attacks of opportunity

Jason Lutes brought the prototype of his awesome pulp adventure board game Thrilling Tales of Adventure over for our playtest Friday session this week. This is the second time I've played this game, and it is surely awesome.



Thrilling Tales features a mechanic where you simultaneously play a globetrotting pulp hero solving plots for heroism points AND a nefarious villain, setting up plots and collecting villainy points for foiling the other players.

Specifically, this week we got to test what happens when one of the players makes a runaway villain victory. I almost immediately had 3 nefarious plots in play. This totally stalled the action of my own hero, but racked up villainy points for me so that after several rounds I was revealed as the arch villain.

I turned over my villain card to reveal that I was actually Malevola, the Queen of Mars. My War machines quickly levelled Los Angeles. Brandon, playing the Blue Falcon, Intrepid Aviatrix, tried to break into my Sky Ark in the jungles of East Asia, but a Martian spy probe stymied his attempt and I levelled Hong Kong.



Next, I relocated the Ark to England. The Reaper (Nocturnal Crime Fighter) and Sgt. Cody of the RCMP were held up by Time Pirates crossing the English Channel, and it looked like I would have London for the win. On the last turn, however, the Reaper and Cody got to England to deactivate my force field. The Blue Falcon used a combination of her plane and some train tickets to get to England and force a confrontation. Even so, the advantage was with me, until Brandon pulled the Queen of Venus out of his hand for a surprise K.O.

However, the best part of the afternoon was when Jason offered to leave his prototype with us! He is currently going to Vermont for a year, and has a new version almost complete. We will be playing this as many times as we can in the months to come.

This is the second time I've played this game, and even in prototype it plays a lot better than many big ticket American-style boardgames I've played. I'm looking forward to playing it again next week!

Labels: actual play, playtest, trhilling tales of adventure

Posted by Unknown at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments

You know, we're doing all this great gaming, and we have a gaming blog, but we're not blogging about our gaming on our blog. We've had some really get-down-and-funky awesome gaming moments over the last year, and we should talk about them here. I'm going to make a quick digest of some of the discussions we've had about our games elsewhere.

Our group typically plays 5-6 sessions of a single game before we switch game system and mechanics. Three switches ago, John ran his Shadow of Yesterday variant Tales from the Aether, a science fantasy game with echoes of Barsoom. Philaros posted this AP of part of our series (The Thought Lords of Mars, by monicker).

We had such a good time playing Thought Lords, that the group prevailed on me to run a follow up called The Jovian Enigma. I wrote this short AP report on the Forge to highlight one twist I introduced into the game, running bringing down the pain as a dungeon crawl. A more technical discussion can be found here.

We also created a heap of new secrets and keys for our game. I do not have the character sheets handy, but I should be able to post some of them in the comments later.

Labels: actual play, TSOY

Posted by Unknown at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments

Last week I ran Magicians of England Playtest #2 with Pat and Phil. Magicians of England has been previously discussed here. I was trying out a new, more streamlined plot twist mechanic, which worked out pretty well, and we also solved some of my problems with how to incorporate magic, which was awesome. I’ve included mechanics notes in square brackets.

Pat played retired Colonel Eustace Beerbellows, renowned war hero and eccentric quack whose ambition is to become more rich and famous. Phil played Byron Burns, idealist poet and champion of the common folk. I played Marcus Beauthorpe, wealthy book collector who seeks to cure his obesity through magic.

We also had to formulate some theories about magic, to wit: Magic must be concentrated to work, Magic can be done with a rare flower from the forest, and using Magic may incur the wrath of the faeries.

Pat set the first scene with Col. Beerbellows vigorously directing two lackeys to dig up the soil in the Oxford public park while Byron Burns looks on from the window of the library. A group of constables appears on horseback demanding to know what is going on [plot twist!]. Pat creates a character – the chief of the constables, who also turns out to be a former member of his regiment, and wins the plot twist, narrating how the constables chip in and help Beerbellows deface a public park for Magic and the Empire!

Phil set scene 2, and chose to have his character trekking through the woods in search of the rare flower (Q. Arcanthus) that is known to have magical properties. As a plot twist, I threw in that Wilhemmena (one of Beerbellows’ lackeys) was following him with intent of stealing his notes so Beerbellows could find the flower for himself. At that moment, a well-dressed gentleman appears and begins questioning an astonished Byron as to his activities. As an additional plot twist, Phil throws in that the man is indeed a faerie, and he intends to steal away both the flower and its possessor. After some bidding over the resolution of this plot twist, it is decided that the faerie may only steal a person away if that person has found the magical Q. Arcanthus, so the faerie (now named Lucien), who has that very flower in his lapel, offers it to Byron, who takes the bait. It also emerges that Lucien is quite a powerful magician, but his Magic rarely works as intended. The other plot twist is resolved with Wilhelmmena returning to report these events to Beerbellows. In the “tying up loose ends” phase, Pat narrates that Beerbellows will be spending some time at the police station explaining himself to the constabulary.

Scene 3 is mine, so I narrate that as Marcus is tending his garden, Byron and the Faerie appear from nowhere. There’s quite a bit of dialog and back-and-forth from which it emerges that the faerie believes this house is actually his own, with some humor as Lucien and Marcus both attempt to invite one another into the same home for tea. The dialog winds around as it’s clear that no one is exactly sure what should happen next in the scene, so someone interrupts and makes the situation into a plot twist, stating that Lucien is minded to disappear to the faerie realm and take the house with him. There was a cool moment in here when Pat spent some chips to narrate a few things about Faeries into the world, that they consider all of England their property, and that they prefer to alter the world to match their opinions (by magic) rather than change their opinions (that’s not how he put it, that’s the best way I can find to phrase it).

Now that the plot twist is set up, Phil decided to resolve it, stating that Byron, who has fulfilled the requirements for Magic, is going to use a spell from his notebook to reveal the true owner of the house. After some bidding he succeeds, but Pat latches onto the risk “incur the wrath of the faeries”, to narrate that both Marcus and Byron have won a bitter enemy in Lucien.

This seemed to be a good point to wrap things up. Everyone agreed that the plot twists worked well, but that Magic needed to be more streamlined. We decided to meet up and continue this storyline, and see how it goes with one more person.

NOTE The playtest packet is almost ready. I am doing some final editing tonite, so I should have rules ready for people to play with themselves very soon. Please let me know if you have a group who are willing to try this out, and I will send you a copy of the rules as they currently stand.

Labels: actual play, magicians of england, playtest

Posted by Unknown at 7:19 PM | Permalink | Comments

Brandon beat me to it!

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=16975.0

Labels: actual play

Posted by John Harper at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments

It's 2 am and I can't sleep, so this is the perfect time to write up the first playtest of Magicians (albeit without notes, which are in my office).

The mechanic I want to highlight for this write up is the plot obstacle mechanic. My experience with un-refereed games (i.e. Universalis) is that plot quickly runs away into random land with little chance of any really satisfying completion.

To fight this tendency, during a scene in Magicians, players can narrate an obstacle (originally called an adversity). Once there are one or more obstacles, players can attempt to remove an obstacle. Once there are no obstacles left, the scene ends. See below for how this worked in practice.

Again, this is without notes, so bear with me.

SCENE I - Rainy Street Oxford.

John suggested that we make a rule limiting obstacles per scene to three. All agreed.

My character (Winthrop "Soddy" Todd, a weedy though cunning fellow) was chosen as protagonist. This means that I narrate the scene set up and that the scene is about my character's goals.

Soddy approached a door in the darkened street. He tries the door finding it locked. The person narrating the door being locked added that this would be an obstacle. I jumped in and narrated that Soddy finds a key under the mat, attempting to remove the obstacle.

When an obstacle is confronted in this way, it is always removed from the game. The goal of the ensuing resolution round is to determine the results of the attempt. There was a bidding round which John won. John narrated that in fact, the door swung open at a touch BUT that a huge mastiff guarded the way. He also added that the house belonged to his character Mortimer (a rather dull member of the nobility, obsessed with newspapers). The mastiff was added as an obstacle.

This illustrates a useful part of the game - the player who wins the narration of an obstacle resolution can add another obstacle. It's a way of saying "I don't want the scene to end yet."

It was also added (I believe by John as well), that the Mastiff was not a real dog, but rather a faeries agent in disguise - something that's sure to come up in later sessions.

I immediately jumped in to resolve this second obstacle. Having player characters does seem to draw you into the action - another thing that I like. My character, being rather intelligent, had the foresight to bring a packet of fish and chips. At this point, Gabe narrated the entrance of his character, the somewhat comical Dr. Nott, and expert on bookshelves and the history of spoons. The two of us rather inadequately tried to bribe the dog with food.

In the ensuing bidding war, several outcomes were suggested, including serious injury to Soddy. Nobody seemed to think that Soddy should be allowed to get by unscathed. I have considered requiring players to narrate getting past an obstacle unscathed when they are controlling a player character, as it encourages the others to bid for narrative control of the results and make things more interesting.

In the end, however, the mastiff was called off by the cook, Orkgrrrl's character. Her character, whose improbably Welsh name I cannot remember without my notes, is a cunning chef with a book of magical recipes and a plan to influence parliament using magical scones.

Scene I was a fairly dull scene, but served to help everyone get their feet wet and establish some hooks for the next scene.

Labels: actual play, magicians of england, playtest

Posted by Unknown at 2:19 AM | Permalink | Comments