State of the Madicon 2015

The state of the Madicon is strong.

Nicole and I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Harrisonburg, VA for Madicon 24.  (Astute readers will note it is apparently not that obligatory, as we missed Madicon 23.  Interested parties can read my write-up of Madicon 22.)

No pictures this time, I'm afraid.  There was a lot of cool cosplay around, but I always feel like a creeper taking cosplay pictures, so I refrained.

This one was not as convention-y as last time, because we mostly spent the convention with friends.  We didn't do the LARP (sadly, as I heard from a reliable source that it was a blast).  Strangely, I did not purchase anything (likely because it's mostly on my shelf anyway), but we did support the Dealer's Room via Nicole.  (A particular shout-out in this case to Emizart; it was her first convention, and Nicole ordered a couple of jewelry pieces from her, including a custom order I understand is headed our way in a couple of weeks.)

For us, Friday featured Lords of Waterdeep, a favorite among many I know.  If I recall correctly, we weren't paying attention and so the player playing Lord Larissa Neathal — the "building lady" — won.

As one does.

Saturday featured Night's Black Agents; interested parties may read about the game session here.  I was fond of it, and the only real complaint was out of the GMs hands — once the vampires appeared, so did the endless parade of 1s.  Seriously, we learned there are about eight 1s on your average six-sided die, a number which seems impossible, and yet there it is.  In truth, this is probably realistic — when Jason Bourne first encounters vampires, everything goes to goddamn Hell.

I know we ignored some of the refresh options for the purposes of learning the game, but I'm really not sure it would have helped.  I watched people blow five points of skills just to make sure they succeeded without rolling, because the dice were our enemy.

Even so, it was a partial success.  We stopped the bioweapon, recovered the scientist, and no PCs died.  Any op you can walk away from, right?

Later Saturday also featured A Single, Small Cut, a sequel to the Death Love Doom game from Madicon 22.  I switched some details around, and once again, the player characters proved to be entirely too careful — they came to St. Gothard's church with a small army of twenty-two mercenaries, and annihilated the Corrector of Sins (which the PCs colloquially called the "ass-monster") in one round.  They accidentally summoned the beast again in the catacombs (a weaker version, as they had moved some of the corpses out of the crypt), and still annihilated it in one round.  They carefully packed away the Red Bell with the knowledge that they can now generate ass-monsters from fresh corpses whenever they want.

Also, the party elf convinced "Father" Clement to track down his fellows and retrieve Eutaric's spellbook, as he'll pay handsomely for it.  Clement knows where they're headed next, so he'll try to retrieve the book and track them down.

Incidentally, A Single, Small Cut was meant to be the cold open to Death Frost Doom, but they stretched out A Single, Small Cut to fit the entire timeslot (again, their preparations are probably a large reason as to why they survived), so Mount Deathfrost waits for another day.

Also, since a couple of us were out in force in our Lamentations of the Flame Princess shirts, we ended up repeatedly explaining about the game system.  Which is good advertising for James Raggi, I suppose.

I only failed to perform two activities this Madicon: we did not make the pilgrimage to Glen's Fair Price Store, and I hoped to debut the Carcosa megadungeon at Madicon 24, but I've been neglecting it in favor of other projects.  Here's hoping to getting it up and running in 2015.

All-in-all, a successful convention.

Holiday in London

I actually saw someone wearing this hat in London.  Damn hipsters.

Nicole and I recently took a trip to London, and while that's not terribly relevant to this blog, the gaming stores we visited are totally relevant.  And now:

The swag.

We visited two gaming stores, Orc's Nest and Leisure Games.  Orc's Nest is located in central London, but Leisure Games tends to get better reviews, largely because they have a little more space.

We also picked up a Cyberman miniature at The Who Shop, because you never know when you might need a Cyberman.

You will be upgraded.

Orc's Nest

The Orc's Nest

The Orc's Nest is located at 6 Earlham Street, London.  Right in the middle of London, the Orc's Nest is probably most easily accessible through the Leicester Square via the Northern or Piccadilly lines on the Tube.  (From the Leicester Square exit, head north along Charing Cross, turn right on Earlham Street, and the store will be on your right.)

Some of the online reviews complained that it didn't have table space (not terribly surprising, as it's crammed into a storefront in the heart of London) and that they shrinkwrap their goods (which local game store Game Parlor does as well and has never been a problem for me).  It has a lot of current board games and role-playing games, particularly given its small space.  There wasn't anything there that really jumped out at me, although Nicole particularly enjoyed their d20-shaped lamp, and took a picture of it.

Icosahedron lamp!

Even though there wasn't anything in particular that caught my interest, we did purchase a couple of things in the interest of supporting local game stores.  A couple of miniatures, an Orc's Nest shirt, and a game called Love Letter that Scooter of DC Geeks' fame showed me and Nicole a while back.

The Orc's Nest haul.

All-in-all, a pretty good run.

Leisure Games

Leisure Games is located closer to the outskirts of London at 100 Ballards Lane.  Out in zone 4, Leisure Games is accessible via Tube at the Finchley Central stop on the Northern line.  From Finchley Central, head northwest until you reach Ballards Lane, then turn right and walk for a couple of blocks.  Leisure Games will be on your right.

A lot of the reviews recommended Leisure Games over the Orc's Nest, and while both are neat little shops, Leisure Games is probably the cooler of the two.  They have a little more space, allowing for a couple of tables as well as more sprawling RPG and board game sections.  Of particular interest to me, they have a lot of new stock, but don't seem to overturn their stock as frequently as some other places.  Nicole got a couple of sets of tiny dice, but I was intensely excited to get three out-of-print adventures from Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Hammers of the God, Tower of the Stargazer, and Weird New World.  I think the only print copy I'm missing at this point is No Dignity in Death (and most of the issues of Green Devil Face, although those are significantly more difficult to find).

The Leisure Games haul.  Win!

If you happen to be visiting London, it's totally worth following the recommendations and checking out these two places.

Review: Rapture's Voyage

Being Valentine's Day and all, I figured I would do something appropriately-themed.  As a word of warning, my review posts tend to draw the highest traffic (ostensibly because a large number of people are searching for the subject of the review).

This...probably won't be one of those posts.

Bedroom Adventures: Rapture's Voyage doesn't actually exist.  I know this because I went around looking for an appropriate summary page (I usually link to Wikipedia articles and suchlike in the main text).  I didn't find any.  Nothing on Wikipedia, nothing on BoardGameGeek.  Nada.  The company, TDC Games, still exists, but from the look of things, did not continue the Bedroom Adventures product line (an advert on the back references the next in the series, Ecstasy Fulfilled, but I can find no evidence of its existence).  In fact, they don't reference Rapture's Voyage at all, apparently having stricken it from the histories.

Of course, no matter how deeply one attempts to bury one's shame, the internet illuminates all.  There is an archived 1993 article from The Seattle Times that discusses the game, for example.  Also, there is a series of videos depicting people playing the game at a party for laughs.

The Game: Rapture's Voyage is a combination role-playing game and board game, drawing from the tropes of romance novels.  It is meant as an intimate game for two lovers, and I strongly suspect it has never been played this way.  The male character is Lord Jonathan Coulter, a noble-turned-pirate, and the female character is Abigail Marie Charington, a wealthy dilettante whose family has fallen on hard times and has been forced to flee an arranged marriage.  She is currently masquerading as a young boy, but Captain Coulter determines her to be a woman in the prelude.

Although I like the idea that he's looking for a young boy, finds an adult woman instead, and decides to roll with it.

Each character has a script, following the format of a choose-your-own-adventure or solo RPG.  The two scripts cross-reference so that you can keep pace with each other.  There is limited decision-making, and there is a spinner that is used for some actions to add an element of chance.

The default path assumes a rather pedestrian romance novel script — douchebag captain calls in young "boy" to mess with her, they become some manner of friends, she nearly dies in a squall, both fall in love, and live happily ever after.

Did I mention that the timetable is only two days long?

The game's unplanned humor comes from the cheesy writing quality and interjection of various tropes.  Coulter notes a crewman who might be a South Seas cannibal, and Charington's arranged husband "was a disgusting dredge of a man with wisps of course [sic] orange hair grown long at the sides and brushed across the top of a shiny bald spot.  It was a contest to see which part of his body protruded more... his eyes or his stomach.  His breath could tarnish silver.  He was at least fifty, stuttered when angry and had a penchant for young women... young inexperienced women, to be more precise."

A South Seas cannibal and a deep one hybrid?  Around Boston?  This should be pretty awesome.

For me, though, the best part of the game is the potential for failure.  The game does have a couple of "Game Over" conditions — in skimming and playing this monstrosity, I found two death conditions and a nonstandard game over.  It is possible for Lord Coulter to attempt to lift Abigail Charington over his head and suffer a fatal heart attack, it is possible for Coulter to make a move such that Charington shivs him to death, and it is possible for Coulter to discover a birth mark that marks Charington as his long-lost sister, so they stop making love.

Awkward.

If there are more lose conditions, I didn't encounter them.

Play this game if you have time to kill and someone hilarious with which to play it.  Drink helps, too.

Since there is no way my rambling will do this game justice, you should probably make sure you watch those videos I linked earlier.  Here they are again:

Board Game Ouroboros

The first board game I recall (well, that I recall reading about, anyway) with a cooperative, almost roleplaying sort of premise was Shadows Over Camelot, released in 2005.  In it, you play the knights of the Round Table, questing for Camelot.  But!  One of you may be a traitor who seeks to betray Camelot.  Note that "maybe."  The traitor is randomized such that it is a different character each time, and it is entirely possible that no one is the traitor.  This last part is the most important mechanic, as the uncertainty makes everything more interesting.  In addition to this, there is a vague storytelling aspect as quests are completed for the glory of Camelot.

I believe Battlestar Galactica (2008) has a similar uncertainty with its traitor, but halfway through the game, you check for Cylons again, making it much more likely that you'll encounter a traitor at some point.  Also, outing the traitor doesn't end the problem — then you're just openly opposing the traitor.  Betrayal at House on the Hill (2004) similarly forecasts your inevitable doom — the traitor is inevitable, but isn't determined until the game's climax.  Basically, you're wandering around a randomly-generated mansion with a deep-cover agent who will eventually fly into a cackling rage and enact some grand scheme.  Until that time, though, everyone is working together.  As such, it lacks the same level of paranoia, but that's replaced with a sense of you bastard! instead.

A more recent offering (2010) is Castle Ravenloft, basically a cooperative dungeon crawl with a D&D fourth edition-lite flair.  It lacks the traitor mechanic, but is heavily randomized (basically like an analog version of dungeon-building in Diablo), so there's a lot of replayability.

To the point: last night, I played Mansions of Madness (2011), not to be confused with the classic Call of Cthulhu module of the same name.  It doesn't feature a traitor or a betrayal (though it's possible that other scenarios offer such), but it does form a more narrative experience than, say, Candy Land (though I suppose that's open to debate).  It also offers a very familiar mechanic: one of the players takes the role of the Keeper, and runs all the monsters (as well as the scripted events and random events of the night), while everyone else picks a character and navigates the mansion of the scenario.  This caused a bit of confusion at first, as everyone at the table was a veteran roleplayer, and we immediately fell into our appropriate roles.

The board game did not reward this behavior.

In a horror roleplaying game, it is best to avoid triggering the horror tropes, primarily by sticking together and staying alert.  Mansions of Madness, however, is on the clock; you need to split the party to uncover clues as quickly as possible so that you can get a headstart on stopping whatever horrible thing is going to happen.  We didn't, and suffered an appropriately Lovecraftian pyrrhic victory — the summoned shoggoth evaporated, but all but one of the party lay dead.

Mostly, though, this is an interesting loop.  Board games like chess form primitive wargames; the initial roleplaying offerings of the 1970s came out of wargames (most historians of the hobby trace its lineage directly back to the Little Wars of H. G. Wells).  In turn, the Call of Cthulhu RPG helped beget the board game Arkham Horror (2005, though an original version was published in 1987), which prompted Mansions of Madness — which emulates the structure of the original Call of Cthulhu RPG.

More interesting than that is probably an examination of Mansions of Madness as a roleplaying game.  If I describe what happened last night, I probably wouldn't just leave it at, "Oh, we played a board game, it'll probably be smoother when we know the rules better."  I'd probably tell you about how the private investigator wasted zombies with his twin automatics (except for the zombie that set itself on fire and died), or how I threw a fire extinguisher at the charging fanatic and completely missed him, or how the weird flapper psychic kept binding all the monsters in place, or how the nun was the only survivor.  It has more pieces than a roleplaying game, but the overall mechanics are simpler — exploration is a fairly simple affair (you either find something, find nothing, have to fight something, or have to solve some form of puzzle), and combat moves pretty quickly.

In fact, that can be said for most of these games — these board games have much of the complexity of a roleplaying game while telling a story in a much more focused arc.  They also have interesting ideas of adventure design, and even manage to randomize the map with simple, cardboard tiles.  This is, perhaps, something to consider when running your next game, both from a mechanical perspective and a storyteller one.