First Time Running: Pathfinder 2e Remaster Beginner Box

I've been playing Pathfinder 2e since shortly after it first released, but not felt any particular urge to run it until I got invited to play the Beginner Box adventure, Menace Under Otari, in a streamed game. After a couple of weeks of playing with some complete beginners it dawned on me that I actually know the rules of PF2 reasonably well, and between that and around 15 years of GMing experience, there was no reason I couldn't give it a go myself.

I kicked off with one of the pre-remaster Free RPG Day adventures, A Fistful Of Flowers, an adorable one-shot about a group of leshies out searching for some missing members of their community. That went OK, so I decided to dive in, pick up my own copy of the Beginner Box, and run the adventure at MK-RPG.

What's In The Box?

You get a lot for your money in the box. The two softcover rulebooks cover a lot in a small space.

The hero's handbook has all the basic rules you need for getting started, plus a guide to character creation. This is all heavily cut down from the core rules - the only classes are fighter, rogue, wizard and cleric, and only go up to level 3, while the ancestries include human, elf and dwarf. The actual character creation rules are somewhat altered. While it's possible, using the core rules, to make a character who's completely useless at their key abilities by making really stupid choices, these cut down rules ensure that you get a character with at least a +3 modifier in their class stat who's going to be generally competent at what they do.

Not that you need to use these rules, as there are also pre-made characters in the box - level 1 versions of Valeros the fighter, Merisiel the rogue, Ezren the wizard and Kyra the cleric. These custom character sheets have an additional sheet to explain what everything means, with letter codes for easy reference, have a picture of the arrow symbols PF2 uses to tell you how many actions something takes, and a colour picture of the different dice, which corresponds to the colours of the dice set that's also in the box.

Then there's the reference card. This sums up how dice rolls work, gives you a list of the most common actions like Strike and Stride with their action costs, and has a section to put action and reaction tokens for an easy way to keep track of what you've used on your turn. On the back are descriptions of some of the most common conditions. In short, a handy quick reference of the stuff you need most often without having to hand the book around.

The GM's guide has the adventure Menace Under Otari, as well as some solid advice on GMing generally and how to make your own adventures, and a selection of low level monsters and magic items suitable for level 1-3 characters. It also recommends Troubles In Otari, a set of adventures that directly follow on from Menace Under Otari and should be playable with just the beginner box rulebooks.

There's a set of punched cardboard sheets, which have the aforementioned action and reaction tokens, along with character and monster pawns (plus the little plastic stands to make them stand upright on the battle board). The four iconics are there, plus various ancestry/class combinations for people who chose to use the character creation rules instead, all the monsters you need to run Menace Under Otari and all the other monsters mentioned in the GM's guide. Where there are multiples of the same monster (such as goblins and kobolds) each one has a coloured mark so you can easily keep track of which is which in a fight.

Finally there's a flip-mat, one of Pathfinder's folding battle boards, depicting the Menace Under Otari dungeon. In short, everything I needed to run this adventure was included. I added just two things - a GM screen, and a print-out of the guide to levelling up to level 2 for each character, as we were on a time limit and wanted everyone to be able to level simultaneously and not have to pass the book around.

Running The Game

I was able to get four players for the game. One was my husband who's also experienced in PF2. The others had all played various versions of D&D before but were all new to PF2. With all the basics laid out on the character sheets and the reference cards, I didn't have much explaining to do, and we were able to dive in pretty quick.

The adventure is a fun dungeon crawl in its own right, but where it really shines is in the way it teaches the rules. The first fight is just a straight up fight - nothing special, just a chance to use those Stride, Strike and Cast A Spell actions and get the feel of how the system works. Then comes a skill challenge, where we dig a little into the actions associated with each skill and learn how using equipment can sometimes affect difficulty classes. Each new fight introduces a new concept: conditions, enemies with resistances and weaknesses, enemies who use tactics, etc. and a variety of traps, puzzles and other curios round things out nicely.

By the end of the adventure, the players had a solid grasp on how PF2 works, and I'm pretty sure 2/3 of the new players were sold on the system (the other seemed to be firmly in the 'D&D 5e is the best game ever' camp, but at least he gave it a go.) Just as importantly, the gradual introduction of new mechanics meant that I also learned as we played. The adventure spells everything out very clearly, advising on how certain monsters will use their special abilities. While it can't possibly account for everything players might do, there were only a few moments when I found myself having to think on my feet to come up with a ruling for unusually creative actions.

And by the end we were getting some really fun moments facilitated by the rules. It was great to see effective use of Demoralise to frighten a boss monster, Reposition to throw an enemy off a cliff, and much to my surprise, Deception (plus a magic item) to disguise the fighter as the dead boss monster, leading to a fight with an enemy who literally didn't see them coming.

Having completed this adventure I feel confident in my ability to run PF2, and am thoroughly looking forward to running more of it, both my own adventures and published material.

In short, job done.

First Time Playing: Darkness of the Demimonde

I love the Victorian era as a setting and particularly love Victorian horror. Victoriana was the first game I ran in that setting, but ultimately the system didn't work for me and neither did the Shadowrun inspired take on the setting. Vaesen does what it does very well, but what it does is the clash of the industrial revolution against rural folklore, which I love, but isn't exactly the same thing as the classic works of Poe and Stoker. And The Between got pretty close, but between the weird design decisions and very limited character options, it really wasn't giving me anything other than the TV show on which it's based.

And then up popped a Kickstarter for Darkness of the Demimonde, pitching itself as 'Victorian Pulp Horror'. Zine sized and priced accordingly, I decided it was worth a shot. To avoid excessive postage costs I went for the PDF + POD option. The POD is printed through DTRPG and is the usual quality I expect from there.

The book is A5 size and 39 pages long. Rules are simple and reminiscent of Liminal. Character creation is deceptively simple. Players choose between playing Enlightened (human with an occupation) or Afflicted (supernatural powers with an associated drawback), assign 10 points between 7 skills, and choose knacks and items. With a few pages of options, there's enough there to cover pretty much any concept from the realm of gothic horror. Which meant that even with all the players having largely figured out their concepts beforehand, there was still a fairly long period of finishing off characters at the start of the session.

Setting information is minimal, and consists of a two page introduction. That is all the game really needs though, as the assumption is that you're going in with a pretty solid idea of what Victorian pulp horror is. The character creation section and monster list lays out all the tropes that are in play.

There's no specific rules about group concepts, but as an investigation based game, it tends towards some variation on occult detectives. The players decided that the Detective character was the owned of the business, and given that they had gone for the Wealthy knack I suggested placing it in Mayfair. (This did lead to some fun moments as we had to explain the pronounciation of such locations as Berkeley Square and Grosvenor Square.) The other two characters were a Psychic and his Created servant.

The book comes with three adventures. I picked Horror in Houndsditch to run, as it was very much my kind of thing. It's a pretty light scenario, intended to allow for a lot of improv, and gives several suggested options for involving the player characters. I went for the one that I felt best fit the occult detective agency concept: a young woman asking for help finding her missing brother.

My only issue with this adventure is the map. The one provided is very useful for the GM, but with several key locations marked on it, it's not ideal to give to the players. The geography of Houndsditch is very much not what it was in the 1890s so my usual go-to of Google Maps was less helpful as I had to locate streets that no longer exist under the Gerkin and similiar buildings. I did manage to dig up a period map via a Jack the Ripper website, but vintage maps are a struggle to read. There may be some photoshopping of the adventure map to try to hide the location markers before I run this again.

Despite the book's length, it finds time for a reminded to GMs that key clues shouldn't be hidden behind a dice roll, so if the characters went looking in a suitable place they always found something. In these cases when I asked for action rolls it was to determine if they found something extra, if they got the job done fast and efficiently, etc. Despite being only half a page, the GM advice is a solid bit of writing that's worth reading and absorbing.

(Note: the game indulges in my pet peeve of making up a new name for the GM - the somewhat cheesy sounding Gravemaster. However, since it does still have the initials GM, I'm willing to let this one go.)

The action rolls themselves are 2d6 + skill (here called Archetypes for some reason) + bonuses. There are only seven and they're fairly broad, so figuring out which one to use was sometimes a bit tricky. In particular there's quite a bit of overlap between Priest and Occultist when it comes to knowledge of the supernatural. The GM also had to determine  the Difficulty Score (DS) for each roll. There's a set of guidelines, which suggests DS8 for easy and DS10 for moderate, but I think this is a bit off. Starting characters have Archetypes from 0 to 3, and with an average roll on 2d6 being 7, a character is going to fail DS10 rolls most of the time. For starting characters I would stick with DS8 as the default, increasing it if there are additional complications as suggested.

Two features of the rules I found particularly interesting. First is stress. Stress rolls are made when encountering horrific things, and a failure gives you a stress point. Each stress point gives you a penalty to all your action rolls. The maximum is 6, and while there's no specific consequence to hitting 6 stress, it's pretty debilitating. The only way to get rid of them is rest and sleep. There's a tendency for players to want to get the whole adventure done in one day. This game encourages not doing that - once the stress points start racking up you really need to get some rest, especially since you only recover 1d6 stress each time. Something worth mentioning to new players to manage expectations.

The other interesting feature is combat. Monsters all have their own DS, and you need to exceed it to actually do any damage. But their DS is also their hit points, so once you start damaging them they get gradually easier to hit and damage. Some interesting possibilities for tactical play - particularly as failed melee rolls mean the attacker gets hurt instead.

Overall there are some small niggles with this game, but nothing that can't be overcome. Particularly as the GM I'd advise going in with a reasonable knowledge of Victorian Britain and the classic horror fiction of the time, but there's a lot packed into these 39 pages. The system is light enough that most of the time it was a breeze to run, while still having enough going on to keep things interesting. The authors know what Victorian horror looks like and deliver on that. I had a great time as the GM and fully expect to have a great time in our next session when one of the players takes over as GM and I get to make my own character.

Darkness of the Demimonde will be coming to DTRPG for general purchase soon, presumably once all the kickstarter fulfillment is sorted out. Edit: Available now!

First Time Playing: FIST

I buy a lot of the charity bundles on itch.io. They're generally around $5-$10 a time, and while I'm largely indifferent to most of the content, there's usually a few gems making it well worth the price. FIST has appeared in bundles for abortion funds and for trans rights in Florida and I definitely got my money's worth buying those two.

I hadn't actually looked at FIST properly though until a friend offered a game at a time I was free and I dived in. The pitch was pretty compelling. It's inspired by Metal Gear Solid and The A-Team, so you play as soldiers of fortune in the late 20th century, with a twist in the shape of everyone having supernatural abilities.

We began with character creation, which is very simple. Roll two traits and a role on random tables (or choose, if you prefer) and that defines your stats and abilities. The first trait I rolled would have left me unable to speak, which I decided would not actually be fun, so rolled twice more and got  hybrid and ninja. The hybrid could be any animal, but one of the suggestions was shark, so I went with that - King Shark but also a ninja. My role was Mercenary, so I was absolutely in it for the money.

This part was a ton of fun, as we figured out what our random traits meant and what we could do with them. We came up with our own codenames. I was Mako, and was joined by Shadow, Mr Pink, Toes and Blood, the latter being a telekinetic vampire. Then we just had to choose between extra hitpoints, a piece of equipment, and war dice (single use bonus dice you could add to a roll). Most people went for war dice but I picked the extra hitpoints, having seen how our current points compared to the weapons we already had.

And so into the game, where we were dropped in the middle of a jungle and charged with intercepting trucks, preventing their contents getting to their destination, and figuring out what was going on at the nearby hydroelectric plant. We formed a basic plan and went at it, guns blazing. And it was a wild ride, as we figured out how to make use of our special abilities and threw ourselves into the action. It's fast paced and easy to play.

FIST is mechanically pretty much a PBTA game, with the usual 2d6 and three levels of success. It's also very OSR-like in that combat is brutal and characters are disposable, easily created and easily killed. This is in my opinion, its biggest weakness.

The whole setup is for a narrative game, with supernatural protagonists with extraordinary abilities. Then there's the PBTA mechanics, where every roll drives the story forward. You're all set up for some nice genre emulation, fitting with the PBTA 'be a fan of the characters' philosophy.

Except that doesn't mesh well with the concept of disposable characters. The A-Team aren't disposable. They don't get constantly killed and replaced. Metal Gear Solid...well, the way I play video games, the protagonist dies a lot, but they don't stay dead, and Solid Snake is still the person you're playing at the end of the game. When I play Mork Borg I know my scvm is going to be dead soon enough and that all feels right and proper. In this game it doesn't.

Mako did make it to the end of the mission, entirely thanks to those extra hitpoints I bought at the start.

If you bought one of those bundles, I would definitely recommend giving FIST a try, but with the caveat that the two clashing game philosophies aren't going to work for everyone. It succeeds at fast paced action and fun characters, but ignore the trappings of PBTA because that's not the experience you're going to get. I honestly think this would be better using the Mork Borg mechanics as that would fit a lot better with how the game works generally. And with four stats and similar numeric values, it should be an easy conversion.

So that's my verdict: a game that's well worth checking out but which accidentally used the wrong system. Try it with Mork Borg, or if you want the PBTA experience rather than the OSR one, replace hit points with the harm system from Apocalypse World, which coincidentally also includes the possibility that your character will be entirely obliterated, and then suddenly come back very much like they were before. Just like in a video game. Now that's genre emulation.

First Time Playing: The Between

The Between is a game I picked up a while ago but only recently got the chance to play. It's a PBTA game like its predecessor, Brindlewood Bay, and uses the same Carved From Brindlewood mystery system. As a big fan of said mystery system I was keen to see how it ported over to this game.

The intro page explains that the game is directly inspired by the TV show Penny Dreadful, with some minor nods to other works. I initially thought it might be a game where you could play an adventure akin to Dracula, but no. When you get to the playbooks it becomes clear that this is Penny Dreadful, the RPG, as each one maps directly onto one of the main characters. If you're looking for a more generic gothic horror game, this isn't it.

Fortunately it's not necessary to be a Penny Dreadful fan to play the game. While the GM was a huge fan, the players were a mixed group. I'd watched some of it but not the whole thing, while some hadn't watched it at all. The Penny Dreadful characters are for the most part public domain characters, and the playbooks make it pretty clear who it is you're playing. While Brindlewood Bay's requirement that the PCs are all part of a book club and fans of the same book felt overly restrictive to me (what if you want to be a gardening club, or members of the WI?) the idea here that we were all monster hunters and residents of Hargrave House made total sense and didn't require any show knowledge to understand.

I picked the Vessel, (Vanessa Ives), while the other players went for the Mother (Victor Frankenstein), the Undeniable (Dorian Gray) and the American (Ethan Chandler (actually Lawrence Talbot)).

Like most PBTA games we kicked off with assigning stats and special moves, deciding what we looked like, and choosing names. Then there were the Personal Quarters. We went around each character in turn, and every player described an item that was in that characters's bedroom in Hargrave House. This was both interesting and frustrating. Interesting, because it provided a bit of insight into each character's personality. Frustrating, because these are all things that go on your character sheet and can supposedly be used in the game - except that none of them actually were, because they were in our rooms, and the mystery we were investigating was not in our rooms. Not a single item got so much as a mention after that point.

"...anything from the Personal Quarters that might reasonably be on a hunter’s person in a scene, is."

But as instructed by the game, we were all thinking of things that might be in someone's bedroom, not something they might be carrying around with them. One item we had in the Mother's room was a tank full of living flesh, which was not exactly something portable. And that was something from an AP chosen by the game designer himself.

Obviously this is an easy fix if you're running the game. Instead of personal quarters, frame it as items the PCs might happen to have with them. Then you've got a more freeform version of the equipment lists used by Blades in the Dark, and the items might actually get used.

On to the actual game. The Between has a strict play structure. If you're familiar with Blades in the Dark then you'll remember how it alternates between missions and downtime. This initially appears to be a rather more extreme version, with the four phases being Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night. It's not actually as complicated as it sounds though, as Dawn is just an upkeep phase, and Dusk is pretty much deciding what's going to happen in the Night phase.

The Day phase was all about investigating the mystery, or Threat as the game calls them. We played Sally No-Face, one of the included Threats, about a serial killer who removes people's faces with surgical precision. We went hunting for clues at the morgue and the scene of the most recent murder. We found horrible things, encountered troublesome NPCs, and generally had the kind of spooky fun I was hoping for.

...With one caveat: the Janus masks.

In Monster of the Week each character has a number of luck points. You can spend luck to improve a dice roll. You have a limited number of these, and very few options for regaining them, and running out means trouble. What's more, in the version we're playing, most playbooks have some kind of negative consequence for using luck. It's a mechanic I like a lot.

In The Between, spending a luck point is called 'invoking the Janus Mask.' Mechanically, they're fine. You have a set number available on your playbook, and each time you spend one you have to narrate something from your past. This is a great fit for the TV show theme, as character backstories are typically something you experience as a series of flashbacks at critical moments.

No, my issue (beyond the ridiculous name) is that the GM is supposed to narrate the bad outcome of the roll, even if they know that the player wants to use a mask to negate it. Why? Fortunately the book has an answer.

"Answer: because it’s fun! The Janus Mask lets us glimpse different timelines, play them out, feel them, experience the anguish and terror, and then… do something different."

Only it wasn't fun. There was no anguish and terror because we already knew it wasn't going to happen. All I felt was that we were wasting time and the GM's creativity, putting work into something that was going to be immediately retconned.

Again, this is an easy fix if you're running the game. Our GM rapidly quit bothering with the additional narration. Screw the rules; if it's as un-fun for you as it was for us, don't do it.

But back to the Threat. Like in Brindlewood Bay, the scenario provides a list of somewhat abstract clues that can be found when the characters are successful in their search for information. This is where the game really shines. It was creepy and atmospheric, and lead to some fantastic emotional scenes between characters as they had to deal with the conditions picked up over the course of the investigation. At last we'd collected enough clues to gather back at Hargrave House and discuss our findings, and work out what to do next.

What the game isn't clear about is when this is supposed to take place. Our group came up with our theory at the end of the Day phase, and then spent the Night phase dealing with the threat. This worked well, but with an otherwise rigidly laid out play structure, it's a bit odd that this doesn't seem to have any specific timing.

Something new in The Between's mystery system is that the complexity (and therefore the difficulty of the Answer A Question move) can vary depending on which question you want to answer. In theory I like the idea. In practice, it didn't go so well. Here's the questions for the Sally No Face threat:

WHERE IS THE KILLER HIDING? (Complexity: 4)
Resolve the Threat by infiltrating the killer’s lair, then capturing or
destroying them.

HOW IS THE KILLER CHOOSING THEIR VICTIMS? (Complexity: 6)
Resolve the Threat by luring the killer to you, then capturing or
destroying them.

WHAT IS THE TRUE IDENTITY OF THE KILLER, AND WHAT DROVE THEM TO THIS MADNESS? (Complexity: 8)
Resolve the Threat by empathizing with the killer, then bringing them in
peacefully.

And this became a problem. Because we were all the kind of players who want proper answers. We didn't just want to find the killer, we wanted to understand them! So obviously we were going for the third question. Except having answered that question successfully, we were now expected to empathise with the killer and bring them in peacefully. And there was not a lot of enthusiasm for that. We understood their motivations, but they were also a serial killer going round London cutting people's faces off. We wanted to take them down! And being told we weren't supposed to, just because we wanted to properly understand things, was bloody irritating.

If you've read this far you'll probably already have guessed that we did in fact end up taking them down when our efforts to bring them in peacefully failed due to a) them being a derranged serial killer, b) bad dice rolls, and c) not all of us actually wanting to do that.

There was a brief and somewhat unwelcome interruption to the dramatic finale in the form of the Unscene. This is a scene that takes place somewhere else in London while the Night phase is happening, and has absolutely nothing to do with the PCs, the threat, Hargrave House or anything else from the actual game. It consists of a series of prompts where the players take it in turn at intervals during the night phase to read out a prompt and then do what it says, usually narrating a scene.

The purpose of this is to provide a cinematic play experience and show parts of London's seedy underbelly. What it actually did for me, as the first player to get picked, was suddenly drag me away from the fun game I was having playing my Vanessa expy and shove me into something entirely unrelated. Doubtless someone finds this fun. I found it frustrating and tedious.

Another easy fix. If you also find the Unscene to be an unnecessary interruption to the game you were trying to play, throw it out. Our GM didn't ask any further prompts after mine.

So that's my experience of playing The Between for the first time. Incredibly atmospheric, innovatively designed, full of the kind of gothic horror I've loved since I was old enough to read Dracula, but at the same time extremely restrictive in what characters you can play and how the story unfolds, and hindered by weird design choices that kept pulling me out of the atmosphere and story.

It's something I'd consider playing again, because when the game wasn't getting in the way of its own fun it was genuinely excellent. And I'd consider running it, but only with all the changes I've described above. And probably after I get round to watching the rest of Penny Dreadful.

First Time Playing: Apocalypse World

I've played a lot of PBTA games over the last few years (and even made my own) but I've only just had the opportunity to play the game that started it all: Apocalypse World.

We had four players plus the GM, and began by choosing playbooks.  I went for the Brainer, having had a sneak peak the previous night, and the others picked the Battlebabe, Chopper and Gunlugger.  There was then the now pretty routine process of picking options for name, appearance, gear, attributes and moves.  Then came relations, here known as history, for some reason shortened to Hx.  We each had some questions to ask the other players, which established some initial connections between us and gave us an idea of how we felt about each other.

To give us all a bit of focus for this one-shot, the GM asked us all to come up with a goal for our characters.  More sensible characters wanted money and respect.  I decided my weird Brainer just wanted people to be her friends, and if that meant using her mind powers to force them to do nice things for her on pain of pain, then so be it.

And in we went.  Things kicked off in a canteen.  Thanks to the GM having been watching the brilliant and annoying cancelled Blood Drive the barman was briefly modelled after Julian Slink, although after he'd been named via madlibs and ended up called Guava Seattle, his personality might have shifted a bit.  From there things proceeded in the largely improvised fashion that I'm familiar with from other PBTA games.

For how the whole thing went down see Trouble Comes to Stagnant Waters.

Other than the game itself, which was a delightful romp through a Mad Max style future and which I'm very much hoping to play again, the most interesting thing was comparing how much of this game can be found in the many other PBTA games out there.  The Sprawl loses the XP triggers and replaces them with character agendas and mission targets.  Kult: Divinity Lost drops the playbook aspect for a more flexible approach to character creation, while my own Matrons of Mystery does away with special moves entirely.  But the original game's DNA can be seen running through everything that it inspired.

There were a few bits I didn't really get.  I entirely understood the mechanics of Hx rolling over when it reached +4 and gaining an XP.  I just didn't understand why.  Maybe if I play more it'll start to make sense but at this point it really feels more mechanical than narrative.

Not that that matters.  A game doesn't literally revolutionise RPGs without being pretty damn amazing.

(And yes, I know Apocalypse World calls the GM an MC.  That doesn't mean I have to!)

First Time Playing: Dungeon Bitches

Dungeon Bitches is a game I wanted to support, hence backing the kickstarter, but wasn't one I expected to actually play.  Fortunately I was wrong, and a small group of us assembled to give it a go.

The premise of the game is that you play women who've found themselves for whatever reason with no play in society and end up dungeon crawling because the dungeon, while full of horrors, is still safer than town.  There are inevitable comparisons to be made with Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but while TSL tends more to swashbuckling romance, Dungeon Bitches is more on the survival horror end of things.  And that suits me just fine.  Even after a short campaign of TSL, I still find romance rather awkward.  Horrible things in dungeons, not so much.

We'd all decided on our playbooks (called deals in this game) in advance.  The one I found myself drawn to was the Beast, who's reason for having no place in society is that's she's literally a monster.  Ignoring the obvious werewolf option, I decided to make her a lamia.  Horrid Form and Intoxicating Bite made sense as moves for a snake person.  I had to pick a mannerism that hinted at her true form, so I decided that Emerald always wore long skirts and had a tendency to forget to walk and inadvertantly glide.

The other two players picked up the Wounded Daughter and the Disgraced Princess.  The playbooks list two relationships to define with the other characters, so with only three players, we were a pretty tight-knit group and started with plentiful bonds, the meta-currency you can use to help each other out.  (The fact you can spend bonds to improve a roll after they make the roll is a strong positive for me, someone who hates being forced to gamble with meta-currencies.)

As is tradition, we started out in a tavern.  With the premise of the game being that the town is not a safe place for us to be, there was immediate trouble.  Emerald was concerned about one of the waitresses who might have got a glimpse of her true form, but ultimately it was the Disgraced Princess who ended up getting us into a fight when all Emerald really wanted was to eat her plate of boiled eggs in peace.

The adventure saw us leave town, have a brief period of respite in a hut in the countryside (after cleaning up the remains of a jar of noses that got knocked over), before venturing into the dungeon proper.  There we dealt with spiders, slimes, paladins, and the worst thing of all: temporarily getting separated.

The actual dungeon crawl didn't grab me quite as much as the rest of the adventure.  I suspect it was because it felt a bit OSR-ish, and while I'm not entirely uninterested in OSR dungeon crawls, it doesn't exactly fit in with the PBTA mindset I'd gone in with.  It may just be that in this one-off game which included character creation and a town sequence just didn't have time to properly explore the dungeon aspect, so perhaps a future game will make things clearer.

Mechanically things felt pretty solid.  There are four stats and ten standard moves which covered everything we found ourselves wanting to do.  The playbook moves felt interestingly thematic and got plenty of use.

And despite everything the book says about this not being a nice game, and about it being raw and emotional, it wasn't particularly uncomfortable.  While the characters had traumatic pasts and traumatic presents, we were playing a close-knit group who loved and supported each other.  That meant there was room for light-hearted moments (Emerald's obsession with boiled eggs, the ongoing issues with spilt nose juice) and tender moments (protect Debbie the NPC at all costs!)

We all had enough fun that we're thinking of playing again with these characters.  I'm also looking forward to the various supplements from the kickstarter stretch goals, which offer some different settings to play in.  It's not going to be a regular favourite, but I'm glad I took a chance on this one.

There's just one big negative.  The book itself  Unlike every other book I own, this book is in landscape format.  Which for the PDF actually works really well when I'm reading off the screen, but for the physical book, I hate it.  It's weird to hold, and looks terrible on the shelf.  (There's also no form-fillable PDF character sheet, although that's a minor gripe compared to a landscape oriented book!)

It's also not a particularly enjoyable read.  The author's writing style grates on me at times.  The art is a mixed bag, with some evocative pieces but some that I just find unpleasant - and not the ones that are intended to be unpleasant, either.  The visual layout is stunning but frequently hard to read.  Between that and the landscape layout, this one is not joining my bedtime reading pile.

Ultimately, it's a weird game and one that's certainly not for everyone, but despite my issues with the book, the system is well designed for its target audience and does everything it set out to do.  I would absolutely play this again, if only with a pretty small select group.  I would definitely recommend the PDF over the hardback though.  Unless your shelves are just too well arranged for your liking and you feel the need to throw a spanner into the works, of course.

First Time Playing: Twilight Imperium

I don't talk about board games as much as RPGs on here, for the simple reason that this blog started in late 2019.  Many RPGs work well online.  Board games, not so much, at least without spending money.  Accordingly, I haven't played many recently.  But last week I did venture outside briefly for a friend's birthday, to play Twlight Imperium.

I tend to think of board games as coming in three categories.  First there's the classic, 'family' games that people who aren't board gamers play.  Things like Cluedo, Scrabble and Monopoly.  There's nothing wrong with these games (except Monopoly, there's a lot wrong with that) and I always enjoy the family games of Trivial Pursuit at Christmas.  Or did, pre-covid.

Then there's the board gamers' board games. The kind of thing you'll find in the trade halls at UKGE and Spiel.  Things like Ticket To Ride, Pandemic and Dominion.  The kind of thing I liked to play when I was regularly playing board games.

And then there's the big ones.  Games where you can't just say 'fancy a game?' after dinner, or rock up at the board game club with it in a bag.  These games need planning.  You need a committed group of people, a long period of time set aside for play, and substantial table space.

Of these games, Eldritch Horror is the one I'm most familiar with, requiring the whole of my six person dining table and often spilling over onto side tables, and at least four hours for a 3-4 person game.  But even Eldritch Horror is dwarfed by the monstrosity that is Twilight Imperium.

Before I even got to the game, I had some homework to do.  Fortunately one of our hosts is something of an expert, and provided a handy video:

Factions were selected via a random draw.  Having no particular idea what any of my options meant, I went for the Arborek, because plant people are fun.

I arrived at my friends' house to find their table almost completely covered.  From past D&D games I know that table will fit ten people at a push.  There were six of us playing, with just enough room for some drinks in addition to the game components.  This is not a game I will be buying, simply because I do not have a sufficiently large room in my house to hold the size of table required for this game without removing all other furniture.

We sat down, chose starting locations, then switched seats so that we were all sitting near our home systems.  And the game began.  And while some aspects were confusing, like how production works, it rapidly became clear that the actual turn structure of the game is very clear.  Pick strategy cards going round the table, starting with whoever has the speaker token, then take actions in the order of the numbers on the strategy cards.  To begin with I was a little unclear on how exactly actions worked, or how many rounds happened during the strategy phase, but by the end of the first phase I had it figured out and was prepared for rather more effective play.

Taking a full phase to actually figure out how to play would have been a massive disadvantage, if it wasn't for the fact that most of the group were fellow beginners and took about as long to work out what was going on as I did.  As it was, we remained fairly even, and at the point where the one resident expert crushed us all as expected, we were all pretty close together on the victory point track.

It's clear that the faction you play significantly affects the game.  The Arborek's unique feature is that they can't produce infantry in their space dock, but can produce them from other infantry.  Once I had that part of the game figured out it was clear that my best strategy was to swarm all over the galaxy, dropping infantry on every available planet and build up and build up.  My infestation served me well; I ended the game on six victory points, and was on the point of achieving nine, had the resident expert not ended the game just before we had the chance to achieve more objectives.

I'd heard this game takes a long time to play.  No kidding.  We played for nearly twelve hours.  Twelve hours.  But twelve hours that flew by, without a moment of boredom, with only brief pauses to keep ourselves fed and watered.

I have one criticism of the game, and that is that it's a tricky one to socialise around, simply because it's so physically big and requires so much attention.  One of the other players was someone I know on Twitter but was meeting in person for the first time.  I still don't really feel like we've properly met, because he had the furthest away seat at the table and interaction was minimal.

That said...

It's the biggest of the big board games.  It requires space, time and organisation.  It requires doing homework in advance if you're playing for the first time.  But it's completely worth it to play this incredible game.

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.

First Time Playing: Out of the Ashes

Between Pathfinder 2, Symbaroum and Forbidden Lands, I'm firmly of the opinion that I have enough fantasy games already, but when Paul Mitchener, the creator of Liminal, shows up with one, I've got to at least take a look.

Out of the Ashes is a fantasy game set in the aftermath of a war against a terrible evil that's left the world close to ruin.  Characters will undertake quests to fight the remnants of said evil and rebuild their community.  The setting reminds me of Forbidden Lands, while the play style made me think rather of Mutant: Year Zero.

The system bears no resemblence to these Year Zero engine games, however, using a 2d10 mechanic that's a modification of Liminal.  Success is slightly harder to achieve than in Liminal, reflecting the very different type of game that's happening here, and the various methods for improving rolls all have some kind of roleplay hook attached.

But the important thing is whether it's fun to play, and I loved it.  You could look at the setting and system individually, but what makes this so good is that just like in Liminal, the two sides work together to complement each other.  Things like the skill list including Song, which backs up the importance of music in the setting.

Then there's the monsters, in the form of the Tainted, who are thoroughly creepy.  The main concern with fantasy games for me is whether it's just going to be a rehash of everything I already know from years of playing D&D and Pathfinder.  No; this game has its own theme and the corrupted remnants of what used to be humans fit right in here.

Naturally one of the first things we did (much like when Paul's GMed Liminal games for us) was to head straight for the pub.  Besides that we had two problems to deal with, one requiring planning and subterfuge and the other heading out into the wilderness to fight monsters.  This game has the flexibility to do both well.

I'm a difficult sell on a fantasy game.  I can't see me embracing this quite as wholeheartedly as I have Liminal as there are so many good options in this genre.  But to create a fantasy game that I find exciting and refreshing and want to play more of is quite an achievement.

Out of the Ashes is fully funded on Kickstarter at the moment, with just a few days to go.  Our Actual Play is available on YouTube now if you want to see what it looks like on the (virtual) table.

First Time Playing: Cyberpunk Red

I have a love/hate relationship with Cyberpunk 2020.  I love the incredible setting, which ties multiple classics of the genre together into one glorious whole.  I hate the godawful system where combat has so many variables you're doing algebra to work out what's happened, is so subject to min-maxing that parties can easily end up wildly imbalanced, and where you can't play one of the genre's most important character types, the netrunner, because the system is so badly designed that most GMs won't let anyone play them.

But 30 years have passed and here's a new edition.

We started off with character creation and picked our roles.  I went for a netrunner, since I'd obviously never been able to play one before, and dived into the life path generator.

The life path generator is probably my favourite thing about Cyberpunk 2020, and I'm glad to say that Cyberpunk Red is just as much fun.  Some details have been changed, and notably the bits that made things less fun have been removed.  With the possibility of getting unexpectedly shafted by your life path no longer on the table, it's a lot more reasonable to allow players to choose things off the lists if they don't like what they originally rolled.

So I rolled Eastern European as my ethnic origin, but since 2/3 of the CP2020 characters I've played were Eastern European I decided to make her Middle Eastern instead.  She's also a flashy dresser, with wild hair and a fondness for wearing spiky gloves.

On to personality and background.  Here things got a bit strange, as we rolled a group of antisocial and violent types who nevertheless think people are wonderful.  This would be a good point to allow some choosing off lists, but my group are who we are, so we're running with it.  I'm also a little confused where my character developed her netrunning skills, since she grew up homeless, but I'll find a way to work with it.

The family and relationships section has been trimmed down to a sensible level, with three rolls of 1d10-7 to determine friends, enemies and tragic love affairs.  I rolled three friends, no enemies, and two tragic love affairs, both of which ended in the untimely death of my partner.  The other players immediately gave my character her street name: Widow.

One completely new thing is a custom life path section based on your role.  For my netrunner it filled out a few details like who she works with and for, and what her workspace looks like.  This is a great addition and helps the roles to feel unique.

Onto stats and skills.  There are various degrees of customisation available here, but despite the GM giving us options, we all agreed to ignore all that and take the 'street rat' route: roll 1d10 to select your stat block from a grid, then take a standard set of skills and equipment.  While I wasn't entirely impressed with the stat blocks (I feel if you have a set of standard arrays like this that they should all add up to the same points cost) this was a quick way of getting things done, avoiding both min-maxing and choice paralysis, and made sure we were all at similar levels of competence in our respective roles.

It was a pretty prolonged character creation process, even using the pre-built lists, so I would definitely recommend a Session 0 to anyone running this without pre-gens.  Amongst other things, the life path generator throws up a lot of backstory without fleshing out the details, and some time spent between sessions figuring out things like who my three friends are and why some of my former clients hate me would be useful.

We dived straight into an adventure, however.  I picked up the jumpstart kit from DTRPG during a sale but never got as far as reading the adventure, so I sent that over to the GM so he could run The Apartment.

Things immediately became more complicated, as the GM hasn't actually GMed in quite a while now but has been running LARPs.  When you've got 50-100 players involved, you need multiple storylines running simultaneously to keep everyone engaged.  Not so much with a normal TTRPG party of 4-6 players.  I'm not sure how far into The Apartment we've actually got, as we seem to have spent most of the session somewhere else.

What this did throw up is that it's important to talk about the setting, particularly if you're playing with veteran CP2020 players.  CP2020 was a spectacularly 1980s image of the future.  CPRed has been updated significantly, and things like pocket sized smart phones now exist, so there was a bit of adjustment at the start as we all got used to the fact that we were living in a more up-to-date future.  This won't be an issue for people new to the setting, but for my group it was definitely an important thing to bring up.

We haven't had the chance to dive too deep into the system so far, but we did have a few skill rolls, and so far my impression is that the difficulty chart seems well put together.  My netrunner does extremely well at her particular areas of competence, and is just about capable of success at something very easy in her weakest areas.

We also did a bit of practice combat at the end, just to see how it worked, and unlike CP2020, I actually understand it.  Again it looks pretty well scaled.  A weak, unarmoured opponent can be dropped in one good shot from a heavy gun, but a PC in armour is a bit more durable.  Crits happen when you roll multiple 6s on the damage dice, and there's some nice tables to roll critical injuries on.  While people aren't going to be shedding limbs all over the place like in CP2020 it's nice to see that it's still an option.

My only real qualm is that the game still uses the mechanic where cyberware implants decrease your humanity and take your empathy stat with it.  My netrunner started out with only 5 empathy, and once the neural interface that she needs to do her job was installed, that was down to 3.  The good news is that fashionware no longer has any humanity cost, so rockerboys can have their tech hair and light tattoos without suddenly becoming incompetant.  All the same, it means that empathy retains its status as the 'how much cyberware can I fit in my body?' stat, which is the source of quite a lot of CP2020 min-maxing and the reason I would not allow people to use the point buy system for making their character statblocks.

There's still a lot about this game I've yet to experience, particularly the netrunning, but so far it looks like a solid improvement on CP2020 and I'm looking forward to getting to play more of one of my favourite settings without some of my least favourite rules.

First Time Playing: Brindlewood Bay

Brindlewood Bay is a game where you play elderly women investigating mysteries while a Lovecraftian cult lurks under the surface.  I've been wanting to give this a go since I first heard about it, so was very happy to see it offered in the MK RPG club short block.

By chance, all three players were women - or was it that this game particularly appeals to women?  Either way we were soon busy creating our Mavens, discussing our careers pre-retirement, our dead spouses and our cosy hobbie.  It took quite a large chunk of the first session as there's a lot of things to think about and not all of it can be done by the usual PBTA box ticking.

What can be done by box ticking is selecting your special ability.  Each of these are named after well known characters - I went for MacGyver, and later used it to pick a lock using only some hairgrips, elastic bands and a bit of metal trim.  Rather disappointingly for a game about women, the abilities all seem to be named after male characters.  I would have liked to have seen some iconic female characters on the list - although I appreciate that making them all women would have likely have resulted in a rather short list.

But eventually, Rosemary, Gladys and Hyacinth were created and ready to solve mysteries, and off we went to investigate the death of a man who'd fallen off a yacht.  The way this game works differently to most mystery solving RPGs is that there was no correct solution.  Instead we had to assemble a number of clues, and then towards the end of the adventure we had a discussion where we put together a theory of what happened that made use of said clues.

This all gave it the feel of a TV show where not everything is revealed at once.  At one point my character found a diary with a dramatic phrase on the last page.  What wasn't specified is who the diary belonged to - which meant that we were able to decide between us whose it was when we discussed our theory.  I could just picture the scene where the character pulls out the diary, opens it, and the camera switches to her shocked face without showing the audience what she's just read.

There was one mechanic we didn't use, and that was crowns.  In Brindlewood Bay your character can 'put on a crown' which allows them to change something about the narrative in exchange for narrating something quite specific about their character.  Trouble is, part of the charm of PBTA is that failure is often as interesting as success, and the point where my character unexpectedly got tasered and shoved in a cupboard was such a cool dramatic moment and made for such a good cliffhanger (given that it happened at the end of the first session) that I didn't want to change it.

Something else we didn't use was the dark occult conspiracy aspect of the game.  Partly that was because we only played one mystery and our rolls weren't generally high enough to start digging into that.  But I also don't feel the game needs it.  Cozy Mystery is a perfectly good genre on its own without shoving tentacles into it.  As someone with a great fondness for things like Miss Marple and Rosemary and Thyme, I was far more interested in the 'mature ladies solves mysteries' part of the game.  Part of what's so great about this genre is the contrast between the twee setting and the deep dive into the darkness of the human soul, and I feel like adding the Cthulhu Mythos into that detracts from it rather than adding anything.

Overall I really enjoyed the game.  Mechanically it's solid, with the tweaks to the PBTA engine really suiting the mood.  All three characters got a chance to shine, and the attempt to assemble the clues into some kind of coherent narrative was great fun.  We all enjoyed it enough that we're going to try another mystery in the next short block.

What I'm not quite so sold on is playing it as a longer term campaign rather than these brief one-offs.  Presumably that's what the dark conspiracy stuff is supposed to be for, but given that that aspect just doesn't interest me, that's not going to work for me.  Perhaps it would be possible to reframe it into something a bit more genre-appropriate (Hot Fuzz springs to mind) but cozy mysteries to me are inherently episodic.

But treated as an occasional episodic game, focussed on the cozy mystery and not the occult, I think I'll continue to have a lot of fun with this game.

First time playing (not running): Liminal

So obviously this was not the first game of Liminal I've been involved in.  I've run the adventure from the quickstart eight times now, and I've just started a second eight-week block at MK-RPG.  So I've seen a lot of Liminal from the GM's side of the table but until now I'd never actually played it.

The scenario we're playing is brand new, and the GM is none other than Paul Mitchener, the creator of Liminal.  Plus we were once again going to be streaming.

We're playing with the pre-gen characters from the core book.  I picked up Ygraine Green, a changeling with a mysterious past trying to figure out who she is.  It soon became apparent that she was part of the most dysfunctional group of liminals I can imagine, what with the paranoid wizard, the werewolf with anger issues, the former detective channelling Gene Hunt and the academic who appeared to have snuck in from the 1890s.  Ygraine seemed relatively normal in comparison.  I need to try harder next time.

We roleplayed our way through such seemingly mundane activities as having a cup of tea, going for a drive, and having a drink in a pub, with chaos ensuing at every turn, all with the supposed goal of following up on an anonymous note regarding suspicious werewolf activity.  And to be fair, we did manage to find what we were looking for, despite the many arguments along the way.

Normally I'd say something about the rules at this point, but I said quite a bit after I first ran Liminal  and all I can add having played it is that it's just as enjoyable from the player side as from the GM side.  Fast and uncomplicated, but with enough nuance to make it interesting.

This was intended to be a one-shot game, but due to some technical issues with the stream we didn't get as far through it as planned.  So we'll be returning next weekend to continue the adventure.  I can't wait.

You can watch the stream, technical issues and all, on Twitch, or you can wait for the cleaned up version on YouTube.  And tune in next week for the big finale where we will hopefully manage to stop arguing long enough to solve the case.

First Time Playing: Mutant Year Zero

It's no secret that I love Fria Ligan games and the Year Zero engine.  But while I've played plenty of Coriolis and Alien, until now I'd never really looked at the game that gave its name to the engine: Mutant Year Zero.  I have a PDF copy, acquired when Fria Ligan did a one-day giveaway, but with no likely opportunity to play, I hadn't got round to reading it.

And then came the invitation.

This wasn't just my first time playing Mutant Year Zero.  It was also my first time appearing on a streamed game.  So I was initially a little nervous, but really it was not much different to the online games I've been playing for the last three months.  The main differences were that break times were reliably set every hour (which is something I should think about more in my own games, as my god am I bad at remembering to take breaks) and that I put slightly more thought into my own appearance than usual.

The first game was Session 0, in which we created our characters, established relationships between them and NPCs, and defined the Ark in which they all live.  Like the other YZE games I've played, character creation was mechanically very simple.  Having picked the Stalker role, I simply had to assign a few points to stats and skills, pick one of three talents, and draw a mutation card.  Where character creation shines, and where we ended up spending a fair amount of time, was on the relationships between characters and NPCs.

By the time this process was finished, we'd established that Rudy Russo the Fixer was somewhat unpopular with the rest of the party - although obviously his ability to get hold of decent equipment is likely to endear him to us eventually.  This process did a great job of making the group feel like a coherent team of real people, and also set up some potential hooks for future character development.  It also lead us very well into creating our Ark, with a number of key players already in place.

The book provides a number of suggestions for where the Ark can be set, but the first one to get mentioned, and the one that we went with, was 'subway station' - although since we're playing in the Big Smoke zone, it's a tube station.  Then we had to decide where it was.  Being right in the middle of the zone isn't a great idea, but as anyone who's travelled on the London Underground a lot will know, not all of the Underground is actually underground.  However, with a bit of research we did manage to find a suitable location - Seven Sisters - which also set us up nicely for thinking about the NPCs in our Ark.

By the end of the session we had our PCs and our home base all well defined and ready for playing in.  It was also a lot of fun.  Fria Ligan's take on character creation is so much more fun than the more traditional approach I'm used to from games like D&D.

Since this is a streamed game, you can go and watch it on Twitch or wait for it to appear on Youtube.  We'll be playing on Sunday evenings, UK time, and I can't wait.

First time playing: Vaesen

I missed the kickstarter for Vaesen, but got in on the pre-order.  I'm eagerly awaiting its arrival.  Fortunately my Coriolis GM is an even bigger Fria Ligan fan than I am, and has got the beta.  Hooray!

Like most Fria Ligan games it uses the Year Zero engine, with a push mechanic that requires you to take a condition to push a roll.  It added a little interest to the pushes, thinking about which condition to take and how that affected the interaction.

I haven't seen much of the setting yet, but the combination of urban fantasy and the Victorian era is definitely my jam.  We're playing in the 1850s, which is a little earlier than I'm used to in the 19th century, and combined with the fact we're playing in Sweden, that makes for an interestingly novel setting.  Doing things like climbing into a sewer in voluminous petticoats while carrying a paraffin lantern certainly gives it a different feel to a modern day game, and having to think about things like trains and telegrams not being available yet distinguishes it from games set in Victorian Britain.

So my initial thoughts are that I'm enjoying both system and setting and am looking forward to seeing more.  But there's something else.  Something special.

I love life path systems.  While there's a lot I complain about in Cyberpunk 2020, I maintain the life path system is absolute gold.  So imagine my excitement on learning Vaesen has one too!  But the test of a life path system is whether you get an interesting character out at the end of it.  So here goes...

I rolled an aristocrat
With a rebellious nature
Who is a bohemian academic
And created an influential piece of work
(At this point I had the choice to be older, which I took)
And was involved in a scandal
(I chose not to age any further)

I picked a motivation, trauma and dark secret (from a choice of three of each) and here she is:

Dr Elin Gregorius comes from a wealthy aristocratic family, and was expected to make a good marriage.  She had other ideas.  She wanted an education.  Folklore became the main focus of her studies, and against all odds she produced work on the myths and legends of Sweden that brought her fame and influence within the academic community.

Then it all started to go wrong.  Rumours began to fly; rumours of both immoral conduct and of academic dishonesty.  People were casting doubt on whether the work that brought her fame was truly her own.  Her attempts to defend herself were hindered by a sudden illness, leaving her suffering with headaches and confusion.  The medicines she was prescribed eased the pain but otherwise only seemed to make her worse.

It was by chance that she learned the truth.  An overheard conversation told her that one of her colleagues was behind it all.  He had been spreading the rumours, while poisoning her with arsenic to destroy her credibility.

Escaping her poisoner, she was able to make an almost full recovery from the effects of the arsenic.  What she couldn't recover from was the laudanum addiction that the medicines had given her.  All the same, she is now determined to repair her reputation and prove to everyone that she is every bit the academic she was once lauded as.

So yes, it's a good enough life path generator that I've got a complete character with background and motivation with just a few dice rolls and a couple of minutes to fill in the details.  Wonderful.

So far Elin hasn't done much beyond completely fail to prevent a library being set on fire, but who knows what will happen next week?

First time playing: Symbaroum

I picked up the Symbaroum PDF when Fria Ligan were doing a one-day free giveaway, but hadn't actually got round to looking at it.  Then our Coriolis GM asked if anyone was interested in a one-shot.

We were offered a selection of pre-gen characters.  I picked up Magdala, the barbarian witch, because she was a witch.  Last time I played a witch it was in Pathfinder, when the APG came out and we wanted to try out the new classes.  She was an early casualty of the Player Massacre of 2010.  But back to Symbaroum.

I love dark Germanic flavour fantasy, and I've played Warhammer FRP a couple of times, but I always feel like it suffers a bit from the fundamentally comic nature of some of the races.  Mohawk-wearing dwarves and pie-obsessed halflings don't make for a dark and gritty game.  (See Diversity Hires for what the last game of WFRP I played was like.)  Symbaroum gives me the same flavour but without the comic elements.  The playable races are humans, changelings, ogres and goblins, who feel far more like they wandered out of some ancient fairy tale than the standard Lord of the Rings style party.  The world feels smaller, and a little claustrobic, but there's certainly room for a campaign in there.

The system is uncomplicated - just a row of stats to roll under, and a few special abilities - but still feels flexible.  My first level witch has only one spell, but each spell can be cast at three different levels with different effects.  There are no spell slots.  The only limitation is that each spell cast gives her an amount of temporary corruption, and with that amount being rolled it can vary wildly.  With a threshold to avoid crossing, each spell becomes a gamble.  In one stroke, the game has both done away with Vancian magic and given magic more thematic flavour.  I love it.

Besides magic, I'm also enjoying the fact that the monsters don't roll to attack - the players roll to defend.  This is a mechanic I've only recently encountered in games (The d6 Hack, specifically) and I like it a lot - just as much fun for the players but with fewer dice rolls.  Some of the mechanics are being slightly hidden from us by the VTT (Fantasygrounds appear to have excellent support for Symbaroum) but I can see enough to know I'd be just as happy playing this on a real table.

Like everything else I've seen from Järnringen / Fria Ligan, the art is gorgeous and evocative.  No surprise to see there's an art book available, and a bunch of it has made it onto All Rolled Up products as well.

We played the one-shot introductory adventure, The Promised Land, and enjoyed it so much we agreed to come back for more.  So we're now diving into The Copper Crown, and I eagerly look forward to what terrible places it will take us to.

Pretty much the only criticism I've seen of Symbaroum is that there's not a lot to it, and that's all from early reviews.  There's a bunch of extra stuff available from Modiphius, which hopefully fills in any gaps.

In short, if you like dark fantasy and aren't wedded to WFRP, this is definitely worth playing.  Especially if you managed to pick it up for free.

First time playing: RadioFest

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.

First time running: Delta Green

I've previously played a couple of one-shots of Delta Green at Concrete Cow.  I find I enjoy Lovecraftian horror more when it's set in the present day than the classic 1920s setting, and combining it with The X-Files, one of the best TV shows of my teenage years, completely sold me on Delta Green.

Knowing what my group are like, I requested that they not make comedy characters, and they actually obliged.  Three of them have made characters based on actual people, two of which have their own wikipedia page, which has been the right kind of entertaining.  We have a CIA intelligence analyst who used to be assigned to a program investigating ESP, an engineer convinced he's built an alien spaceship, a security specialist and an archaeologist.  Already the security specialist has picked up the nickname 'Avocado' due to being decades younger than the rest of the party.

I ran them through 'Last Things Last', the adventure from the Need To Know document, as it looked like a nice introduction to the system.  Apart from some wobbles when I couldn't remember how criticals worked it all went pretty smoothly.  (I later located the relevant section of the GM screen.)  Asking for skill scores without rolling works well - necessary information could be put out there without depending on dice rolls.  A bit of a change for the players, who are used to rolling for everything, but we were starting to get the hang of it and it should get easier as we spend more time playing.  The adventure definitely helped me as a GM to make this happen.

Players were initially reluctant to use the leaning on bonds mechanic to reduce sanity loss, resulting in them spending a lot of time running away, but by the end of the first session we'd pretty much figured that one out.  I think I need to spend a little more time over the home scenes between missions and make sure the players are all clear on how that works.

Luck as a straight 50:50 was something I liked.  I used it when a PC wanted to find an archaic piece of technology, and decided success would mean he found one in an antique shop at a reasonable price.  Nice and easy for everyone to understand.


Combat was excellent.  Very smooth and uncomplicated.  The antagonist provided in the starter adventure is strong enough to be a real threat, but nothing a team of three agents with handguns (Avocado had run off at this point) couldn't handle.  The real threat here was the sanity loss - just as it should be.

I'm a little unclear on how some parts of the system work, particularly forming bonds with Delta Green, and how to deal with mental disorders (given that two players started with them and one gained another one in the first session this is quite important) but further reading the rules should sort that out.

The GM screen is very well put together.  I got the PDFs in the Bundle of Holding, so printed it out and constructed my own screen (see future post on that subject).  I referred to it quite a lot over the course of the game and it saved me a lot of searching through PDFs.  Being landscape rather than portrait, it's low enough for a short torsoed person like me to see over without any trouble, even though it did mean I had to construct my own screen rather than using one of the many generic screens available to buy online.

First impressions are that this game is a lot of fun to run.  With a bunch of adventures included in the bundle I bought, I've got enough to keep this going as long as we all want to play even without writing my own, but I also think I could have some fun writing my own adventures.  This is an excellent game and I can't wait for my hard copies to arrive.

Alien RPG - First Look

We're playing a two session game of Fria Ligan's Alien RPG, using the Chariot of the Gods scenario.

Like every Fria Ligan game I've encountered, Alien uses the Year Zero engine, once again modified to suit the specific game.  Four attributes, each with three associated skills, makes for a solid base and also makes every attribute equally valuable.  (Compare with Coriolis, where Wits has significantly more associated skills than Strength.)  The skills make sense for the setting, with Heavy Machinery being the one that most stands out to me - it's not one that shows up in most games, but you know in Alien that at some point you're going to want to get in an power loader.

Besides the skill and attribute sitting in the middle of the character sheet, there's various other bits and pieces going on around the edge.  One of them is resources - air, water, power, food.  Irrelevant when you're on your own ship but absolutely critical as you explore a derelict vessel in your exo suit.  Rather than any kind of tedious resource management, it uses a variation on the innovative system from the Black Hack - roll a number of dice equal to your current rating, and subtract any 1s.  There's also a system for tracking radiation exposure, similar to the one in Coriolis.

Stress is probably the mechanic we were most aware of in the game.  Any time you make a skill roll, you add additional stress dice to your dice pool, equal to your current stress rating.  This means that a bit of stress makes you more likely to succeed in whatever you're doing.  It also means you're more likely to panic, because rolling a 1 on a stress die is a bad thing.  The official dice illustrate this nicely by putting a picture of a facehugger on the 1 face of the stress dice.

A panic roll is a d6 plus your current stress, and a table tells the GM what the result means.  As yet nobody has rolled particularly high on the panic table, with the highest results merely resulting in us spreading our stress to other nearby party members.  However, by the end of the session, my character was a 5 stress.  That means any time I make a roll, we don't know if she's going to be hyper-competant or completely freak out.  Things could get interesting next week.

There was a little concern that things might be a bit predictable.  We were all familiar with Alien and Aliens, and some of us had seen the other movies.  (I haven't, as it's one of those franchises where I'm reliably informed that any movie after the second can be safely ignored.)  We made a conscious effort to avoid metagaming and have our characters act like people who are only vaguely aware of rumours that there might be alien life out there, rather than our own instinct to expect facehuggers at any moment.

And of course we did encounter an alien, but not a xenomorph, facehugger, or anything else we remembered from the movies.  While we're only halfway through the adventure, it feels like it's an original story, not just a rehash of one of the Alien franchise movies.  While this adventure is intended as a one-off (we've already had one PC death and I'll be surprised if the rest of us all make it to the end) I can see this game working for a campaign.

Sci-fi horror is absolutely my favourite kind of horror, and I'm really excited about how well this game handles it.  While there's a limit to how much I can tell from a single session, at this point it's looking really really good.

First time running The Sprawl

Today's post was supposed to be about how my Christmas cyberpunk game went, but since due to lack of numbers/interest it didn't go, here's a previous cyberpunk game instead.

We started out with four players last week. A hunter, a reporter, a tech and an infiltrator. I sent them off on the sample mission from the book (The Kurosawa Extraction) which they carried out rather efficiently.

However, having borrowed an armoured limosine from a contact, they decided to keep it. So this week's mission began with Boone the hunter getting an email from Kendall the limo driver contact, saying that he'd been fired and the only way back into Weyland Yutani's good books was an email full of names. Or Boone and his team (now down to 3 as the reporter was off sick) could do him a little favour...

Over soy chicken substitute and worm burgers, they discussed the job with Kendall. He didn't want to work for Weyland Yutani any more anyway, but he did need a job. There was one going at Peppa Pig Pharmaceuticals, but there were a few issues, including the front runner candidate, the reference from WY which would no doubt have something about how he'd totally lost a limo, and the drug test that Kendall was definitely not going to pass.

"Why do you think you're not going to pass the drug test?"

"Why do you think?"

Boone's initial idea for dealing with the frontrunner candidate, one Radislav Braelynn, was to kill him. Kendall didn't mind what happened to Braelynn so long as he got the job, and ultimately another plan was hatched.

Some initial research revealed that while PPP had some pretty decent security, their IT was terrible, with computers running on Vista.

Loe Qi the infiltrator and Topper Harley the tech both headed into PPP's lab facility, with the help of some forged passes, claiming to be temps. Topper went to the server room to 'fix' the computers while Loe Qi headed for the labs, where he was sent to work by the supervisor technician to process 300 lab samples through the mass spectrometer.

He was able to find Braelynn's sample pretty fast, and got in contact with Topper. With the help of some YouTube tutorials they were able to figure out how to use the mass spec and run Braelynn's sample. As they suspected, he was completely clean of drugs.

Now they just needed Kendall's sample. Topper managed to figure out which lab it was in, but the nurse on duty was unconvinced by Loe Qi's requests and told him to come back with proper authorisation.

With nothing else he could do until the supervisor came back, Loe Qi got to work on the samples. By lunchtime, he'd processed all 300, and was told to take a lunch break while the supervisor got the next batch. He hung out in the cafeteria listening in on conversations for half an hour, then went back to work.

Kendall's sample was in the second batch. He'd been right to be concerned, with the test revealing a truly horrific amount of drugs for someone who was supposed to be responsible for a moving vehicle. Still, it wasn't their job to make moral choices, and soon the RFID tags on the samples had been updated so that Braelynn's clean sample now registered as belonging to Kendall.

Loe Qi got back to work running samples, while Topper dug deeper into PPP's computer systems. While getting into the security systems had been a cinch, the database was apparently rather less incompetantly programmed, and it wasn't long before he'd attracted the attention of the system's blue ICE and was kicked out of the system. Getting in for the second time was more of an effort, but at last he managed to get into the HR database and change Kendall's reference. Rather surprisingly, it was largely positive - Kendall had apparently been an excellent employee up until the limo incident. Soon the reference was suitably glowing.

Topper took one last dig into the database and managed to hit paydata - the formula for an oncology drug that had proved pretty useless for treating cancer but which did get you high.

Topper and Loe Qi left the facility (with Loe Qi leaving his paypal account details so that he could get paid for the day's work he'd done). There were no further incidents, except that the cameras that were no longer under Topper's control all seemed to be moving to look at him as he left.

Back at the bar, they met with Kendall again, who'd got the job and was willing to pay them in addition to not sending any emails. Things were looking good - although they did now owe a favour to Miss Smythe the forger, and had drawn a certain amount of heat from PPP in the process.

---

We got to use the matrix moves in this session. It went pretty well - Topper is a tech, not a hacker, so doesn't have access to all the stuff a hacker can do, but with his cyberdeck he can still get stuff done in the matrix, and it didn't drag things away from the main game the way netrunning apparently does in Cyberpunk 2020 (I've never played in a game with a GM who allowed netrunners so I've never seen this in action.)

The biggest challenge running this game is keeping the spotlight balanced across the players. The hunter had plenty to do in the legwork phase, but as should be obvious from the above, didn't get to do much in the action phase. But last week I didn't feel I involved the tech and reporter as much as the hunter and infiltrator, so a mission that called for tech skills wasn't a bad call - things just worked out with less for a hunter to do than I'd hoped.

I thought running the book mission would be a nice easy start for me. No; things got easier once I was doing my own material. To the point where I'd be up for continuing this campaign some time if I've got enough interested players. The fact I was able to run it despite having been literally offline from Thursday to Tuesday bodes well.