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?