of a character was set and then it was up to that player in the flashback to seamlessly merge the timeline.  I think with a more difficult player it might have been a complete disaster.

Todd also does some interesting things with the Fight, Flight, Freeze responses when your character loses control and he takes over.

I can see why Todd likes to run 4 hour games as that is enough to get a full story arc for his gaming style.  Most of us GMs take either 6 or 8 hours to do the same thing.  Bravo.

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In the flash forward, a NPC is dead and a PC is in the hospital.  So, when we flashback,  the PC can't save the NPC and must become severely injured.  Somehow Todd pulled this off.

As things unfold, people in the town are being sliced and diced by a crazy person with a magic sword.

The major reveal is that this was all the work of fallen angels or as they would like to put it, "Exiled, NOT Fallen."

As luck would have it, I picked one of the town's pastors as my character.  I volunteered my church as the final battle ground and during the final confrontation, I was able to banish Lucifer back to Hell.  Cool, huh?

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Our Little Town

Game system	Nemesis (One Roll Engine)	Start time:	SAT, 5:00 PM
Category	RPG	Duration	7 Hours
Event ID	42111	Location	2070-A
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Matthulhu Steele
Description	You wake up in a quaint hotel in a quaint little town. You don't remember checking into the hotel. You're trying to recall what happened before you arrived here. Hey, why is the door locked? Is there anybody out there? Hello? Our Little Town is a game of psychological horror among six strangers. These are normal, interesting and competent people who find themselves in an unusual situation. Nemesis uses the One Roll Engine from Wild Talents and Godlike, customized for horror.

Matt also did a lot of prep work.  In this game, we were only given character portraits to pick characters from, then he handed us multi-page character sheets with extensive backgrounds.

In this game, the six strangers never really stayed together.  Matt was a master of parallel action and scene switching.  Throughout the game, there were at least 2 to 3 groups separated from each other doing parallel actions and it all flowed together very well.

Matt had a really good feel for the right amount of screen time for each player, when to switch between groups, and how to keep the tension up.  In some games, I've seen other players get bored when it isn't their turn.  This doesn't happen in Matt's games.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

In Our Little Town, the game started a little bit slow as each character explored their escape proof hotel room.  The problem was that we were in separate rooms and there was little character interaction as we did each of our scenes.  So, when one player explored the room, the other players had to wait their turn.

But as we started pounding on the walls and screaming, we were able to communicate with each other and eventually escape.

One fun moment was when one of the characters escaped with a lamp (held like a baseball bat) and ran into another that had a gun.  Blam!   I think it was Matt's excellent sense of timing and scene switching that caused this to happen.  It was a great moment.

The deception Matt pulled on us was that this was a Cthulhu game and Cthulhu creatures did come out of the woodwork.  But shhhhhh, it's a secret.  You shouldn't be reading this spoiler section unless you've already played the game.

Another great moment was when a Cthulhu creature got pulled down out of the sky.  Through parallel actions we all got to the gazebo and got to act against it even though a fair number of characters were initially spread out in different parts of the town.  It was masterful.

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The Only Good Bug is a Dead Bug!

Game system	Nemesis/The One Roll Engine	Start time:	SUN, 10:00 AM
Category	RPG	Duration	6 Hours
Event ID	72004	Location	2062-A
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Morgan Hua
Description	Mars settlement went dark and your squad of Space Marines have been sent in to find out if Bugs have infested Mars. Your mission: find survivors, kill bugs, and get out alive. Solider, what else do you need to know? --- Would you like to know more? See below. --- The system is ORE which is a very deadly game system that uses up to 10d10. This is a mash-up of Starship Troopers and Aliens. As a Space Marine, you'll have state of the art weapons and armor, but if you bite it, you might have to play a Civilian. This is not a pure combat game. It will be part investigation and part combat as your squad tries to figure out what's really going on. If you don't, you might all just die.

The game went very well for me.  I incorporated feed back from my play test and those suggestions pushed the game up a notch.

In my games, I like to incorporate some video at the beginning as a shortcut to set the mood and setting.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  I've been in some games where the GM must take a lot of time explaining the world and society.  Two minutes of video can cut out half an hour of exposition.  In my Ghost in the Shell game, half the players never saw the Anime -- and I wasn't prepped for explaining the world to them.  I wished I had a short video segment where I could have shown them what the world was like.  So, that was a big fail.

This time, I had a video clip from Starship Troopers and I also created a video of Felix Baumgartner's supersonic jump from space.

This also helps in the case a player admits that they've never seen Starship Troopers nor Aliens -- which happened to be the case, this time with Jill S.

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Hell Rides For Delamar

Game system	Boneslingers	Start time:	SUN, 7:00 PM
Category	RPG	Duration	6 Hours
Event ID	Pickup Game	Location	Brdrm-2
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Duane O'Brien
Description	Getting by as an undead gunslinger is tough. You hope this job in Delamar will give you a chance to lift your burden. It's time to kill some bad men. Delamar was one of the most notorious towns in the old west. It was known as The Widowmaker. You're going to find out why. You'll be playing undead gunslingers in a setting called Boneslingers. If you've played The Putrescent Seven, this setting is an evolution of that game. Bad things will happen in this game.

The shuffler wasn't good to a large number of us on Sunday night, but Duane was nice enough to run a pickup game for us.

Again lots of prep work.  Maps, painted undead gunslinger minis, extensive character backgrounds, period poker cards, and a great looking GM screen that's a wooden period desk-set.

So far, I haven't been disappointed by any of the games that Duane has run.

I'll only go over one aspect of how Duane runs a game:  Character selection.

In the game The Island Of Misfortune, we were asked seemingly random questions and then characters were assigned to us.

In the game, Goblin Ninjas Flipping Out And Killing Like A Hundred Guys, we generated characters and then did our signature vignette.  And if during the course of play, we recreated it, we would gain bonus dice.

In this game, Duane made each player do a small vignette and asked pointed questions about the character we're playing.  He'd take notes and then through some magic, decides which character fits us. 

I think the refinement of doing a small vignette and asking us who we are in the scene worked much better than just asking questions and it made character selection a part of the game.

This method for character selection works really well.  So far, I haven't been disappointed.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The two big reveals in this game was that the group of bandits were women and Delamar is a terrible, terrible place to live and die in.

Both were key reveals and totally turned the game on it's head for us.

Nice.

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TS Emulator V2.2

Game system	Paranoia XP	Start time:	MON, 10:00 AM
Category	RPG	Duration	6 Hours
Event ID	112004	Location	2044-A
# of Players:	5	GM / Judge	Matthulhu Steele
Description	Greetings Troubleshooters! On this mission you will be accompanied by the next generation of BotShooters - bots designed to replace Troubleshooters for those rare dangerous missions. Now with the upgraded Emulator V2.2 circuit installed, these bots will learn to act just like the Troubleshooter they are assigned to. Soon these new heroes of Alpha Complex will walk, talk, shoot and act like real Troubleshooters. Hail the Computer!

Again lots of prep work.  Multi-page character sheets.

Comedy requires perfect timing and perfect timing must be Matt's Talent.  I laughed so much in this game, I had to wipe the tears away.

Again, lots of split scenes and parallel action.  All the trouble shooters started out in different parts of Alpha Complex and had to get to the Briefing room.  Hilarity ensued.

Wilson Z. never played Paranoia before, but I think he was a natural.  If Wilson didn't have to leave early for his flight home, he would have won one of the prizes that were handed out.  Sorry, Wilson.

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Mateo C. got one of his clones killed before the game even started, by explaining one of the rules -- knowing the rules is treasonous and punishable by death.  :-)

I wonder how many other players ever made it into the Briefing Room.  The big reveal was when we got to the hallway to the Briefing Room, the corridor was painted Green, above our security clearance.

I think we spent more than half the game trying to get into the Briefing Room.

Once inside, we were to be Borged.  I was able to dance/maneuver my BotShooter into the Borging-booth in my stead.

Once briefed, we were to go to HAL Sector, but I don't want to spoil that ending...

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

Morgan's DunDraCon 2013 Adventures

Once upon a time, I used to run games at DunDraCon.  I ran games at DunDraCon 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. After 21 years, I've returned to running a game at DunDraCon 37.  Wow, a 21 year absence.

I generally go on ski trips during February, but this year, after hearing so much about Matt Steele's CthulhuPorn game, I wanted to experience it myself, so after some prodding from Shannon and getting a request to run my Feng Shui game by Mark Schynert (event coordinator at DunDraCon) who played in my Feng Shui game at BigBadCon, I decided to go to DunDraCon this year.

All the games I played in were either good or great.

The DunDraCon shuffler was a bit messed up this year.  I got into nothing on Friday, but got into a pickup game of Monster of the Week run by Bryan H.   I ran my game on Sat and used my priority slip to get into Matt's CthulhuPorn game.  On Sun morning, I got into my first choice (Rich Taylor's game) and I also got into my first choice for Sun afternoon (Matt Steele's), but the two games overlapped by two hours.  So, I had to give up my seat in Matt's game (damn you shuffler).  Because I got into those two games, I didn't get into any other game for the rest of the convention.  I did run into Frank F. outside as I decided to go home after I tried to crash into several other games and failed.  So, I asked Frank if I could be his #1 crasher for his game on Monday -- otherwise, I'd risk driving in Monday morning for no reason at all.  Frank thought it wouldn't be a problem and it wasn't.  There were lots of no show, five people were able to crash his game on Monday.  Thanks, Frank.

In discussing the games I was in, I'm going to focus on Players and what they bring to the table, and I'm not talking about food.

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Little Trouble in Big China

Saturday 8 AM in 608 for 6 hours
GM: Morgan Hua
System: Feng Shui
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Power Level: Jackie Chan/Chow Yun-Fat
Variations: Loyalties & Secrets
Rules Knowledge: Beginners Welcome
Game Content: Mainstream

You are all Triad members in modern day Hong Kong. This game will be a mix of John Woo over the top action with Jackie Chan stunts, Big Trouble in Little China oddness, tests of loyalty and betrayal, Yakuza, other competing Triads, and sometimes the PTU (Police Tactical Unit) will show up at the most inopportune time.

The Dragon Head, the master of your Triad, has sent you on a job. You better not F this one up like last time. Very few people get a second chance, those who disappoint him wind up inside the Steamed Pork Dumplings on Food Street. Sounds like a simple job, so why are there so many of us involved? That Dragon Head is one tricky fellow, there's something big going on and he's not telling.

I got to run my game in the 6th floor suite. I had a video presentation that introduces a number of the characters and the setting.  The flat screen TV's input button was disabled.  I had brought an HDMI cable, but was unable to make the TV show my video presentation.  I called the front desk and they quickly sent a technician with a TV remote and he was able to change the input, so I could show my video.

The game went very well.  At the end, I got applause which Shannon mentioned happens to him once in a while, but this was the first time I got to experience it.  The applause was much appreciated.

The players were very devious and crafty devils which was great for this game.  They generated some nice surprises and at one point, one of those chaotic scenes with gang members, competing triads, Yakuza, and a hostage exchange happening at the same time.

I still think Feng Shui is hard to get one's head around as the players weren't very cinematic in their descriptions, but they certainly got the deviousness of Infernal Affairs which actually brought a lot to the table.

I'm not sure I'm going to run this game again, so I'm going to detail the construction of this game in the spoiler section below with descriptions of what happened in some of the sessions.

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The whole inspiration behind this game was the movie Infernal Affairs which was remade into The Departed.

I wanted a game about betrayal and loyalties, but more about betrayal.  I decided that one player would be tasked to find the traitor in the Triad Organization, but as an evil twist, all the other players would be traitors.  So, I generated random loyalty and betrayal slips.  One slip designated a player as the person tasked to find the traitor.  The other slips gave motivations for all the other players.  There was one police mole, one police informant, one informant for the Yakuza, one mole from another triad, and one member secretly creating a separate triad.

Each player selected a random slip.  I have a master list and they only need to tell me which numbered slip they had picked for me to know what their motivation was.

To help get a common mindset for setting and characters, I made an eight minute video of various John Woo movie clips showcasing various famous Hong Kong actors (Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Q, Chow Yun Fat, Andy Lau, Tony Leung).  Note that I have seven PCs and only six players at the table, so I can have a backup character.  I also did a progressive slideshow going from the glitzy skyline to a more rundown section of Hong Kong. To make running the game flow smoothly, I actually do an overview of the Feng Shui core rules first, show the video, and then do character selection and customization.

Chow Yun Fat w/$100 bill

To help fuel suspicion, I handed out note paper that looked like $100 bills -- as per a Chow Yun Fat picture of him using money to light a cigarette.  Players were told that they can speak freely on their cell phones in code and whatever they say can be written on the $100 bills and they can hand it to me.  And to not tear the money apart, but to keep it as a log of their actions.  In a previous play test, the players handed me bits of paper and I easily lost track of the conversations.  This helped me keep track of what was going on.  This also added to the paranoia as all players would be handing me notes and it would help confuse the player trying to figure out who the traitor was.

Triad Org Chart

I then asked each player to pick a job in the Triad and explained each position.  Each player selected a token representing them and placed it on one of the available jobs.  I also had a bag of these tokens, so I could randomly pick a player and "call" them with a cell phone, if I didn't get enough action from them.

PTU (Police Tactical Unit)

I then spoke to each player to make sure they know about their skills and to fill out more of their background and to tell the police informants that they can call on the PTU (Police Tactical Unit, the Hong Kong version of SWAT) at any time for a raid.

Now, we were ready to play.  The first question I asked everyone around the table, and I told them this would be general knowledge, is how did they F-up the first time.  This served two purposes:  character building and setting up my hidden agenda, that this Triad has a lot of things going wrong for unexpected reasons.  Well, with so many traitors in the organization, of course everything always goes wrong.

As background, I show everyone pictures of the earthquake, tidal wave, Fukushima power plant disaster and present it as having happened just a few days ago.  Unknown to the players, this event is tied to the McGuffin.  I wanted to call it the Fuck-a-Shima power plant, but I never got to use that phrase in any of my games.

Now I needed a McGuffin.  I needed something for players to go after, something so valuable that other triads, Yakuza, and the police would all want, but if you knew what it did, you wouldn't tell anyone for fear of never getting it into your own hands.

After much thought, I figured out what the item was and I found a picture of it on the internet.  The cool thing is that it looks like a Karaoke mike or a vibrator.  Few people will recognize it.  One picture that I found had a red button.  So, it was perfect.  "Get it at all costs, but don't hit the RED button" would be the instruction that the Dragon Head would give the players.

Dragon Head (Sammo Hung)

The first thing the players learn is that there's a disturbance inside their territory.  Some guy is tearing up a book store.  Of course, I cropped the picture and took out the caption, but here's the original picture.

Also light rain is falling as a typhoon is approaching Hong Kong -- more foreshadowing for the McGuffin.

One Eyed Jack and his Yakuza gang

Inside the book store is the Yakuza head, One Eyed Jack with a baseball bat.  He's looking for his missing daughter and the McGuffin.  He was told to exchange the McGuffin for his daughter, but unknown to the kidnappers, the McGuffin was stolen from him and he didn't posses it anymore.  So, through his contacts, he was told his daughter or McGuffin would be at this book store.  His daughter was kidnapped from a foreigner's school in Hong Kong.  Of course, the player who is the Yakuza informant works for One Eyed Jack.  One Eyed Jack will be willing to help the players if they recover his daughter for him.  In my test run and in both convention games, there is always a fight between One Eyed Jack (and his mooks) and the players.  Sometimes One Eyed Jack gets away and sometimes he gets subdued.  At BigBadCon, Mike G. drove his motorcycle through the plate glass window and mowed down mooks with his twin Uzi's.  In that game, the players tried to use the book store's cat as a weapon.  So I've used that as a reoccurring theme.

One Eyed Jack's daughter

There are various ways of finding One Eyed Jack's daughter, but the easiest is a book in the window that says "Three Doors Down."  Three doors down is another book store.  The Lai Ying Lo Book Store.  Inside is a nervous clerk and two triad members that belong to the same triad that the triad mole belongs to.  Under a trap door and a small roughly dug out basement with a low wattage naked light bulb is One Eyed Jack's daughter.  Why would a rival gang use Dragon Head's territory as a hide out?  Seems stupid.  Or maybe they wanted to put the blame on Dragon Head's Triad if things go wrong?

Lips

Once the daughter is returned, either One Eyed Jack or his associates will tell the players that Lips, a free lance thief who One Eyed Jack was involved with, may have stolen the McGuffin.

At BigBadCon, the players sneaked into a high end charity ball and wound up in a massive fight in the women's bathroom in an effort to subdue Lips.

In my play test, the players pretended to have the McGuffin and offered to sell it -- in order to figure out who was involved -- and wound up in a massive three way fight with various triads and the Yakuza.

At DunDraCon, one player offered to exchange the Yakuza's daughter for his little sister and some money.  Another player had informed the Red Circle triad that this deal was going down, so it wound up in a big gun fight at a construction site with the players, Yakuza, and the Red Circle Triad.

If negotiated with, Lips will tell the players that another Triad hired her to steal the McGuffin, but she knows where it is hidden, but she cannot get it.  She can show the players how to get to it though.

By now, the weather should be definitely stormy with dark clouds, lightning, and heavy rain.  More foreshadowing.

Lips will take one player with her on a drive and wander through Hong Kong looking at manhole covers.  At this point, Smoke, one of the PCs, will know that entrances into the underworld are accessed via the sewers.  Once the appropriate manhole cover is found, Lips will point to it and leave.  I actually have various pictures of manhole covers for the players to look at.  Here's a small sample:

Once underground the sewer will transform into something more natural and cave-like as they enter the underworld.  As they enter the transition, an earthquake will occur, something that shouldn't happen in the underworld -- more foreshadowing that something is terribly wrong.

Once underground, their cell phones will have no reception.

Smoke (Andy Lau)

Smoke should be able to lead the players to the McGuffin.  After multiple branches of tunnels and such, they will enter an enormous cavern and see a pagoda.  Several figures can be seen at the base of the pagoda.

Hopping Vampire

The players will see four hopping vampires and the Judge of the Dead.  He has been given the McGuffin for safe keeping by the triad boss who had hired Lips.

Hopping Vampire

Judge of the Dead

If the players speak to the Judge of the Dead he will display the McGuffin and tell the players that it is theirs if they can take it from him.

In the play test and BigBadCon, the players fought the vampires (sometimes slapping sheets of paper on the foreheads of the Vampires) and the Judge and grabbed the McGuffin from him.  At DunDraCon, Grasshopper made an extraordinary roll and plucked it out of the Judge's hand on the first try.

In the play test, several players tried to take the McGuffin from each other.  At BigBadCon, Adam, who had already made a dummy copy of the McGuffin, took the McGuffin and when asked, handed over the fake.  At DunDraCon, the players played nice and took it with them back to the surface.

Before exiting the sewers, another earthquake will jolt the players.  As they open the manhole cover, bits of concrete will fall into the sewer.  The first players exiting the sewer will see:

At this point, the Dragon Head will finally be able to reach them on their cell phones.  If Nikita (Dragon Head's daughter) is one of the players, he will call a random player and ask to speak to her.  He will ask if she sees the creature and if she has the McGuffin.  At that point, he'll tell her to hit the RED button.

At BigBadCon, Nikita asked Adam's character for the McGuffin, and he handed the fake one to her.  When she hit the button, Adam hit the button on the real McGuffin and turned into:

Ultraman

Ultrawoman

Yes, the McGuffin is the Ultraman Beta Capsule.  (So far, only one player figured this out and only seconds before the RED button was pushed.) At this point, Ultra-person gets to face off with Godzilla.  At BigBadCon, the Ultra-Godzilla fight took a while and sort of left out some of the players.  As a fix, I left abandoned military equipment laying around from the Chinese Army that had fled Godzilla.  In both BigBadCon and DunDraCon, a player found a military helicopter with missiles and went after Godzilla with it.

After Godzilla is defeated, we go through each player's secrets.

I first ask the player tasked with finding the traitor who he thinks the traitor is.  Then I go around the table and have the other players reveal their secret, that they were traitors too.

Godzilla is down for the count.

At BigBadCon, Adam, as Ultraman, picked up a double decker bus and asked his Triad-mates to get into the bus, they did and then he gave them their rights and arrested them -- he was the police mole.

At DunDraCon, Ultraman "accidentally" dropped Godzilla on Dragon Head's HQ, killing Dragon Head -- the player was a mole for a competing triad -- nice job.  He was also tempted to kill Dragon Head's daughter with a missed bolt of Ultraman energy, but he was nice and didn't want to kill another PC -- aww.

At BigBadCon and DunDraCon, the player tasked with finding the traitor both fingered the Yakuza informant.  At BigBadCon, the Yakuza informant decided to leave the country and played the backup character.  At DunDraCon, Dragon Head called the Yakuza informant in for a meeting and the informant readily admitted to being a traitor -- oops -- time for steamed pork dumplings and a backup character.

I have various pictures of other potential NPCs for other eventualities.  I've never been able to use the Yakuza babes, but I guess I get to show them to you here.

So, that's the game.  Two major reveals with lots of behind the scenes player vs player action.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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A Blake Brothers Production (aka CthulhuPorn)

Saturday 4 PM in 160 for 8 hours
GM: Matt "Matthulhu" Steel
System: Call of Cthulhu
Edition: 5.6.1
Players: 8
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Power Level: normal people
Rules Knowledge: Beginners Welcome
Game Content: Mature Themes

Modern-Day B-movie Cthulhu! Like their fathers before them, film producer/writer/directors Wally and George Blake plan to make low-budget movies until they can break into legit film. Their latest big-budget production 'Deep Behind the Iron Curtain' is shooting in an ancient unrestored castle in Estonia. A pre-production crew was sent to the location a week ago to make it livable. A sat-phone call from the Production Manager 2 days ago let everyone know that Principal Photography begins tomorrow. The cast and crew head into the mountains...

MATURE THEMES. Please refer to DunDraCon's game content guidelines; Mature Themes games are not appropriate for some players.

I was really excited about playing in Matt's game, Cthulhu-porn.  I had heard so much about it and the character Shank, that on FB, I asked if I could play Shank in the game.  Matt said, "Yes."  Cool.  I wanted dirty jokes, off-color jokes, and a good sex-comedy.

Well, some of the players embraced the porn stars that they were given, but four players (2 couples) were in the game with their significant others and should I say, they seemed a bit prudish?  I guess they were afraid to show how depraved they could be in front of their significant other.  Due to that, I felt I had to rein in my Shank-ness.  One comment was, "I'm glad I wasn't there when you said that."  That decreased the enjoyment of the game.

I really enjoyed Jason's Assistant Director character, the DP (director of photography, not double-penetration), and Lisa's Lead Porn Actress, Candice.  At one point, there was a comment about close-ups and make-up.  I had to bite my tongue about what type of close-ups they do in porn movies -- and it doesn't involve face make-up.

Advice if you play in this game, do all your high-jinks before you enter the castle.

Overall, still a very good game, but if the players could have been more uninhibited, it would have been a great game.

I ran into Frank F. outside taking a smoke break from Shannon's game and chatted to Frank about the game, there was an elderly lady, probably over 60 overhearing our conversation.  "Cthulhu-porn?"  she asked, "What game is that?  I've been playing games with my son and now he's old enough to play in games by himself.  I can now play in other games.  I want to play in it."  She was ready for some adult content.  Too bad she wasn't in the game this year.  I bet she would have played her character to the hilt. 

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

For a porn shoot, I think only my character got some sex (I got to shower with 3 female extras).
Starr, an over-the-hill porn star tried to pickup gals from the women's tent and struck out.
The NPC extras in the field definitely got some sex.  The sex to character ratio was quite low.  I blame the prudish players.  How can you sign up for a Cthulhu-porn game and be so inhibited?  Seriously, people.

On my character sheet, I noticed that Shank had a high climb skill and when volunteers were asked to climb into the hole for all eternity, I knew that Shank's skills was built for that role, but I think it's hard for such extremely selfish characters to sacrifice themselves.

In our game, there was a sudden rush to seal the hole.  I thought it would have been pretty funny if people deliberately held back as they rushed to the hole and hoped that someone else would get there first.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Jungle Law

Sunday 10 AM in 376 for 8 hours
GM: Richard "UnkyRich" Taylor
System: Vampire: The Requiem
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Variations: Vampire: the Masquerade setting; some World of Darkness: Mirrors
Rules Knowledge: Beginners Welcome
Game Content: Mature Themes

Three vampires in your city have been found dead - not destroyed, just reverted to dead bodies. Your sires and the Prince have brought you together to solve this situation, uncover who is behind this, and bring them to the Prince.

You'll be rewarded for your service.

One of the better investigative games.  Lots of clue trails, no dead ends.  Lots of cools stuff.  This game was set in Chicago and Rich used to live there, so he knew the area very well and it showed.  Rich said he hadn't run White Wolf for over 10 years; I wouldn't have known that.

I was in his Monsterhearts game at Celesticon and I had a pretty tepid time -- due to lack of players -- it could have been better, much better.

This time, I really enjoyed the game and the character interactions.  Some of the characters went in some strange tangents in the investigation, but since it was an investigation game, odd approaches could be valid avenues of investigation.  So, I gave leeway to those unlikely choices.

Right before the final boss battle, Matt S. gave me a call and asked if I was showing up for his game at 4pm.  Um, I didn't even know I got into Matt's game (since I didn't have time to check the postings).  The tail end of this game, session 5, overlapped the start of Matt's game in session 6.  I had to give up my seat in Matt's game and lost all my weight on the shuffler as this game and Matt's game were my first choices for session 5 and 6.  Who would have guessed that the shuffler would let me get into first choices that overlapped and then inadvertently screw me for the rest of the convention?  Damn you shuffler, you know how to really F* with people.

So, I stayed for the ending. The action sequence at the end of the game was really well done and it was a top notch game. 

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Calling All Stations!!! This is Attu!!!

Monday 8 AM in 508 for 6 hours
GM: Frank A. Figoni
System: Dread!
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Power Level: Gritty Reality!!!
Rules Knowledge: Beginners Welcome
Game Content: Mainstream

Attu Island, an isolated, windswept, cold, and desolate place at the end of the Aleutian Island chain. Not a great place to be stationed when you're in the Coast Guard, but even less accommodating in the winter months when darkness and snow cover the landscape. And, something goes horribly wrong.

For the crew of the Coast Guard's high endurance cutter Morgenthau, WHEC 722, winter means three months of an Alaskan fishery patrol, a relatively mundane task. Five weeks into their cruise, a brief all stations distress call comes in from the small Coast Guard contingent on Attu Island only eighty nautical miles to the south. However, the message is almost incoherent and the caller hysterical:

'Say again Attu! Say again!'

'Dead!!! Help us!!! Please God! HELP US!!!'

This was my favorite game of the convention.  It was a great game.  Frank definitely knows the Coast Guard and he helped us fill in the details of Coast Guard life for all of us.  The game pacing was top notch and the dread (ha-ha) and fear kept us on our toes.

When I showed up, Mike G. and Gil T. were already waiting to crash the game.  Lucky enough, four of the signed up players didn't show up, so all the crashers were able to play and Frank let Mateo C. play (after asking us if it was ok) as the 7th out of 6 players.  Little did we know that Mateo would be the one to stop the boss monster and save the world.  Luckily we let him play.

With such a good table of players, there was no question the game was going to be really good and I wasn't disappointed.  We played off each others characters and had a great time.

We filled out our character questionnaire and at one point, I wanted one of the other players to have sexually harassed my female character.  Frank told me that I had to okay it with the other player or modify it.  It actually dovetailed with the other player's back story, so it was great, and Mike actually got to privately question both of us about what had happened.

We got to introduce our characters and my line was:  "Strippers are not whores.  And pole dancing is a sport."

Frank actually revealed that the backup characters actually had some seedy information that actually matched up with my character's back story.  So, talk about synergy.  When things go right, everything goes right and falls into place perfectly.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

At the end of the game, "Boats" was going to hand over the samurai sword to the ghost.  My character wasn't there and it felt all wrong, but I couldn't do anything about it.  Well, Mateo as "Bull" had just rushed up the mountain in time to push the Jenga Tower down for a heroic death.  He rips the samurai sword out of the sheath that "Boats" was holding and impales the ghost with it.  Both "Bull" and the possessed Japanese Professor are impaled upon each other's sword and die.  The ghost is banished and the world is saved.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Pickup Game - Monster of the Week

Friday 7:30 PM in Open Gaming for 4.5 hours
GM: Bryan Hitchcock
System: Monster of the Week
Players: 6
Provided: Generated at the table using templates

Bryan ran this game for us because the shuffler F* all of us and we got into nothing for our Friday night game.  The players were Alicia H., Frank F., Nik G., and Ukelele girl and her boyfriend.

This was a very fun game.

I didn't like Monsterhearts because of the sex moves.  In this game, that aspect of Apocalypse World is gone; there are no sex moves in Monster of the Week.

We went off the rails early in the game and Bryan was really good on winging it with us wacko players.  The game became "The Mummy" on steroids.  We went to Egypt and had a big fight in a pyramid -- all not part of the scenario.

Had a good time and mostly due to Bryan doing a great job and the players bringing to the table their brand of whack.

Morgan's Dead of Winter 2012 Adventures

This year, Dead of Winter moved to Placerville or what used to be called Hangtown. You can tell from the boastful street signs -- nice, huh?  Placerville has a mixed population of young ski bums and old retirees.  The store fronts are old antique stores and leftovers from an era long ago.  Numerous restaurants fill the main street.  The hardware store celebrated its 160 anniversary and is the 2nd oldest running establishment in California and the oldest store west of the Mississippi.  The Cary House Hotel, where we played our games, has the 2nd oldest elevator in California.

Old Hangtown Street Sign

California Historical Landmark.  Nice, huh?

Historic Cary House Hotel

It took us 5 hours to get to Hangtown from the South Bay Area.  We took a local's recommended route and it was a bad decision.  Other people from the Bay Area took only 3-1/2 hours to get to Hangtown. The return trip to the Bay Area without recommended route took only 3 hours.

In this discussion of the games I was in, I'm going to focus on pacing.

I like to think of the games I run like a movie.  Where the GM is the director, setting up the scene, costumes, props, and plot.  The players are improv actors, making up their lines and action.

For me, pacing is defined by the tension level in the scene.  Generally, the more tension, the faster paced the scene; the less tension, the slower pace.  Tension also depends on the system used for the game.  For example, I playtested Mike G's With a Million Voices, it suffered from pacing problems because it was the first time Mike ran Dread.  One of the lessons of Dread is that the GM has to watch the tower very closely.  The GM can't just pay attention to the plot and characters.  In other traditional RPGs that use dice, the dice are random number generators, which the GM has no control over.  The GM can adjust the bonuses and such during the game in an effort to fudge the results, but the GM can't control the tower that way.  The only way the GM can control the tension level is to gauge its stability and throw "preset" encounters at the players to destabilize the tower as they reach a crisis so the scene becomes fraught with tension.  If the tower falls, the tension level suddenly drops and it is a bad time to have a boss battle or critical scene since every test becomes easy.  I mentioned this to Mike after the playtest and I heard that when he ran his game at DoW, it went very well.

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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Saturday, December 8, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Fear Itself / Unknown Armies
Scenario Title: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
GM: Morgan Hua
Power Level: Varies
Number of Players: 5
All Characters Provided
Description: Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, Velma, Daphne, and Fred investigate the disappearance of a professor from Coolsville University.  The game starts as a standard Scooby-Doo episode, but things aren’t what they seem and events go very, very wrong.  As the characters “harden” we will switch to another gaming system to reflect the changes in characters and the world as it descends into darkness.

In The Misery Machine:
Jim M. (Scooby-Doo)
Wayne C. (Shaggy)
Nik G. (Fred)
Alicia H. (Daphne)
Elisabeth B. (Velma)

Matt contacted me and asked me to run a game.  I told him that I remembered that he told us "No Scooby-Doo games" but the only game I have that is new is a "Scooby-Doo" game.
"Really," he asked.
"Seriously, Scooby-Doo, for real," I replied.
I emailed him pictures of the setting and character concepts and I got the Matt S. seal of approval.
So, you can't run a Scooby-Doo game at DoW except if it is Scooby-Doo.  Matt S. accepts no imitations.  Disclaimer:  When Matt says, no "Scooby-Doo," he means a game with no supernatural elements and it's just a guy with a mask.

The game starts with the Scooby-Doo characters that we know and love.  I used Fear Itself for the starting system since the game starts off as a pure investigation.

My whole plan was to go through an investigation phase and then an escalating action phase.  One flaw with the Gumshoe system (Fear Itself, Trail of Cthulhu, etc), is that the combat system is dull and lacks drama.  Basically, combat sucks.   One of the better fixes for Gumshoe is Lorefinder where it uses Gumshoe investigation skills and Pathfinder combat skills.

I originally designed the game to be 3 acts with 3 game systems.  But due to time constraints and the difficulty of explaining 3 game systems in a six hour time slot, I decided to switch it to two acts with two systems, merging the 2nd and 3rd act into a single 2nd act.

Well, the players actually skipped a part of the investigation and finished the first act in 1-1/2 hours.  So, that meant that I could actually go with my original 3 act structure.  If I knew this would have happened, I would have brought the 3rd act Feng Shui character sheets and introduced them to Feng Shui.

They continued to gallop through my scenario at breakneck speed and when they went through the three acts, we were only at the 4th hour.  The good news was that they didn't reach a satisfactory ending with their solution to the 3rd act.  So, I added a 4th act (I re-purposed material and conflict from the 3rd act that they had handily avoided) and added an entirely new 5th act to the game.  We finally wrapped up at the 5-1/2 hour mark with a satisfying ending.

The game didn't really go as planned, the pacing felt a little dead in a few spots as the players struggled to figure out what to do next. At the end of the third and forth act, some players wondered whether that was the end of the game.  I asked them what they wanted to do next and that prompted them to come up with additional plans to save the world and thankfully, if it weren't for those meddling kids, we'd be up to our eyeballs in non-Euclidean zombies.

In the spoiler section is art work from the game, the game plot, and surprises from the playtest and the DoW game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Act 3 Post-Apocalyptic Velma and Scooby-Doo

The whole game was inspired by a post-apocalyptic picture of Velma and Scooby-Doo by Travis Pitts. I wanted to tell the story of how you can get from Scooby-Doo to post-apocalyptic Scooby-Doo.

The progression was to be from non-combat (Fear Itself) to gun combat (Unknown Armies) to uber-hand-to-hand combat (Feng Shui) as they survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape low on bullets and supplies.  But when I merged the 2nd and 3rd act, I just created powered up Unknown Army characters and discarded the Feng Shui character sheets.  I actually playtested with the Feng Shui characters and they worked well.

But the problem with Feng Shui is that it seems like half the players can't get the hang of a descriptive cinematic system -- even for people with a black belt in Kung Fu movie viewing.

Some non-Euclidean math

So, the game really starts with a missing university professor, Prof White.  The Mystery Machine is asked to find an old woman's missing husband.  Gone for only half a day -- he didn't return for dinner -- she resorts to calling in the Mystery Machine to find him since his disappearance isn't technically a missing person until he is missing much longer.  The professor teaches Metaphysics -- why we exist, why we are here, religious studies, etc.  In the home are pictures of him and his wife meeting at the 5th Annual County Fair many years ago.  He was a judge for her Rhubarb pie which won first place.  On his desk are journals of what he is working on.  Only Velma can tell it has something to do with particle physics.  11 dimensions: our standard 4, plus 7 more tightly wound dimensions.

On the way to the Coolsville University, a bunch of grad students and a professor stand around the University's dead Mascot, Betsy, the Cow.  Apparently, something has chewed on parts of Betsy and killed her.  After some investigation, the Mystery Machine can discover that several individuals chewed on Betsy and another had arrived at the scene and shot one of the individuals with a gun and dragged the body into the surrounding corn field.

At Coolsville University, the Mystery Machine would find that Prof White is collaborating with a physics professor and sharing a lab.  Prof White has grad students who are also missing.  Prof White's car is still in the parking lot.  They would find that Prof White was working on non-Euclidean math, trying to find a Unified Theory for the Universe.  This was the part that was skipped by the players at DoW.

Further into the corn field, on the edge of University property is an abandoned amusement park.  The same park that Prof White met his wife.  The players at DoW just kept on tracking through the corn field until they found the amusement park.

The sign says, "Welcome 2 Zombie-land, Kids."

After the players see the above sign, flesh eating zombies show up and chase the characters throughout the park.  Getting the rusty roller coaster ride to work is a favorite -- with zombies riding in the car trying to get to the characters.  The roller coaster ends with broken tracks and dumps the players into the water ride's tidal pool.

Eventually, the characters find an abandoned highrise hotel in the park.  In the basement is a working kitchen and a chocolate cake in the fridge that hides behind it a cleanly severed head -- one of the missing graduate students.  Close examination will uncover that the head was severed with an unnaturally clean cut.  The grad student was killed by a dimensional shear.  In the penthouse is the owner of the abandoned theme park.  He reveals that he has hired Prof White to complete mysterious drawings he has found in a cave in one of the park's hidden basement areas.  The owner, if asked, does confess that he shot the zombie that killed Betsy and zombies did appear after Prof White started working on the mysterious drawings.  He will also lead the players to Prof White.

In the playtest, the players built a trap and lured Prof White out of the cave and then Velma went into the cave and smudged the drawing.  At DoW, Velma convinces the owner that she is another grad student of Prof White and winds up in the cave and finds an error in the drawing and completes it for Prof White.  In either case, the Drawing comes to life, glowing unearthly green, and opens 7 portals throughout the Earth where zombies pour out.  At the playtest, Prof White quipped, "Look at what you've done, you meddling kids have destroyed the world.  I was trying to gracefully shut down the gate and now you've ruined everything."

This ends Act 1.

Act 2 Gun Toting Characters

Act 2 starts with the Mystery Machine several years later and the characters converted to Unknown Armies.  They've got guns and knives. Velma has developed a metallic grapefruit-sized device that lets them shutdown gates gracefully, but they must be in the gate's center for it to work.  They've shutdown all the small and easy ones and have two left.  They follow Velma's gate detector to Texas near Dallas where the SSC, the Superconducting Super Collider resides. It was a massive multi-million dollar abandoned cyclotron.

Texas Superconducting Super Collider

They have to get through a clogged freeway filled with abandoned cars and some zombies as civilization is collapsing.

As they approach the SCC, an odd thing happens, the players may discover that they are now left handed.  This gate is so massive that it affects an area much larger than anything they would have encountered before.

Control Room of Many Random Doors

At the facility, they'll have to shoot several lab coated zombies.  Once inside, they'll have to find the "center."  One of the key areas is the control room with multiple doors.  Once the players start searching the tunnels, they'll be chased by zombies and one of the center pieces of the location is the doors that open to other doors in the same room.  If done right, the characters should be running away from zombies from door to random door echoing one of the chase montages from the TV show.

While in the tunnels, they should encounter some non-Euclidean geometry.  At one point, they should see themselves in the tunnel ahead, but facing away from themselves.  They would see a zombie trying to attack one of them.  They can either react to the threat by shooting in front or turning to the threat and attacking.

Eventually, the players will find the center. It is where the supercollider is and the gate.   A strange creature is being paid homage by extra-dimensional zombies.

By now the players should have found out that the zombies are odd and some have extra limbs, but in an extra-dimensional way.  e.g. if they follow the extra limb, it folds into the body somehow in a logical fashion.  Hand, arm, elbow, shoulder, torso, etc, but folded upon itself in an extra-dimensional way.

The gate glows green and zombies and strange creatures are shuffling through the gate.

King of Escher-land

At this time, the players should find a way to get to the base of the gate and activate Velma's device.  In the playtest, the players fought their way in.  At DoW, Velma got captured and was taken to this location.

One weirdness is that sometimes they have to miss badly to hit as the non-Euclidean space affects their linear geometry in this warped space.

In both cases, the players shutdown the gate and ran for it.  Outside, they find that they have shutdown the gate from the wrong side.  They are stuck in the wrong dimension.  They remain left-handed.

This ends Act 2.

Oops, we're not in Kansas anymore.

Act 3 Dope Fiend Shaggy

Act 3 starts with the characters buffed up.  They've been living off the land in the foreign dimension.  They're mostly out of ammo and are now hand-to-hand combat experts.

Act 3 Homeless Fred

Act 3 Dominatrix Daphne

They now have contacts with locals and their goal is to find the last gate, go through it, and close it from the correct side.  In the playtest, the players actually got their Mystery Machine Van to go 88 mile per hour and returned to their own dimension "Back to the Future"-style and then assaulted the last gate and closed it from the correct side.  At DoW, the players schemed to get enough cash to pay their way through the long lines of emigrants wanting a better life in a new dimension.  Once on the other side, the players shutdown the gate and find that the King of Escher-land has taken over Earth.  In both cases, the players get into a boss fight with the King and his body guards.  The guards use swords that are extra-dimensional shears.  They basically erase parts that they hit.  Pretty bad if you're a cartoon character.  :-)

The DoW players made their own gate, as Velma is now an expert in non-Euclidean geometry and math, and lured the King to them with promise of a way back home.  The new gate actually was flawed and opened up into R'lyeh.  The players actually pushed the King through the gate and shut it down as the King tried to climb back through, shearing through his hand that was gripping the rim of the gate.  But a survey of the world after the King showed that Earth was trashed.

So, the players decided to open a gate through time, to attend the 5th Annual County Fair.  They went back in time and killed Prof White and destroyed the cave drawings.

In both the playtest and DoW, during Act 1, one player went with the Scooby-Doo trope and ripped the face off of a zombie, thinking that it was a mask, but revealed bone and muscle instead of Mr Jenkins.  Score 1 for insanity.  :-)

In the playtest the players really got the wacky flavor of Scooby-Doo as they ran from zombies and offered Scooby snacks as incentives.  At DoW, the players went very, very dark.

At the beginning, the DoW players ran from the flesh eating zombies.  At the end, Scooby-Doo and Shaggy started eating people alive -- just like what the zombies did.  They became what they feared at the beginning of the game.

Citizens of non-Euclidean-land

To make money to cross over back to Earth, Fred and Velma went on a killing spree.  Daphne performed erotic Euclidean services for non-Euclidean clients -- the perversion, the horror.  Scooby-Doo made and sold Euclidean art which was heralded as the new, new modern.

To poison Prof White, they asked his wife in the post-apocalyptic future to bake a Rhubarb pie (a reoccurring joke in the game) and poisoned it.  They then took it back to the past and fed it to Prof White at the 5th Annual County Fair's pie contest.  While this was happening a dog catcher went after Scooby-Doo, but with help from Shaggy, they turned the tables on the dog catcher and ate him alive.  After this, the gang entered the cave and defaced the inactive drawings on the wall, thus saving the world.

As the very dark versions of the Mystery Machine (or should I say Misery Machine) left the fair, Velma noticed 5 kids, their younger selves, enjoying the venue.  And maybe later, the kids would look at the newspaper and wonder about the missing persons at the County Fair -- A new mystery to be solved.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Saturday, December 8, 7PM – 1AM
Game System: Call of Cthulhu (d20)
Scenario Title: MAD Men
GM: Jim Mathews
Power Level: Realistic (4^th level characters)
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description: The cold war may be over, but the shadows still linger, as your START team heads off into the dark, cold, northern reaches of Russia to inspect a decommissioned missile complex.

START Team:
Patrick I. (American #1, Team Lead)
Jack Y. (American #2, Nuclear Dude)
Gil T. (Russian #1, Guy in Charge)
Ben H. (Russian #2, Bureaucrat)
Tom I. (Russian #3, Security Officer)
Morgan H. (Russian #4, Driver)

Because of the title, and the descriptive words, "cold war," I thought the game was going to be set in the 1950's.  Now that I've re-read the game description carefully, it is clear that was going to be set in the modern day because "the cold war is over."  I was actually looking forward to some 1950's spy-fu.

In any case, when I saw the list of players, I knew we were going to have a lot of fun.  We randomly pulled characters and we wound up with 2 Americans and 4 Russians.  Our job was to accompany the Americans to three random decommissioned silos, so they can verify that Russia is in compliance with the START treaty.

We really got into our Russian accents and misconceptions about what America was like.  The back-and-forth was a lot of fun.  My character drove a piece-of-sh*t truck that was held together with spit and discarded pieces of wire.  I think we spent at least an hour f*ing around and having a good time in character before we even started on the road trip.

Then we got into the weirdness and being in character, we were wigged out and had to weigh completing our mission or leaving for better equipment and maybe never returning.  I think this is where things went wrong.  I knew the players and trusted them and I'm not sure our GM, Jim, did.  At the hint of us abandoning the scenario, Jim hit the GM panic button and launched the end game.  So, we went into full-on end game and we finished 2 hours early -- even with our 1 hour of f*ing around.

I had a lot of fun, but I would have liked to have more of a middle game and wished that Jim trusted us a bit more.  The game felt truncated as we went from slight creepiness to an adrenaline rush end game.

The highlight of the game was Gil's performance during the end game.  Details in the spoiler section.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We were in the Russian Urals in the middle of winter to inspect 3 decommissioned nuclear missile silos.  For various GM reasons, we had to go back to a small backwoods village between each trip.  We couldn't go from silo to silo.

The Russians thought all this was a bullsh*t mission and would have preferred the Americans to declare everything was ok and then we could hangout in Moscow or somewhere comfortable until it was time to return home.  Our team and the American team seemed to be a bunch of misfits on a bullsh*t mission.  We were deliberately under-equipped and setup for failure, so we made the best of a bad situation.  I couldn't even requisition extra fuel or vodka, outrageous!

My truck kept on stalling and breaking down, so it wasn't reliable.  It also didn't help that I rolled two 1's during repairs.  For CoC d20, 1 = fumble.

The first creepy thing that happened was our vehicle got rammed by some mysterious creature that left blood and slime on the truck.  (I think some characters found out it was a slime covered bear, but I never found out how they knew.  The room was very noisy and I think I must of missed that).

We also kept on getting traveling radiation readings on our vehicle and skittering noises around the vehicle.

The village had a creepy old woman who warned us and an over-the-top-religious headman.

At the first silo, we found a dead area around the silo grounds and giant insect nests inside the silo, but a mostly decommissioned silo.  Computer equipment and generators were still present.  So, the Americans did declare that the first silo was not in violation of the treaty.  We had an option of staying overnight in the silo or leaving, after a discussion, we decided to leave.  What we didn't know was the silo was completely abandoned by the giant insects and we could have explored it more and gotten some clues.  Considering the circumstances, I don't think we would have done that.  None of our characters were heroic in nature.

We returned to the village and this is where the GM hit the panic button.  We had discussed returning to our starting point and getting a new truck.  I think the GM thought that we were abandoning the scenario.  At this point, we found the gas station attendant was killed in a horrible and inexplicable manner.  After this, we decided to flee.  Then the sh*t hit the fan and we all basically got overwhelmed by an army of mutant bugs and died.

Jim told us afterwards that we were supposed to inspect the 2nd silo where the bugs were nesting.  But the bugs at the village was a backup plan.

Things that could have been done to extend the game:
1.  We could have returned to get a new truck and Moscow could have ordered us to finish the mission. We would have done so.  I don't think any of us wanted to be shot for not doing our duty.
2.  If the dead body didn't show up or seemed more natural, we would have continued to the 2nd silo.  Considering how hard it was to get equipment, we would have just soldiered on.
3.  Add a deadline to inspecting the silos.  e.g. tell us that if the silos don't get inspected in time, we're all in big trouble.

One issue I had was that our deaths were pretty much cookie cutter.  3 characters were bitten and eaten by mutant spider bugs.  2 characters were shot.  In teen slasher movies, the deaths are strange and unique.  If we were going to die, we should all die in various strange and creative ways.

If we gave out a best RPGer award for this game, Gil would have gotten it.  When we found out there was no escape, Gil phoned the American Embassy and told them he was al-Qaeda and holding the Americans hostage and that he would torture and execute them unless they come and stop him.  At first, Patrick played along and made "I'm being tortured" noises.  When that didn't seem to work, Gil asked for a shotgun from one of the other players, and blew Patrick's foot off.  After some fleeing, the helicopters with the snipers came and shot both Gil's and Tom's characters and rescued Patrick's.   Afterwards, Patrick asked Gil why he shot him, and why not in the arm vs the leg.  Gil listed various reasons and then concluded with, "It would have been funny."  It was.

When we heard the helicopters coming, we thought it would have been funnier if it were giant wasps coming.  And if a character was on a roof waving, it would have been hilarious if a giant wasp swooped down and carried him off instead of being rescued.

At one point of the game, the crazed old gypsy woman told my character to mix my blood with an ointment and to spread it on my face (actually, she said my whole body, but I didn't hear that in the noisy room).  I did that and the bugs avoided my face, but ate the rest of my body.  In a bug nest somewhere there's just the face of my character.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Sunday, December 9, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Cthulhu by Gaslight (1850)
Scenario Title: The Golden Rule
GM: Leon C Glover III
Power Level: Moderate – some prior SAN losses, a few “odd” experiences
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description:  Eureka! The gold rush is on in California!  Brought together by fortune and Wells Fargo, the gold country will test your fortitude and your ideals. Power and greed aren’t the only things that can corrupt a man’s soul.  Remember the Golden Rule – he who owns the gold makes the rules!

You are jumping off at the boom town, San Francisco, on your way to Hangtown/Placerville.  The “locals” will be very grateful to help you with anything you might need.

Would-be Rulers:
June G. (Mormon)
Josh C. (Franciscan Friar)
Frank F. (Madame)
Badger M. (Enforcer/Body Guard)
Basil B. (Calvary)
Morgan H. (East Coast City Guy)

We all started on a stage coach from San Francisco to Placerville.  Leon did a great job of invoking the setting.  I felt like I was in the TV show, Deadwood.

Unfortunately, we spent 4 hours building up our fortunes in Placerville.  I hate the Sims and I felt like I was playing the Sims and going through the motion of collecting gold.  Things didn't really happen until the last 2 hours.  It felt like we were just doing our own thing with no real danger or tension.  There weren't enough character motivation or interaction or weirdness or threat to make us want to figure out what was going on.

I think the game needed more interlocking character motivations and more events in town to make us act sooner.  4 hours of collecting gold was just too slow a pace for me.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

When we arrived at Hangtown, the first thing that happened was a hanging.  My character was a sociopath (on the character sheet), so he didn't really care.  He actually bet on the hanging and won a substantial amount of money.

Later, Badger found out that every week or so, various people would be round up and thrown in jail and then they would confess and would be hung.  This only happened after the 4th hour which set off the end game.  By that time, my character was making distilled spirits and started a plan to knock off the Assayer's office with the help of the local Chinese.  He had no real connection with the other characters, so there was no reason he would help them.  Also he wasn't told about the trumped up hangings, though he probably didn't care due to his mental condition.  I did help the other characters in minor ways, but under the threat of bodily harm.

I think if there were more character back story that connected us together, the game would have been better.  That would also explain why we would be traveling together vs six strangers in a stage coach.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Sunday, December 9, 7PM – 1AM - The Killer Session
Game System: Call of Cthulhu V6
Scenario Title: The Day the Whole World Went Away
GM: Gil Trevizo
Power Level: Average People
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description: You wake up to the taste of ashes and the smell of dead flesh, surrounded by the freshly ruined landscape that was modern civilization not so long ago. You don’t know who you are or how this came to be, your dwindling cache of memory suppression drugs having kept your sanity intact in the face of the madness that has swallowed the rest of humanity. Now, as the stars come right and all men kill and revel in joy amidst a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom, even stranger things rise from dark depths to end the time of mankind. A number scrawled on your skin – “1121221121″ – and fragmented memories of impossible things will lead you through this day, when all of your world goes away.

1121221121:
Frank F. (Army Sniper)
Morgan H. (Jet Pilot)
Shannon M. (Psychologist?)
Michael G. (Geologist?)
June G. (Pharmacist?)

For me, this game was the highlight of DoW.  Gil showed us character portraits and we picked characters based solely on the pictures.  We then got blank character sheets to reflect our amnesia.  When we tried to figure out something, if we made our roll, Gil would tell us our real score.  A few years ago, Jeff Y. did the same thing, but used an invisible ink for your stats and you can wipe a marker over the invisible ink to reveal your stats.

The game was actually various scenes stitched together, with each scene having a time gap.  When we started a new scene, Gil would hand out new character sheets with additional information on them, then we would have to transfer what we learned from the previous character sheet.  I liked Jeff Y's method better; it was more efficient and had less down time.

The game worked very well because we went from scene to scene without any dead spots.  The scene shifts were also integral to the overall plot line.  Some scenes were cut short as Gil tried to finish before our 1am deadline.  Little did we know that the other late games ran over time, and we could have played longer.

Gil said he's not going to run this game again since he thinks the game teetered on disaster and the excellent quality of the players brought awesomeness to the game.  Gil knew us all and had trusted our ability as players.

My only small minor nit was the time spent on switching character sheets and us trying to figure out our skills.  There was some Metagaming as we tried various skills (sometimes for no reason at all) in order to figure out what we were good at.  One scene (with Mike) got cut short and I actually wanted the whole scene to play out and see how Mike's character would deal with the horror he had wrought.

Again, an excellent game and excellent players.

Just in case Gil changes his mind and runs this game again, I'm going to put spoilers in the spoiler section.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game started with us waking up in a crater with amnesia.  Most of us had weapons and some of us had blood on us.  Between us was a duffel bag with drugs in it -- drugs that wiped out our memory.

As we tried to figure out what was going on, we would roll dice and if we succeeded, we would find out our skill levels.  Most of us had high numbers in several specialties.  Once comfortable, we climbed out of the crater and found that we were in the Oakland hills.  A giant tidal wave, like that Japanese painting, The Great Wave off Kanagwa, was frozen behind a damaged Golden Gate bridge and most of the Bay Area was underwater and frozen solid.

My character wore a jet pilot's high-G suit.  At one point, I wanted to makeup a story about being abducted by aliens, but events progressed so that I didn't get to do that.  (In reality, I was wearing a Weyland Industries T-shirt, a reference to the Alien movie franchise).

We discovered that the Mayan end of the world had happened on 12/2012.  That the magnetic poles had shifted and that roving bands of infected humans were making pyramids of human heads.  Nice, huh?  An NPC had a satellite phone that rang and it told us to get to the Edwards Air Force Base and it told us to RUN -- a band of infected humans were heading our way -- the voice on the phone could see us and them on his spy satellite.

We ran.

In the next scene, we wound up outside a small town and Frank's character sneaked in and got a newspaper from a newspaper stand.  We found that the paper was dated Saturday, Dec 22, 2012, the day after the Mayan Apocalypse.  Apparently the world survived the 21st, but a strange virus was unleashed throughout the world that made people go mad.  We were able to scavenge some needed materials for our overland trek.

We then found a cave to spend the night in.  During that time, we had disturbing dreams and flashes of memory helped us remember things.  (New character sheets).  In the morning, a school bus drove up to a marsh and a priest starts dragging out children to sledge hammer them.  Mike's character rushes down there to save the children and kills the priest.  At this point, Gil cut the scene.  This is where I wanted to scene to continue.  It was apparent to some of the other characters that the children were chanting in unison to Cthulhu.  The priest and nun were giving them last rites and killing them.  I suspect, that Mike would have had to kill the nun and then he would slowly realize that what the priest and nun were doing was right.  I wanted to know what Mike would have done at that point.  Would he kill the children?  Let them go?  Kill herself?  (Mike was playing a female character).

More dreams/flashbacks and new character sheets.

I learned that I was abducted by aliens and an alien creature had been imbedded in my body (OMG, this is really funny, I wonder what Gil would have done if I told my alien abduction story several scenes earlier?  Also I was wearing that Weyland T-shirt, a reference to the movie Alien).  I didn't tell the other characters about my alien impregnation because I was afraid they'd kill me.  Other characters went through various horrors.  Out of character, we learned of each horror, but in character we were clueless.

Next scene.

We're in a helicopter heading towards Edwards Air Force Base.  A missile is getting ready to launch and we're supposed to get a NPC into the missile.  I'm piloting the copter and the other characters are in the back.  A fight breaks out in the helicopter and various NPCs are killed and thrown out of the copter.   I see Cthulhu rise from the waves and lose 52 sanity points.  At this point most of the players have exited the copter.  I fly the copter towards Cthulhu and pull out my pistol, switch it to full automatic, point it at the thing rising out of my belly and fill it and myself full of bullets.

Next scene, new character sheets.

We wake up in virtual reality chambers as test subjects.  We're tied down.  A mad scientist is monologuing about limits of reality, adjusting people's perception and their inner nature, etc.  A number of us breakout of our bonds and kill him.  One of the tied down NPCs is clearly affecting our reality and bringing to life Cthulhu.  I go and kill him as 3 of the players run for safety as Cthulhuesque creatures enter our chamber.  Frank's character quietly waits for the next simulation.  My character gets gang raped and impregnated by Cthulhuesque creatures as the the PCs try to kill each other after they escape the facility and windup in unknown waters in some unknown ocean.

The camera pans back as the three primates do their primate thing.

The End.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===