First Time Playing: The Dee Sanction

The Dee Sanction is a game of 'covert enochian intelligence' - or in other words, supernatural spies in Elizabethan England.  It's a rules-light system taking inspiration from The Cthulhu Hack, and sees you playing people with a small amount of occult knowledge, saved from the gallows in return for using your skills in defense of the Queen.

What none of this makes clear is just how funny this can be.

We used the pre-generated characters.  I picked Grace, a former scholar with a passion for geometry, now living on the streets.  With what knowledge I have of the Elizabethan period, including sumtuary laws that restricted what clothes people were allowed to wear, I concluded that Grace had been a student at a university, but was forced to leave at around 16 or so when it started to become apparent that in addition to practicing heretical magics, she had also been illegally wearing trousers.

I would say that set the tone for the game, but honestly the others were already there.  We rapidly began to wonder if Dee had been scraping the barrel when it came to finding agents for this particular mission.  The alternative - that we actually were Dee's best agents - was too horrible to contemplate.

The system is very light indeed.  Just three stats, a simple method of adjusting difficulty, a couple of special abilities, plus an 'unravelling' resource that works a lot like sanity in Cthulhu-based games.  Like many modern games it takes the approach that failing a dice roll doesn't always mean failure; sometimes it means success but at a cost.  There's just enough there to make for interesting results.

Our hapless quartet set off on the introductory adventure, 'Lost In Translation', a title that having played the game, seems to contain more layers than I anticipated.  Sent to retrieve a relic from a remote farmhouse, we found ourselves dealing with inclement weather, strange behaviour, and one very persistent chicken.  Ultimately we did retrieve the relic, and more, but at the cost of most of the party.  I suspect the fact we were intentionally playing a one-shot resulted in the GM taking a more deadly approach than normal, but new characters look pretty simple to make.

While the game might have started out comedic, I'd have no hesitation in calling this a horror scenario, and I'm sure it could be played straight (at least with a different set of players.)

My thoughts after playing this is that this is the kind of game where a bit of knowledge of the time period isn't essential to play, but can certainly be an enhancement.  England was in an interesting position at the time, both politically and religiously, but it's also fun just to play up the small details like the aforementioned sumputuary laws.  As someone with strong interest in history, this game holds a strong appeal.

Overall, The Dee Sanction delivered a delightful combination of comedy, horror and history, and I very much hope I'll get to play it some more.  It's well supported with additional adventures and hopefully still more to come.  Perhaps it's time I started spreading the word?

First Time Playing: Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a game that didn't grab me when I first heard about it, largely because I couldn't figure out what it was for.  Most games have some kind of elevator pitch that sums it up, like 'space western' or 'modern day urban fantasy' or 'investigative horror' which tells me pretty quickly if it's something I want to know more about.  TSL didn't seem to have that, so it was hard to find the appeal.

I finally did find the appeal when a game pitch went up at MK-RPG for a game entitled 'The Three (Thirsty) Musketeers.  Now it made sense.  Swashbuckling and romance!  Having grown up watching Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds I was absolutely willing to give this a go.  Unfortunately only one other player was interested, and we all felt that two was an insufficient number of musketeers, but I was now interested.

So a group of people from the Good Friends of Jackson Elias assembled to give this game a go.  We were invited to pretty much create the setting from scratch.  We unanimously agreed on the idea of being space pirates and decided we were going to do a heist.

Slightly more complicated was picking playbooks.  Like most PBTA games, TSL uses playbooks with a set of archetypes, each having their own special moves.  This is one of the things that initially put me off the game, as I couldn't really relate to the archetypes, especially without any context to fit them into.  With some actual context (space pirates!) to work with, they were a little less confusing.  I went for the Trickster as I could see how she could fit into the pirate crew with her deception based skillset.  I could then work from there in making sense of the rest of the playbook and how it worked.

I found a lot of constrast here with two other queer-friendly PBTA games, Monsterhearts and Dungeon Bitches.  Both of these have much more defined themes: high school supernatural romance for the former, traumatised dungeoneers for the latter.  I had little trouble coming up with a character for Dungeon Bitches, and could probably do the same with Monsterhearts if I didn't absolutely refuse to play anything focused on teenage romance.

With our setting and characters sorted out, we proceeded to the heist, taking place at a society wedding at a mansion on a private asteroid owned by a billionaire socialite who I suggested we name Ellen Musk.  All the rich people would be bringing valuables that would get stored in Ellen's safe, and we could use the wedding as cover for our crime.  We went in with very little plan, in the great traditions of Blades in the Dark, figuring that the actual heist was less important than the relationships we made along the way.

The hardest part for me was getting into the romance mindset.  Romance as a literary genre is something I just plain don't like.  (I've been known to accidentally pick up crime novels that turned out to be romantic crime novels and then spend half the book yelling at the protagonists to stop kissing and solve the goddam murder.)  But I'll happily watch a good rom-com, or the thematically similar friendship movie, so I do technically know how it works.  It's just a very new thing in RPGs for me.

But I got there in the end, and the heist went off in dramatic style, ending with us absconding with the entire safe, a pirate from a different crew, and the bride.

Overall I found this a challenging game to play.  The themes are unfamiliar, the lack of a standard setting makes it hard to contextualise, and the mechanics are a little confusing.  But it also forced me to step outside my comfort zone, think about characters in a different way, and ultimately roleplay something really fun.  Challenging but worthwhile.

Accordingly, I've backed the kickstarter for this game's supplement, Advanced Lovers and Lesbians and will pick up the main book at the same time.  And here's hoping one day we'll assemble sufficient musketeers.

ConDensed 2021

I wasn't really sure until a few days before that ConDensed was actually going to happen.  Turns out I'm not the only one.  This event was originally planned for November 2020 and booked well in advance, and the venue, Billing Aquadrome, has changed hands since then.  At least four times.  Most recently, six weeks ago.  It's only thanks to one of the organisers doing a site visit between then and the event that we actually had the use of the indoor venue and didn't have to share with a children's disco.

But by the time I arrived on Friday morning, we had a venue, and if the staff were a little surprised to see us, at least they were there to sell us coffee.  Since my house is about 10 minutes from site, I decided to volunteer to help with the set up, and soon found myself setting up the board game library and sanitising the gaming tables.  Then I spent some time on the reception desk checking people in and selling them game tickets, which was also a useful way of hearing a lot of people's names.  Some of which I even remembered.

The problem with RPG conventions, of course, particularly for someone with mild face blindness, is that there's an awful lot of middle aged balding white men with beards and glasses and it's really hard for me to tell them all apart.

Game 1 - Matrons of Mystery

I decided to kick things off with a game of Matrons of Mystery.  Four people signed up to be old ladies solving murders, and soon the death of a bellringer was escalating into utter chaos, ultimately resulting in the crime being pinned on one of two co-conspirators while the other got away due to the machinations of one of the Matrons.  Certainly an ending I didn't expect.

This was the first opportunity I'd had to run the game in person, without the aid of a virtual whiteboard.  I used wipe-clean cards from All Rolled Up and dry wipe pens in a variety of colours to display suspects, clues and secrets, and while it does mean you need a reasonable amount of table space, it works well.  The different colour pens really helped, making it easy to quickly count up how many of each type of thing were on the table.

Game 2 - Matrons of Mystery

I have a scenario that's set early in the morning at a roleplay convention, so of course I had to run it in the 9am slot on Saturday.  I had four players signed up again, but one person wasn't well so we played with three.  Since he'd been a player in the previous night's game, at least I knew he wasn't missing out completely.

Mystery solving went rather quicker this time, and I suspect the number of players is a factor here.  Three player games do seem to wrap up faster than four player games, possibly due to needing less time to give everyone the spotlight, and possibly because there are fewer people coming up with solutions at the end.  None of which is bad, of course, but it is interesting to note.

It seems like people had a lot of fun with the two sessions, so hopefully there'll be some interest once I get it onto DriveThruRPG.

Game 3 - Black Code

I had originally planned to play Casting the Runes with CJ Romer on Saturday afternoon, but since nobody else had signed up and there was no sign of CJ either, I jumped into a game of Black Code since there was still a space.  Probably a good thing I did, since one of the signed up players seemed to be missing too.

Black Code is a game I'd been wanting to try out for quite a long time.  A cyberpunk game that's focused more on the transhumanism side of cyberpunk than the hacking side.  I was dubious of the system, which seemed complicated from what I'd read, but in practice turned out to be very easy to get my head around.  The archetypes were appropriate to the genre and the setting was imaginative, with some variations on the standard cyberpunk city that I wasn't expecting.

All in all I was thoroughly impressed, and will most likely pick this up at the next convention I go to.  The biggest trap most cyberpunk games fall into is taking too much influence from Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, and this one's pitched it just right.  Whether I can persuade my home group to play it, I don't know, but it's worth a try.

Game 4 - Call of Cthulhu

When I saw there was a space left in Matt Sanderson's game, The Blue, on Saturday night, I jumped in.  People have been talking about how great it is online, and I've played with Matt enough times to be sure of a good time.  Even if this was the first time in person.

The venue was pretty full on Saturday night, and with a group of six players plus GM, we were spread out enough that it was difficult to hear each other.  So we decamped to the static caravan that two of the group were staying in, and played there.  I'd never been in one of the static caravans before, so didn't really know what to expect, but there was a roomy lounge with plenty of space for the seven of us to sit comfortably.  Cups of tea and coffee were provided, and the game resumed.

We were a team of divers, surveying a newly appeared blue hole to find out if it was suitable to be marketed as a tourist attraction.  It won't be a surprise to any Call of Cthulhu fans that the answer was an emphatic no, but I certainly wasn't expecting the reason why.  As always, a great game, and worth staying up significantly past the official end time for.

Game 5 - Starfinder

After the late night on Saturday, and given that there was nothing on Sunday morning that I felt desperate to join, I decided to have a bit of extra sleep and arrived just in time to observe the silence for Remembrance Sunday.  It took me a long time to decide on a game for the afternoon, but I finally settled on Starfinder.

I don't have much of an interest in organised play, so ignored most of the Pathfinder Society and D&D Adventurer's League games on offer, but this particular game not only offered pre-gens, but also had one of my favourite PC party concepts: a band.

The other two players had already sat down at the table, knowing where they were going, and had picked the lead singer and drummer for their characters.  I had a choice between an Ysoki technomancer keyboard player and a human engineer bass player.  I took the engineer, because it's that long since I last played Starfinder that I have no memory of how magic works, but figured I could probably manage the engineer.

We were on our way to a concert, where we were going to perform and finally make it big, when our ship broke down and we had to land at the space motorway services and figure out a new way to get to the show.  With a guiding principle of 'what is the most metal thing we can do here?' we somehow made our way to the stage and into fame and fortune.

While there was another game slot in the evening, I had my own online campaign to run on Sunday night, so headed home to get ready.

Reflections

This is a convention I really wanted to succeed.  While this was the first event, it was run by the same team as ConTingency, so they've had a lot of practice in this kind of thing.  Numbers were apparantly around 150, which is excellent for a first event, especially given that we're still in a global pandemic and a lot of people still aren't doing face to face conventions.  The last I heard before I left was that we'd raised £1000 for charity as well.

Diversity looked pretty good, at least by the standards of RPG conventions.  With the convention organisers all being women, I could be confident that I wouldn't be the only one there, which is always reassuring.  Despite the usual dominance of middle aged balding white men with beards and glasses, three of my five games had other women in, and in Matt's game we actually outnumbered the men.  There's still a long way to go but things are getting better.

Despite some issues with the other people using the site hanging around in the venue, it was pretty well suited to gaming with plentiful tables of a suitable size to sit a group around and use a battlemap where required.  Free wifi and a bar available at all times were an additional bonus.  The staff were very friendly, and I got the impression they enjoyed having us there.  While the static vans apparently weren't quite up to the standards of the park used for ConTingency, they seemed pretty nice to me.  While a little more choice of food would have been nice (I ate far too many chips) it was very convenient not having to go anywhere, and there were other options for people who didn't mind leaving the building.

Going back to a face to face convention was exhausting.  I wasn't sure I was going to make it to the Saturday night game, and I'm glad I cut down a bit on Sunday.  With ConTingency being significantly longer than ConDensed, I'm going to have to be careful to pace myself and not overdo it.

But ultimately, I had a wonderful time, got to play some amazing games, talked to old friends and new, and really hope we'll be doing it all again next year.