[Tuesday Night Board Games] Holiday Treats

Board games this Tuesday at Quarterstaff took a rules-light turn this week. I mean “rules-light” in the sense that we didn’t follow the rules as rigorously as we normally might, rather than as a description of how complicated they were.

Arkham Ho-Ho-Horror

First was the session of One with Everything Arkham Horror I wrote about earlier this week. In addition to the rules I concocted, we changed our usual start-up process. Not only did players choose one of three randomly drawn investigators, but we did the same for the Ancient One, as well. Usually I’m not one to cherry-pick our doom, but given it was already a hodge-podge game, so I had little hope of finishing the game, and at the time I thought it would be a small game because of the holidays, I rolled with it. John and Chris eventually settled on Nyarlathotep. We also decided everyone had a free train pass, otherwise we would haven’t sufficiently mobility to get around as necessary.

Amazingly, by the time we got all the boards laid out, tokens placed and characters and items dealt, we had a full table of eight players, with three newcomers to Arkham and five long-time residents, as it were. I spent most of the game on my feet, answering questions and directing the flow of play. Joe Diamond, my private eye, spent most of his time in the streets trying first to get to the Bank to use his safety deposit key — only got two clue tokens from that — and then trying to get up to Kingsport to start investigating rift activity. I only ever got as far as the train depot, as we had rough luck with monster surges on Devil Reef in Innsmouth, which packed the Deep Ones Rising track to full in about three or four turns.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident

I’d say this one writes itself, but this article only relates the inexplicable results. The Fortean Times relates how of a ten students on a skiing holiday in the Ural Mountains in 1959, five are found frozen to death, four have mysteries injuries including a missing tongue. The sole survivor had to turn back early in the expedition because of illness.

Let us maunder in the realms of high strangeness for a bit, mulling over the possible causes of this admittedly gruesome tale.

[Read 'Em 'Cause You Got 'Em] The Day After Ragnarok

For once, the crazy Nazi mystics pulled off one of the innumerable rites they’ve staged during countless World War IIs in the annals of fiction. Unfortunately for most people living on Earth in 1945 in Ken Hite’s The Day After Ragnarok, this particular rite summoned Jörmungandr, the serpent of Norse mythology that circles Midgard. The colossal serpent had already spanned Africa and continued to stretch across Europe when an American bomber, carrying the Trinity device, crashed straight into its eye, killing it. Things got worse after that as the serpent’s venom seeped into the sea and the air, and from there drinking water and foodstuffs. Nations crumbled, millions died under the serpent or from the harsh years without summer that followed. It’s a whole new world for everyone who survived.

I’m not usually one for post-apocalyptic settings in RPGs. I’m not really into the Road Warrior aesthetic, nor do I find adventures centered around scrounging bullets and gas all that interesting to play. So it took me a while to realize that Day After Ragnarok, Hite fan that I am, was something that would appeal to me. I’m still not sure what pushed me to pick it up — it could have been an interview I heard with Hite on some podcast or other; maybe Master Plan, but I can’t find a likely-looking episode in the archive — but I’m glad I took the leap.

In this post-Serpentfall world, civilization still hangs on in places, trying to get a handle on things, or at least hang on. And that’s what appeals to me about the setting: there’s enough of the modern world still in place that life as we know it can go on, even though the Poison Lands are just across the Rockies. Heroes working for institutions like Rhodes University, bastion of Western knowledge since Cambridge and Oxford both were crushed, or the great state of Texas, can get useful gear without having to root through department stores and abandoned bunkers.

That’s No Department Store Variety Santa

Under the guise of demonstrating why he should be writing Dr. Strange, the blogger behind Mightygodking has just posted a most delightful notion: the Santae, a clandestine brotherhood of entities with a mutual interest in preserving the human race from wholly succumbing to despair and greed:

The Santae are a very, very old brotherhood, not just of humans but indeed a plethora of supernatural creatures as well. Wizards, sorcerers, spirits, ghosts, monsters, angels, demons, lawyers, you name it – the Santae don’t care what you are so long as you’re willing to contribute to their crusade. Which, in a word, is Christmas.

It’s a fantastically bizarre thought. You could easily insert the Santae as a Solitaire Covenant in a relatively light WitchCraft game, antagonists or protagonists in any campaign level of Unknown Armies or even something really outré, like a hodge-podge alliance of celestial and ethereal entities in In Nomine.

Signs of Alien Abduction

Our Strange World offers up fifty-eight potential indicators of alien abduction.¹ My favorite is the very last: “Have many of these traits but can’t remember anything about an abduction or alien encounter.”

Running a scenario centered around alien abduction can be tricky. You can go the X-Files route, with the players acting as investigators looking into a strange occurrence. It’s the traditional tactic, I suppose, but one I’m leery of. I like to have outright fantastic elements in my modern games, rather than dancing along the “is it genuine or something mundane?” line that The X-Files liked to play with. Asking players to putz around interviewing characters is more procedural than seems interesting to me. That and my ability to improvise their half of the conversation tends to peter out after the second exchange, leaving it down to interaction skill rolls, which isn’t terribly fun for anyone.

An alien abduction adventure that I ran would have to be more situational than interaction-based. “Here’s the premise of the situation. Now poke around and try to achieve a goal.” Which is why I like the set up of Tri Tac Games’ Incursion. Player characters are alien abductees, kidnapped to serve as slave labor elsewhere in the galaxy. But they escape their captors and must not only defend their planet from further predations, but first find it. It’s Lost in Space meets Communion II: Communion Harder.

Moreover, I’d put more moving parts in the adventure, things the player characters can experiment with, or at least take advantage of. A lot of archetypal X-Files episodes involved Mulder and Scully fumbling around in the woods, looking for things or avoiding things. A roleplaying adventure would need to be more tactile, in a mental sense: a spaceship to explore, alien widgets to brandish unwisely, agents to strive against and confound.

My mind keeps going back to an adventure written for West End Games’ Ghostbusters game, Hot Rods of the Gods. It played with UFOs, ancient astronauts and, of course, how they might tie to modern perceptions of paranormal phenomena, all with a cheesy sense of humor. I wish I hadn’t accidentally traded that away with a stack of Teenage Mutants Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness books.

¹ I’ll point out a lot of these indicators also apply to older beliefs about faeries, their tendency to abduct humans and changelings.

[Tuesday Night Board Games] Tales of the Arabian Nights

Luke reads from the Book of Tales while Brennan listens intently to learn his character's fate.

Brennan, the local demo representative for Z-Man Games, set up a repeat demo for Tales of the Arabian Nights this past Tuesday. I missed the first demo and, having heard it’s heavily story-oriented, thought it would be just the thing for me.

I rolled in just as the game was getting underway — we were delayed getting out of the Scuffer up the block — and cheerfully hopped into the last seat, taking the pawn and tokens for Aladdin. Everyone seemed to know how the game would play, so they were already experienced with it or I missed the rules explanation because of my tardiness. Either way, the gameplay was easy to pick up. In Tales of the Arabian Nights, everyone chooses their own win conditions, which are some combination of story and destiny points that add up to twenty. The thought amused me, and I thought about going all out for one or the other, but decided to go for a plain split, since this was my first play of the game.

After I sat down, everyone received a quest. Almost everyone but me received a kind of quest where another player scatters three markers around the map, usually at the most far-flung locations, natch. They had to visit each of those locations to gain a quest award. In my case, I had a quest of being in the same city space as another character while having more skills than they. That quest wouldn’t really work out for me, unfortunately.

Make Me One with Everything, Azathoth

By request, and because it’s something I’ve meant to do after getting sufficient plays of Innsmouth Horror in, I’m bringing everything published for Arkham Horror for a One With Everything session this Tuesday night. That’s six expansions total; three big boxes — Dunwich Horror, Kingsport Horror and the aforementioned Innsmouth Horror — add a board each, additional encounters, more investigators and Ancient Ones, plus sundry items and impediments; and three smaller box expansions — Curse of the Dark Pharaoh, The King in Yellow and The Black Goat of the Woods — add items and encounters typically centered around a particular theme or nemesis.

Add all that together and it’s easy to have a jumbled mess. Other Arkham players report that the more expansions added to the game, the less effect any of them exert. Gates open less frequently in the outlying townships because they’re outnumbered by each other, as well as all the Arkham-centric mythos cards added by the small expansions. It becomes much harder to find really useful items in the equipment cards as tommy guns and shotguns are outnumbered by weapons with one-shot applications or fiddly usage rules that reduce their overall utility — which, admittedly, were added by later expansions in an attempt to water down the frequency of investigators tearing up the countryside with tommy guns and dynamite.

Got Con? Part Two

The registration desk and freebie table at Northeast Wars VIII. http://www.flickr.com/photos/northeastwars/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Got Con? is a three part series originally written and posted the summer of 2009 for Northeast Wars’ web site. It is republished here over the course of three Mondays for completeness’ sake.

Previously on Got Con?, we discussed finding conventions via the local hobby store and just talking to people who share your interests. That will become an ongoing theme in your search for that perfect weekend getaway, if it hasn’t already. Two more routes of investigation await you behind the jump.

[Carnage 2009] Gameopolis’ After-Action Report

I just had the chance to listen to Gameopolis episode 4.5, their after-action report for Carnage 2009. Co-host Jeff recounts his experiences running and playing at this year’s convention. He mentioned something that mirrored my own experience, but I didn’t realize until I heard somebody else say it: all the players I met this year were really into playing the game for fun’s sake, rather than to debate rules or make the game unpleasant for other people.

He also mentioned his practice of running a kind of living board game. His Car Wars arena has a scoreboard, pictured here, that immortalizes not only the winners of past matches, but the truly inglorious crack-ups, as well. Since few board games carry any kind of a memory across sessions, the idea of making past games part of the play experience is a really appealing one.

Be sure to check out the rest of Jeff’s photos from Carnage on Gameopolis‘ Flickr account.

[Carnage 2009] GURPS Infinite Worlds: Highway to Niflheim

Saturday afternoon of Carnage, I ran Highway to Niflheim, an adventure in the campaign setting Infinite Worlds, where a near-future society explores and exploits parallel worlds for knowledge, art and resources. The players took the roles of I-Cops assigned to investigate the failure of a research station on a low tech world to check in with Homeline Control on schedule.

The session got off on the wrong foot for me because I forgot to print out one of the six character sheets for the players. Usually I keep backups of character sheets, notes and such on a thumb drive just in case of such forgetfulness. However, this time, as I pulled all my gear together the day before, I thought to myself, “Oh, there won’t be a printer or a laptop available for you to use, so there’s no point in bringing digital backups.” Fortunately, the last player to get to the table gracefully volunteered to bow out, so that worked out okay, if not ideally.

There was an initial misunderstanding about the kind of game I was running versus what some players thought they were in for. A couple took tactics better suited to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 while I had envisioned something more like Stargate: SG-1 with disguises. But we all seemed to get on the same page readily enough. Some of that was me rolling with what they wanted and some was the players stretching out a bit when they realized it was meant to be a cinematic game I think.