End of the World 2013, Day Two

-
Continuing my coverage of the 2013 End of the World gaming weekend...


The second scenario also took place in the ongoing campaign's “Traveller” universe, but in a very different way. In this game, the king of a Tech 1 world of medieval culture is brought into the Empire of Man. The king arranges to have eight of his elderly and loyal royal knights retrofitted as cyborgs, a process taking about 18 months. When the knights return, having been restored to youthful vigor, they discover the king dead, his son imprisoned, and usurper aspiring to the throne. This, obviously, can not stand.

One of the big factors in the system that is used at EOW is first that it is heavily geared towards shooting combat (mostly firearms) rather than melee combat, and second that the game is so lethal.  You can die in one hit.  Not only that but if you are shot, you're likely to die or at least be no longer able to fight.  That's the "realism" of the system, and it has a big factor on how quick people are to pull a gun in a bar fight or kick a door in and start shooting everything in sight.

This game removed both of those qualities.  It used the melee system I helped introduce a couple of years ago, and the PC's cyborg bodies could be rendered inert as easily as a non-cyborg PC, but the caveat was they could come back in a couple of hours.  Since the PC's were on a tight timetable to rescue the prince before the evil Duke could claim the throne, sitting out a scene or two of play was a palpable hit.

The judge also went all out on props: miniatures, detailed maps of a castle and its keep, interesting PC backgrounds, etc.  What's more impressive is he pulled it all together in a matter of weeks, since the judge who was supposed to be running the second day's session bailed at the last minute.  The game was full of cinematic swashbuckling and loads of flashing blades, all of which was unusual for this system and setting.

Final note: in the end, the group failed, so to speak.  After killing the major bad guy (who was only the usurper's lieutenant) and freeing the prince, the prince was killed by a minor flunkie while the group struggled to lower the drawbridge and allow the loyalist troops to make their way into the castle.  The good guys won, but the prince is now dead as well, and the usurper is still poised to claim the throne.  Stopping him and finding someone else to rule could have made for a great campaign.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I moved ages ago, but forgot to tell anyone

-
 I decided to get my own domain name: strangevistas.org and have been posting there for over a year.  When Adam at Barking Alien mentioned that he wanted me to start blogging again, I realized that he might not know, and that likely others didn't as well. So, now you do.  See you soon!
Read more

RPG Review: Far Trek

-
Image
So, as I mentioned recently, I've got a lot of sentimentality for Star Trek RPG's, and Star Trek in general.  Three actual honest-to-God licensed ones exist in history: FASA's, Last Unicorn Games, and Decipher's.  I own the first two and have heard mixed things about the third. But there are also a lot of non-licensed Star Trek RPG's out there, and recently I saw that one of them, Far Trek , was offering a hard copy for a couple of bucks on Lulu.  Never one to let a deal go by I picked it up and thought I'd give you, gentle readers, my thoughts. Far Trek is a light-hearted, even breezy take on the Star Trek universe, almost exclusively the original series.  There rules incorporate stats, skills, and talents.  There are four stats: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, with the stats ranging from about a -2 to a +2, reflecting their modifier on the die roll.  I actually like this mechanic, which I first encountered in True20.  It does...
Read more

Heroes Against Darkness review

-
Image
For my birthday I picked up a print copy of Heroes Against Darkness  by Justin Halliday .  Why, might you ask, would I spent hard currency on a book that is offered as a .pdf for free? First, I like real books.  I read them better, and can do so in places other than in front of a computer monitor. Second, it's worth it.  Beats me if Halliday makes any money off the sale or not, but I hope he did, because offering this game for free was a very generous gift to the gaming world. Heroes Against Darkness is worth owning. (At least if you are me.  Your mileage may vary.) Heroes Against Darkness  is, by its own admission, a "fantasy heartbreaker," which is the usually derogatory term used by someone's homegrown version of Dungeons & Dragons.  If I had to summarize HAD's genetic heritage, I'd call it an early edition of D&D done using Fourth Edition mechanics.  If that early edition had 11 character classes. HAD has the standard D...
Read more