General Brief Write Ups from DexCon 2012
My DexCon notes for everything except the Night's Black Agents tournament (from last issue) and the Monsterhearts session are sketchy, at best.
Thursday at midnight was Jason Schneiderman's Vampire: The Masquerade game. He didn't ask for the midnight slot, and he decided to run the Old World of Darkness (Masquerade) because he got only one player when he ran the scenario as New World of Darkness (Requiem). There were three players, counting myself. Troy played Henri, a Brujah. I forget the name of the man who played Lucy, a Caitiff vampire, but he was very good. I played Kovach, a Malkavian alienist. Our mission was to find and stop the Axeman, returning to New Orleans after many years.
The PCs did manage to do this, and, after very little pondering, decided to give the being who was the Axeman to a vampire who'd helped them out. The Axeman jumped from body to body. If I understand correctly, the Axeman could only leave its body when the body died, but the allied vampire turned the body the Axeman was currently in into a vampire, trapping the Axeman. He then staked the Axeman to his wall as a piece of unusual art.
The NPC ally was a potential PC. What Jason saw as the heart of the scenario was not so much chasing the Axeman down, which is what it was with three PCs all more or less on the same page, but what one does with him, which is more of an issue if you have one Axeman and ten vampires, each of whom want to do something different with / to him. Fr'ex, Kovach wanted to psychoanalyze and study the Axeman. The NPC ally was fascinated by this Axeman who had the prince of the city terrified. Lucy didn't care about most of the Axeman's victims, but the Axeman had murdered a child, and for that, Lucy was convinced, he had to die. I forget Henri's angle.
The other unused PCs became NPCs, and since all of the PCs had connections to at least a few of the others, this meant that we were never at a loss for where to look for clues. The hunt was tightly focused, but not grim or hopeless. The PCs were not especially high status, but for the most part, they were respected. This was not a punishment assignment, but an important task that had to be done.
Friday morning was Bob Dushay's Mouseguard game. What I remember most is an encounter with bandits. This was inevitable because the bandit was a friend of one of the PCs and an enemy of another. I'm still not sure I get the system, but I think one of the other players had more of a disconnect than I did this time.
Saturday morning, I played Cthulhu Dark, run by Mel White. The PCs were Andrew Mellon, the members of his family, and one outsider, an art dealer. Mellon was going to pay for a Giorgione painting, but had recently gotten word from another dealer, one who was supposedly on friendly terms with the PC dealer, that the supposed Giorgione was a mere Titian, and hence not worth nearly so much.
The group went to visit this art dealer in Italy, and wound up pressed into a ritual that took the form of enacting the story of Salome. All well and good, and beautifully insane, but for some reason, the GM thought that the PCs should recover Sanity by participating in the ritual. Now, Cthulhu Dark does have mechanics for regaining Sanity, but this involves suppressing mythos knowledge and stopping rituals, not participating in them. I'm not sure what the GM was thinking.
Some out of context game quotes:
Andrew Mellon (frequently) (to his son-in-law, aka my PC): Good work, David. (to his son): Why can't you be more like him?
Titan murdered Giorgione.
I assumed he died of syphilis -- like everyone else.
Are the musicians human?
They're humanoid!
Saturday night, after the Night's Black Agents tournament, I was able to make a session of Monster of the Week. Again, my notes are not detailed.
- GM: Brendan Conway
- Miranda Cooper: Johnny, the Mundane (think early Xander or Oz)
- Me: Verity, the Wronged
- ???: Eric Lyman, the Chosen (think Buffy)
- Todd Furler: Jacob Watson, the Expert (think Giles)
- ???: Miralee, the Spooky
- ???: Illiona, the Fae
This was the first time Todd Furler and I have been on the same side of the table, I think.
I don't know where the Fae playbook for Monster of the Week comes from, or if Brendan modified the one from Monsterhearts.
Character generation includes determining relationships between the PCs, and this is made easier by a list in each playbook telling the player to choose a different one of the listed relationships for each other PC. For example:
You are close relations. Tell them exactly how you're related. They introduced you to the existence of monsters. Tell them how you feel about that. You saved their life from a monster, due to an unlikely chain of events. Tell them what.
The player is, of course, supposed to accept input from the other players on these questions, especially if he or she is stuck for inspiration.
The Mundane was the nephew of the Expert, I think, and the Wronged and the Spooky were cousins. The Wronged might have been the Chosen, but wasn't good enough. And just about everyone had saved the Mundane from Yet Another Girlfriend who turned out to be a Supernatural Menace.
What one gets is a group of Scoobies, as on Buffy, with a web of connections explaining why they all hang out together to fight monsters. Each character has luck points which can be spent to turn a roll into a total success (12) or heal all wounds. When a character runs out of luck (and it rarely, if ever, regenerates, and even then, only by a point at a time), the GM can pretty much cut loose with the doom.
Brendan took this one step further, setting up three apocalypses and putting four tokens on each card labeled with an apocalypse type. At any point, a player could take a token off the card and use it up the way a luck point is used -- and bring the apocalypse that much closer. When all tokens were gone from a card, the apocalypse listed on it would be generated. Naturally, that didn't mean the world would end. It just meant that the PCs had to fight to stop the apocalypse.
I forget what the three were, but I think one involved vampires or werewolves, and one involved opening a portal, which required the Chosen's blood. Sadly, we ran out of time as things were reaching a climax, and did have to call that a wrap, as the room was needed for the poker tournament. But, I liked Brendan's idea of a sort of cliffhanger ending of having the Wronged, who, after all, might have been the Chosen, getting sucked through the portal and trapped on the wrong side.
I'm going to leave the Sunday morning game of Dogs in the Vineyard until next time, as it's now 8 pm on Tuesday, 14 August 2012, and we have a flight to Indianapolis for GenCon tomorrow at 10:25 am, which means we have a cab reserved for 7 am.
