Category Archives: What’s he playing?

And what does he wish he was playing?

Dateline – Storm Point

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Way back when we started the Storm Point campaign, I threw in a little comment in one of the  background sheets I did, mentioning how the islands in Lake Thunder floated in a complex pattern through the storm that hung perpetually over the middle of the lake. I said that the representatives from the city of Beylis were planning on sending an expedition to one of the islands in order to ride it through the storm and see what was inside. One of the players said, basically, “Wow. I wish we could do that.” I replied, “So why don’t you?”

So the expedition to the floating islands was originally going to be the second adventure in the campaign. But things got sidetracked, what with the whole Jemmy Fish thing, which led to the goblins, which led to the Shadar-kai and their plot and eventually the siege of Storm Point. Now, with all that out of the way, everyone decided to go back to the floating island expedition.

I’ve had the finished scenario for this adventure done for close to a year. The problem, of course, is that now the PCs are level 7, not level 2, so I’ve had to redo all the encounters and treasure packages. Fortunately, that’s not such a big deal with the Monster Builder from Wizards – it allows exporting of stat blocks as both rich text and images, and does wonderful customization for you. The only thing it doesn’t do that I wish it did was apply templates. But, of course, it’s still in development, so that might be coming.

Anyway, it was a pretty quick job to update the adventure. The most time-consuming part was deciding on what new monsters to use – originally, I was using a lot of kobolds, and even leveling them up a fair bit, it started to strain my ideas of what kobolds were good for. So, I shifted to other, higher-level monsters.

I also did up a couple of maps and set things up for a magician’s choice kind of deal: when the party flew out on their hippogriffs to scout the available islands, they saw a number of small islands and two big ones ready to enter the storm. A few of the small islands had ruined structures on them, but none were any bigger than about a hundred yards across. The two larger islands each had a couple of ruined sites, were about five miles across, and were topped with ziggurats ringed by crystal spires. One large island was roughly kidney-shaped, and the other was vaguely heart-shaped.

What I didn’t tell the players was that the only real choice that mattered was whether they were going to a big island or a small island. The encounters on all the small islands were the same, as were the encounters on both the big islands. On the big islands, I had arranged them slightly differently, but that would affect only the order of encounters, really. Still, the set-up gave them a realistic perception of choice without me having to produce twice the number of encounters, half of which wouldn’t get used.

Well, they chose the heart-shaped island, and decided to land at a ruined Arkhosian fortification with a built-in aerial stable.

Now, a little bit of background about the Storm Point area is in order. Storm Point sits on the borders of what used to be Arkhosia and Bael Turath, the ancient dragonborn and tiefling empires that annihilated each other several centuries ago. This lets me litter the area with all sorts of interesting ruins, and explains the interest that other, more powerful nations have in this little backwater city. The floating islands are the shattered remnants of part of the Arkhosian defensive line that once stretched across the region to hold off the Bael Turathian flying fortresses. The Arkhosians used young dragons and large flying drakes as mounts, hence the aerial stable. The final conflict with Bael Turath broke the main islands in Lake Thunder, uprooting them, and casting them adrift in the storm that formed as a result of that last battle.

Okay. So, Arkhosian fort ruins with aerial stable. Good. Of course, it wasn’t undefended – as they were looking from the landing pad down to the parade ground, the arcane ballistae almost took the cleric’s head clean off. The party immediately swooped down to deal with these, and ran afoul of the iron cobras and advanced iron defenders hidden in the rubble and scrub*.

The battle was a little disordered – mainly because the players (myself included) were a little disordered. This was our first session in about a month and a half, and we spent a great deal of time off-topic, socializing, and otherwise not focusing on the game. Still, they managed fairly well against this rather easy encounter. Then, as we were ready to wrap up for the evening, I told them that the doors of the barracks and the stable opened up to let out a crowd of dragonborn ghouls and a zombie-like dragon.

And we called it a night.

Next session starts with the rolling of initiative. That should provide a little focus.

 
 
 

*2 arcane ballistae, 2 iron cobras, 2 advanced iron defenders (6th level) = 1500 xp, a 6th-level encounter for six characters. Back

Trail of Cthulhu Playtest

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This past Saturday evening, my friend Michael ran a playtest of Trail of Cthulhu, from Pelgrane Press, written by Ken Hite. I talked a little bit about reading the game way back here, but this is the first time I’ve played it.

One of the big things standing in the way of running a playtest of the game is the character creation system. It’s complex enough, with enough choices the players need to make at every step, that it requires a pretty solid understanding of the rules before building characters. And, in a playtest, you can’t count on the players to read any of the rules. So, that means pregenerated characters, which takes more time for the GM. Also, the points you get for investigative abilities are based on the number of characters in the game, so if you’re doing pregens, you need to know how many people will be playing – in my experience, not always possible with a playtest or one-shot.

In short, I’ve always thought that Pelgrane Press could do themselves a big favour by posting some pregens for their GUMSHOE games – ideally, complete parties of two, three, four, and five characters. It certainly would have got me playing the games a lot sooner.

This need has been met for ToC by an introductory scenario available for download on their site: The Murderer of Thomas Fell. While the characters are specifically for the scenario, they can certainly be used in other adventures.

Now, I’m not going to give you a bunch of spoilers – we played the game, we sort-of-solved the mystery, and we kinda-won – which is par for the course in a Purist Cthulhu game. We all had fun and liked both the system and the story. After the game, we had a bit of a discussion about it, and came up with these thoughts:

  • The game really demands a fair bit of input from players to keep it from devolving into a story being read to you by the Keeper. Specifically, the players need to develop familiarity with their abilities – especially the investigative abilities – and how to use them in the scenes. Otherwise, it can become a case of the Keeper asking, “Okay, who’s got Accounting? There’s an Accounting clue here.” Now, this will come with practice, both the input from the players in the correct circumstances (“I use Accounting to look through the papers in his business desk to see if there’s anything hinky.”) and the way the Keeper deals with it.
  • Combat is fast and can be surprisingly deadly. Especially for humans. The bad things are always tougher than you. And this is as it should be. There was a wonderful feeling of panic in the one real combat we had in the game.
  • The lightness of the rules really lets roleplaying shine through. Even with the pregens, pretty much everything that happened was the result of character personality interacting with the situation. The ending of the adventure was pretty much entirely dictated by the emotions of the characters, with very little in the way of dice rolling or use of rules. And I found that ending to be immensely satisfying, dramatically speaking.
  • Specialization among the characters is key. While the spend mechanic means that the person with the highest rating in a skill can only outdo the others a limited amount of time, it’s good to have at least one relevant investigative ability at a higher level than the others in the group have. My character had only a couple of irrelevant ones at high levels, and he didn’t get to find as many clues, etc. Which is okay in a single session, but would get tiring over time in a campaign.
  • The scene mechanic – letting the players know when the characters have got all the available clues from a scene and telling them to move on – was something that I thought would be awkward and artificial in play, but really worked very nicely. The first time Michael used it, it was a little disorienting and surprising, but then it just worked very smoothly.

All in all, a fun game and a big success. Thanks to Michael for beating me to running the game, and to Sandy, Jen, Fera, and Tom for playing with us.

Now I just need to convince Michael to run a campaign…

Boardgame Fest

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Back before Christmas, my friend Chris and I started talking about all the boardgames we have that we hardly ever play. Not because they’re not fun, or we don’t like them, but because the roleplaying games always seem to fill up the schedule. So, we decided to see what we could do about that – we scheduled an all-afternoon-and-evening boardgame event at my place for December 30th. The idea was for people to come by when they wanted, play what they wanted, sit around and kibitz, and enjoy the company and refreshments. In particular, I wanted to try out Carcassonne and Battlestar Galactica with the Pegasus Expansion.

Talisman, with all three expansions, turned out to be the big hit, though. It ran essentially all day, with a short break for one person to go pick up someone else while we played Carcassonne. Yeah, Talisman will take all day when you get seven or eight players around the table. It was a lot of fun, despite the fact that I never seemed to have a chance of winning. I’m not going to talk much about the play of the game, because I did that back here. I will say that it’s pretty easy for people to join and leave the game during play, though obviously it’s not ideal if you’re trying to win.

This was also my first time ever playing Carcassonne. I’m pretty sure everyone else in the entire world has already played it, so most of what I have to say will surprise no one. The game is very simple to learn and play, but the scoring system reveals a complexity under the surface that supports pretty deep strategy. We played without any expansions, so the game went quickly – about an hour from opening it up to closing it up again. There’s an interesting combination of laying tiles for maximum benefit – or minimum detriment, as the case may be – with the resource management of using the little wooden people to claim various things. There is a danger to being both too daring and too cautious – sometimes long shots pay off, which is good for the person taking the risk, but not for those avoiding it.

It was a lot of fun, with various folks coming by and playing for a while at various points, and we’re going to do it again.

After all, I still haven’t had a chance to try out the Pegasus Expansion.

King Cailan Wants YOU!

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I mentioned previously my enjoyment of the Dragon Age video game. I also mentioned in that post that Green Ronin was coming out with a pen-and-paper version of the game. Well, about a week ago, maybe a little more, Green Ronin offered up the boxed set of the game for preorder, with the bonus of a .pdf version free. I jumped at the deal, and have been reading the game.

I like it.

Some specific comments, in no particular order:

  • I like the idea of a boxed set, even though that hasn’t made it to me, yet. I think it’s mostly nostalgia, the feeling of opening a Christmas present that I associate with the boxed sets.
  • There is a real old-school feel to the game, mixed with more modern concepts in game design. It feels, in a lot of ways, similar to the old D&D Basic Set, but with the system aesthetics of things like d20 and FATE.
  • There aren’t a lot of options for starting characters, but really this is the simplest thing to develop as the game line matures. You get three character classes (Mage, Rogue, and Warrior) and seven backgrounds (Apostate, Avvarian, Circle Mage, City Elf, Dalish Elf, Ferelden Freeman, and Surface Dwarf). While I don’t think we’re going to see more classes added, new backgrounds (even just adding the ones from the video game) are an easy way for the game to add variety and options.
  • The rules look simple, flexible, and fast. It uses 3d6, with a simple bonus from stats and focuses (skills), compared to a target number. The broad middle of a three-dice bell curve creates a different feel to the game from the flat probabilities of the d20 system, and the Dragon Die component of the system (one of the d6s is a different colour, and is used to determine degree of success, among other things) adds an interesting variety to the rolls.
  • For a small book, the Player’s Guide provides a surprising wealth of information on the game world. If you supplement that with the information you can pick up playing the video game, you get a very rich starting background.

So, I’ve been reading the game, and trying to think when I could fit time into my schedule to run the intro adventure in the Game Master’s Guide. What with it being the run-up to the holiday season, and all the work I’m doing on getting Scio Occultus Res ready to go, my schedule’s a little cramped. Last Thursday, I figured I was about a day-and-a-half away from breaking down and sending out an e-mail invite.

Fortunately, I was saved by my friend, Clint, beating me to it. He proposed a game for that Friday night, and then asked me to run it by his wife, whom I work with, to see if she wanted to play. We also roped in their daughter and her boyfriend – hey, we’re all gamers in this group.

So, I threw together a character (two, actually; each one took about twenty minutes, and that’s with paging back and forth in the .pdf Player’s Guide), picked one to play, gathered up some dice, and headed out.

Oh, I also printed out a hard copy of the Player’s Guide. I was playing a mage, and wanted to make sure I had all the rules for the spells and Mana and stuff close at hand.

Clint ran us through the first part of The Dalish Curse, the intro adventure in the game. I hadn’t got around to reading it yet, fortunately, and I’m not going to give out any spoilers. It was a fun evening, though, and we made faster progress through the adventure than I had anticipated.

Some observations on actual play:

  • Combat moves fast and can be really deadly. I was playing a mage, which class isn’t great in a stand-up fight, and I almost died a couple of times in different combats. We got through three separate combats, plus a fair bit of exploration and roleplaying, in a single play session that ran about five hours. That’s significantly more than we generally get done in D&D.
  • Healing, while not quite as ubiquitous as in 4E, is robust enough that the twenty-minute-adventuring-day bogeyman never showed up. Still, you can feel the pressure of multiple fights. Same thing with Mana points.
  • The stunt system in combat rocks. Basically, when you roll doubles on any two of the three dice in a successful attack roll, you get a number of stunt point equal to the number on the Dragon Die that you can spend on that attack. The list is fairly short, but flavourful, and includes things like moving the target (or yourself) a couple of yards, doing extra damage, knocking the target prone, penetrating armour, getting an extra attack, and things like that. Now, by my calculations (and I could be wrong here – need an actual math-guy to check my numbers) you’ll roll doubles on 3d6 roughly 31% of the time. Even if only half those rolls hit the target, you’re looking at about one successful attack in six generating stunt points, which is a pretty good ration. It actually seemed to happen a little more often than that in play, but that may just be my perception of it. It made the combats (and spellcasting – spells get stunts, too) very interesting and flavourful.
  • The stunt system is currently only for combat, but I would be terribly surprised if it remained that way. It seems such rich game development ground to produce stunt lists for other actions that I can’t imagine the designers ignoring it.
  • The system in general handled a number of very different combat and non-combat tasks very well, and very easily. The structure of the intro adventure is nicely designed to allow new players to try a little bit of everything – this is what intro adventures should be, in my opinion – and it worked smoothly and almost transparently, which is what I want in a game mechanic.

So, we had a lot of fun, and we’re probably going to get back together to finish the adventure soon. And Clint is talking about setting up a loose gaming group to play Dragon Age semi-regularly, with a changing cast of characters and GMs trading off duties in a manner similar to the Spirit of the Century Pick-Up League.

I’m in.

Deadly Island Pick-Up Game

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Tonight was supposed to be our Shadowlands D&D 3.5 game, run by my friend Clint, but we had to cancel because one of the players is sick*. So, four of us were sort of at loose ends, looking for something to do rather than just call the evening off. I suggested some board games, but Clint asked if there was any one-shot I was prepared to run.

Now, running some one-shots is one of my goals with my change in gaming priorities, so I suggested possibly Mutant City Blues or Trail of Cthulhu, two games that I’ve been wanting to try, but haven’t got around to, yet. The problem was prep time; This was at about 1:00, and game time was 7:00. I didn’t have time to adequately prep the games, create characters*, re-read the adventure, and get back up to speed on the system, and also take care of the other stuff I have to do today.

And then I remembered Spirit of the Century.

Some time ago, I came up with and organized a Spirit of the Century Pick-Up League, with the bold plan of encouraging the play of the game in our group. We created characters, posted our character novels, and played a session. Everyone had a good time, and we agreed we should do it again.

That was more than two years ago. Life gets in the way, sometimes. But tonight was a great opportunity to resurrect the League, throw together an adventure, and play SotC again.

That’s what I did.

I broke some of the rules in the League Charter*, in the interests of time. I cribbed the adventure from the adventure design section of the rulebook, where they have the skeletons of five or six different adventures mapped out for the GM. And I didn’t send out an invite, both because of the time and because I wasn’t hosting the game. I cobbled together two pages of notes, shoved the rulebook and my Fudge dice in my bag, and away I went.

I started with the characters – Sky Knight, Artemis Argo, and Myra Hawkridge – going on the maiden voyage of the New Golden Hind*, a galvanic turbine driven ship designed by Dr. Hubert Toynbee. The ship, designed to run at a steady 70 knots and to withstand extremely rough seas, was going to make a crossing from Liverpool to New York, and the members of the Century Club were going to go along for the ride.

On my notes, this section of the trip took up about half a sentence. In play, it ran to about an hour, because everyone was having fun with the idea of the trip, and I kept elaborating on the ship, and playing up Toynbee’s intense scientist mode. So, we stuck with this bit for as long as people were enjoying it.

When I felt the time was right, and there was no more to explore on the ship, I moved on to the next scene: the terrible storm that wrecks the ship and strands our heroes (and a bunch of extras) on a mysterious jungle island in the North Atlantic*. There they found a cave for shelter, and spotted some old ruins up the side of an extinct volcano.

After getting shelters set up and water found and food gathered, our heroes took off to explore the jungle. They were called back to camp by gunshots, and found that velociraptors had attacked*, carrying off one of the sailors. Being pulp heroes, the characters set off into the jungle, following the trail. Along the way, they fought some velociraptors of their own, and some pterodactyls, and a sabre-tooth tiger*.

Then, of course, the Ultramegasaurus showed up and chased them. This was a (completely fictitious) dinosaur that was too big and fierce for them to actually hurt, but Argo used a great little feature of the game to declare that the thing’s vision was movement-based, like a frog or a T-rex, and he and Myra froze while Sky Knight lured it away.

When the group made it up to the ruins, where the trail led, they found a mostly-insane scientist had saved their sailor from the dinosaurs, and was trying to use him to bargain for a way off the island and away from the evil Dr. Methuselah – one of the game’s iconic archvillains, with the ability to use math to alter reality. It seems Dr. Methuselah was planning to bring through a host of Ultramegasauri through a time-gate that had already brought through other dinosaurs, smilodons, and the tropical climate*. As the poor deranged scientist was begging to be taken away, Dr. Methuselah solved him out of the reality equation, and he vanished.

Which led to the showdown in the time lab, which ended with Argo throwing a stone chair through the time machine and Sky Knight and Myra co-operating to decapitate Dr. Methuselah, thanks to their arcane or hyper-technological abilities.

Of course, that didn’t stop Dr. Methuselah from continuing to talk.

So they stuck his head in one box, his body in another, and, now that the time portal wasn’t messing with radio transmissions anymore, Sky Knight called in the Draco to pick everyone up and snow started to fall.

The game was a blast, and everyone had a lot of fun. I think that I’m going to have to start working to revive the League, have another character creation session for those that don’t have characters, and get things moving again.

Because I want someone else to run a game so I can play.

 
 
 

*Hope you feel better soon, Fera. Back

*Y’know, Pelgrane Press, some generic pre-gen characters for your GUMSHOE games downloadable from your website would be a great thing to add. Just sayin’. Back

*I made ’em, I can break ’em. Back

*It started out called The New Argo, but then Tom chose to play Artemis Argo, so that name didn’t work anymore, and I had to come up with a new one on the spot. I think I did pretty good. Back

*Yeah, I know. But it’s a pulp game, and when you get shipwrecked in a pulp game, it happens on a jungle island. And probably dinosaurs will show up soon. Anyway, I explained it in-game. Back

*See? Dinosaurs! Back

*I did mention this was a pulp game, didn’t I? Back

*Told you I explained it. Back

Another Casualty of the Crown of Command

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Today, my friend Chris ran a demo of the Talisman boardgame at Imagine Games and Hobbies here in Winnipeg.

Now, I realize that what I’m about to confess may cost me a whole pile of grognard geek cred, but I’d never played Talisman before, in any of its incarnations. Don’t really know why; I just never owned it, and neither did any of my friends. And there were always other games to buy. So, I never tried Talisman before today.

I’ve really been missing out.

Yeah, I know everyone else out there who’s reading this has probably played the game to death, and are giggling at my naive wonder. Y’know what? I don’t care. I was blown away.

The game is great fun. And the addition of the Dungeon and Reaper expansions make for even more fun. There was a great variety of things going on in game, and we didn’t get even half-way through the stack of adventure cards that provide the encounters and events. I can see that the game has some real replay value.

Downsides? Yeah, a couple. Mainly they’re artifacts of the era the game was created in: as a product of the 80s, there are some game design decisions that I don’t think you’d see if the game was designed today. Lot’s of “miss a turn” mechanics, for example, and a huge random factor in play. The game is very luck-based; if the dice don’t like you, all the deep strategizing in the world won’t help you. You need to get the right cards at the right times, and make the right rolls when you need them. For example, I spent six or seven turns just trying to get to the Warlock’s Cave to get a quest in order to get a Talisman to get to the end of the game.

I didn’t get one, and someone beat me to the Crown of Command, then killed the rest of us off, as you’re supposed to do to win the game.

So, some degree of frustration, but not enough to actually sour the play of the game.

Set-up took under 10 minutes, including the time for us to sort out some of the cards. Chris taught us the rules in another ten. So, with someone who knows the game, under 20 minutes from opening the box to the first turn. This is very nice, and a bit of a change for me: most of my games require much more elaborate set-up.

The individual turns also went very quickly, averaging maybe two to three minutes per turn. Nice, quick pace without feeling rushed. Again, a nice change from the number of games I have that have each person’s turn taking five to ten minutes. And it takes some of the sting out the “miss a turn” stuff.

All in all, we played for about four hours, and finished with a nice win by Tania, who now apparently rules the world with her Crown of Command.

The game is, as one would expect from Fantasy Flight Games, absolutely gorgeous, with nice, high-quality and durable components. It’s a little pricey, but considering what you get in the box, it’s worth it. It’s going on my Christmas list.

So, a fun afternoon. Thanks to Chris for running the game, and to Clint and Tania for coming to play with us.

Hidden Things

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A while back, I promised my friends Penny and Clint that I would run a small game for just the two of them, something that we could pick up and play when other folks aren’t available. At the time, it was going to be The Phoenix Covenant, and I did a fair bit of work getting the campaign ready. Then I started burning out on D&D, and didn’t want to keep pushing on that particular campaign. So, I sent out a set of options for discussion, and we settled on playing Mage: The Awakening, influenced in part at least by the success of the first Hunter game I ran a couple of weeks ago.

This is the initial pitch for the Mage game, pulled from the list of pitches I sent:

Mage: The Awakening – The past is reluctant to give up it’s hidden secrets, even to one with the power of a wizard. But you search for traces of the occult history of the world, hidden in archaelogical digs, museum artifacts, urban legends, and strange pocket worlds and times. You will find not just the truth, but the TRUTH.

After some discussion, we decided to set the game in the early 20th century, during the height of archaeological exploration and at the beginning of the decline of secret societies like the Golden Dawn. The ideas I have in mind are a mix of Henry Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Warren Ellis‘s magnificent Planetary comic series. Basically, I want a mix of pulp and noir: the cinematic action, globe-trotting adventure, weird science and magic of pulp blended with the moral relativism, conspiracy, and paranoia of noir. After doing a little bit of research on the era, I picked 1910 as a starting year because of some things that I don’t want to talk about just yet – I know that at least one of the players reads this blog.

So, with those decisions made, I got to work on a wiki for the game. Since I discovered Obsidian Portal, this has become one of my must-do items when I’m building a campaign that’s going to follow an extended story arc, as opposed to episodic campaigns like the Hunter game.

My first idea for the game was just to use the published material for Boston that’s appeared in the Mage books, just back-dating it as necessary. I don’t feel the need to be absolutely accurate and faithful to reality in building a historical campaign: to me, evocation of the feel of the period is more important than strict historical veracity. That said, I try to at least pay lip-service to the truth, so certain elements were going to have to change. Just not all that many.

But this weekend, I read through Boston Unveiled, as opposed to just skimming it as I had done previously. The chapter on the history of the area convinced me that using the by-the-book political situation they posit in 1910 would be far more interesting to me than the one that currently holds sway in modern times. I started rewriting the Boston entry on the wiki, and changing the other entries for the major cabals and events. I’m still not quite done, but I think it’s going to be fun.

One of the things that I’ve realized is that I have to be careful with this campaign framework. It has real potential to devolve into a series of MacGuffin hunts, and that can get old. In order to try and avoid that, I’ve given the framework an overarching theme – the idea that the Bonehunters want to restore Atlantis and take the fight to the Exarchs in the Supernal Realm. This means that they’re going to be facing the Seers of the Throne, who make great Nazi-esque villains in a Mage game. It also means that some adventures and subplots are going to revolve around dealing with threats from the Seers and other opposition; not everything adventure is going to be about rushing off to the ruins of Crete to try and find the Minotaur Device at the heart of the Astral Labyrinth.

And, as I always try to do in small games, a fair bit of the agenda is going to be set by the players and the characters. I’m going to be throwing out a number of plot hooks and loose threads, and seeing what interests them, what they decide to pursue and what they decide to ignore. That will shape the flow of the game, as well.

As I work on the background, my players are reading up on the game and generating some ideas for their characters. I don’t want to get too locked into things until I know at least what their concepts are, but we’re getting very close to being able to start the game. Perhaps even before Christmas.

Oh. The name of the campaign is Scio Occultus Res, which is Latin for To Know Hidden Things.

Don’t You Know There’s a Blight On?

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My time has recently been sucked away by a video game – Dragon Age: Origins.

Bioware bills this game as a dark fantasy roleplaying game, the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate games, and I can see that. It’s also taken a lot of influence, especially for the character interactions, from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – the original, not the initially-brilliant-but-ultimately-disappointing sequel.

I really like this game.

The emphasis in Dragon Age is the story. The story drives everything forward, and the vast majority of the quests are concerned with moving the main quest forward. The few side quests that don’t contribute directly to the main story have an indirect contribution to make – getting a piece of gear or a companion to aid you, or winning the trust of a companion to help them aid you better. This focus on the main story and, to a secondary degree, the development of relationships with your companions, is something I’ve been looking for in a game.

Now, I also played through Fallout 3 this summer. I loved that game, too, but I prefer Dragon Age. See, the two games take a rather divergent view of building the story in the game. Fallout gives you a fairly thin main storyline, and then fills the sandbox of the world with a myriad of side quests, interesting areas to visit, interesting people, and other things to keep you busy. Every now and then, you wander back across the main storyline and advance the plot a bit – right up until you land on the plot railroad and rush madly to the story’s end.

It was a fun game, but the story, as noted, felt a little thin a lot of the time. The side quests were often of more interest and, at times, seemed to have a bigger impact on the world than the main story.

Dragon Age takes the opposite approach. The main storyline is deep, and rich, and features a number of interesting twists and turns. You stay on the main quest for most of the game, with only a few distractions here and there to follow up on something a companion wants, or something a merchant mentioned.

The only downside is that the Dragon Age approach has less replay potential than the Fallout approach. After all, by the end of Dragon Age, I will have played through almost all the quests and scenarios – like about 90% of them. Whereas in Fallout, there were a number of side quests and areas to explore that I jut didn’t get to. I figure I managed to play through about 60% of the content.

Playing these two games has got me thinking about this dichotomy in computer game design. The two schools both target the same base audience – the CRPG player – but each is optimized for a different segment of that market. One targets the story junkies like me, who want to squeeze the narrative out of any game we play. The other targets the action junkies, who want to always have something new and interesting to explore in a game. Both, of course, have features that will attract the rest of the audience – lots of neat battles and interesting quests in Dragon Age, lots of stories and interesting characters in Fallout – but the designers obviously made their choice about what the game was going to be, and stuck to it.

And I say good for them. For both of them. I’d rather have a game that unashamedly knew what it was and stuck to that than a game that tried to be all things to all people.

One last note of interest: Dragon Age is coming out as a pen-and-paper RPG, as well. I’m very curious.

Now back to the game. Ferelden needs me!

Talisman Demo December 6

By | | What's he playing?
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My friend Chris is running a boardgame demo at Imagine Games on Sunday, December 6, from 12:00 noon to 5:00 pm.

He’s going to be showing off Talisman 4th Edition, complete with the Dungeon and Reaper expansions.

Strange as it may seem coming from an old geek like me, I’ve never played the game. I plant to be down there, rolling the dice (and probably getting ganged up on), so come on down and play with us.

It’ll be fun.

Hunter: The Vigil – War Stories

By | | Hunter - Shadow Wars, What's he playing?
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Last night was Friday the 13th, and I felt it appropriate to have the inaugural game of my Hunter: The Vigil game. This game has been a long time coming, and that’s been my fault.

First off, I did a collaborative world-building thing with the players, and truth to tell, several of them weren’t very interested in that. I didn’t give them enough of a foundation to build on, so they all had very different ideas about what the game was going to be, and I had trouble getting them to talk about what was in their minds. I wound up assigning each player one question about the world to answer, and encouraged them to ask any of their own of the other players.

Because of the disparity of ideas about the game world, and some ham-fisted handling of them on my part, we wound up with a compromise setting that managed to please no one. No one was getting excited about the game. In fact, the people who were encouraging me the most to run the game were talking about how we should just ignore what had been decided.

Very discouraging for me. It’s hard to get pumped about running a game when no one really wants to play what you have all collaboratively created.

But we got past that.

The other big stumbling block was that they voted on a campaign frame that included a fairly free-form option to take special abilities. I worked out a basic system for this, but it was more a structure for the players to shape their ideas than it was a mechanic. I used the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck as a symbolic structure to tie people’s powers together: each player selected a card he or she liked, and came up with a symbolic interpretation of that card, and three tricks they could do in keeping with that symbology.

Now, I don’t know why I assumed that everyone would be familiar with the Tarot symbolism. I just did. Stupid, in retrospect, but there you have it. So, I got to spend some time explaining the various cards to different players, and talking about the flexibility of interpreting them.

It certainly worked to spark creativity. I got one alchemist, one shaman, one weapons specialist, one martian illusionist, and one nano-bot filled possibly artificial person. Now came the hard part – I had to make up mechanics for all the tricks they had come up with. That wound up being a bigger job than I had imagined, and I kept putting it off.

Because I was having more fun with other games, and doing less work. The Post Tenebras Lux game was working, and the Storm Point game was really going strong. Both took less effort, and had more enthusiastic reception.

And then I realized I was burning out on 4E. And I realized that this Hunter game could be something new and different for me, a chance to move away from the D&D mindset for a while. So, I wrapped up Post Tenebras Lux, which had always been meant to be a temporary game, and finished the work on Hunter – Shadow Wars.

As I said, it was a long time coming. But last night it arrived.

Things got off to a shaky start, as a couple of the players had lost parts of their characters (usually the mechanics of their special powers that I had worked so long on hammering out), and I had one of those “What’s the point?” moments that can hit a GM when they see all their hard work spiraling toward the drain. I almost chucked the whole thing right there to play a boardgame, instead.

Instead, I said, “Screw it.” It was Friday the 13th, I had the players gathered, and I wanted to run a horror game. I decided I would just wing it if things came up that people didn’t have mechanics for. And if it didn’t work, well, the campaign just turns into a one-shot.

The game was set in a slightly less Dresdenesque Magical Winnipeg, slanted more to the horror than to the modern fantasy adventure. To that end, I had done some wandering through weird sites on the Internet until I found this. I fell in love with that post, not least because of the borderline illiteracy of it. The story is, of course, pure crap, but it’s eminently gameable crap.

I tracked down some pictures of the house in question, got a Google satellite view of the neigbourhood, and even drove past twice, once in the daytime and once at night, to get a good feel for the place. Then I went to work.

I kept the story pretty much as written in the post, with a slight twist: I decided that the mother had killed the child while in a deep depression, and the father killed her when he found out, and tried to hide her body. When it became obvious that he wouldn’t be able to get away with it for long, he shot himself.

The adventure started with a weird local news story about a large number of mutilated animals in the area, which attracted our paranormal investigators quite nicely. They spent a significant amount of time gathering information before venturing to the house, and had some strong suspicions of what was going on by the time it got dark. They thought about waiting until the morning, but they figured that they might not find any trace of anything supernatural there during daylight hours. Also, they had noticed that the animals that were found mutilated were getting larger; this was of concern because it’s not unusual to see a large number of very young children wandering the streets there after dark in real life, and they might be the next victims.

So, they broke into the house and searched it for the ghostly anchors to destroy. I trotted out every creepy haunted house trope I could, mixed with the characters of the three spirits still trapped in the house. The mother, with fingers made of knives, would attack out of the walls, where her husband had tried to hide her dismembered body. The father, with his axe, did his best to scare the characters out of the house so as not to wake the mother to her murderous work. And the child’s spirit was still in the ice chest in the basement, shouting out freezing cold and abject terror to anyone who got near.

Mixed with that, I included a few time slip moments to show them bits and pieces of the story, and they were able to figure out that it was the mother’s ghost doing the killing and dismembering of the animals, and the father’s ghost who would hunt her down and bring her back. The extra attention and belief garnered by the Internet story, bolstered by the fact the fear the killings and sightings were producing, was making her stronger and able to range farther afield.

They found her paper-wrapped heart in the walls after a few terrible encounters with her, and pierced it with cold iron to sever the anchor. They found the child’s toy horse in the ice chest, amid a storm of ice and fear, and burned it to free him. When that was done, the father’s ghost appeared to them in the kitchen, said, “Thank you. Now I go,” and walked out the back door into Hell.

So we wrapped it up in one evening. And it worked. A couple of the players mentioned that they found the adventure creepy and disturbing, and the grounding in the familiar (Winnipeg, the weather, the abandoned house descriptions, etc.) made it actually scary at a couple of points.

I am so glad I ran it. I am so glad I didn’t just pitch the whole thing. I had so much fun.

There’s going to be a next adventure. Not sure just when, because we’re moving into holiday season, and social commitments start to pile up for all of us. But there’s going to be a next adventure. It’s going to be a one-night episode, too, because that worked, and it’s going to be set in Winnipeg, because that works.

Thanks to my players for bearing with me through the long lead up to this game. I hope you’re in for the next one, too.