KaijuFest was supposed to be a LARP about a group of actors and film makers getting together to make a kaiju movie. I wasn't going because I had a dance show on the Saturday evening, so I didn't look into it too closely. However, thanks to the lockdown, both KaijuFest and the dance show were cancelled, and the organisers came up with online alternatives. In the case of the dance show that was a YouTube livestream with videos of dancers and other performers. In the case of KaijuFest it was...RadioFest.
Rather than the full weekend that KaijuFest would have been, each RadioFest event lasts only four hours. A team of actors, writers and foley artists get together to produce a radio drama. The script is unfinished, the props are missing, nobody has been cast and corporate sponsorship rears its ugly head, but somehow it has to get done.
Three RadioFest events have already run, with three more to come, each with a different starting script. I signed up for event 3 with the title "I, Madman", joining the writers as Yolanda Hall, a writer of sleazy horror novels. The event began with everyone gathering in the green room for introductions, and then we split off into our respective groups.
My fellow writers were Matthew Scattergood, a writer of romance novels, and Vyron Savage, a writer of detective novels. We were given our outline script, a story about a man who finds a way to see the future and then sees his own death. Matthew wanted the script to be an exploration of one soul's descent into madness. Vyron wanted lots of hard boiled detective action. I wanted lots of horrible murder, and if at all possible, a love interest. Amazingly enough, we actually gelled pretty well in the end, besides an argument about whether or not we should have a happy ending.
Now and then one of the actors dropped into our room to ask questions and make requests. Request 1, for some more female characters, we were able to immediately grant, having already changed the lead character's name from John to Vivienne. A later request proved more problematic. The initial script started out in a gentleman's club, but Vyron thought it should be set in a dive bar on the mean streets of Chicago, and I heartily agreed. However, the actors had all been practicing their RP accents, and insisted they couldn't possibly do Chicago. The compromise was that it was now set in a pub in the east end of London - although the RP accents remained.
The script progressed through various iterations as we met with both actors and foley artists, and found a way to name drop our sponsor's product. And finally, we were ready to record.
Recording was done largely in one take, with occasional interruptions from the writers. ("When we said we wanted crowd noises, we didn't literally want you to say rhubarb!") And if the technology worked, the end result should have been recorded so we can all listen to it again.
With LARP off the table for at least the next couple of months, games like this are as close as we're going to get, and the organisers have done a superb job with RadioFest. I've signed up for event 6 to play Yolanda Hall again, and while all the writer slots are filled for event 5, I'm very tempted to give the foley artist game a try. While there's still a little room for improvement, the organisers are actively seeking feedback to make this the best game they can, and the fact they've pulled it together in such a short space of time is spectacular.
Eventually we'll all be allowed out again, and LARP can resume, but I hope online events like this will continue all the same.
Monday 30 March 2020
Sunday 29 March 2020
Running Delta Green: Gathering the Magic
Time for another game of Delta Green, and this time I decided to try out another of Jake "ChiefMcCLane" Cook's scenarios: Gathering the Magic.
The team met up with Agent Chung again, who seemed about as pleased to see them as they were to see her, reminding them of how she'd had to cover up the murder of the professor in the haunted house. She had a new assignment for them though. A college student had bought a book from a honeytrap website run by the Program. Their job was to find out if there was anything unnatural going on or if he was just a teenage edgelord trying to be cool. They were supplied with a dummy book, a UPS uniform and a van.
Rather than head straight there, Avocado did some research. They learned that their subject, Timothy Michaels, was a computer science student at Princeton, and appeared to be a mega nerd. He lived with his parents rather than on campus. His browser history consisted largely of visiting Reddit, where he was a member of /r/atheism, /r/mtg/ and other nerd things. Nothing flagged up as suspicious in his background. The only out of the ordinary thing was a recent hospital admission.
It was time to pay a visit. Crusty, with his good HUMINT skills, was chosen to make the delivery, and managed to convince Timothy to come out to the van for a chat. He was quite willing to talk, and explained that he had to take the book to the Magic: The Gathering tournament he was going to the following evening. He seemed a bit confused about why, but mentioned that he'd been taken to the hospital for amnesia, although he was sure he was fine now.
Clearly Timothy was not a problem, but someone at the Magic tournament probably was. Time to check out the Friendly Local Game Shop.
It was early evening when they arrived, and games were in full swing. They were welcomed in by the owner, who enthusiastically showed them around. Avocado took a particular interest in both the X-Wing miniatures and the very high quality security cameras.
He told them it was D&D night, and when asked if it was only D&D, assured them that they had both kinds of roleplaying there - D&D and Pathfinder. Yu-Gi-Oh was on Tuesdays, and Friday was the magic tournament. Unfortunately he couldn't invite them to play as it was final and everything was already set. Who was the favourite to win? That would be David Kaley.
They left the shop and did some more research. The shop owner checked out, having been running the place for ten years. The tournament checked out too - an official Magic Grand Prix with a $35,000 prize and guest referees brought in specially.
David Kaley, on the other hand, was a fake. Crusty and Avocado between them tracked down his real identity: Daniel Thompson. Running a few checks they found a couple of tangentially related police reports, one about his father who was missing and one about a possible marijuana growhouse at his address that had never been followed up on.
They decided to pay Daniel a visit. It was dark by the time they arrived, but they could still see that there was less snow on one side of the roof than the other. Avocado had a sudden brainwave.
"That's not a growhouse. That's a server farm."
Buzz got out his infra-red camera and noticed that while the outside of the house appeared to be in darkness, through the camera it was brightly lit up. There had to be infra-red emitters all over the place, probably from security cameras with night vision.
Nobody answered the door when they knocked, and Avocado opened the door to a hideous sight - empty pizza boxes and takeaway cartons as far as the eye could see, an appalling stink of rotten food, and something moving in the layers of filth. Bones threw up immediately.
Crusty did a sweep of the house, finding the remains of a dead body on the dining table, a server farm in the office, and a dead german shepherd in the bedroom. No sign of Daniel. A more systematic search located some eldritch looking carvings of interlocking circles on the dining table, and a gaming rig and a bucket of silver jewellery on the table in the bedroom.
Avocado investigated the technology, easily identifying a crypto-currency mining operation. He shut down the security and took a look at the cameras. Daniel had been here shortly before they arrived, watching an episode of Star Trek TOS and eating a pizza. Looking further back through the archives he noticed something strange: Daniel appeared to have arrived at the house significantly more frequently than he'd left it.
There was something strange about one wall of the office. A slight shimmer. In the interests of science, Buzz got out a pencil and poked it. The pencil went straight through. Avocado tried with an endoscope, and saw that on the other side of the wall there appeared to be a library.
Everyone piled through.
They were in a room full of very old books, that looked like they weren't often disturbed. However, they had been disturbed, and a dust-free patch showed where something had recently been removed. There was no sign of Daniel, so they had a look at the card catalogue and concluded that the missing book was one called Livre D'Ivon.
Avocado checked his GPS to see where they were. Two states away, in Northampton, Massachusets. Buzz was very excited. The time on their phones suggested that they had travelled pretty much instantly. With an atomic clock he could determine exactly how fast they had travelled.
The portal they had come through could not be found, however, and they still hadn't got hold of Daniel. They called Agent Chung to request a car so they could drive back to Princeton. She was somewhat sarcastic, but did send someone to pick them up. They quietly exited Smith College, doing their best to look inconspicious despite being four men currently disguised as nerds trying to sneak out of a women's college.
A librarian met them, and quickly explained that she would not be driving them back. She was just dropping off the car for them. She got out, leaving them the key, and they began the long drive back to Princeton.
It was past midnight when they got back, but rather than attempt to sleep (never an easy matter for Crusty) they decided to have another go at finding Daniel. This time he was at home, deeply immersed in a game of Call of Duty. Crusty gave him a punch in the face, and when he reached for a revolver that he had concealed in the piles of junk on the desk, he was immediately shot dead.
Crusty set into motion his next plan, which was to burn down the house, and began sprinkling petrol around the living room. And then they heard a sound. The sound of burning, even though they hadn't set a fire yet.
A living column of flame emerged from the office, and lashed out at Bones with flaming appendages. It missed him, and Avocado grabbed a fire extinguisher to try to stop it, but failed to aim it correctly. Everyone decided it was time to leave the house.
The petrol went up shortly afterwards and the place was rapidly completely ablaze. However, there was still sign of movement in there. The living flame was still present. They called Agent Chung - could she dispatch a friendly fire engine?
A team of fire fighters showed up shortly afterwards and the blaze was quenched. There was no sign of the living flame.
Back home, Crusty decided he really did need to get some therapy this time, but Bones and Buzz had both been intrigued by the things they had seen and decided to do some research, Bones into ifrits once he realised what he'd seen in the house, and Buzz into how Daniel had created the gate. He found answers in a very interesting book.
Avocado, looking for a bit of normality for once, went home, met up with his business partner, and actually did some work.
The team met up with Agent Chung again, who seemed about as pleased to see them as they were to see her, reminding them of how she'd had to cover up the murder of the professor in the haunted house. She had a new assignment for them though. A college student had bought a book from a honeytrap website run by the Program. Their job was to find out if there was anything unnatural going on or if he was just a teenage edgelord trying to be cool. They were supplied with a dummy book, a UPS uniform and a van.
Rather than head straight there, Avocado did some research. They learned that their subject, Timothy Michaels, was a computer science student at Princeton, and appeared to be a mega nerd. He lived with his parents rather than on campus. His browser history consisted largely of visiting Reddit, where he was a member of /r/atheism, /r/mtg/ and other nerd things. Nothing flagged up as suspicious in his background. The only out of the ordinary thing was a recent hospital admission.
It was time to pay a visit. Crusty, with his good HUMINT skills, was chosen to make the delivery, and managed to convince Timothy to come out to the van for a chat. He was quite willing to talk, and explained that he had to take the book to the Magic: The Gathering tournament he was going to the following evening. He seemed a bit confused about why, but mentioned that he'd been taken to the hospital for amnesia, although he was sure he was fine now.
Clearly Timothy was not a problem, but someone at the Magic tournament probably was. Time to check out the Friendly Local Game Shop.
It was early evening when they arrived, and games were in full swing. They were welcomed in by the owner, who enthusiastically showed them around. Avocado took a particular interest in both the X-Wing miniatures and the very high quality security cameras.
He told them it was D&D night, and when asked if it was only D&D, assured them that they had both kinds of roleplaying there - D&D and Pathfinder. Yu-Gi-Oh was on Tuesdays, and Friday was the magic tournament. Unfortunately he couldn't invite them to play as it was final and everything was already set. Who was the favourite to win? That would be David Kaley.
They left the shop and did some more research. The shop owner checked out, having been running the place for ten years. The tournament checked out too - an official Magic Grand Prix with a $35,000 prize and guest referees brought in specially.
David Kaley, on the other hand, was a fake. Crusty and Avocado between them tracked down his real identity: Daniel Thompson. Running a few checks they found a couple of tangentially related police reports, one about his father who was missing and one about a possible marijuana growhouse at his address that had never been followed up on.
They decided to pay Daniel a visit. It was dark by the time they arrived, but they could still see that there was less snow on one side of the roof than the other. Avocado had a sudden brainwave.
"That's not a growhouse. That's a server farm."
Buzz got out his infra-red camera and noticed that while the outside of the house appeared to be in darkness, through the camera it was brightly lit up. There had to be infra-red emitters all over the place, probably from security cameras with night vision.
Nobody answered the door when they knocked, and Avocado opened the door to a hideous sight - empty pizza boxes and takeaway cartons as far as the eye could see, an appalling stink of rotten food, and something moving in the layers of filth. Bones threw up immediately.
Crusty did a sweep of the house, finding the remains of a dead body on the dining table, a server farm in the office, and a dead german shepherd in the bedroom. No sign of Daniel. A more systematic search located some eldritch looking carvings of interlocking circles on the dining table, and a gaming rig and a bucket of silver jewellery on the table in the bedroom.
Avocado investigated the technology, easily identifying a crypto-currency mining operation. He shut down the security and took a look at the cameras. Daniel had been here shortly before they arrived, watching an episode of Star Trek TOS and eating a pizza. Looking further back through the archives he noticed something strange: Daniel appeared to have arrived at the house significantly more frequently than he'd left it.
There was something strange about one wall of the office. A slight shimmer. In the interests of science, Buzz got out a pencil and poked it. The pencil went straight through. Avocado tried with an endoscope, and saw that on the other side of the wall there appeared to be a library.
Everyone piled through.
They were in a room full of very old books, that looked like they weren't often disturbed. However, they had been disturbed, and a dust-free patch showed where something had recently been removed. There was no sign of Daniel, so they had a look at the card catalogue and concluded that the missing book was one called Livre D'Ivon.
Avocado checked his GPS to see where they were. Two states away, in Northampton, Massachusets. Buzz was very excited. The time on their phones suggested that they had travelled pretty much instantly. With an atomic clock he could determine exactly how fast they had travelled.
The portal they had come through could not be found, however, and they still hadn't got hold of Daniel. They called Agent Chung to request a car so they could drive back to Princeton. She was somewhat sarcastic, but did send someone to pick them up. They quietly exited Smith College, doing their best to look inconspicious despite being four men currently disguised as nerds trying to sneak out of a women's college.
A librarian met them, and quickly explained that she would not be driving them back. She was just dropping off the car for them. She got out, leaving them the key, and they began the long drive back to Princeton.
It was past midnight when they got back, but rather than attempt to sleep (never an easy matter for Crusty) they decided to have another go at finding Daniel. This time he was at home, deeply immersed in a game of Call of Duty. Crusty gave him a punch in the face, and when he reached for a revolver that he had concealed in the piles of junk on the desk, he was immediately shot dead.
Crusty set into motion his next plan, which was to burn down the house, and began sprinkling petrol around the living room. And then they heard a sound. The sound of burning, even though they hadn't set a fire yet.
A living column of flame emerged from the office, and lashed out at Bones with flaming appendages. It missed him, and Avocado grabbed a fire extinguisher to try to stop it, but failed to aim it correctly. Everyone decided it was time to leave the house.
The petrol went up shortly afterwards and the place was rapidly completely ablaze. However, there was still sign of movement in there. The living flame was still present. They called Agent Chung - could she dispatch a friendly fire engine?
A team of fire fighters showed up shortly afterwards and the blaze was quenched. There was no sign of the living flame.
Back home, Crusty decided he really did need to get some therapy this time, but Bones and Buzz had both been intrigued by the things they had seen and decided to do some research, Bones into ifrits once he realised what he'd seen in the house, and Buzz into how Daniel had created the gate. He found answers in a very interesting book.
Avocado, looking for a bit of normality for once, went home, met up with his business partner, and actually did some work.
Friday 20 March 2020
Running Delta Green: Black Winter, part 2
The crab man was dead, and in an aquarium it wasn't too hard to dispose of the remains. There was still time for a bit of science though. Bones examined the remains, and noted that the creature's legs were quite spindly compared to the rest of it, and might be more prone to damage. He also attempted to determine sex, but concluded that he really didn't know the sexual dimorphism of mutant crab people. The creature was reclassified from crab man to crab person. There was something disturbingly human about the creature's form, however, and searching the remains located an amalgam filling lodged in its mouth.
They still had the two sleeping men in their foamy cocoons. Avocado suggested attaching one of the radio trackers the aquarium used on seals to one of them and sending him out to sea to see what happened, but Hernandez wasn't entirely happy with what he saw as basically human sacrifice, and in the end they decided to take them both to the medical centre.
The first one woke up easily enough, thrashed about briefly, and raved about a dark watery void and the thing waiting in the ocean. Bones got samples off both of them to run through the testing kits. The second woke up in a similar state, but once they had both calmed down a bit, Avocado was able to get some information out of them. Both were overweight, and had put more weight on recently. Neither of them had eaten anything out of the ordinary recently, but both said it had seemed like a good idea to eat a lot.
It was starting to get light, and the medical centre staff were arriving. Bones took the opportunity to get his arm seen to, making up an excuse for the wound. None of the team had had any sleep. Once they were away from the medical centre, Crusty handed out meth.
Crusty wanted to pay another visit to the dam. Hernandez drove him back upstream, and he talked to the chief engineer, and learned it was going to take at least a month before they were going to get the dam in anything resembling working order and the turbines back on.
Bones checked the completed tests on Steve and Jeff. Both negative for whatever it was the test was for. He also serruptitiously tested himself, given how badly the crab man had wounded him.
Avocado had a theory. Something was causing people to eat more to fatten them up for use as food. The three people who'd been attacked rather than disappearing had all been rather more athletic than the typical resident of Bear Point. He decided to have another talk with them.
The two women chatted happily enough. They mentioned that they sometimes got accused of being lesbians because they chose to share a house. They weren't, but they weren't going to let homophobia stop them living together. James mentioned that people thought he was a bit weird for living on the edge of town and had tried to persuade him to move to the centre, but he liked it out there, and his house was one of the few that wasn't flooded, so who was laughing now?
Hernandez dropped off Crusty with the others, but not long afterwards radioed them to let them know a shipping container of supplies had come in, and he thought it might have a false back because it seemed to be smaller on the inside. This must be the equipment that Agent Pakrati had promised them.
Buzz's knowledge of physics and engineering confirmed that there was a false back, and where the door release mechanism was likely to be. Avocado soon had it open and they passed around the weapons inside. Struggling to use a shotgun since the previous night's injury, Bones took the submachine gun, while Crusty took ownership of the grenade launcher.
They needed a plan. The idea that the crab person they'd killed was the only one seemed too good to be true. Hernandez was unhappy with some of the initial plans, which tended towards the 'nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure' end of the scale, but finally they came up with something. The turbines were out of action, and the town was depending on diesel generators for power. New supplies had just come in on the container, and the diesel was being held at the airport for distribution. If they could destroy the diesel dump, they could simultaneously cut off power to the town, making it easier to force an evactuation, and also cause an environmental disaster that probably wouldn't go well for the crab people.
Actually destroying the diesel dump proved something of a challenge. Hernandez suggested getting one of the army engineers from the dam to help, but they didn't want anyone else knowing what was really going on. In the end they waited until nightfall and then deployed Buzz, who had some past experience with artillery, and Crusty, who didn't want to relinquish control of the grenade launcher. There were a few practices with tear gas grenades before switching to explosives. It took a few attempts, but at last the town's entire diesel supply was spreading across the bay while a cloud of tear gas blew towards town.
Then wading through the water came an angry, slightly oily, crab person. Slightly different to the one they'd seen before, with extra legs, huge pincers for hands, and a long tail with a barbed end. Everyone piled back into the Zodiac, and at Crusty's instruction, Hernandez drove it straight at the creature. Avocado and Buzz fired at it, and then the boat smashed into it, bouncing off and throwing everyone around. As Bones fired, the creature snapped its pincers at him, but missed.
Crusty threw a grenade that merely exploded a small column of water. Avocado and Buzz kept firing their shotguns. Bones sprayed bullets from the submachine gun. The creature reached out with its pincers again, this time grabbing hold of Bones and jabbing him with its barbed tail.
But Crusty's grenade finally landed exactly where he wanted it. The explosion right underneath the crab person's body ripped it apart. Bones was dropped into the freezing water, the shock almost knocking him unconscious, but he managed to hold it together long enough for Hernandez to grab him and haul him back into the boat.
They went straight back to the medical centre to get Bones treated for hypothermia. They had decided to blame the fuel explosion and gas cloud on a terrorist attack, and Crusty took up the task of convincing the town that the only option at this point was to evacuate on the supply ship. A tough job, faced with stubborn Alaskans, but combined with the fact they were about to lose power, the environmental disaster meaning they were also going to struggle for food, and Alice at the aquarium being absolutely determined to get her sea otters to safety, they were eventually persuaded and the evacuation began.
The town was duly abandoned, and the agents were able to make their way back to Anchorage, and from there back home. Bones tipped off Delta Green about the three positive tests. He said nothing about the wound he'd taken on his torso that looked very similar to the ones on the three attack victims. Or about the second test he'd administered on himself. The one that came back positive.
They still had the two sleeping men in their foamy cocoons. Avocado suggested attaching one of the radio trackers the aquarium used on seals to one of them and sending him out to sea to see what happened, but Hernandez wasn't entirely happy with what he saw as basically human sacrifice, and in the end they decided to take them both to the medical centre.
The first one woke up easily enough, thrashed about briefly, and raved about a dark watery void and the thing waiting in the ocean. Bones got samples off both of them to run through the testing kits. The second woke up in a similar state, but once they had both calmed down a bit, Avocado was able to get some information out of them. Both were overweight, and had put more weight on recently. Neither of them had eaten anything out of the ordinary recently, but both said it had seemed like a good idea to eat a lot.
It was starting to get light, and the medical centre staff were arriving. Bones took the opportunity to get his arm seen to, making up an excuse for the wound. None of the team had had any sleep. Once they were away from the medical centre, Crusty handed out meth.
Crusty wanted to pay another visit to the dam. Hernandez drove him back upstream, and he talked to the chief engineer, and learned it was going to take at least a month before they were going to get the dam in anything resembling working order and the turbines back on.
Bones checked the completed tests on Steve and Jeff. Both negative for whatever it was the test was for. He also serruptitiously tested himself, given how badly the crab man had wounded him.
Avocado had a theory. Something was causing people to eat more to fatten them up for use as food. The three people who'd been attacked rather than disappearing had all been rather more athletic than the typical resident of Bear Point. He decided to have another talk with them.
The two women chatted happily enough. They mentioned that they sometimes got accused of being lesbians because they chose to share a house. They weren't, but they weren't going to let homophobia stop them living together. James mentioned that people thought he was a bit weird for living on the edge of town and had tried to persuade him to move to the centre, but he liked it out there, and his house was one of the few that wasn't flooded, so who was laughing now?
Hernandez dropped off Crusty with the others, but not long afterwards radioed them to let them know a shipping container of supplies had come in, and he thought it might have a false back because it seemed to be smaller on the inside. This must be the equipment that Agent Pakrati had promised them.
Buzz's knowledge of physics and engineering confirmed that there was a false back, and where the door release mechanism was likely to be. Avocado soon had it open and they passed around the weapons inside. Struggling to use a shotgun since the previous night's injury, Bones took the submachine gun, while Crusty took ownership of the grenade launcher.
They needed a plan. The idea that the crab person they'd killed was the only one seemed too good to be true. Hernandez was unhappy with some of the initial plans, which tended towards the 'nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure' end of the scale, but finally they came up with something. The turbines were out of action, and the town was depending on diesel generators for power. New supplies had just come in on the container, and the diesel was being held at the airport for distribution. If they could destroy the diesel dump, they could simultaneously cut off power to the town, making it easier to force an evactuation, and also cause an environmental disaster that probably wouldn't go well for the crab people.
Actually destroying the diesel dump proved something of a challenge. Hernandez suggested getting one of the army engineers from the dam to help, but they didn't want anyone else knowing what was really going on. In the end they waited until nightfall and then deployed Buzz, who had some past experience with artillery, and Crusty, who didn't want to relinquish control of the grenade launcher. There were a few practices with tear gas grenades before switching to explosives. It took a few attempts, but at last the town's entire diesel supply was spreading across the bay while a cloud of tear gas blew towards town.
Then wading through the water came an angry, slightly oily, crab person. Slightly different to the one they'd seen before, with extra legs, huge pincers for hands, and a long tail with a barbed end. Everyone piled back into the Zodiac, and at Crusty's instruction, Hernandez drove it straight at the creature. Avocado and Buzz fired at it, and then the boat smashed into it, bouncing off and throwing everyone around. As Bones fired, the creature snapped its pincers at him, but missed.
Crusty threw a grenade that merely exploded a small column of water. Avocado and Buzz kept firing their shotguns. Bones sprayed bullets from the submachine gun. The creature reached out with its pincers again, this time grabbing hold of Bones and jabbing him with its barbed tail.
But Crusty's grenade finally landed exactly where he wanted it. The explosion right underneath the crab person's body ripped it apart. Bones was dropped into the freezing water, the shock almost knocking him unconscious, but he managed to hold it together long enough for Hernandez to grab him and haul him back into the boat.
They went straight back to the medical centre to get Bones treated for hypothermia. They had decided to blame the fuel explosion and gas cloud on a terrorist attack, and Crusty took up the task of convincing the town that the only option at this point was to evacuate on the supply ship. A tough job, faced with stubborn Alaskans, but combined with the fact they were about to lose power, the environmental disaster meaning they were also going to struggle for food, and Alice at the aquarium being absolutely determined to get her sea otters to safety, they were eventually persuaded and the evacuation began.
The town was duly abandoned, and the agents were able to make their way back to Anchorage, and from there back home. Bones tipped off Delta Green about the three positive tests. He said nothing about the wound he'd taken on his torso that looked very similar to the ones on the three attack victims. Or about the second test he'd administered on himself. The one that came back positive.
Sunday 15 March 2020
Concrete Cow 20
With the possibility of future game conventions being cancelled this year, I was determined to make the most of Concrete Cow while I had the chance.
Dead of Night is a game based on B-movies and slasher horror. Characters have stats in Dead of Night, but the really important (for which read fun) thing on the character sheet is your bad habit, which enables you to get survival points back.
Accordingly we made a group of disfunctional students and sent them off on holiday together. For my character's bad habit I chose a tendency to act without thinking. I thought it would both be entertaining and a way to ensure that I didn't spend too much time thinking about what to do. This is the kind of game that's more fun if you make bad decisions.
By the end of the game we were all somehow still alive, but none of us got out unscathed. Excellent fun, and really had the feel of being in a low budget horror movie. I would definitely recommend this game for one-shots. With its super-fast character creation, you can be up and running in a few minutes, and I felt free to make those bad decisions without worrying about my character's survival.
I successfully made my int check to use the microwave in the kitchen, and reheated some leftovers for lunch. Then it was time for afternoon sign-up. With only four player slots and a game I already knew there was interest in, I wasn't surprised when mine filled up first.
I love the way this scenario gives me all the key points I need to run it, but at the same time leaves enough space for me to improvise around when the players come up with new ideas. I've got a few things nailed down; the first group who played it definitely wanted to know the location of the house they were looking for, and so each future game has included content from Google Maps and Streetview, plus a handy floorplan from Rightmove. But other than that things are pretty flexible, and things go differently every time.
Re-running this scenario multiple times has not only been a lot of fun, I'm pretty sure it's making me a better GM.
And as for whether the players enjoyed it? Two of them went straight to the Leisure Games stall afterwards to buy the book, so I'm calling that a win.
I don't always stick around for the evening session at Concrete Cow, but with the possibility of a lot of conventions having to cancel this year, I was determined to get everything I could out of this one. I grabbed a sandwich from Tesco, had a lovely chat with some of the other attendees, and awaited evening sign-up.
Hope's Last Day is a fun introduction to Alien's cinematic mode, with plenty of horrible things happening, and a GM willing to bang on the table any time the xenomorphs were making similar noises in game, keeping tension high throughout.
Amongst the four other players was someone who I'd previously played the Chariot of the Gods scenario with. In that game I was responsible for the deaths of both his characters. I picked a character at random, and looked at their agenda. Oh no. By the end of the game I had killed another of his characters. He is never going to trust me again.
Little things can really add to a convention. Name badges are supplied, and they're proper name badge stickers rather than just sticky labels, so they actually stick to your clothes. Free tea and coffee in the kitchen (with a donation plate) was very welcome. Hand sanitiser was also supplied, and I gratefully made use of it.
As usual, not many women, but enough that I did get to play in a game where I wasn't the only female player. We'll get there!
Three awesome games for £5 and the price of a Tesco sandwich. If that turns out to be my last game convention for a while, at least it was something I'll remember fondly for a long time.
Game 1
With a golden ticket for offering a game in the afternoon slot, I got to go first in the morning sign-up. I picked Graham Sargeant's Dead of Night game, Normal for Norfolk, having missed out on playing it on a previous occasion.Dead of Night is a game based on B-movies and slasher horror. Characters have stats in Dead of Night, but the really important (for which read fun) thing on the character sheet is your bad habit, which enables you to get survival points back.
Accordingly we made a group of disfunctional students and sent them off on holiday together. For my character's bad habit I chose a tendency to act without thinking. I thought it would both be entertaining and a way to ensure that I didn't spend too much time thinking about what to do. This is the kind of game that's more fun if you make bad decisions.
By the end of the game we were all somehow still alive, but none of us got out unscathed. Excellent fun, and really had the feel of being in a low budget horror movie. I would definitely recommend this game for one-shots. With its super-fast character creation, you can be up and running in a few minutes, and I felt free to make those bad decisions without worrying about my character's survival.
I successfully made my int check to use the microwave in the kitchen, and reheated some leftovers for lunch. Then it was time for afternoon sign-up. With only four player slots and a game I already knew there was interest in, I wasn't surprised when mine filled up first.
Game 2
Another outing for Liminal and the Fang Gang, an adventure I've run at least five times before but which never stops being fun. Samir, David, Tony and Alison set out to rid London of vampires.I love the way this scenario gives me all the key points I need to run it, but at the same time leaves enough space for me to improvise around when the players come up with new ideas. I've got a few things nailed down; the first group who played it definitely wanted to know the location of the house they were looking for, and so each future game has included content from Google Maps and Streetview, plus a handy floorplan from Rightmove. But other than that things are pretty flexible, and things go differently every time.
Re-running this scenario multiple times has not only been a lot of fun, I'm pretty sure it's making me a better GM.
And as for whether the players enjoyed it? Two of them went straight to the Leisure Games stall afterwards to buy the book, so I'm calling that a win.
I don't always stick around for the evening session at Concrete Cow, but with the possibility of a lot of conventions having to cancel this year, I was determined to get everything I could out of this one. I grabbed a sandwich from Tesco, had a lovely chat with some of the other attendees, and awaited evening sign-up.
Game 3
I've been carefully not reading the adventure Hope's Last Day in the Alien core book, so when I saw someone was running it I was pretty keen to sign up, and was lucky enough to get a space.Hope's Last Day is a fun introduction to Alien's cinematic mode, with plenty of horrible things happening, and a GM willing to bang on the table any time the xenomorphs were making similar noises in game, keeping tension high throughout.
Amongst the four other players was someone who I'd previously played the Chariot of the Gods scenario with. In that game I was responsible for the deaths of both his characters. I picked a character at random, and looked at their agenda. Oh no. By the end of the game I had killed another of his characters. He is never going to trust me again.
Reflections
Numbers were low at the previous Concrete Cow. This time things seemed a lot healthier, even with a few people not attending due to Coronavirus.Little things can really add to a convention. Name badges are supplied, and they're proper name badge stickers rather than just sticky labels, so they actually stick to your clothes. Free tea and coffee in the kitchen (with a donation plate) was very welcome. Hand sanitiser was also supplied, and I gratefully made use of it.
As usual, not many women, but enough that I did get to play in a game where I wasn't the only female player. We'll get there!
Three awesome games for £5 and the price of a Tesco sandwich. If that turns out to be my last game convention for a while, at least it was something I'll remember fondly for a long time.
Friday 13 March 2020
Running Delta Green: Black Winter
The scenarios collected in A Night at the Opera are individually and collectively amazing, but what I really need is something a bit more tailored to my group. That means both something we can all get our heads round and something which suits the style of this particular group of PCs, which could be summed up as 'prefer shotguns to subtlety'. So I asked the internet for advice; specifically the Good Friends of Jackson Elias discord, where I got a recommendation: Black Winter by Jake "ChiefMcCLane" Cook.
Here's how it went down.
Our team consists of four agents:
'Crusty', a former CIA intelligence analyst of Native American ancestry who was previously posted to the Stargate project.
'Buzz', a conspiracy theorist who claims to have worked on alien spaceships.
'Bones', a historian and anthropologist who's encountered some weird things.
'Avocado', a physical security expert and computer scientist who got called into the wrong crime scene.
Previously the team have worked with a single handler, who calls herself Agent Chung. Right now she's not too fond of them. While their last mission did result in complete success regarding locating and stopping the unnatural incursion, the amount of mess left behind was significant. Having to cover up the brutal murder of a beloved university professor has kept her busy for quite some time. So when an urgent mission came up in Alaska that called for agents with old school tradecraft skills, she was quite happy to let someone else deal with them for a change.
Via the usual subterfuge, the players found themselves flying into Anchorage, where they were met by Agent Pakrati. He gave them a briefing, a selection of somewhat random objects, including a radio transmitter and some unspecified organic material testing kits, then packed them into a Cessna and sent them on their way.
Their destination was the town of Bear Point, normally a town funded by tourism and fishing, but currently under four foot of water due to a burst dam and a damaged sea wall. Their cover as FEMA consultants got them access to pretty much everything they needed. They located the DG friendly - Hernandez - pretty quickly, and kept him around pretty much constantly, his access to a Zodiac and ability to drive it making him invaluable in the flooded town.
They decided to start by following up on the recent attacks. They talked briefly with the victims, and took samples from each of them for testing, then went to visit the scenes of the attacks, where they obtained more suspicious material for testing. Hernandez told them a little about how he'd come into contact with Delta Green - trying to rescue his friend from drowning and ending up in a fight with some kind of fish man. Just as they were leaving the second scene, however, they realised they were being watched.
The news reporter failed to give a particularly good explanation of why he was following them around, but they did manage to learn that he was failing to get anything from the army engineers up at the broken dam. They decided to pay a visit.
Part way through the two hour journey up to the dam, the test kits began to return results. Positive, for whatever it was they were testing for. In accordance with their instructions, Avocado activated the radio transmitter.
They were unable to get much useful information out of the staff at the damn, but did manage to get a look at the blueprints. Buzz, an experienced engineer, was able to identify the cause of the breach. An explosion in the storage area. Some new parts had been delivered recently, but that was routine parts for maintaining the turbines. It looked like sabotage was involved.
Next stop was the Inuit village museum, where they had a look round and admired the remarkable size of the taxidermy crab on display, but ultimately concluded they should go back to the town. By now it was getting dark. The aquarium seemed like a good place to go next, and as an emergency shelter they could spend the night there too.
They were greeted by zookeeper Alice, who was very happy to have them there, and keen to tell them about how great sea otters were, even if they were acting a bit weird at the moment. Attempting to get out and leave was quite normal behaviour for the octopuses, but rather more unusual for the seals and sea otters.
They bedded down for the night - or at least, Buzz, Bones and Avocado did. Crusty wasn't a good sleeper, and it seemed Hernandez wasn't either. Not that the others got restful nights, however, with all three of them dreaming about drowning, and Buzz awakened convinced that there was something terrible in the sea and it was coming for them.
Word quickly arrived that there had been another disappearance, in addition to the three they were already aware of. The reporter.
Hernandez drove them to his house, where they found Deputy Chesterfield already present and conducting an investigation. She explained her theory that a serial killer was using the flood as cover for these sick crimes. However, spotting a door handle that had been oddly crushed, almost as if it had been held in the grip of a giant crab pincer, the team weren't so sure.
There was nothing for it. They were going to have to tool up and go hunting crab people. They drove around until they found a sporting goods shop that wasn't completely underwater and bought some shotguns. They also picked up some explosives (for fishing, according to the shopkeeper) and some night vision goggles.
First Avocado wanted to do a test, to see exactly where it was that the aquarium creatures were trying to get to. He convinced Alice to loan them an octopus. His name was Philip, and he apparently enjoyed taking photographs. He was also keen to escape, but experimentation proved that all he really wanted was to get to the sea.
It seemed like the crab attacks were happening at night, and the fewer people there were around the better, they decided, and spent the rest of the day convincing people to get as far away from the harbour as possible.
Once darkness fell they took up positions by the aquarium. After a while they spotted something floating on the water, which on closer inspection turned out to be two people, both asleep, and wrapped in some kind of slimy material which matched something they'd found in the reporter's house. They took the people into the aquarium, and Bones and Crusty resumed their watch.
And there it was. A monstrous crab man, spindly legged and pincered, climbing out of the water. Shots were fired immediately. Crusty's went wide, but Bones' hit it square in the chest. It attacked, seriously injuring Bones with its massive pincer, but as the others joined the attack, the hail of shot reduced it to crab meat.
And there we had to leave it. We'll pick up again next week for more crab and shotgun action.
Here's how it went down.
Our team consists of four agents:
'Crusty', a former CIA intelligence analyst of Native American ancestry who was previously posted to the Stargate project.
'Buzz', a conspiracy theorist who claims to have worked on alien spaceships.
'Bones', a historian and anthropologist who's encountered some weird things.
'Avocado', a physical security expert and computer scientist who got called into the wrong crime scene.
Previously the team have worked with a single handler, who calls herself Agent Chung. Right now she's not too fond of them. While their last mission did result in complete success regarding locating and stopping the unnatural incursion, the amount of mess left behind was significant. Having to cover up the brutal murder of a beloved university professor has kept her busy for quite some time. So when an urgent mission came up in Alaska that called for agents with old school tradecraft skills, she was quite happy to let someone else deal with them for a change.
Via the usual subterfuge, the players found themselves flying into Anchorage, where they were met by Agent Pakrati. He gave them a briefing, a selection of somewhat random objects, including a radio transmitter and some unspecified organic material testing kits, then packed them into a Cessna and sent them on their way.
Their destination was the town of Bear Point, normally a town funded by tourism and fishing, but currently under four foot of water due to a burst dam and a damaged sea wall. Their cover as FEMA consultants got them access to pretty much everything they needed. They located the DG friendly - Hernandez - pretty quickly, and kept him around pretty much constantly, his access to a Zodiac and ability to drive it making him invaluable in the flooded town.
They decided to start by following up on the recent attacks. They talked briefly with the victims, and took samples from each of them for testing, then went to visit the scenes of the attacks, where they obtained more suspicious material for testing. Hernandez told them a little about how he'd come into contact with Delta Green - trying to rescue his friend from drowning and ending up in a fight with some kind of fish man. Just as they were leaving the second scene, however, they realised they were being watched.
The news reporter failed to give a particularly good explanation of why he was following them around, but they did manage to learn that he was failing to get anything from the army engineers up at the broken dam. They decided to pay a visit.
Part way through the two hour journey up to the dam, the test kits began to return results. Positive, for whatever it was they were testing for. In accordance with their instructions, Avocado activated the radio transmitter.
They were unable to get much useful information out of the staff at the damn, but did manage to get a look at the blueprints. Buzz, an experienced engineer, was able to identify the cause of the breach. An explosion in the storage area. Some new parts had been delivered recently, but that was routine parts for maintaining the turbines. It looked like sabotage was involved.
Next stop was the Inuit village museum, where they had a look round and admired the remarkable size of the taxidermy crab on display, but ultimately concluded they should go back to the town. By now it was getting dark. The aquarium seemed like a good place to go next, and as an emergency shelter they could spend the night there too.
They were greeted by zookeeper Alice, who was very happy to have them there, and keen to tell them about how great sea otters were, even if they were acting a bit weird at the moment. Attempting to get out and leave was quite normal behaviour for the octopuses, but rather more unusual for the seals and sea otters.
They bedded down for the night - or at least, Buzz, Bones and Avocado did. Crusty wasn't a good sleeper, and it seemed Hernandez wasn't either. Not that the others got restful nights, however, with all three of them dreaming about drowning, and Buzz awakened convinced that there was something terrible in the sea and it was coming for them.
Word quickly arrived that there had been another disappearance, in addition to the three they were already aware of. The reporter.
Hernandez drove them to his house, where they found Deputy Chesterfield already present and conducting an investigation. She explained her theory that a serial killer was using the flood as cover for these sick crimes. However, spotting a door handle that had been oddly crushed, almost as if it had been held in the grip of a giant crab pincer, the team weren't so sure.
There was nothing for it. They were going to have to tool up and go hunting crab people. They drove around until they found a sporting goods shop that wasn't completely underwater and bought some shotguns. They also picked up some explosives (for fishing, according to the shopkeeper) and some night vision goggles.
First Avocado wanted to do a test, to see exactly where it was that the aquarium creatures were trying to get to. He convinced Alice to loan them an octopus. His name was Philip, and he apparently enjoyed taking photographs. He was also keen to escape, but experimentation proved that all he really wanted was to get to the sea.
It seemed like the crab attacks were happening at night, and the fewer people there were around the better, they decided, and spent the rest of the day convincing people to get as far away from the harbour as possible.
Once darkness fell they took up positions by the aquarium. After a while they spotted something floating on the water, which on closer inspection turned out to be two people, both asleep, and wrapped in some kind of slimy material which matched something they'd found in the reporter's house. They took the people into the aquarium, and Bones and Crusty resumed their watch.
And there it was. A monstrous crab man, spindly legged and pincered, climbing out of the water. Shots were fired immediately. Crusty's went wide, but Bones' hit it square in the chest. It attacked, seriously injuring Bones with its massive pincer, but as the others joined the attack, the hail of shot reduced it to crab meat.
And there we had to leave it. We'll pick up again next week for more crab and shotgun action.
Wednesday 11 March 2020
Crew of the Aliya, part 17: Send In The Baboons
The card contained a video file. It showed the opening of a space station, which looked a lot like the one we were currently on. A number of scientists were present, and Gurgeh was able to recognise one of them - a Professor Darim. Based on the data on the card, Darim was also the name of the man we had found. Perhaps a younger relative, looking for his lost family member?
Our Darim had been drugged into unconsciousness. Lila and Karim took him back to the Aliya and Professor Wana, while the rest of us continued our search of the station. The med bay was our next stop. Here we found more control panels, and decided to have another shot at getting information from them. Gurgeh and Sayah worked together to get enough power into the computers to be able to download some information.
We found some notes from one of the scientists who had worked here. They told of self-sustaining gardens, where the boundary between animals and plants no longer existed. Beautiful oases where travellers could find oxygen. She planned to use DNA manipulation to recreate these gardens, and based on what we'd seen on the space station, it looked like she had found some success.
There was also a passage from the writings of a prophet, describing how the flowers of light could be corrupted. What did it mean? We weren't sure, but it was certainly ominous.
Another eyeless child appeared. Sayah joined Alqadi searching the med bay for drugs to distract herself from it, but Gurgeh noticed it did not seem to be particularly hostile. It reached out a hand towards him. He took it. For a little while they held hands.
The next new arrival was significantly less disturbing. A woman, with clothes and all the normal body parts. Her name was Wahina, and she was pleased with how we hadn't murdered the creepy children. She wanted us to come up to the bio-dome, as mentioned in the notes we'd found earlier. She also looked suspiciously like a younger version of one of the scientists in the video file.
Tahir wanted to have a look at the engineering section of the station before we went anywhere else, but as we approached it we found it was significantly overgrown with plants. Getting through would involve hacking our way through the plants, and that didn't seem like a great idea right now. We made our way to the lift shaft instead. More eyeless children appeared, accompanied by baboon dogs.
The shaft was crowded with creepers. Gurgeh put a hand on one, and when he took his hand away there was an eye looking back at him. While Sayah quietly freaked out, he got the lift working again. We all huddled in the middle of the open platform, and the creepers moved out of the way as we ascended.
The bio-dome was a mass of plant life and feathered monkeys, but we also had something else to worry about. A message from Suleiman, telling us that a light battlecruiser was approaching the station. The Legion were here.
Wahina lead us to what she called the heart of the station, which turned out to be a plant with a face. Wahina's face. She wanted our help. Not with the seeding of the asteroid belt with the seeds of life to create the gardens, which apparently she could do quite well by herself, but to stop the team of Legion soldiers from blowing up the entire space station with a bomb.
Sayah: "They've got three soldiers and a demolitions expert. We've got two soldiers and two nerds."
Gurgeh: "But we are great nerds."
Sayah: "The best nerds."
After a trip to the armory to pick up some supplies, we approached the area where the legionaries were setting up the bomb. At the end of a long corridor, an auto gun had been set up. The two nerds worked together to deactivate it, and then sent in Gurgeh's drone for recon. Tahir used the feed from the drone to identify the closest target, fly down the corridor past the auto gun, shoot the target and take cover behind a makeshift barricade made of gym equipment.
Alqadi ran in, firing on full auto. He was followed by Sayah, who took cover behind a riot shield and fired a single shot, only to discover she'd forgotten to reload after the previous fight. Gurgeh held back, to try to communicate with the plants and get us some backup.
Gurgeh: "Send in the baboons!"
Despite the hail of ammunition flying in both directions, we weren't making much headway and Tahir was close to dropping. But then Tahir managed to stun the legion commander, Gurgeh took control of the auto gun and turned it on the legionaries, and Sayah's reloaded carbine took out the bomb setter. We had won.
Even with the opposing forces all dead and being assimilated into the plant life along with a couple of baboon casualties, there was still the matter of the bomb to deal with. Gurgeh and Sayah got to work. Gurgeh offered a prayer to the Faceless as he opened up the casing, and when faced with the electronics inside, Sayah prayed for the luck of the Gambler. The bomb was defused.
We cleared up a few remaining breaching charges and collected up the auto gun and other legion tech. It was time to go. Had we done the right thing? Wahina had shown genuine remorse at the deaths of the scientists on the station, and her motivations seemed good, but who could know what the consequences of unleashing this entity upon the Rimward Reach would be?
Still, it wasn't like it was the first time we'd unwittingly released something upon the universe without knowing the consequences.
Wahina made us an offer. To implant each of us with a seed that would bring some benefit to us. Gurgeh agreed at once, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, and was keen to gain powers of regeneration. Sayah chose the same, reluctant to take such a risk with her own body but feeling it was the will of the Gambler. Tahir and Alqadi both wanted to be better looking.
And so we went on our way, a cloud of plant matter concealing us from the legion battlecruiser as a path through the micro black holes opened up ahead of us. We could see the space station breaking up behind us, with plants drifting off in all directions. Wahina was seeding herself.
Questions still remained. What were the corrupted flowers that the prophet warned of? What was the real purpose of the Loom of Heaven and the flower-adorned nodes that seemed to control it? What had happened to Lavim? And would we ever catch up with the Fatima's Bounty and avenge our soft furnishings?
Crew of the Aliya is now on hold, so the GM can play for a bit, but may return...
Our Darim had been drugged into unconsciousness. Lila and Karim took him back to the Aliya and Professor Wana, while the rest of us continued our search of the station. The med bay was our next stop. Here we found more control panels, and decided to have another shot at getting information from them. Gurgeh and Sayah worked together to get enough power into the computers to be able to download some information.
We found some notes from one of the scientists who had worked here. They told of self-sustaining gardens, where the boundary between animals and plants no longer existed. Beautiful oases where travellers could find oxygen. She planned to use DNA manipulation to recreate these gardens, and based on what we'd seen on the space station, it looked like she had found some success.
There was also a passage from the writings of a prophet, describing how the flowers of light could be corrupted. What did it mean? We weren't sure, but it was certainly ominous.
Another eyeless child appeared. Sayah joined Alqadi searching the med bay for drugs to distract herself from it, but Gurgeh noticed it did not seem to be particularly hostile. It reached out a hand towards him. He took it. For a little while they held hands.
The next new arrival was significantly less disturbing. A woman, with clothes and all the normal body parts. Her name was Wahina, and she was pleased with how we hadn't murdered the creepy children. She wanted us to come up to the bio-dome, as mentioned in the notes we'd found earlier. She also looked suspiciously like a younger version of one of the scientists in the video file.
Tahir wanted to have a look at the engineering section of the station before we went anywhere else, but as we approached it we found it was significantly overgrown with plants. Getting through would involve hacking our way through the plants, and that didn't seem like a great idea right now. We made our way to the lift shaft instead. More eyeless children appeared, accompanied by baboon dogs.
The shaft was crowded with creepers. Gurgeh put a hand on one, and when he took his hand away there was an eye looking back at him. While Sayah quietly freaked out, he got the lift working again. We all huddled in the middle of the open platform, and the creepers moved out of the way as we ascended.
The bio-dome was a mass of plant life and feathered monkeys, but we also had something else to worry about. A message from Suleiman, telling us that a light battlecruiser was approaching the station. The Legion were here.
Wahina lead us to what she called the heart of the station, which turned out to be a plant with a face. Wahina's face. She wanted our help. Not with the seeding of the asteroid belt with the seeds of life to create the gardens, which apparently she could do quite well by herself, but to stop the team of Legion soldiers from blowing up the entire space station with a bomb.
Sayah: "They've got three soldiers and a demolitions expert. We've got two soldiers and two nerds."
Gurgeh: "But we are great nerds."
Sayah: "The best nerds."
After a trip to the armory to pick up some supplies, we approached the area where the legionaries were setting up the bomb. At the end of a long corridor, an auto gun had been set up. The two nerds worked together to deactivate it, and then sent in Gurgeh's drone for recon. Tahir used the feed from the drone to identify the closest target, fly down the corridor past the auto gun, shoot the target and take cover behind a makeshift barricade made of gym equipment.
Alqadi ran in, firing on full auto. He was followed by Sayah, who took cover behind a riot shield and fired a single shot, only to discover she'd forgotten to reload after the previous fight. Gurgeh held back, to try to communicate with the plants and get us some backup.
Gurgeh: "Send in the baboons!"
Despite the hail of ammunition flying in both directions, we weren't making much headway and Tahir was close to dropping. But then Tahir managed to stun the legion commander, Gurgeh took control of the auto gun and turned it on the legionaries, and Sayah's reloaded carbine took out the bomb setter. We had won.
Even with the opposing forces all dead and being assimilated into the plant life along with a couple of baboon casualties, there was still the matter of the bomb to deal with. Gurgeh and Sayah got to work. Gurgeh offered a prayer to the Faceless as he opened up the casing, and when faced with the electronics inside, Sayah prayed for the luck of the Gambler. The bomb was defused.
We cleared up a few remaining breaching charges and collected up the auto gun and other legion tech. It was time to go. Had we done the right thing? Wahina had shown genuine remorse at the deaths of the scientists on the station, and her motivations seemed good, but who could know what the consequences of unleashing this entity upon the Rimward Reach would be?
Still, it wasn't like it was the first time we'd unwittingly released something upon the universe without knowing the consequences.
Wahina made us an offer. To implant each of us with a seed that would bring some benefit to us. Gurgeh agreed at once, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, and was keen to gain powers of regeneration. Sayah chose the same, reluctant to take such a risk with her own body but feeling it was the will of the Gambler. Tahir and Alqadi both wanted to be better looking.
And so we went on our way, a cloud of plant matter concealing us from the legion battlecruiser as a path through the micro black holes opened up ahead of us. We could see the space station breaking up behind us, with plants drifting off in all directions. Wahina was seeding herself.
Questions still remained. What were the corrupted flowers that the prophet warned of? What was the real purpose of the Loom of Heaven and the flower-adorned nodes that seemed to control it? What had happened to Lavim? And would we ever catch up with the Fatima's Bounty and avenge our soft furnishings?
Crew of the Aliya is now on hold, so the GM can play for a bit, but may return...
Tuesday 10 March 2020
Black Void Quickstart Reviewed
About time I did another quickstart review. Black Void is available from Modiphius. Let's have a look.
We start out with a bit of backstory - useful, since the name Black Void isn't exactly telling us a lot - which in combination with the cover art does give me some idea what's going on here.
Then we have a contents page with some introductory information. Useful stuff like what kind of game this actually is, and already I'm getting the impression this is to fantasy what Coriolis is to sci-fi. Plus there's the information you really want to know - what kind of dice does it use? (The answer is d12s.)
After this, the document is broken down into four sections: character creation, equipment, playing the game, and the arbiter's guide because god forbid anyone just calls a GM a GM any more.
The character creation rules presented here are a slimmed down version of the actual rules, but there's still plenty going on here. First there's eight traits (what a certain other fantasy game would call attributes) and a set of talents you can add on to higher traits, with two options given for each trait, so a decent amount of customisation is available.
There are two pools of points for character creation: one for traits, and one for literally everything else, including talents and everything further down the page, all under the heading of abilities.
The first ability after talents is backgrounds, which come with a mix of flavour and mechanical benefits. Hard to say how useful any of these are at this point, but the flavour does give me a feel for what kind of game we're looking at here.
Next is attributes, which you can only get if you picked up the half-blood background, which lets you have things like wings and claws.
Then there's powers, which I was expecting given that we're in a fantasy setting. With this being a slimmed down version, we're not seeing all the powers here, but the one they've chosen to show us is blood rituals - literally sacrificing creatures to imbue yourself and others with power or practice divination. Not everyone is going to like this, and I think that makes it an excellent choice for the quickstart. If the idea of blood soaked oracles puts you off, best to find out now. If it does appeal, you're going to want to know more.
Finally we have skills, split into general skills and combat skills. Nothing particularly notable here, although it's worth mentioning that most skills have several associated traits. I'm not quite sure what this means mechanically at this point, although my guess is when you add up your bonuses you decide which trait goes with the skills. Stealth can use agility if you're moving silently or intelligence if you're analysing patterns of guard movements. It's an extra layer of complexity but certainly an intriguing one.
Then there's a couple of pages on various bits and pieces - health, movement, wealth, and rather more unusual things like sanity, enlightenment and wastah, which the internet tells me is an Arabic word that roughly translates to 'clout' or 'who you know'.
The equipment chapter is limited to weapons and armour, and has thankfully listed things with generic names like 'sword' and saved words like 'scimitar' and 'talwar' for the flavour text. The Middle Eastern theme of this game is really shining through but they're not putting up linguistic boundaries to play it.
And fittingly we're now on to chapter 3: playing the game. Finally we get the dice mechanic - d12 + modifiers versus a target number that's normally 7. And here's where it gets confusing, because you don't add your trait, you add your trait modifier, which ranges from -3 to +2 with a trait of 3 being 0. And skill ratings do seem to add on directly, but not having a skill means -3. And then there's further modifiers for bad weather. Hopefully this is laid out more clearly in the main book, because the table that appears here is not helping.
Once you've actually figured out what you're rolling though, things are pretty straightforward. There are some combat manoeuvres that resemble the feats from certain well known fantasy games, but otherwise not too much complexity. It's a pretty clear level of crunch, and I've got a good grasp of how much I'm likely to enjoy it.
A single page on the subject of sanity and fear saves, and then we're on to character advancement. I'm not entirely convinced this is necessary in a quickstart document. At the point where you're engaging in character advancement, surely it's time to buy the book?
The arbiter's guide section is pretty standard stuff, except for some reason this is where you'll find the tables for crits and fumbles (here called exceptional hits and mishaps - why is everyone so desperate to rename standard terms?)
Well, that was quite a slog. What you won't find here is a sample adventure or any pregen characters. These are available in separate documents which are linked at the end of the quickstart.
What it would be like to print, I'm not sure. Even if you can not print the page backgrounds, there's still full colour art on quite a lot of pages. For screen use however, it's a fully bookmarked PDF and everything is very easy to find.
For what's in this document, the ordering is fine. I think I would have liked some more setting info at the start, and maybe the basic mechanics so I knew what I was doing when going through the character creation section, but that's pretty minor.
Content
This quickstart comes in at an apparently minimal 33 pages, although don't be fooled into thinking it's lighter than the previous quickstarts I've looked at. Quite the opposite.We start out with a bit of backstory - useful, since the name Black Void isn't exactly telling us a lot - which in combination with the cover art does give me some idea what's going on here.
Then we have a contents page with some introductory information. Useful stuff like what kind of game this actually is, and already I'm getting the impression this is to fantasy what Coriolis is to sci-fi. Plus there's the information you really want to know - what kind of dice does it use? (The answer is d12s.)
After this, the document is broken down into four sections: character creation, equipment, playing the game, and the arbiter's guide because god forbid anyone just calls a GM a GM any more.
The character creation rules presented here are a slimmed down version of the actual rules, but there's still plenty going on here. First there's eight traits (what a certain other fantasy game would call attributes) and a set of talents you can add on to higher traits, with two options given for each trait, so a decent amount of customisation is available.
There are two pools of points for character creation: one for traits, and one for literally everything else, including talents and everything further down the page, all under the heading of abilities.
The first ability after talents is backgrounds, which come with a mix of flavour and mechanical benefits. Hard to say how useful any of these are at this point, but the flavour does give me a feel for what kind of game we're looking at here.
Next is attributes, which you can only get if you picked up the half-blood background, which lets you have things like wings and claws.
Then there's powers, which I was expecting given that we're in a fantasy setting. With this being a slimmed down version, we're not seeing all the powers here, but the one they've chosen to show us is blood rituals - literally sacrificing creatures to imbue yourself and others with power or practice divination. Not everyone is going to like this, and I think that makes it an excellent choice for the quickstart. If the idea of blood soaked oracles puts you off, best to find out now. If it does appeal, you're going to want to know more.
Finally we have skills, split into general skills and combat skills. Nothing particularly notable here, although it's worth mentioning that most skills have several associated traits. I'm not quite sure what this means mechanically at this point, although my guess is when you add up your bonuses you decide which trait goes with the skills. Stealth can use agility if you're moving silently or intelligence if you're analysing patterns of guard movements. It's an extra layer of complexity but certainly an intriguing one.
Then there's a couple of pages on various bits and pieces - health, movement, wealth, and rather more unusual things like sanity, enlightenment and wastah, which the internet tells me is an Arabic word that roughly translates to 'clout' or 'who you know'.
The equipment chapter is limited to weapons and armour, and has thankfully listed things with generic names like 'sword' and saved words like 'scimitar' and 'talwar' for the flavour text. The Middle Eastern theme of this game is really shining through but they're not putting up linguistic boundaries to play it.
And fittingly we're now on to chapter 3: playing the game. Finally we get the dice mechanic - d12 + modifiers versus a target number that's normally 7. And here's where it gets confusing, because you don't add your trait, you add your trait modifier, which ranges from -3 to +2 with a trait of 3 being 0. And skill ratings do seem to add on directly, but not having a skill means -3. And then there's further modifiers for bad weather. Hopefully this is laid out more clearly in the main book, because the table that appears here is not helping.
Once you've actually figured out what you're rolling though, things are pretty straightforward. There are some combat manoeuvres that resemble the feats from certain well known fantasy games, but otherwise not too much complexity. It's a pretty clear level of crunch, and I've got a good grasp of how much I'm likely to enjoy it.
A single page on the subject of sanity and fear saves, and then we're on to character advancement. I'm not entirely convinced this is necessary in a quickstart document. At the point where you're engaging in character advancement, surely it's time to buy the book?
The arbiter's guide section is pretty standard stuff, except for some reason this is where you'll find the tables for crits and fumbles (here called exceptional hits and mishaps - why is everyone so desperate to rename standard terms?)
Well, that was quite a slog. What you won't find here is a sample adventure or any pregen characters. These are available in separate documents which are linked at the end of the quickstart.
Presentation
In short, it looks great. It's got a ton of art, from full colour illustrations to black and white sketches, and it all brings the setting to life. The page design is gorgeous. The layout is clear and easy to read. The only hiccups are the skills and talents pages, where the two column layout used everywhere else inexplicably turns into three columns.What it would be like to print, I'm not sure. Even if you can not print the page backgrounds, there's still full colour art on quite a lot of pages. For screen use however, it's a fully bookmarked PDF and everything is very easy to find.
For what's in this document, the ordering is fine. I think I would have liked some more setting info at the start, and maybe the basic mechanics so I knew what I was doing when going through the character creation section, but that's pretty minor.
What can I do with it?
You can get a feel for what kind of game this is and whether it's relevant to your interests. You can't actually run an adventure with only this document - there's just not enough here - but you can pick up the two other documents and use those to run an adventure in conjunction with this, and I might just do that.Conclusion
Much like Cold And Dark, there's too much in here for it to really be called a quickstart. I would be inclined to ditch a lot of the character creation stuff in favour of including the pre-gen characters in the document, and focus on the rules needed to run the sample adventure. However, it's done its job of getting me interested in the game. Assuming I enjoy running the sample adventure there's a good chance of me buying the main book. So on that basis, it's done its job.Friday 6 March 2020
Delta Green, a few games in
I've run a bunch of games for my home group, and a bunch of games at conventions, and running Delta Green for the current iteration of the home group is absolutely playing on hard mode.
I've run three scenarios now: Last Things Last, from the Need to Know PDF, and Reverberations and Music from a Darkened Room from A Night at the Opera. These are excellent scenarios and I would thoroughly recommend all three of them to someone new to running Delta Green. But with a caveat: know your players.
Reverberations was not a good fit for my group. I've mentioned before they tend to be a bit wacky, and this scenario really requires a more considered approach. A bunch of key points got missed, and there was very little actual horror occurring.
Based on this I decided to skip the second scenario in the book (Viscid) and go straight on to the third. I wanted something more like Last Things Last, with clear goals to achieve. I also asked one of the players (my husband) to make some notes, so that they would have something to refer back to if attention spans started to flag. Music from a Darkened Room is basically a haunted house adventure, and I was a lot more confident in my ability to make this one work.
And it largely did work. A few wobbles, and enough of a mess left behind to keep DG busy for some time cleaning up, but I'm happy with how this one went overall. I'm offering it as a one-shot at the FLGS at the end of March, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes with a different group.
I call this playing on hard mode because I don't normally run published adventures for the home group. I might start out with one for a session or two, but as soon as that's finished I run entirely my own original material tailored to the PCs. However, for games like Scion, Victoriana and The Dresden Files I have an extremely thorough grounding in the source material. Delta Green's blend of Cthulhu mythos and conspiracy theories is new ground for me. New and exciting ground, but I just don't know it well enough to start building on it yet.
So rather than writing stories tailored to the PCs, I'm having to find scenarios that suit them. Three adventures in I think I've got a better grasp of what that actually means. And I've got just under a week to work out what to run next.
I've run three scenarios now: Last Things Last, from the Need to Know PDF, and Reverberations and Music from a Darkened Room from A Night at the Opera. These are excellent scenarios and I would thoroughly recommend all three of them to someone new to running Delta Green. But with a caveat: know your players.
Reverberations was not a good fit for my group. I've mentioned before they tend to be a bit wacky, and this scenario really requires a more considered approach. A bunch of key points got missed, and there was very little actual horror occurring.
Based on this I decided to skip the second scenario in the book (Viscid) and go straight on to the third. I wanted something more like Last Things Last, with clear goals to achieve. I also asked one of the players (my husband) to make some notes, so that they would have something to refer back to if attention spans started to flag. Music from a Darkened Room is basically a haunted house adventure, and I was a lot more confident in my ability to make this one work.
And it largely did work. A few wobbles, and enough of a mess left behind to keep DG busy for some time cleaning up, but I'm happy with how this one went overall. I'm offering it as a one-shot at the FLGS at the end of March, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes with a different group.
I call this playing on hard mode because I don't normally run published adventures for the home group. I might start out with one for a session or two, but as soon as that's finished I run entirely my own original material tailored to the PCs. However, for games like Scion, Victoriana and The Dresden Files I have an extremely thorough grounding in the source material. Delta Green's blend of Cthulhu mythos and conspiracy theories is new ground for me. New and exciting ground, but I just don't know it well enough to start building on it yet.
So rather than writing stories tailored to the PCs, I'm having to find scenarios that suit them. Three adventures in I think I've got a better grasp of what that actually means. And I've got just under a week to work out what to run next.
Wednesday 4 March 2020
Crew of the Aliya, part 16: Space Moss
Lavim had been sent off to (hopefully) safety with Maliki the union rep. We didn't entirely trust her - she was being altogether too helpful - but we were running out of options.
Above us was the starry void, but now it was starting to fill up with ships. Not modern ships, but ones we realised were part of the rimward reach nomad swarm. From the walls of the rift, concealed doors opened and people emerged, heading for the ships above.
After some discussion, we decided that we needed to go too. Having overstayed our time down here, and already somewhat unpopular due to Lavim's actions, we decided it would be a good idea to bring the Aliya to us rather than going back through Djachroum. Sayah djinned into the ship's controls, and with some assistance flew it out of the dock and around to the rift.
Lila got a message from Doctor Wana, who was unexpectedly in the area, wanting to know what we'd done. It was rather hard to explain.
We left a message for Jinna, who hadn't been on the ship when it left the dock, explaining why we'd had to leave and where Lavim was. Hopefully she would be OK. Unfortunately we were in no position to go back and check.
Doctor Wana had been visiting the archaeological institute on Djachroum, but now she had a job for us. A trip to Station 18, a small space science lab which had gone quiet. With our excellent track record on retrieving missing people, having managed to find Lavim multiple times now, she thought we might be the crew to do it.
It was a three day journey to Station 18. Gurgeh and Sayah gave the exosuits we'd picked up on Djachroum a quick MOT and service in case we needed them again, then recalibrated the ships sensors to detect Hawking radiation from the field of tiny black holes that surrounded Station 18. There were some dicey moments as Tahir flew us in, but we made it within exosuit range of the station without any damage to the ship.
Something strange was happening here. Sayah's scans brought up a warning that this was a forbidden area due to radiation, but also detected low levels of radiation and multiple bio signatures. The station had suffered severe damage to the habitation unit, and seemed to have some kind of plant life growing over significant parts of it. After some initial experiment with throwing things at it, Gurgeh sent his drone to get a sample. Lila did some analysis, and concluded that it was vulnerable to acids and fire.
With this in mind we donned exosuits, and with Tahir in the lead, made the space walk across to the portable airlock that had been installed on the side of the station. A control panel inside looked promising, but despite their best efforts, Sayah and Gurgeh couldn't get enough power into it to get it working.
On we went down the corridor. The plant growth got thicker, dark tendrils with small purple flowers snaking under our feet. As it grew thicker, the floor started to feel spongy, and it seemed like the plants were eating through the very fabric of the space station. Something crunched under Tahir's feet, and examination proved it to be bone. A small ribcage. Nearby Lila found a similarly diminuative skull. Was it human?
But dead bones were hardly our biggest concern. Somewhere up ahead Tahir saw movement - some kind of bat with human hands for wings. Alqadi, bringing up the lead, spotted a figure behind him. A child, it initially appeared. But when it turned around it had only smooth blank skin where its eyes should be.
And there was a sound. A whimpering that might actually be human. Tahir climbed up into a nearby ventilation duct and started crawling along. He attempted to stun a blue snake that was crawling down the tunnel ahead of him, but instead it turned around to look at him with human eyes and open a mouth full of thankfully not human teeth. Tahir fired at it, splattering it into bits.
Further down the duct was a man. Clearly scared as even our voices were enough to spook him, but hungry enough that an offer of ration packs and the removal of the snake corpse was enough for Karim to lure him out.
He was wearing the remains of an exosuit, and a card, which was handed to Sayah for scanning. So far all this station had given us was questions. Now, perhaps, we could get some answers.
Above us was the starry void, but now it was starting to fill up with ships. Not modern ships, but ones we realised were part of the rimward reach nomad swarm. From the walls of the rift, concealed doors opened and people emerged, heading for the ships above.
After some discussion, we decided that we needed to go too. Having overstayed our time down here, and already somewhat unpopular due to Lavim's actions, we decided it would be a good idea to bring the Aliya to us rather than going back through Djachroum. Sayah djinned into the ship's controls, and with some assistance flew it out of the dock and around to the rift.
Lila got a message from Doctor Wana, who was unexpectedly in the area, wanting to know what we'd done. It was rather hard to explain.
We left a message for Jinna, who hadn't been on the ship when it left the dock, explaining why we'd had to leave and where Lavim was. Hopefully she would be OK. Unfortunately we were in no position to go back and check.
Doctor Wana had been visiting the archaeological institute on Djachroum, but now she had a job for us. A trip to Station 18, a small space science lab which had gone quiet. With our excellent track record on retrieving missing people, having managed to find Lavim multiple times now, she thought we might be the crew to do it.
It was a three day journey to Station 18. Gurgeh and Sayah gave the exosuits we'd picked up on Djachroum a quick MOT and service in case we needed them again, then recalibrated the ships sensors to detect Hawking radiation from the field of tiny black holes that surrounded Station 18. There were some dicey moments as Tahir flew us in, but we made it within exosuit range of the station without any damage to the ship.
Something strange was happening here. Sayah's scans brought up a warning that this was a forbidden area due to radiation, but also detected low levels of radiation and multiple bio signatures. The station had suffered severe damage to the habitation unit, and seemed to have some kind of plant life growing over significant parts of it. After some initial experiment with throwing things at it, Gurgeh sent his drone to get a sample. Lila did some analysis, and concluded that it was vulnerable to acids and fire.
With this in mind we donned exosuits, and with Tahir in the lead, made the space walk across to the portable airlock that had been installed on the side of the station. A control panel inside looked promising, but despite their best efforts, Sayah and Gurgeh couldn't get enough power into it to get it working.
On we went down the corridor. The plant growth got thicker, dark tendrils with small purple flowers snaking under our feet. As it grew thicker, the floor started to feel spongy, and it seemed like the plants were eating through the very fabric of the space station. Something crunched under Tahir's feet, and examination proved it to be bone. A small ribcage. Nearby Lila found a similarly diminuative skull. Was it human?
But dead bones were hardly our biggest concern. Somewhere up ahead Tahir saw movement - some kind of bat with human hands for wings. Alqadi, bringing up the lead, spotted a figure behind him. A child, it initially appeared. But when it turned around it had only smooth blank skin where its eyes should be.
And there was a sound. A whimpering that might actually be human. Tahir climbed up into a nearby ventilation duct and started crawling along. He attempted to stun a blue snake that was crawling down the tunnel ahead of him, but instead it turned around to look at him with human eyes and open a mouth full of thankfully not human teeth. Tahir fired at it, splattering it into bits.
Further down the duct was a man. Clearly scared as even our voices were enough to spook him, but hungry enough that an offer of ration packs and the removal of the snake corpse was enough for Karim to lure him out.
He was wearing the remains of an exosuit, and a card, which was handed to Sayah for scanning. So far all this station had given us was questions. Now, perhaps, we could get some answers.
Tuesday 3 March 2020
Curse of the Alien Pre-gens
If there's one thing I don't like about prepping for one-shots, it's making pre-gen characters.
I've thought about past convention games and one-shots I've run:
But now I've started branching out a bit and running different games. Fortunately some games make it easy for me.
Plenty of games provide a set of fairly generic pre-gens that you can slot into most adventures, which I really appreciate. Writing the adventure is the fun part for me, while bringing the characters to life is the domain of the players.
However, I'm writing a cinematic one-shot for Alien. And that's more of a challenge.
The actual stats part isn't too hard. The pre-gens for the characters in Chariot of the Gods are all available online, and wouldn't be too hard to reuse. I haven't actually done this, because running up an Alien character is pretty damn fast. Six characters, statted and equipped and ready to go in under an hour.
No, the challenge for making characters for an Alien one-shot is the agendas. For each character I've had to come up with a brief backstory, and then something that they want to achieve in all three phases of the game. And to at least some extent these need to be tailored to the adventure. "Search the ship for information on X" doesn't work if the adventure isn't taking place on a ship. All this is significantly more work than I'm used to doing on something that's not the adventure itself.
That said, if I can pull this off, it will be thoroughly worth it. And I'm going to laminate these character sheets.
I've thought about past convention games and one-shots I've run:
- Don't Rest Your Head. Character creation consists of thinking of two powers. We did it at the table.
- The Sprawl and other PBTA games. Character creation involves ticking boxes. We did it at the table.
- Scum and Villainy. FITD isn't much different to PBTA. We did it at the table.
But now I've started branching out a bit and running different games. Fortunately some games make it easy for me.
- I've run a lot of Liminal recently, but it's all been the quickstart adventure that comes with a complete set of pre-gens. When I start running other adventures, there's pre-gens in the main book I can use.
- I'm going to be running a Delta Green one-shot. Not only does the Delta Green quickstart provide a bunch of pre-gens, but there's also over 900 characters available to download via the Delta Green website.
Plenty of games provide a set of fairly generic pre-gens that you can slot into most adventures, which I really appreciate. Writing the adventure is the fun part for me, while bringing the characters to life is the domain of the players.
However, I'm writing a cinematic one-shot for Alien. And that's more of a challenge.
The actual stats part isn't too hard. The pre-gens for the characters in Chariot of the Gods are all available online, and wouldn't be too hard to reuse. I haven't actually done this, because running up an Alien character is pretty damn fast. Six characters, statted and equipped and ready to go in under an hour.
No, the challenge for making characters for an Alien one-shot is the agendas. For each character I've had to come up with a brief backstory, and then something that they want to achieve in all three phases of the game. And to at least some extent these need to be tailored to the adventure. "Search the ship for information on X" doesn't work if the adventure isn't taking place on a ship. All this is significantly more work than I'm used to doing on something that's not the adventure itself.
That said, if I can pull this off, it will be thoroughly worth it. And I'm going to laminate these character sheets.
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