Hullo, folks,
As noted in this thread,
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=421, I ran two Desolation RPG scenarios this past weekend at CanGames, 2011 in Ottawa. What follows is the second post about the game that I ran on Sunday. Please note that there are SPOILER WARNINGS for the scenario below, so read the rest of the post at your own risk.
Finishing lunch, I started to set up the table for the
Desolation game, and then went over to the sign-up tables to see what was going on after the crowd thinned a little bit. I was delighted to see that I suddenly had two more players, for a total of four, and immediately started recruiting gamers for the table. Since I was wearing my
"Have you spit on an elf today?" Desolation t-shirt, I decided to do so by talking to likely prospects and start off saying, "So, have *you* spit on an elf today?" It actually worked like a charm, and I was able to convince another couple of players to join the game, for a full table of six. Another fellow asked if he could join the table as the game sounded interesting, and since I always have seven pre-generated characters for the
Desolation games, I had no problem with this. So I had a full table, plus one, for the game.
The scenario that I was running for the game on the Sunday afternoon was originally a convention scenario that had been altered somewhat and added to the
Journeys, Before and After supplement for the game, "Any Port in a Storm". Again, I'm not going to go into details about the plot of "Any Port in a Storm", since the scenario can still be run at conventions and the like by the folks from Greymalkin Designs, and don't want to spoil it for those who might play the game in campaign. I didn't have to make any real alterations to the scenario to run it though some scenes got omitted and others were expanded as the players decided to do some roleplaying, thus eating up a bit of time.
The scenario is always a fun one to run, especially with the full complement of characters - Menelaris Covalanar, Tarl Ishrak, Krek of Kharhut, Denner Khent, Esther LaVore, Lem Ollender, and Sasha Veng. The roleplaying becomes more dominant and special when the group of seven is used (though some GMs can't handle player groups that size in convention play), and this was something that I was pleased to see in this running of the game (as compared to the game that I ran Friday evening, with some exceptions). Note that SPOILER WARNINGS for the adventure can be found below.
The folks playing Lem and Esther did a very good job handling them. Lem played it very protective of her, and while she reciprocated this somewhat, the failure on the part of the Esther player was not having a good handle on her magic and what it could do. I think this was partially due to the fact that the player (and his friend who played Krek) both came from a more traditional kind of fantasy magic background, and had some difficulty with this. Lem also was pretty morally inclined, refusing to leave the body of their charge behind, and hauled him all the way to the wine cellar that they called home for part of the storm. He and Tarl (see stuff below) insisted on burying him, and eventually convinced their charge's fellow dwarf, Denner, to also help them and say a few dwarven words on his passing. Esther's player had some difficulty with the character also because the player wasn't really used to playing female characters, and this was problematic for him. The fellow who played Menelaris did something with the character that I didn't expect. He played Menelaris in a disinterested manner, condescending and aloof, not really caring about other people, except how they will affect him. The emphasis was not on the condescending aspects of the character, but more on the aloofness, and this made the character more interesting. The fellow playing Tarl Ishrak did an excellent job with the character, coming across extremely morally centred. He played the religious elements very well, and did a superb job of making sure that the characters as a group remained relatively morally straight. (Except for Lem and Menelaris and the wine, of course!) The gentleman who came in last, missing the beginning of the intro and stuff, played Denner, the dwarf, and did a decent job as far as he could. He never really played Denner's fear of the apocalypse returning aspects and phobia, and missed out on quite a few Style points I thought, and suffered a bit from uncertainty. Both Denner and the Krek character were played somewhat utilitarianly, I thought, but the two players did have some good moments as well. The fellow playing Krek of Kharhut had a good deal of trouble getting into the Mongrel's mindset, and the character suffered from an uncertainty in this regard, and didn't really take on much of a role in the game as he could have. Finally, the fellow playing Sasha, Ron, did a *brilliant* job with the character, making her somewhat over-the-top and foppish in manner with a slightly camp feel. He did a masterful roleplaying experience in this game, one of the best I've seen with Sasha Veng, and made the character truly memorable.
This game had some definitely interesting moments to it. Some of the highlights that I remember were bits where Doug, playing Menelaris, tried to harness the energy of the Weave storm and got badly...Burned. (However, he spent a ton of Style points and actually survived, though he was unconscious for a bit). The fight with the cliff fishers was very good, and went surprisingly well. The players were taken totally off guard by their appearance and attack, and this and the Weave storm set the stage for some of the "this is how the world of Desolation is seriously different than other fantasy rpgs" object lessons. The characters of Lem and Menelaris scavenged a huge amount of wine - Lem's player taking five bottles of good red stuff, while Menelaris only took one bottle, but he was drinking the wine immediately after he took the bottle, despite the situation the player characters found themselves in. Rick, playing Lem, actually got into a confrontation with Ron's Sasha Veng about his treatment and lack of respect for Lady Esther, and insisted that he call her "Lady LaVore". The Rover consented, but in that snidely reassuring way that tells you he isn't going to do that. And finally, in the sub-ocean tunnels, when Tarl realised that the others had all fled back the way they came when confronted with the *censored for playability sake!*, the look on his face was priceless as he realised that discretion was the better part of valour! There was other good stuff that I can't remember right now, and didn't note at the time of the game.
I ended up having to rush the finish of the scenario somewhat, as the CanGames Presentation Ceremony was due to start around 6:00 pm or so. Part of this was due to a couple of extended scenes of roleplaying on the part of the players, as well as two short breaks that I had to take because of the sciatica pains (though I didn't take any pills for that at the time). The scenario came to a close with the player characters having won the day, but it could have been at a perilous cost, as several characters really did take their lives into their own hands. My friend, Steve Ross, had finished his game about an hour early, and thus came down and took the two photos that you see with the full post about
CanGames, Day 3. Kind of cool of him to do that. And I'm grateful to him for that. He watched part of the last hour of the game, and wandered around a bit as well (far as I could tell). The players all told me that they had a pretty good time, and that they liked the game system and the mechanics. Ron and Rick both commented that they thought the game mechanics could be adapted to other games as well, and I told them that they were attached to two other Ubiquity licences. Everyone liked the post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, and found the dice mechanics easy to learn and pick up, and commented that it was really neat to see a game set itself only a few years after the apocalypse, rather than 500 years later and so forth. They found this brought home the survival aspects of the game in the post-apocalyptic setting, and felt the game offered a lot of scope for the types of fantasy campaigns that could be used with it. They also loved the Nutrition Value (NV) thing, too.
Overall, it was a very successful run of the
Desolation game system, and used a scenario that was really pleasing to run and enjoyable by the players, with all its twists and plot machinations. I could easily see where this adventure might run over the alloted four-hour time slot, but some of the encounters can easily be done away with. Again, many of these players had never played
Desolation before, let alone the Ubiquity game system, and for me that made the game special in terms of how it runs with a bunch of newbies who don't know the world and are getting their feet wet for the first time. I look forward to running this adventure again in the future.
Thank *you*