As a fan of sci-fi games, what could be better than an entire weekend of sci-fi games?
Game 1: Tales from the Loop
Four kids dealing with serious problems at home went out on Boxing Day 1984 for a snowball fight with their friends, and somehow ended up getting recruited as Time Police, helping prevent an incursion of killer robots from the future that strangely didn't look anything like the killer robots from the future in that new movie that none of us were allowed to see because we were only thirteen.
I was lucky enough to get into another game with the same GM I played with at ConTingency. My previous choices of Bookworm and Computer Geek had already been claimed, so concluding we could probably use a character with social skills, I went for the Rocker. A quick google told me that Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry had come out in 1984, and she was ready to use inspirational quotes from the lyrics in the cassette liner at any moment.
The 1980s is always a slightly weird era for me to game in, since I technically lived through it, but don't actually remember very much. Fortunately the internet is there to fill in some of the details, and the GM's liberal use of handouts does the rest.
The most notable thing about this game though, is that we used Roll20 for the A/V and it actually worked! I can no longer claim a 0% success rate.
Game 2: Alien
My own adventure, CSI:Weyland Yutani, has been a long time in the writing but I managed to push myself to get it finished (even if that did mean I was still tweaking character sheets between the morning and evening game slots.) As the name suggests, a murder mystery, although of course it also included the kind of body horror that an Alien game calls for.
With this being the first outing for this particular adventure, I wasn't sure how it was going to go. My three act structure was a bit off, with act 1 going on significantly longer than planned and acts 2 and 3 blending together, so possibly I need to tweak the agendas to fit with that. The players were also reasonably lucky with their panic rolls, meaning the panic spiral never really kicked off.
That said, while I don't think it delivered quite as much horror as I'd hoped for, the mystery solving aspect seems to have landed really well. Clues unfolded at a reasonable rate, and when the team departed, all rather surprisingly alive, they'd got the answers they were looking for.
I put some extra work into the Roll20 implementation for this adventure, using a base map I made on Dungeon Scrawl and implementing a card deck to use for initiative and a rollable table for the monster's attacks. The thing I had most trouble with was the card deck, which kept telling me that I didn't have enough cards to deal to everyone despite the fact that I clearly did. Adding people to the turn tracker was also not particularly fun, and I guess I need to figure out if there's a way to streamline that (although I did appreciate being able to add the monster in more than once to allow for its multiple attacks.)
The work in running an Alien scenario is extremely front-loaded, so now I've got the adventure and VTT set up all sorted out, it should be fairly simple to run it again once I've figured out how I want to tweak it.
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| This is fine. |
Game 3: Mothership
I'd never really thought of Mothership as a comedy game before, but thanks to the Scott Vanden Bosch artwork the GM was using, I wasn't surprised when it turned out that way. The general incompetence of Mothership characters ended up contributing admirably to the slapstick tone.
In addition to the random output of the character generator, the GM also gave us a few character details. My character, Magdalena, had a general disatisfaction with the way guns don't make cool noises in the vacuum of space. So when the adventure started with us visiting a clinic to get cyberware installed, I naturally had her pick the 'Loudmouth' - an internal recording and playback device that can be used at high volume to stun people, but more importantly, could be used to record a variety of music, sound effects and so on, which could then be played back throughout the mission. Team members hearing gunfire could feel reassured that the fight had gone OK when they heard Magdalena's victory music playing.
I don't like Mothership for space horror as much as I like Alien, because I think the randomness gets in the way sometimes, and the low skills mean people who should know what they're doing are frequently highly ineffective. But it turns out all of that makes it pretty much spot on for space horror comedy.
— Scott Vanden Bosch (@scott_v_b) May 5, 2021
Game 4: Hammerheads
My first time playing Cortex Prime. Like SWADE, this seems to be the latest iteration of a game I previously disliked, but which has now sorted itself out and become fun. While I don't think I completely grasped the rules, the basic concept of assembling a dice pool and choosing two results to keep wasn't too complicated, and with a skilled GM to keep us on track, things went pretty smoothly.
Smoothly mechanically, anyway. With a game inspired by Thunderbirds, we were obviously going to be dealing with some kind of disaster, and the adventure's description involving 'Prehistoric Park' was all the motivation I needed to give it a go, as we found ourselves faced with not only hoards of angry dinosaurs but a significant number of disgruntled humans and a malfunctioning time portal, all of which we had to find a way to deal with.
By the end of the adventure we'd killed significantly more dinosaurs than my character had been planning on, discovered the many uses of an ice cream van and its contents, and even slightly expanded our knowledge of paleontology as we found ourselves pursued by what another player described as 'badger pigeons'.
How exactly Cortex Prime works for adventures whose premise is not Thunderbirds + disaster movie, I don't know, but for this it works well and makes for a very funny adventure, full of surprises.
Playing Cortex Prime for the first time with a bit of help from @AllRolledUpUK bit trays. pic.twitter.com/xK6XWAMvG8
— SavageSpiel (@SavageSpiel) May 9, 2021
Reflections
This time last year I thought we'd be playing in person again long before now. I'm glad the Garrison conventions have managed to adapt, but I still hope that next year we really will be playing in person. I've met so many lovely people at these events, and North Star feels a bit extra special because of that unique sci-fi focus. I hope I feel ready when it's time to step out into that brave new world.