Enjoyed two games at big bad con today. The morning game was Sleeper on Glass Mountain, a Dungeon World scenario. It was a very interesting experience, significantly different if feel from my previous play in Fresno. The scenario was very exploration focused for the first 2 hours (few rolls and no fights), a frustrating middle where we couldn’t figure out how to continue our progress, then some interesting fights and conflicts that we rushed to get in before the session’s end.
Breakdown: The Breaking Point was the afternoon game. We made a tight squadron of paramedics, each with important challenges that threatened to derail our characters. The game started with a bang, with three of us coming off our third day of work, but staying after as a nearby school called in a three alarm fire – the chemistry lab exploded and the nearby wing had partially collapsed. So, exhausted, we rushed out to the school and split into two groups – to save children from the collapsed rubble of the school wing, and rescue another class from the burning chem lab. The rescue was a success, though we paid physically and emotionally. We then dealt with all of the messy drama that went along with trying to juggle lives alongside our work — for example, my character had to cancel taking his mom to her doctor’s appointment when the call came in… and woke up in the hospital, where Aunt and Mom were picking Kareem up… instead of the reverse. Great characters emerged quickly from play, and the tension only built as we put aside obligations to fill the short staffed positions…
(Breakdown is hoping to get a short print run to IPR for fulfillment this holiday season.)
Friday night, I went to games on demand and got to play Wildsea. It’s an interesting Forged in the Dark game with a few minor rules changes… But really, it’s all about the setting. It’s a deeply weird post apocalypse, but this apocalypse was the greening – trees a mile high have grown around the globe, blanketing everything.
It’s a fascinating world to explore, reminding me positively in many ways of Scum and Villainy. The setting is deeply silly but played straight; like the ships draw themselves through the tree tops with immense chainsaws, some of the PC races are a collective of spiders in a people suit, humans from our era who were trapped in amber and awake to this strange world, cactus people and more. The art is beautiful and evocative.
Saturday morning I played the Alien RPG, Hope’s Last Day. A great table, including an awesome android, Holroyd, who staved off a grizzly end for us many times, boldly throwing themselves in harm’s way to save the doomed colonists. The ending was bittersweet, in part because of a sleazy betrayal (by my character) at the end… But it felt very true to the universe.
Last Fleet: Cold War was probably my favorite game of the whole convention. It was very Battlestar Galactica in setup – full of juicy drama (and drama atop that!) , but it was really my fellow players who made it sing. We had dueling Admirals, an overwhelmed CAG who woke up in the bed of the Chief Engineer to kick off the game… plus family drama and hard decisions. The Corax were implacable, ambushing us at exactly the wrong moment… but trusting our corrupted Corax clone was the right decision when our foe ambushed us out of hyperspace while we were squabbling…
Really, I was a pure pleasure to be at the table. Our characters were mostly generated, with a few picks required to finish them off, and with some links to other characters already generated. We introduced our characters to each other in character… whew! And made up extra NPCs to share, who really had vibrancy from the word go – and totally messed up out lives. I played the President, and I still feel guilty about blowing my top and alienating my awesome Chief of Staff Julia…
Sunday morning I played The Dawn Of A New Era / X-men, a Tokyo Brain Pop system. We joked an hour in that we were playing a Spring Beak Issue, since we broke the power grid at the fence and got a trip to Savage Island resorts while the repairs were made. The system was a little too simple for my tastes, but the characters we made were fun, and the asides about the various “Professors” from the Xavier School who were chaperoning reflected a lot of love and lore from my fellow players.
