Endgamex
Back to actual games. After my shopping, I headed over to my first game.
Sunday, 10:00. Election Day (Mike Olson). Getting up at ten in the morning on the third day of a con can be rough (hello, NPL business meeting!), so there are typically a lot of dead games. The makeup of this game ended up being pretty eclectic. I'd preregistered, and I think only one other person (maybe two) signed up on the day of. But our party got bulked up by two GMs, who had nobody show up for their games. And a little bit after we started, we got added another player who'd come for a game run by one of the GMs folded into our game. (One GM and one player apparently weren't enough for the game he'd planned, so we welcomed her into our game.
Election Day was an adventure run in Spirit of the Sword, a fantasy hack of Spirit of the Century. Century is a pretty awesome game designed for pulp adventures. The mechanics are pretty simple, and they are designed to have players do awesome things with relative ease. (Compare that to players trying to duplicate Legolas's moves using AD&D 3.5.)
The key to Century, though, is something called aspects. For your character, these are the things that make your characters characters. The things that are special about them, their strengths and weaknesses, the things they always have to run back into the burning building to save. Other parts of the games have aspects too, your enemies, your environment, etc. And the game then reduces down to the cool parts of you character interacting with the cool parts of your enemies and the scene, and the rest of the rules are really just a formality.
Spirit of the Sword, as I said, is a hack on this system. Century is set in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the Western world (or a Western perspective on "exotic" or "oriental" locales). Sword has a detailed fantasy setting and several changes to skills and such to make it appropriate to the new world. It also comes with a magic system, that I got a taste of. (Olson has been posting his information on the hack on his website.)
Anyway, the game started with an overview of the world and the characters. I chose Yves, the "Spellcasting Thief" Olson posted PDF files of the character sheets, but the links are broken right now. (I still have my copy with me, though.) In addition to the technical sheet, we also got a page with our characters' backgrounds broken into five phases: Origins, Calling, Goals, People, and Adventure. That last one was left blank, and we started our game by having each player devise and then roleplay their character's latest escapade. For Yves, I said that she infiltrate the "Pepperers' Guild" and stole a huge box of very fine pepper. After our adventure, we added two aspects to the five already given us; Yves ended up with:
It was essentially an escort mission. This ragtag bunch of adventurers had been hired to protect a huge cartload of money in the most dangerous part of town for complicated political reasons that need not be described here. We would, of course, be ambushed and then forced to recover the lost money. At the end, there was a giant monster.
Unfortunately, there really wasn't a place for a thief in this mission, especially after I'd taken Yves to a place where she was really more into hiding and taking things in the dark than guarding something with a whole bunch of people. Sure, she knew how to cast magic missile, but she was much more apt to cast Darkness isntead.
When the first battle was joined, Yves hid, and . . . then I was stuck. I couldn't really tell what the character would do. Attacking didn't feel right; I'd hidden nearly perfectly. Leaving that safety seemed against character. What I was really itching to do was betray the party-after all, I was a thief who was pretty much invisible at the moment and I had a huge sack of other people's money on my back. My instinct was just to run off and see what happened. Why I didn't was a little complicated.
For one thing, the adventure didn't really seem laid out that way. Having one character disappear with the loot would send things going a little crazy. Still, with most of the other people at the table, I probably would've felt safe doing it. However, one player- the one who'd come to play a different game-made thigns different. She hadn't played a tabletop RPG before, a fact that I'd picked up on pretty early and that she confirmed afterward. So, I just didn't feel right changing the game so drastically when she was still getting used to things. And she was having a great time, dominating the swordplay of the main battle. I felt better with her driving the adventure than with me doing it, so I laid off. I kept looking for a hook to get Yves into the story, but it didn't really gel.
Olson addressed this and other things in his own writeup. Overall, the adventure felt a bit more traditional than I expceted, but that might simply be because the size of the group and the number of enemies in the ambush meant that a lot of time was dedicated to fighting one group of guys (while, you know, Yves hid in the dark). Still, things worked out pretty well, and I know I would've enjoyed the fighting more if I'd been some sort of battle-oriented mage or something.
Still More Shopping. My last stop in the dealer room. At about this time, ojouchan called, and she was lonely. I felt absolutely terrible for leaving without her. I'd asked her the night before whether she wanted to come, but she demurred because she thought she might have to do some work. Then, when I left I woke her up to kiss her goodbye and asked if she wanted to come. Or I thought I did. It turns out, she didn't really wake up until a few minutes after I'd left. Feelign like an idiot, I picked up two games for her, a Killer Bunnies expansion (which turned out to be unplayable-making me feel even idioter) and Gloom, which we haven't played yet but which looks like a lot of fun.
And then, I finally remembered that I still needed dice. But this time, I actually did, I picked up two sets of black "baby dice," which were cheap and generally very nice (though the numbers on the icosahedron are a bit hard to read. And quickly it was off to my next game.
Sunday 3:00. The Council of Elders Has Convened . . . (Alejandro Jose Gervasio Duarte). This was a playtest of a game Alex is working on called Unwritten. (There's a development blog, but it's kind of hard to follow and doesn't give much concrete information on the game itself.) I'd describe it as a mix between In a Wicked Age and Shock. Since the game is still being designed, everything I say here is, of course, subject to change. In fact, Alex was making changes over the course of the weekend. Still, this is what the game was like when i played it.
First, players work to create a few "prompts" that are the seeds of the story, much like the an oracle in IAWA. Then one player frames a scene with or about their character, picking a prompt for inspiration. This player also picks a question off of his character sheet. These questions reflect a Hero's Journey-like character arc, and each one is designed to make the player either learn more about their character or change something about their character they already knew.
After one player (the primary player) sets the scene, the other players begin narrating everything that happens other than the primary character's protagonist. The goal for these players is to drive the scene to conflict. More specifically, it's to offer the primary player a conflict that they find particularly interesting. When the player has accepted a conflict, dice are rolled to determine the what happens in the scene, what happens in the story, and what happens to the character. The resolution of the conflict is then narrated, and the character sheet is modified, and story prompts are added or changed.
We based our story off of the rough guideline Alex had provided in the description of the game:The council of elders has convened. They have decided to send out a task force to enforce the new law. You are that task force. You will be armed with a council wizard, a guardian, a spokesman, and a silent agent. The new law: complete submission.
We were legendary heroes resurrected to quash a resistance, though we did not know the nature of it. We represented the archetypal RPG party-mage, fighter, cleric, and rogue-though we differing views of the present conflict.
We didn't get through a full game (or even a half game). The system is a bit finicky, and it takes a little while to get used to. In a previous game, Alex said he'd been able to get things going much faster, and it may simply be that the amount of time the game takes grows drastically as the number of new players rises. Still, I enjoyed the game. It did a great job of spurring dramatic changes in the world and in the characters using a pretty spare set of rules. I'm going to be keeping an eye on this one as it gets closer to production.
Dinner. I ate dinner with the same co-supperers as I had the previous two evenings. Colin was in a bit of a hurry, so we ate at the lobby restaurant of the next-door hotel. It turned out that it's a decent place to get a meal, without the crowd of the con hotel.
Sunday, Eightish. Inspectres Pickup Game (joshroby). There was only one game that looked interesting to me on Sunday night, Colin's Spirit of the Force. Many others agreed, which meant that the game was full, but also that there were a lot of people looking for a game. joshroby decided that he was too tired to play Inspectres, but he was coherent enough to run it. So a bunch of us gathered for another game.
In our first case, we had to help a child that had been transformed into a huge tentacle creature at the Beverly Hills City Hall. Plotwise, it was relatively straightforward. Our second case involved a mysterious something at a residential development, cultists, and a glowing door through space and time. But the highlight of the night happened in the first case and was unrelated to the plot. Alex (the GM of the Unwritten game) had left the game momentarily to take a phone call. When he returned, he decided that his character, who had been driving to town hall on his own, had gotten lost. So he started calling the other characters on our company cell phones (cell phones that were disastrously malfunctional). Despite having really nothing to do with the case, he called each character in turn for wacky hijinks. And with each call, he got farther and farther away from Bevery Hills. (I think he was close to San Diego by the time he turned around.)
Wrap-Up. After the game was over, many people left. I stuck around to talk with James about IAWA. We discussed how the problems that had plagued Friday's game could have been avoided. Then we went in to kibbitz on the end of Colin's Spirit of the Force before most of his players left. Morgan told us the fantastic details of his own Spirit of the Century games, the post-apocalyptic Spirit of the Shattered Earth. With so much Century hacking, Colin joked about running the most inconceivable variation and seeing who would want to play: Spirit of the Tax Code and Spirit of My Little Pony. Sadly, these two options may be too viable, as I later demonstrated.
And that's it, and I think it's enough. The next one's during Labor Day weekend. I currently plan on going, but I'm probably going to hold off on deciding. That's a big weekend for people doing stuff.
Sunday, 10:00. Election Day (Mike Olson). Getting up at ten in the morning on the third day of a con can be rough (hello, NPL business meeting!), so there are typically a lot of dead games. The makeup of this game ended up being pretty eclectic. I'd preregistered, and I think only one other person (maybe two) signed up on the day of. But our party got bulked up by two GMs, who had nobody show up for their games. And a little bit after we started, we got added another player who'd come for a game run by one of the GMs folded into our game. (One GM and one player apparently weren't enough for the game he'd planned, so we welcomed her into our game.
Election Day was an adventure run in Spirit of the Sword, a fantasy hack of Spirit of the Century. Century is a pretty awesome game designed for pulp adventures. The mechanics are pretty simple, and they are designed to have players do awesome things with relative ease. (Compare that to players trying to duplicate Legolas's moves using AD&D 3.5.)
The key to Century, though, is something called aspects. For your character, these are the things that make your characters characters. The things that are special about them, their strengths and weaknesses, the things they always have to run back into the burning building to save. Other parts of the games have aspects too, your enemies, your environment, etc. And the game then reduces down to the cool parts of you character interacting with the cool parts of your enemies and the scene, and the rest of the rules are really just a formality.
Spirit of the Sword, as I said, is a hack on this system. Century is set in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the Western world (or a Western perspective on "exotic" or "oriental" locales). Sword has a detailed fantasy setting and several changes to skills and such to make it appropriate to the new world. It also comes with a magic system, that I got a taste of. (Olson has been posting his information on the hack on his website.)
Anyway, the game started with an overview of the world and the characters. I chose Yves, the "Spellcasting Thief" Olson posted PDF files of the character sheets, but the links are broken right now. (I still have my copy with me, though.) In addition to the technical sheet, we also got a page with our characters' backgrounds broken into five phases: Origins, Calling, Goals, People, and Adventure. That last one was left blank, and we started our game by having each player devise and then roleplay their character's latest escapade. For Yves, I said that she infiltrate the "Pepperers' Guild" and stole a huge box of very fine pepper. After our adventure, we added two aspects to the five already given us; Yves ended up with:
- Member of the Thieves' Guild
- Spell and Shadow
- "I've got an angle."
- Flashing Eyes
- Squirrel the Fence [that's a seller of stolen goods named "Squirrel"]
- Box of hot, hot pepper
- When the going gets tough, the tough hide in the dark
It was essentially an escort mission. This ragtag bunch of adventurers had been hired to protect a huge cartload of money in the most dangerous part of town for complicated political reasons that need not be described here. We would, of course, be ambushed and then forced to recover the lost money. At the end, there was a giant monster.
Unfortunately, there really wasn't a place for a thief in this mission, especially after I'd taken Yves to a place where she was really more into hiding and taking things in the dark than guarding something with a whole bunch of people. Sure, she knew how to cast magic missile, but she was much more apt to cast Darkness isntead.
When the first battle was joined, Yves hid, and . . . then I was stuck. I couldn't really tell what the character would do. Attacking didn't feel right; I'd hidden nearly perfectly. Leaving that safety seemed against character. What I was really itching to do was betray the party-after all, I was a thief who was pretty much invisible at the moment and I had a huge sack of other people's money on my back. My instinct was just to run off and see what happened. Why I didn't was a little complicated.
For one thing, the adventure didn't really seem laid out that way. Having one character disappear with the loot would send things going a little crazy. Still, with most of the other people at the table, I probably would've felt safe doing it. However, one player- the one who'd come to play a different game-made thigns different. She hadn't played a tabletop RPG before, a fact that I'd picked up on pretty early and that she confirmed afterward. So, I just didn't feel right changing the game so drastically when she was still getting used to things. And she was having a great time, dominating the swordplay of the main battle. I felt better with her driving the adventure than with me doing it, so I laid off. I kept looking for a hook to get Yves into the story, but it didn't really gel.
Olson addressed this and other things in his own writeup. Overall, the adventure felt a bit more traditional than I expceted, but that might simply be because the size of the group and the number of enemies in the ambush meant that a lot of time was dedicated to fighting one group of guys (while, you know, Yves hid in the dark). Still, things worked out pretty well, and I know I would've enjoyed the fighting more if I'd been some sort of battle-oriented mage or something.
Still More Shopping. My last stop in the dealer room. At about this time, ojouchan called, and she was lonely. I felt absolutely terrible for leaving without her. I'd asked her the night before whether she wanted to come, but she demurred because she thought she might have to do some work. Then, when I left I woke her up to kiss her goodbye and asked if she wanted to come. Or I thought I did. It turns out, she didn't really wake up until a few minutes after I'd left. Feelign like an idiot, I picked up two games for her, a Killer Bunnies expansion (which turned out to be unplayable-making me feel even idioter) and Gloom, which we haven't played yet but which looks like a lot of fun.
And then, I finally remembered that I still needed dice. But this time, I actually did, I picked up two sets of black "baby dice," which were cheap and generally very nice (though the numbers on the icosahedron are a bit hard to read. And quickly it was off to my next game.
Sunday 3:00. The Council of Elders Has Convened . . . (Alejandro Jose Gervasio Duarte). This was a playtest of a game Alex is working on called Unwritten. (There's a development blog, but it's kind of hard to follow and doesn't give much concrete information on the game itself.) I'd describe it as a mix between In a Wicked Age and Shock. Since the game is still being designed, everything I say here is, of course, subject to change. In fact, Alex was making changes over the course of the weekend. Still, this is what the game was like when i played it.
First, players work to create a few "prompts" that are the seeds of the story, much like the an oracle in IAWA. Then one player frames a scene with or about their character, picking a prompt for inspiration. This player also picks a question off of his character sheet. These questions reflect a Hero's Journey-like character arc, and each one is designed to make the player either learn more about their character or change something about their character they already knew.
After one player (the primary player) sets the scene, the other players begin narrating everything that happens other than the primary character's protagonist. The goal for these players is to drive the scene to conflict. More specifically, it's to offer the primary player a conflict that they find particularly interesting. When the player has accepted a conflict, dice are rolled to determine the what happens in the scene, what happens in the story, and what happens to the character. The resolution of the conflict is then narrated, and the character sheet is modified, and story prompts are added or changed.
We based our story off of the rough guideline Alex had provided in the description of the game:The council of elders has convened. They have decided to send out a task force to enforce the new law. You are that task force. You will be armed with a council wizard, a guardian, a spokesman, and a silent agent. The new law: complete submission.
We were legendary heroes resurrected to quash a resistance, though we did not know the nature of it. We represented the archetypal RPG party-mage, fighter, cleric, and rogue-though we differing views of the present conflict.
We didn't get through a full game (or even a half game). The system is a bit finicky, and it takes a little while to get used to. In a previous game, Alex said he'd been able to get things going much faster, and it may simply be that the amount of time the game takes grows drastically as the number of new players rises. Still, I enjoyed the game. It did a great job of spurring dramatic changes in the world and in the characters using a pretty spare set of rules. I'm going to be keeping an eye on this one as it gets closer to production.
Dinner. I ate dinner with the same co-supperers as I had the previous two evenings. Colin was in a bit of a hurry, so we ate at the lobby restaurant of the next-door hotel. It turned out that it's a decent place to get a meal, without the crowd of the con hotel.
Sunday, Eightish. Inspectres Pickup Game (joshroby). There was only one game that looked interesting to me on Sunday night, Colin's Spirit of the Force. Many others agreed, which meant that the game was full, but also that there were a lot of people looking for a game. joshroby decided that he was too tired to play Inspectres, but he was coherent enough to run it. So a bunch of us gathered for another game.
In our first case, we had to help a child that had been transformed into a huge tentacle creature at the Beverly Hills City Hall. Plotwise, it was relatively straightforward. Our second case involved a mysterious something at a residential development, cultists, and a glowing door through space and time. But the highlight of the night happened in the first case and was unrelated to the plot. Alex (the GM of the Unwritten game) had left the game momentarily to take a phone call. When he returned, he decided that his character, who had been driving to town hall on his own, had gotten lost. So he started calling the other characters on our company cell phones (cell phones that were disastrously malfunctional). Despite having really nothing to do with the case, he called each character in turn for wacky hijinks. And with each call, he got farther and farther away from Bevery Hills. (I think he was close to San Diego by the time he turned around.)
Wrap-Up. After the game was over, many people left. I stuck around to talk with James about IAWA. We discussed how the problems that had plagued Friday's game could have been avoided. Then we went in to kibbitz on the end of Colin's Spirit of the Force before most of his players left. Morgan told us the fantastic details of his own Spirit of the Century games, the post-apocalyptic Spirit of the Shattered Earth. With so much Century hacking, Colin joked about running the most inconceivable variation and seeing who would want to play: Spirit of the Tax Code and Spirit of My Little Pony. Sadly, these two options may be too viable, as I later demonstrated.
And that's it, and I think it's enough. The next one's during Labor Day weekend. I currently plan on going, but I'm probably going to hold off on deciding. That's a big weekend for people doing stuff.