Special guest of CelestiCon this year was Sandy Petersen, game designer of Call of Cthulhu.
They also had a special drawing to see who would get into a game run by Sandy.
I didn't win a seat, but Shannon M. and William L. did get into the game. Funny thing was that William L. played in my Eagle's Nest game instead of Sandy's game. Mic DROP. :-)
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Fifty Shades of Earl Grey
GM: Jeff Yin Friday Noon for 4 hours Type: RPG System: Fading Suns Edition: 2nd Ed Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Game Content: Mature Themes A
Questing Knight is charged with investigating the death of the
Emperor's cousin. Fading Suns is a game of science fantasy, with a
medieval Europe in space feel. Beginners welcome!
Interesting setting with a very good table of players. We wound up f**king around so much doing side things that we didn't get into the murder mystery until the last half hour, so we poked around the crime scene for a bit and then stopped the game. This means we can play this game all over again. Yay!
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Shannon sent Frank's character as a messenger, an alien that is very looked down upon by the human populace, to tell the Emperor's cousin that we have arrived. Frank's character was also our lawyer. Well, he wound up beaten up and his family relic was stolen (in addition to everything else).
So, we wound up hunting down the muggers and also investigated an issue of refugees from "Viking" space raiders.
We also got snubbed by the Emperor's cousin and we were trying to figure out if the guy was snubbing us deliberately or whether he was in some dire situation. We decided on the former.
The Emperor's cousin also had this odd history of picking one of the loveliest women each year during a festival to keep for a while. His own wife vanished mysteriously and his son hasn't left the castle for decades (and maybe not seen). He also collected odd curios.
In the last half hour of the game, the Emperor's cousin wound up dead in a kinky torture room. We knew we didn't have time to solve the murder mystery, so we just looked at the murder scene and stopped the game.
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It's a magical place
GM: David Weinstein Friday 4 PM for 6 hours Type: RPG System: All Flesh Must Be Eaten Edition: First Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Power Level: Norms Game Content: Mature Themes It's
summer, and that means vacation! People of all stripes are packing
themselves into the amusement park for summer fun and adventure! This
year, however, some folks are going to get more of an adventure than
they bargained for...
My two favorite games this CelestiCon was this game and Hamel's Cthulhu Azorian.
Pacing was great in this game. No dead spots and the tension was kept up until the end. A very fun game -- or at least I enjoyed it immensely for the fear and terror.
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In Disneyland, there's no access to weapons. It's pretty bad when a fast spreading disease causes the park to lockdown and shutdown. Worse when people turn into fast moving zombies with infectious projectile vomiting.
What was great and an interesting level of misdirection was that a number of characters had weapon skills, but no access to weapons. We kept on looking for guns and stuff to no avail.
We kept running and running and trying to survive as we got overwhelmed and either got turned or killed by the military sent to contain the infection.
Best two scenes:
My character was a LARPer and nerd with every Disney item possible. He had a plastic light saber which came in handy to light up some dark areas. At one point, we rescued some teenagers, but as the PCs ran they stood there immobile as the horde of zombies came after us. My character turned and attacked the zombies with the light saber. The light saber shattered on the first attack and four zombies tore him apart, giving the rest of the PCs and the teenagers time to escape.
One character decided to climb down some rungs of a support structure for the monorail to escape some zombies. Below were soldiers shooting and flamethrowering zombies, so it wasn't safe to go all the way to the ground. Above, the zombies couldn't reach him, but they then projectile vomited on him. His goofy hat saved him, but now the rungs were coated in slime, so he hunkered down and pretended he wasn't there. The soldiers fired at the commotion above and took out the zombies and also hit the character. The character continued to pretend he wasn't there. He got shot again and died.
Yeah, this game was harsh, as it should have been in the "Happiest place on earth."
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High and Dry
GM: Jeff Dee Saturday 9 AM for 4 hours Type: RPG System: Bethorm: the Plane of Tekumel Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Power Level: beginning characters Game Content: Mainstream Grain
shipments from the town of Mishábar, near an ancient ruined castle, to
the Temple of Hnálla in the city of Katalál have inexplicably ceased. As
priests of Hnálla, Lord of Light, you are sent to discover the reasons
for this lapse and set things aright!
Jeff Dee, one of the writers of Tekumel, ran this game. He had in depth knowledge of the world and this game had great NPC motivations and gave the PCs hard choices.
My main complaint is that the combat system seemed unnecessarily drawn out -- very old school. I picked a sorcerer of light and wound up being a more effective combat character than our four-armed insectoid warrior (due to a lot of bad rolls). I can create fighting phantasms and my quarterstaff seemed to do as much damage as the insectoid's weapons. The only difference was the insectoid had natural armor.
After one and a half combats, we ran out of time, so we rushed through the ending and hand-waved through the remaining combats.
Overall, I liked the world and enjoyed the game, but I didn't like the mechanics and the long drawn out combats.
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The first combat was with giant spiders and it was touch and go for a moment when it looked like we wouldn't be able to beat them due to a long series of bad die rolls. The spiders seemed like a warm-up introductory combat that didn't have anything to do with the scenario. The main issue is that this took time away from the later combat that was more key to the scenario.
The next combat was in an underground section of an ancient castle against undead. We got half-way through the combat and it looked like we might win, but we cut the combat short in order to finish the game. Thus my above comment about having more time for key combats.
Then when we returned to the local lord with his missing wife, we told him (without thinking since we were already running over in time) that his wife was infected and turning undead and we cured her. Well, he worshiped a Death deity and got really angry at us and there was a non-combat by GM fiat, where we beat him and we resolved the scenario -- he might have kicked our ass as we would have been sorely hurt by the undead.
Under the local lord were several underlings who mainly favored removing their lord -- we had found this out through earlier role playing. They seemed more reasonable than the local lord, so they were willing to stand up for us after we killed him.
Due to the social hierarchy, we were probably in deep trouble for killing the lord since he was five societal levels above us; so high that we were not even allowed to speak to him directly, but had to speak to him through an intermediary in the same audience chamber. It was the society and the social interactions that I found interesting. The combat less so.
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Reunification III
GM: Andrew Davis Saturday 2 PM for 6 hours Type: RPG System: Star Trek RPG Edition: Decipher Players: 8 Provided: All characters provided by GM Power Level: Enterprise Officers. Characters provided. Game Content: Mainstream Ambassador
Spock and his party have been working with Romulan dissidents for the
past 20 years on Romulus in the hope of forwarding an eventual
reunification of Vulcan and Romulus. Ambassador Spock and his two
Vulcan aides have been kidnapped on Romulus. Unknown agents are at work.
The Enterprise must investigate his disappearance, recover Spock and
his Vulcan aides and escort them to safety in Federation Space, and
bring his kidnappers to justice.
I loved the props and toys the GM brought. It required a hotel handcart to bring everything into the room.
It's clear that the GM had in-depth knowledge of the world of Star Trek and was a great fan.
I had fun because I was able to play Jean-Luc Picard, but there were several issues with the game:
1. We had seats for 8 players, but only 6 were filled, so a lot of people showed up trying to fill the empty seats. The GM let 11 players into the game and even said 12 would be ok. IMHO, I think the ideal game should have been 6 players, not 12. During play, I felt guilty that I had a lot of screen time and it seemed like the extra players had nothing to do. So, I asked Riker to pick the away team members to give him something to do. At some point, I started asking Riker to pick people who didn't have enough screen time, so they would have something to do. I felt I was making a balancing act that the GM should have designed into the scenario.
2. If certain players made specific rolls, or needed plot nudges, they were given 3x5 cards to read out loud. I understand what that was for, to give us clues and Trek-speak, but it also felt like giving lines for the players to read instead of letting them role play.
3. The plot was very complicated, but the solution was very A to B to C, so although what was going on had a fair amount of complexity, the solution felt like it was on rails. We did finish the game early, so maybe we were better or luckier than expected. Not sure about that, but events seem to gallop by and on auto pilot. At one point, I asked the officers to gather in the ready room to discuss what was going on, just to get other player's impressions and input because things were just happening so fast without us being able to decide if what was happening was some elaborate deceptive plot or whether what was happening should be taken at face value.
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I felt like we were playing scripted parts in a well-written fanfic. I got a major part, so it was fun, but the game lacked player choice. I assume if we didn't play our parts as intended, according to the cannon character profiles, bad things might have happened. So, maybe we played our parts too well.
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Eagle's Nest
GM: Morgan Hua Saturday 9 PM for 4 hours Type: RPG System: Godlike Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Game Content: Mainstream Allied Talents, WWII soldiers with superpowers, are sent to capture the Eagle's Nest, one of Hitler's retreats.
Godlike is a brutal WWII system where one lucky bullet can kill a PC.
Not only do you have to deal with trained soldiers, but the Germans have
their own supermen too.
William L. got into Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu game, but he didn't know he did, so he signed up for two other games that overlapped with Sandy's game. One of those games was this one, so I get to brag that someone picked my game over Sandy's. :-)
Actually, the game pacing felt a little flat to me as the GM; when I ran it at KublaCon, there were more ups and downs and more excitement. The players finished the game early. When I ran this game at KublaCon, it took 5 hours. The players this time finished an hour early. Only one player wasn't familiar with the ORE system and I was short two players, so maybe not having to take time to explain the system in detail and having less players shortened the play time. See spoiler section for more musings on this.
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The players didn't do much investigation and actually just killed their way into the Eagle's Nest and whacked Hitler. Which leads to an interesting idea: I didn't intend to design a game that can be solved through brute force only, but it appears that this game could be done that way or with more careful investigation. So, it means that a game can be designed to run with or without investigation; it can be tailored or designed to be run to match the style of varying players.
Another factor for the shortened game time may have been the lack of investigation. If the players spent more time talking to NPCs it would have made the assault on Eagle's Nest easier.
I also forgot to put two NPC Talents in Hitler's room which would have extended the final fight. But then I was short two players, so leaving out two NPC talents was probably fair. By the time they reached Hitler's room, they were down to three PCs and one was missing a leg.
The players were pretty smart in that in the end, facing a room full of Talents, they just opened fire without using their talents, so there were no contest of Wills.
In this game Gil wound up killing Hitler twice. This is like three for three; the same PC kills both the fake Hitler and the real Hitler.
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Cthulhu Azorian
GM: Richard Hamel Sunday 4 PM for 8 hours Type: RPG System: Call of Cthulhu Edition:7 Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Game Content: Mature Themes June
1974. The CIA has assembled your team to assist with the covert
recovery of the K-129 submarine that mysteriously sunk in the Pacific
Ocean in 1968. What forgotten horrors lie on the ocean floor?
My two favorite games this CelestiCon was this game and Weinstein's It's a Magical Place.
The setup and plot had enough twists and turns to keep us on our toes. I really enjoyed this game.
There were some issues with pacing and division of labor between PCs. More in the spoiler section below.
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It was clear Rich did a lot of research for this game. The start was like the beginning of a James Bond movie where every starts in media res. We're all setup and ready to see what's going on and the action starts. I think this took maybe 30 minutes to complete -- I didn't time it, but it felt like that.
Where the pacing lagged was after this great action scene, Rich then goes into a long description of the special boat we're on and the mission. The mission briefing didn't stop until 2 hours into the game (I looked at my watch at that time), so the briefing took more than one hour. Ugh. I would have just told us to get the code books, the nukes, and the submarine and dropped us on the special subraising boat and let the players explore the boat and ask questions of the engineers instead of explaining everything about the boat before hand.
One issue was the division of labor. We had two add-on players. So, we had 8 players: 4 navy seals and 4 CIA operatives. The seals were the muscle and had nothing to do when the CIA operatives did investigations. That also happened in the James Bond intro -- the seals waited for the CIA to give the go ahead.
When the action started, the seals then got stuff to do, but even in that instance the CIA operatives got into the action by shooting guns. I'm not sure whether the issue is that we had a team of 4 and 4 (with two extra seals) or whether the game would have been served better with just a team of CIA operatives (though not realistic, but maybe a better game dynamic).
Our game ended in a TPK as one of the add-on navy seals (Frank) detonated the nukes we had recovered -- on orders of the CIA lead.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Super Train
GM: Morgan Hua Monday 9 AM for 4 hours Type: RPG System: Godlike Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM Game Content: Mainstream Allied
Talents, WWII soldiers with superpowers, are notified by the French
Resistance that a Nazi Super Train is loading secret cargo. Your
mission, stop whatever the Germans are doing.
Godlike is a brutal WWII system where one lucky bullet can kill a PC.
Not only do you have to deal with trained soldiers, but the Germans have
their own supermen too.
This game went well and took exactly 4 hours. The players were less tactical than the group of players I had at KublaCon.
It seems like the less tactical the group, the more foobar happens and actually the more ups and downs during the game with more interesting and unexpected things happening.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
In this game, Clyde, Eastwood's invisible monkey flipped the Rabbit (an advance train that checks the rail before the Super Train). This alerted the Super Train, so troops were deployed.
The players advanced on the Super Train and actually hit the Gizmo turret with a rocket propelled grenade and got a lucky roll and knocked out the Nazi Talent in the train.
So, it was an easy cleanup at that point.
An interesting scene was how the players rescued the three French Resistance members from the Nazi HQ. Lots of sneaking around, punching Nazis through helmets, and then lots of shooting.
Memorial Day weekend at KublaCon. Most of the RPGs I was in or running had to do with war -- sort of appropriate for Memorial Day, huh?
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All’s Well That Ends Well: Blood of The Gods
Thursday 6pm, invite-only pre-convention game, 6 hours
GM: Nick "The Orange Duke" Szczech
System: Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition
My Version of a Colin Dimock classic. Our heroes have just returned from
a deadly but successful mission. They are tired, wounded and in some
cases dead. At least it is over, or is it? Play one of the Men in Black
as you battle a horrible beast inside the confines of your own secret
base. What is going on? What went wrong? Who can you trust? Only time
will tell. It’s character against character in an all out battle to the
death, but be sure you kill the right ones!
Hyle Hooper – ex FBI, dream warrior
Black Basil Thorn – world Traveler
Shannon Mac – navy seal, black ops agent
Clarice Scully – Bio/forensic expert
Kurt Salu – Computer expert, hacker
Madame Rotunda – power psychic
Arthur C. Carter –archeologist, dreamer
Eddie Dane – Killer, Stake Team leader
I got invited to a game before the convention started. This is great. No shuffler, no loss of weight for getting into games. Also the Atrium is pretty quiet before the convention starts and is a great place to play a game.
This was an interesting game. My only complaint is that this game needs 2 GMs. When players were doing secret things (which was most of the time), the rest of the players wind up sitting at the table without anything to do.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The game is basically Player vs Player, but we didn't know that, so all the secret conferences were Players that were infected doing nefarious things to other players. The players basically didn't have a chance, so this game was mainly a survival horror game.
I actually made it to the end of the game with my original character, locked in the lower level with another character. I assume we would eventually escape through the incinerator flue, but then it would be too late to stop the infection of the rest of the world which we didn't know was at stake since we thought the facility was completely locked down.
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Death From A Jeep
Friday 7pm, 6 hours
GM: Thomas Vallejos
System: GURPS 4th Edition
January 1944: You are members of an Allied Team of special ops who
operate behind enemy lines. Your methods include the use of heavily
armed jeeps, explosives, knives... Just about everything you will need
to convince "Jerry” that starting this war was a bad idea.
You come back from Christmas leave only to find your next assignment is waiting for you. Destination: Somewhere in France.
Tom had lots of technical details and info. It's been a long time since I played GURPS and I love the bell curve that comes with 3d6 vs straight percentile die rolls. Glad that Tom had pre-generated characters since there was a lot of crunch on the character sheets. The mission was pretty straight forward, but we had a lot of fun in this game due to character interactions.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
We're dropped behind enemy lines in gliders with our Death Jeeps. We meet up with the French Resistance and are given several possible targets: Radar installation, Gestapo HQ, and extraction of a Nazi Rocket Scientist. Well, being the overachievers that we were, we extracted the Nazi Scientist and attacked the Gestapo HQ. Given enough time, I think we would have invaded Berlin too.
We had a great group of role players and that was where all the fun was. We also killed a lot of Nazis: at a castle, at Gestapo HQ, at a check point, at our extraction point.
The extraction plane didn't have enough seats, so a number of the PCs decided to stay, to kill more Nazis.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Super Train
Saturday 10am, 4 hours
GM: Morgan Hua
System: Godlike
Allied Talents, WWII soldiers with superpowers, are notified by the
French Resistance that a Nazi Super Train is loading secret cargo. Your
mission, stop whatever the Germans are doing.
Godlike is a
brutal WWII system where one lucky bullet can kill a PC. Not only do
you have to deal with trained soldiers, but the Germans have their own
supermen too.
This game is short and pretty straight forward. I took two of the highlights from my Godlike campaign and created two standalone scenarios. The other scenario is Eagle's Nest.
I got some Godlike veterans in my game: Jack Y., Gil T., Jason F., etc. I think only one player didn't know the system. To my amazement, no PCs were harmed in this game.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
I think it shows that if a group of soldiers know what they're doing and do things smartly, they can survive the chaos of war. The players did smart things and did things right. It was slaughter-fest of Nazis.
In my campaign, the players deliberately blew up the cargo thinking that if the Nazis want it, we should deny it to them. Well, the cargo contained France's national treasures. I had a print out of the Mona Lisa. I tore out a piece that contained her head and told a player that wood chips, plaster, and dust rain down with the explosion and this fluttered in the air and dropped at your feet.
In this game, the players were smarter and actually saved the art work.
Allied Talents, WWII soldiers with superpowers, are sent to capture the Eagle's Nest, one of Hitler's retreats.
Godlike
is a brutal WWII system where one lucky bullet can kill a PC. Not only
do you have to deal with trained soldiers, but the Germans have their
own supermen too.
This time, due to a tactical mistake on the players part, two PCs died. But I think I'll change the talent on one of the PCs, being able to do two things at once isn't much of an advantage.
One PC kept on getting the killing shot and racked up massive will points even though the other players helped in knocking the enemy NPCs down. Didn't know you could be a Godlike Will Hog by getting the killing shot.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
I got a lot of crashers for my game, unfortunately, everyone who signed up for the game showed up. I guess people who can read between the lines want a chance to kill Hitler.
One of the best moments was when a player did a Precog during combat and everyone had rolled their dice. By looking at the dice, we can tell that Hitler was going to go through a portal to Argentina and right afterwards, another player would kill the enemy Talent that had opened the portal and in effect would close the portal and save Hitler. The Precog PC threw himself infront of the friendly fire, taking the bullets that would have killed the enemy Talent, so the portal would stay open -- and in effect sacrificed himself. This allowed the other players to chase after Hitler in Argentina and finish him off.
What's better than killing Hitler? Killing him twice. This happened in my campaign and in this scenario too -- lucky Will Hog.
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The Treaty Worlds
Sunday, 10am, 6 hours
GM: Jeff Yin
System: Dark Heresy
Inquisitorial Acolytes are dispatched to conduct a diplomatically sensitive investigation.
Jeff is a very under-rated GM. He does great NPCs and has their nuances down. Their actions and dialog tells the players oh-so-very-much without having to explain to us what is going on.
I've never played Dark Heresy and got a good introduction to the world and enjoyed the game very much.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Jeff put us in a very interesting situation. Most Inquisitors have absolute power, but on Treaty World, we would be in the instigator of a War if we over-stepped, so we weren't allowed to do our bad-ass Inquisitor stuff until near the end of the game. It was an exercise in restraint as we investigated without torturing and killing our way through the planet.
In the past, the Imperium did have a War with the Treaty Worlds and after hundreds of years and many lives and material lost, the treaty was signed. The Imperium allowed the Treaty Worlds to stand because it provided ancient technology that couldn't be replicated elsewhere.
Due to the War, the inhabitants of the Treaty Worlds hated the Imperium and protested our presence.
Inquistors aren't very subtle, so we marched around with large cloaks thrown over our power armor as we investigated stuff and got into bad situations of our own making. Lots of fun.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Oh, The Unspeakable Things
Sunday, 5pm. 7 hours
GM: Matt Steele
System: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition
27 June 1918, the Canadian Hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle is bound
from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Liverpool, England to pick up soldiers
wounded in The Great War. In theory, hospital ships are immune from
attack by ship, by air, or even by U-boat. In practice, the Germans have
been known to fire at hospital ships, even though it’s against
international law and standing orders of the Imperial German Navy.
But the dangers don’t end there. Mines drift unseen around the British
Isles. Spies and saboteurs are everywhere. And on the high seas, one
never knows what nightmares might rise from the deep – or what horrors
of war might be found drifting in the current.
My favorite game of the convention. Definitely creepy and I definitely felt threatened throughout the whole game.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Matt started off the game by torpedoing the ship and machine gunning survivors in the water. Yeah, it's that type of game.
We wound up on a mysterious island and only slowly did we discover that the island wasn't what it seemed. That it wasn't normal in any sense and that some characters flickered back-and-forth between the eerie safety of the island and drowning at sea.
We eventually found that a powerful magician was trying to sacrifice us for great power and we had to stop him.
A great conceit of the game was that the characters had names of people who survived the sinking of the HMHS Llandovery Castle. So, if we survived the game, we would know what had really happened at that tragic event.
Again, due to weather and time, I didn't get to visit the Foresthill Bridge, but I got to visit the Haggin Museum in Stockton and see the Alex Ross exhibit. The Haggin Museum is a small museum situated in a nice park. It contains some historical displays about the early days of Stockton and a fine art collection. I was in there for about two hours.
The art of Alex Ross was very interesting and the museum included Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker pieces that influenced his work. And the Haggin collection has over 50 Leyendeckers, the largest of any museum.
Shannon M. and I went through the museum and Frank F., uninterested in comic book art, decided to skip "The Jewel of Stockton" and visit a Starbucks instead. So much for getting some culture. :-)
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Sunday 11am Game System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition
Scenario Title: The Woebegone Winter
GM: Josh Clark & John Castillo
Variations: Modified sanity rules
Power Level: Plain ol’ Humans
Number of Players: 6
Characters Provided: Yes Description:A family treks across the 1850′s
American frontier to lay claim to a plot of land bursting with gold, but
what they find once the snow starts to fall should have stayed buried.
Players: Badger M. Dovi A. Gil T. Jack Y. Matt A. Morgan H.
An amazing game. I guess I'm becoming jaded by CoC games that follow the template of follow the clue trails, figure out how to kill the big bad, and then confronting the big bad. Well, this game was way different. The players were excellent and we picked the right scenes to highlight and pulled in the right PCs at the right time. It was one of those games where everything clicked and worked out.
The game was full of surprises brought on by the players. Some gems were:
Dovi wrapping his fleece jacket into swaddling and playing a crying baby audio from his cell phone as he rocked the "baby."
Gil started as the most hated PC and wound up being a favorite and the only survivor.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
This game was more Donner Party than The Waltons. There has been a trend of resource management games, maybe brought on by Euro-gaming. For RPGs, Trail of Cthulhu and Torchbearer come to mind. I found the record keeping in Torchbearer a bit mind numbing -- I mean if I wanted to keep track of supplies, I'd play Be An Accountant, The LARP, The endless record keeping and grind of Torchbearer becomes more tedious than fun. In this game, as supplies ran low, we didn't keep track of any supplies, but we felt the unrelenting cold and lack of food. So, what I'm saying is that you don't need recording keeping mechanics to simulate starvation and despair. One interesting conceit was that there was no supernatural agency in this whole game. We saw things that might have been supernatural, but we didn't get attacked by strange creatures or find magic spells or face a big bad. We faced our own wants and desires, our own hearts of darkness, and a very, very cold winter. My favorite bits were: 1. We were attacked by wolves and we wound up hitting none of them because of a string of bad die rolls. 2. Jack shot at a wolf and caused an avalanche that started a chain reaction that was exciting and horribly tragic. The avalanche caused the river we were crossing to flash flood and it flipped our wagon. We lost an ox, our wagon, most of our supplies and most tragically, a baby who's head was bashed against a rock. Dovi's character also broke her ankle. 3. Finding that the gold was a scam and that I (I played the patriarch) had brought tragedy to my whole family. The trip also revealed horrible truths about my family. When I found that I had been had, I rolled 2d10 and got a 20 point san loss -- how appropriate was that? 4. After finding the baby was dead and that my son was having an affair with my wife (and the baby was theirs), I wanted to reconcile with my son who understandably was avoiding me. I said, "We need to talk, but I know this is not the time. We should sit in prayer and contemplate why this has happened." My son (played by Badger) then punched me. 5. I was allowed to save one item after the wagon was destroyed with all our supplies. Some people picked some useful items. I picked the family bible. 6. Gil played the only non-family member, an ex-soldier and drunken guide. Everybody hated him, but he did save some of us and he was saved twice by Patience (Matt's character) during the flash flood. He wound up returning to Placerville to get some supplies, but when he returned to the mining camp, everyone else was dead. Because the players were so good and the GMs were flexible, we were allowed to create scenes where we interacted with each other. Each scene we invented seemed real and were real gems.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Saturday 7pm
Game System: Call of Cthulhu 6th ed
Scenario Title: Pale Harvest
GM: Badger McInnes Variations:Maybe
Power Level:Competent Officers
Number of Players: 6
Characters Provided: Yes
Description: Los Angeles, 1950. In the late 40s, the
Los Angeles Police Department created what became to be known as the
“Gangster Squad”- an elite group of police officers, reporting directly
to Chief of Police William Parker. Their job: to combat organized crime
in LA, and to eradicate mob boss Mickey Cohen. Given wide latitude, you
and other members of the Gangster Squad were able to use any means
necessary to stamp out the mob.
That’s your official duty, anyway. But Chief Parker has called you
and a few of your fellow officers in with an assignment that he says he
needs to bury in the books of the Squad (which itself is buried in the
LAPD’s finances). Seems some teenage girls have been gone missing. One
body has been found. The press hasn’t gotten a hold of it yet, but it’s
only a matter of time before they do. And the last thing the department
needs is another Black Dahlia PR disaster. Your assignment: find the
girls. Find out who’s kidnapping them. Bring them to justice. By any
means necessary.
Note: This Call of Cthulhu scenario deals with sensitive
topics of an adult nature. Strong investigative elements and role playing
emphasized. Mature players only. Players: Anthony B. Morgan H. Shannon M. Jill S. Gil T. Jack Y.
Another great game with great players. I'd seen the movie "Gangster Squad," and enjoyed it. We basically played the characters from the movie, but instead of busting Mickey Cohen, we were solving a CoC mystery. I was entirely immersed in the police procedural and loved it: multiple clue trails, red herrings, dead ends, interrogations, bribery and murder. What was there to not like?
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The beginning was a bit slow because we broke up into three teams of two and as two PCs followed a clue trail, the other four players had to sit it out, so we would have to wait a fair bit before we could have our turn at a potential clue. This game did fit the standard CoC template, but it emphasized the following of the clue trails. In most games, the big finale was the big bad confrontation. This game was more front-loaded and de-emphasized the other two parts of the CoC template. So, this game felt very different for me and was refreshing.
If we were playing ToC, we would have just spent some Resource points and gotten our clues, but I think we would have missed out really trying to solve the mystery by using our own brains instead of simple point spends.
Early on, we found one of the girls at a home for wayward youths and thought the clue was a dead end. In a nice twist, we actually had to face the mastermind at that place. At another point, we busted a brothel (like the one in the movie) and found one of the missing girls there and found that the other missing girls were "bought" by a farmer. Taking down the brothel was where we showed that we were bad asses and could kick butt. We caught the farmer and was able to find his farm and another twist was that the farmer and his father were killing girls who were infected. The only way to remove the infection was chopping off their hands and head. Then we found out that the home for wayward youths were infecting the children and sending them out into the world. At the home, we confronted the matron who came with us quietly -- which is another nice twist. There was no big fight. But when we put her into a restraining chair and started a ritual, we had a moment of panic as she started transforming and we had a string of bad luck as we failed to chop off her head and hands -- critical fails all around -- for maybe about 6 die rolls. Once that was done, the question of what to do with the children came up. Luckily, Jack's character went insane and without telling us, got a school bus, loaded up the children and drove them off a cliff. There was some discussion as to having the players make a hard moral choice at the end as the finale. But by then, I understood my character and I would have chosen to just put the children into an institution. So, having Jack get rid of the children did not bother me. I had already made up my mind at that point. So, an interesting and different game. I enjoyed it a lot.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Sunday 11am
Game System: Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition
Scenario Title: Thirty-Five Miles to Jalalabad
GM: Gil Trevizo
Variations: None
Power Level: Wives and Daughters
Number of Players: 6
Characters Provided: Yes Description: It’s been five days and three thousand
dead since the column left Kabul, where not long ago you were drinking
madeira wine and watching the men play cricket amidst what then seemed a
bastion of the British Empire. The men had taken Afghanistan back in
1839, all for Queen, country, and the greater profit of the British East
India Company. Now, just three years later, the men had lost
Afghanistan, lost your homes in Kabul, and perhaps lost all your lives.
As the snows deepen and the tribesmen snipe from the mountaintops,
rumors have spread that the women and children will be allowed to
surrender. Nonetheless, your husbands and fathers have spoken and it
will not be: a proper Englishman would never allow their woman to fall
into the hands of these rapacious savages, not when the column is so
close, just thirty-five miles left to go before safety awaits at the
garrison in Jalalabad. Players: Marcus F. Janaki S. Shannon M. Morgan H. Skylar W. Scott M.
Another really good game. This time Gil has taken some mechanics from independent storytelling games and put them in CoC. Given the historical context, Gil gave us scene cards where we read out the historical event and we made up a scene with our characters. This added or subtracted points from our bonds.
More great players and the incredible Gil, who ran this game again right afterwards to replace Dovi's game (who had gotten very sick with the flu). Gil was also sick and I would be surprised if he still had his voice the next day.
Kudos to Skylar who played an amazing Grand Dame, the epitome of British stiff upper lip, unperturbed by almost everything: from a starving death march to gunfire by Afghan savages.
The game was unrelenting and grim. Perfect for DoW.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
In this game, Gil treated our Con points and Hit points as resources. As we did the death march, we continued to get worn down by losing Con points; once those were gone, we'd lose Hit points. San points were also lost as we watched the horror of war and attrition remove all the hope that we had left.
My favorite bits were scenes of Skylar's character:
While we ran for cover, she walked nobly as bullets flew by, none hitting her.
As Afghan boys told their mothers and sisters to stone us, she stared them down and they failed to throw a rock at her.
When the German solider and his Afghans threatened to kill us, she stood her ground as we all fled. The Afghans pulled out their swords and cut her down.
In our game, we decided the cult was a better world than the outside world. Half the characters were already insane. So, it was no surprise that all but Shannon's character joined the cult. My backup character was Wendy who thought she was in fairy land, so she didn't technically join the cult, but she was happy running around the underground complex and some horrible fate probably awaited her. Technically, the game was a TPK.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Sunday 7pm
Game System: CASTE
Scenario Title: The Dust Lust Bust GM: Arthur Stone Wallis
Variations: Historical Number of Players: 5 Characters Provided: Yes Description: San
Francisco, 1849. The discovery of GOLD at Sutter's Mill has created a
worldwide panic of immigration. Once a backwater Spanish missionary
village of less than a thousand, the City by the Bay as become a vibrant
boom town...more than a quarter of a million souls have arrived in less
than a year. Abandoned clipper ships choke the harbors, their crews
running to the gold fields along with their passengers...only to return
scant weeks later, wealthy or penniless. Crusty West Virginia miners rub
elbows with East Coast industry magnates in the saloons, risking
fortunes on the turn of a card.
In mere days, a disaster of terrible proportions will befall this fledgling city.
Far
from the diggings on the American River, where Christ is Lord and men
pull wealth from the earth, a war of commerce is being fought in the
boardwalk-lined streets of San Francisco. What little law there is must
be swift and brutal, as the rules of warfare have not yet been written
here. Players will take on the role of various immigrant
personalities in this tumultuous time and place, just before the famous
disaster. With a level playing field, a certain saloon is out earning
its rivals to a vast degree. Chinamen, former slaves, and other
unscrupulous types have been seen coming and going in the night. Solving
this mystery would be worth a lot of money to the waterfront saloon
league...but don't expect any help, and steer clear of the law.
CASTE
is a system of merciless chance, and deep humanity. Easy to learn
because it is so hard to forget. Bring your love of character
development, history, storytelling, and at the bottom of the bag pack
your blackest cruelty. Just in case...
Players: Morgan H. John C. Marcus F. Andy V. Basil B.
CASTE is an interesting system. It uses tarot cards instead of dice. Character classes fall into suits of the tarot deck. If you draw your suit, you get a bonus. Face cards and Major Arcane cards have special meaning. The only flaw is that you use a standard tarot deck and for the cards with special meaning, you still need a lookup chart.
Another fun game with great character interaction.
Marcus played a great Chinese character and had the best bits.
The mystery did keep us guessing until I figured out which movie we were in. But it was the character interactions that were fun.
A good end to DoW.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Our group was hired to figure out how the bad guy was making a lot of gold. We started to put the pieces together and realized the scheme was taken from the movie "Paint Your Wagon."
The scheme wasn't really illegal. The only problem is when the bull (from the bull-and-bear fight) comes crashing down into the tunnels and ruins the town.
Near the end, we were being chased by some unknown assailant in the
tunnels underneath San Francisco. My character and Marcus's tried to
escape through the top of a tunnel whereas the other three players kept
on running. We wound up making the assailant flee (I got knocked unconscious, I probably died, but Arthur was nice and let me live), but the other three
characters made it out of the tunnels. We all had grabbed bags of gold
dust, so two of the three decided to leave San Francisco with their
bonanza, so in effect they exited the game. I had actually hoped that
they were going to exit into the bear and bull cages, but that didn't
happen.
Without the two players, the rest of us were enlisted by the sheriff into capturing the bad guy -- the guy who was chasing us in the tunnels -- at the bull-and-bear fight. Once we grabbed the bad guy, the bull ran into the tunnels and did its damage off screen. I think the ending was foreshortened as a fair number of us had seen the movie (we're old folks, maybe some young-ins haven't seen this movie), so there wasn't any reason to do an extensive description of the bull crashing through the tunnels.
As an epilogue, my character decided to follow Marcus's character to Deadwood, since he saved my life. What could go wrong?
GM: Gil Trevizo
System: Delta Green RPG (Playtest)
Number of Players: 5
Characters: Provided
One year ago, a platoon of Guatemalan “Kaibiles” commandos was sent
into the Congo to capture or kill Caesar Okeke, an African warlord
wanted for numerous human rights violations carried out by his army of
child soldiers. The entire platoon disappeared, along with the Delta
Green agents leading them, who were there to end Okeke for a wholly
different order of crimes against humanity. Now the lost unit’s radio
has been reactivated and is broadcasting strange transmissions in an
ancient language never before spoken by human tongue. A-Cell is sending
you into darkest Africa to silence that radio, terminate Okeke, and
contain any preternatural threats at all costs.
Delta Green is a game of modern conspiracy and cosmic horror, setting
government agents against the terrors of the Lovecraft Mythos.
Published in 1997, an updated version of Delta Green is in production,
and this game will use the latest rules still in development.
We played using Delta Green Beta version 3.0. The system takes ideas from Trail of Cthulhu (Pillars of Sanity), Unknown Armies (Stress Notches), and Call of Cthulhu 7th Ed (Pushing the Roll) -- and tweaks them. Those DG changes worked really well and I liked them. One addition, kill % for grenades and machine guns didn't seem necessary to me. Without the instant kill %, the average damage from 2d10 will generally kill anybody, so it's usually moot, also to roll the small kill percent (of 10% to 15%) most likely the 10's die is a 0 (= 10 pts), so the average damage with a kill is about 15 points of damage.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
My two favorite scenes in the game were:
1. Shannon's character got shot in the head and he was dying, so my character had to save him since he was a bond. My character missed most of my die rolls, so to succeed in First Aid, I had to "Succeed with a Consequence." I took some damage, but saved him, but it left me without cover. Shannon's character failed to pull me into cover and my character got shot. I then tried to throw a grenade and critically failed, so I also opted to "Succeed with a Consequence." I wound up blowing up the bad guys but got killed as a consequence. My character was a bond for Shannon's character and after all the horror and insanity, his character committed suicide.
2. The finale. An NPC was working a counter ritual and critically failed and exploded. Noam's character wound up finishing the ritual at the same time my character (replacement #3) shot a priest dancing on top of a pyramid. This stopped the big bad from fully manifesting and destroying the world. Note: None of what I wrote in this paragraph is quite true, but that would spoil some surprises. :-)
Kris and Lisa run a great convention and each year it gets better and better. They give you a feedback form when you pickup your badge and they actively want you to give them feedback and they act on your requests.
I love how they do signups. They open a few seats in each game for early signups and then the remaining seats are through a shuffler. They look at the statistics for who gets in which game and found that anybody that signed up for multiple games in a time slot always got into a game. And only people who put only one choice for a slot was SoL, but most people got into their 1st or 2nd choice games. That is great since in other conventions, people keep on complaining about the shuffler.
This time my experience at the con highlighted a theme for me: Failure is an option.
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Desert Places
Friday 6 PM in Carneros for 6 hours (ran for 6 hrs)
GM: Scott MacPherson
Type: RPG
System: Cthulhu Dark
Edition: 1st
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
'They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.'
Years after a horrible event, old friends and enemies reunite to solve a mystery. The answers they find will either save - or doom - the world. Heavy roleplaying.
Cthulhu Dark is a rules-light system that fits on one sheet of paper.
I was amazed by the props that Scott used. Almost all of the props were found items. He took booklets, videos, and other items that were authentic and created a game from them. The clue trails were organic and made a good mystery. Throughout the game, Scott had either period music or various snippets of special effects audio.
If Scott is running this game, you should signup for it.
More in the spoiler section, but player success or failure in the first scene sets up the 2nd and 3rd acts. So, failure was an option.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The game started with some high school buddies looking for UFOs in Sonora. A storm and a horrible auto accident later, several PCs went to prison and others went scott free. What was cool was that Scott found either high school yearbook pictures of actors or pictures of them as child actors. He then picked pictures of them 20 years later in either "clean" roles or "hardened criminal" roles. Depending on whether you went to prison or not, you got either the "clean" version or the "hardened" version.
During the introductory scene, I was wondering where the game was going, which was pretty rare.
The 20 years later choices were a very nice surprise. I loved it.
The game resumed at the 20th year high school reunion. In our game, two PCs went to prison. One for 6 years, another for 10. My character saw on a telephone pole a "missing persons" flyer of the man our van ran over 20 years ago, but the flyer says he was missing since January -- which was impossible.
I brought the flyer to the reunion and we go to solve the mystery. We called the number on the flyer and meet the man's wife and we stole an envelope of clues. The envelope contained various items (all authentic from various time periods). We returned to Sonora and we got maps of Vortex Tours (real tri-folds for these), a new age temple (and a real video introduction). As I said before, the props were amazing.
As we followed the clue trail, we got more and more authentic props. One of the props that Scott made was just a well-worn folded sheet of paper with a phone number on it. But when you unfolded the sheet of scratch paper, inside was a printed email with a clue in it. Very nice.
The climax of the game was the end of the world. I unfortunately got eaten, but the other players, using the vortices and other clues we found changed the timeline and saved the world.
One interesting bit, the PCs who "failed" and went to prison had skills that were more appropriate to the 2nd and 3rd acts than the ones that avoided prison. So, failure was an option.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Dead of Winter : A Crossroads Game
Saturday 10 AM in BG Foyer for 4 hours (ran for 2 hrs)
GM: Tyson Fultz
Type: Board
System: Dead of Winter
Players: 5
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Play the new Dead of Winter game by Plaid Hat Games.
It's a cooperative resource management game with a zombie theme. The theme integration is great. The flavor text on cards reminded me of The Walking Dead. Each player has a hidden agenda. Someone may also be a traitor who's agenda is to tank the colony.
The flaw of the game is that you roll your dice and you decide whether to scrounge for items or kill zombies. Since the die roll is already made, you know you'll kill some zombies, but you risk getting injured or infected. I prefer a more visceral zombie game where you gun down zombies on a tactical map.
In this game, we failed and died just as we were about to meet our victory conditions, so it was a nail biter.
Acthung Cthulhu! - Alien Transmissions
Saturday 7 PM in Salon 6 for 8 hours (ran for 6 hrs)
GM: William Lee
Type: RPG
System: Call of Cthulhu
Edition: 7th Edition - Quick Play
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
February, 1942. The Second World War rages across the globe. The Axis Powers are at their zenith. Hitler's empire stretches from France through Ukraine. Night time bomber raids by the RAF are the only way the Allies can strike at the heart of Germany. But the Germans have constructed an advanced radar at Bruneval, France, directly in the path of RAF's bombers. The British Special Operations Executive plans a daring operation to send paratroopers to destroy the radar with the help of the French Resistance. But mere moments before their drop, the instruments on the transport plane go haywire. Strange transmissions come unbidden over the radio. Could there be something more dangerous than German soldiers waiting for our heroes at Bruneval? Acthung Cthulhu is a pulp-action World War II supplement for Call of Cthulhu. It invokes the feel of classic Hollywood war movies like Kelly's Heroes, the Dirty Dozen, and the Devil's Brigade, while mashing it up with Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Although no experience with the rules are necessary, a love for the genre is required.
The first thing we did was pick characters. There were about 6 Canadian Commandos and 2 female French Resistance Fighters. Since the whole table was male, I thought I would be different and picked the French Resistance Fighter with the least sanity points. To my surprise, the other French Resistance Fighter was picked and two other non-combat heavy Commandos: one technician, one ex-lord, and the Capt who lead the Canadian team. So, we were light on fire power.
The game was interesting enough, but overall, I felt like I'd seen the movie before. There's something about WWII games that fall into certain tropes. I guess I'm waiting for something completely different.
There were some genuinely creepy stuff in the game. So, that was a plus.
Anyway, the game was very entertaining as our Capt made a lot of mistakes and we wound up almost with a TPK. We lost 4 out of 5 PCs and completed 4 out of 5 objectives. The survivor was the Capt, but he became permanently insane; locked up somewhere in a Canadian Asylum.
Without the failures we had, I think the game wouldn't a have been as interesting. So, failure was the best option.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
One thing I noticed was this game and Badger's game at KublaCon involved a villa with dead Germans in it. Is this the new cliche for WWII Cthulhu games? In CoC, the tired trope is the haunted house that investigators explore due to an inheritance or being hired to do so. In WWII games, soldiers are ordered to enter an enemy villa with Germans in it and we find Germans dead in bizarre and grotesque ways.
We also had a botched parachute drop. This also matches several other WWII games I've played. Another over used trope?
Also what's with this green glow in the dark stuff? Almost every game has this radium glow = unearthly menace.
I picked the female with the least San points hoping that I would have some Cthulhu Mythos or some spells. Well, the character had none of those. Oops. My dark secret was that I was actually a French Communist and I had a Russian handler that wasn't in the game. My secret mission was actually very close to the mission we were on so there was no real conflict of interest. But if I could, I was supposed to interrogate one of the Radar operators and to steal any important papers.
My favorite bits from the game were:
Having both female French characters hanging off the arms of one of the
Commandos (wearing a captured German uniform) and staggering towards a
machine nest, distracting the sentries as the rest of the commandos sneaked
in from behind to kill them silently.
Finding a dried out body underneath a blanket and then throwing the blanket back on the body to save the rest of the party from making San checks, but then finding that the hallway had 3 more bodies that couldn't be avoided.
Having one character deciding to put a German out of his misery by suffocating him with a pillow and accidentally pulverizing his half-dessicated head with the pillow. Ugh.
The Captain throwing a grenade into the room in front of us and hitting the monster with 10 pts of damage and 5 pts to everybody except for the Captain. Everybody else basically went to about half hit points with that move. Then one person in the rear went insane, unloaded his whole clip of ammo and hit my character in the back of the head with a machine gun burst, killing her instantly. Then after the monster tears the ex-Lord in half, the Captain throws another grenade and yells, "Duck." Well, in this system, that doesn't really work. The Captain had the highest initiative and the grenade would have just gone off and killed everyone else. This was when we all broke out laughing. OMG, he had just killed us all. After we stopped laughing, the GM was nice and allowed the rest of the PCs to try to dive down a stairwell. Everyone made it, but took fall damage. This resulted in the other French Fighter falling unconscious. Above them the creature looked down the stairwell.
The technician decided he had to save the unconscious female French Resistance Fighter. He spent all his "hero" point in order to fireman carry her out of the villa. At this point, the Captain went insane and fled to the pickup point at the beach. The technician ran to the beach, but not in time to catch the departing boats. The GM gave the technician a choice. He could abandon the Resistance Fighter and get another chance to get on the boats, or stay as an eldritch glow started to engulf the beach. The Captain on a boat watched as the technician still carrying the French Resistance Fighter was swallowed by the green glow.
If we did a better job, we would have made it to the boats with few if no casualties. But I don't think this game would have been as fun. In the end we had the perfect CoC game: one character in an insane asylum and everyone else dead.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Tomb of Paranoia
Sunday 2 PM in Napa for 6 hours (ran for 4 hrs)
GM: Morgan Hua
Type: RPG
System: Paranoia
Edition: 2nd Edition
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Tomb of Horrors vs Paranoia. I’ll be running Tomb of Horrors, but we’ll be sending in clones from Paranoia. Welcome troubleshooters, The Computer has found an anomaly. You will be outfitted to explore a strange region in Alpha Complex -- most likely the headquarters of Commie Mutant Traitors. Due to the dangerous nature of this threat, you have been granted more than your standard allotment of clones.
When I created this game, I thought it would be funny to send clones without magic and appropriate skills to defeat the Tomb of Horrors. Their only tool was clones and unlimited lives, so I wondered how long this joke could go before the players would get tired of it. When I ran this at KublaCon, the players wanted to finish the Tomb and had a great time. The energy was up until the defeat of the demi-lich. That game took the full 6 hours.
This time, I had several Paranoia veterans with high energy plus two newbies to Paranoia. At the end, one of the newbies got into the spirit, but the other was more focused on solving the Tomb and was relatively quiet. Near the 4 hour mark, the players only got through four rooms in the Tomb. But I could tell their energy was flagging -- earlier I couldn't get a word in edgewise with all the laughter, now it was dead quiet -- and I asked if they just wanted to skip to the end. They said, "Yes." So, I fast-forwarded them to the last two rooms to face the demi-lich. Though this group laughed louder than the KublaCon group, I felt everyone in the KublaCon group had a good time and they were more creative.
Problems, But a Witch Ain't One Monday 10 AM in Carneros for 4 hours GM: Jeff Yin Type: RPG System: Fading Suns Players: 6 Provided: All characters provided by GM While on a survey of Imperial lands, a Questing Knight and their companions must adjudicated conflicting claims of witchcraft.
The game was full according to the signup sheet, but only Jeff Yin, Jason F. and I showed up. Jeff said he needed 4 players (out of 6) for the game to go. This is the danger of a morning game on the last day of the con. So, instead Jason F. pulled out his Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures Game and we played for two hours.
I've only played this game once. Jeff never, and Jason owned the game. I played the Rebels and they played the Empire. Each side had 100 build points and we met on a field of battle in the midst of an asteroid field. After a few rounds, my 3 rebel X-Wings shot down 3 (out of 6) Imperial Tie fighters and had them at a great disadvantage. Jeff and Jason conceded. The Empire failed.
Cold Dead Hand
Saturday 6 PM in 217 for 10 hours
GM: Shannon Mac
Type: RPG
System: Delta Green
Edition: 6E Call of Cthulhu
Players: 5
Power Level: Experienced yet mortal Spetsnaz (not heroic)
1991:
The hard-liners of the Communist Party have ousted Soviet Premier
Mikhail Gorbachev from power. As a result the Soviet Union is in
disarray and many fear that the return of the Old Regime has increased
the possibility of a nuclear war.
Don't worry. It gets worse.
Mother Russia has lost contact with Site 6, an ICBM silo far to the
wintery north on the Taymyr Peninsula (Siberia) and needs politically
reliable yet capable soldiers to investigate the matter.
The worst storm in years has hit Site 6.
You are all veteran Spetsnaz. Most of you have served together multiple
times and on average the typical Spetsnaz has served at least two years
in Afghanistan. Yours is a tight brotherhood with a distinctive chain of
command (though that may not be fun at the gaming table so it will be
likely loosely recognized unless we have a very hardcore group).
This Spetsnaz company is led by a Kapitan Kozlov, a senior LT named
Babenko and a handful of Warrant Officers. Included are Strategic Rocket
Forces technical advisors. The total size of the company is in the
fifties so if your first character dies don't worry about a replacement.
I played in Shannon's playtest, so I didn't play in this game at Celesticon, but since the Acthung Cthulhu game ended early, I decided to drop by and say hello. Andy W. was DJ taking care of Shannon's ambient music and sound effects. Andy and I quietly snickered as this group totally F*ed up everything.
When we played in this game, we were very tactical and set up choke points and kill zones. This group made a lot of mistakes and died left and right, top and center.
So, the question is, is it better to play a game effectively with few screw ups or totally F* everything up and have more interesting situations and massive death and destruction? In the game I played in, I felt like we were Spetsnaz. Watching these guys, it was like an episode of Gomer Pyle. But it did look like they had a lot of fun.
So, failure is an option.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
At the beginning of the game, the GM gave the players a portable nuke and three nuclear technicians (one main character and two backups). Though it was a secret, the rest of the party found out about it.
At one point, the players set the timer on their portable nuke and left it upstairs and unguarded in an armored car -- where terrible intelligent creatures roamed. An earlier encounter with several creatures had them rip open one of the vehicles. So what makes you think the nuke'll still be upstairs when you need it?
Later, they decided to detonate the nuke earlier, so almost everyone went back upstairs to retrieve the nuke. Well, guess what? Yep, it wasn't there. Not only that, a massive Cthulhu creature showed up and drove most of them insane. The survivors scrambled back downstairs.
Later, a PC who was clearly unstable was allowed free movement. That PC had clearly killed at least three of the backup PCs and the other PCs bought his excuses repeatedly. Finally, that PC gunned down a key NPC right in front of them. The response was swift, but the quote of the day was, "I should have killed him way back when."
Another funny failure was when the creatures opened up the armored vehicle, one PC open fired with a rocket launcher at point blank and it exploded inside their armored vehicle. The back blast would have ignited the ammo, Molotov cocktails, and loose fuel inside anyway. This killed everyone inside the vehicle.
So, lots of horrible failure, but plenty of fun situations.
In this game, I think the Spetsnaz team had 50 PCs. Six main PCs and the rest were backups.
Shannon said only six survived at the end and I have a feeling that he was being nice.
Hey, Shannon, you didn't know you were running a Paranoia game, did ya?
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Drive-Thru Armageddon
Sunday 7 PM in Sonoma for 5 hours (game ran 6 hrs)
GM: Micheal Garcia
Type: RPG
System: Apocalypse World
Players: 4
Twenty years ago, the bombs fell, society collapsed, and we now live in the
smoldering ruin. The radiation has made us all sterile, and humanity is
doomed to extinction. Except now there is hope in the form of the first
pregnant mother in twenty years. Too bad she is in the heart of an
enemy hardhold. You have been tasked to get her out and bring her back
so we as a species have a fighting chance. Load your guns, get in your
car, and save the day. The fate of the whole human race is riding with
you.
Take Children of Men, the Road Warrior, and Escape from New York, and
put in a gasoline powered blender and hit frappe. The result: this game.
You've got shootouts, car chases, and good old fashioned melodrama
powered by the Apocalypse.
My Paranoia game ended early, so I dropped by hoping to pick up an empty seat, but no luck, so I stayed and watched the game. I fell asleep twice and I hope I didn't snore (sorry Mike). But I woke up in time to see the climax.
In the end, there was a very tense scene and almost everything went wrong. Earlier in the game I watched the players roll success after success; finally, their luck caught up with them and they got a long string of bad luck, but then the tension level kept on rising as it looked like a TPK. But Mike was nice and the players squeaked through the situation.
So, looming failure was a great option.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Near the end of the game, a driver (PC), action gun guy (PC), and madam (PC) were in the front seat of a Lincoln Town car. In the back seat was a mind-control psychic (enemy NPC), gun guy (enemy NPC), pregnant lady (neutral NPC and MacGuffin), and a healer (PC).
At one point everybody knew it was going to go to a head and all hell would break loose. The nurse tried to slap a knock out patch on the psychic, but the psychic reached out and ordered the nurse to do that to the PC action gun guy instead, if she refuses the order, she would loose 75% of her hit points due to a brain hemorrhage. In the front seat, the madam was already suffering from massive bleeding when she had disobeyed an order from the psychic earlier. The psychic whispers into the gun guy's (NPC) ear. The driver sees the gun guy (NPC) start to shift his gun from pointing at the driver to pointing at the action gun guy (PC). The driver jerks the steering wheel and fails to make the gun guy (NPC) point at no one. The gun goes off and the driver loses 75% of his hit points as the gun shot goes through his chest and splatters the windshield. Not wanting to hit the pregnant woman, the action gun guy (PC) pulls out his machete to kill the psychic. The madam rolls an assist. The action gun guy (PC) fails badly and in Apocalypse world, not only does something bad happen, but to people assisting too. The machete kills the madam and since the psychic had armor, the machete only cuts off the psychic's hand. The nurse is given the choice of trying to save the dying madam or slapping a knock out patch on the action gun guy (PC). She decides to save the madam and takes the 75% damage. She botches her roll and winds up mentally bound to the dying madam.The driver grabs his gun and shoots blindly behind his seat and takes out the gun guy (NPC). The psychic then grabs the action gun guy (PC) pulls him to her and impales herself on his machete. She then kisses him and transfers her consciousness into him and takes him over.
At this point, two PCs are dying, the action gun guy (PC) is now inhabited by the psychic and the driver is sorely hurt.
The psychic only needed to touch the driver to command him and the game would be over. But Mike was nice and let them get out of this pickle. From the depths of despair, the PCs survived and actually had one more big action scene.
But without teeterring on the brink of failure, the tension level wouldn't have been so great and the scene wouldn't have sizzled so much.
It's a magical place
High and Dry
Reunification III
Eagle's Nest
Cthulhu Azorian
Super Train
