Monthly Archives: February 2011

[Scions of Time] Way Out West

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Photo by Josh Burker.

Last Monday we played the second episode of Scions of Time, “Way Out West.” Victor’s TARDIS landed in the wild west in 1876. After being “rescued” by a posse chasing a band of Apaches, the group was escorted into town, met a new cast member, a riverboat gambler on the run named Lionel Stroller, dealt with a alien spaceship buried in the nearby mountain and accidentally left Ed the starship deckmate behind, as Victor the Time Lord counted four heads when they arrived and four when they departed.

I didn’t go into this session with a good feeling. Most of my preparation time went into idly noodling around the same ideas: the wild west, an alien spaceship trying to repair itself and the different ways it tries to co-opt the local inhabitants, either by turning them into laborers or substitute crew members. That wound up being muddled and probably not at all apparent to the players.

In fact, most of the time went to trying to get Lionel connected with the rest of the group. Lionel’s player hadn’t been able to make the first game, so we tried to work his appearance into the narrative. In retrospect, it might have been easier to write Lionel in as having been part of the original batch of abductees on board the Tzun ship who had previously blended into the background. It would also have given his player, Dan, an equally wide range of possibilities in creating the character, but Dan got on board with a character from that time period quite readily.

There at least two different forces at play here. First, the characters haven’t any bonds among each other at the moment. They all hail from different places and times. Having been thrown together, their common goal is to go home. Victor is currently their only means of doing so. This leads to situations where Adam the starfighter pilot quite rightly focuses on badgering Victor into taking them home. There’s little reason that a sensible person wouldn’t insist on pushing the “go” button as many times as it takes for the TARDIS to land somewhere slightly relevant.

In the early days of Doctor Who, the writers used multiple techniques to handle that concern. First, the Doctor’s TARDIS couldn’t steer then for squat, making it nigh-impossible for the Doctor to return them home. But that’s not enough to stop a determined person from strong-arming their pilot into trying again and again. So at that time, the Doctor was insatiably curious and often a selfish heel. He was often a provoker of action and conflict, which were then left to the other characters to resolve as best they could. In The Daleks, he went so far as to sabotage the TARDIS to justify exploring the planet.

So one thing this group needs is motivation to leave the TARDIS. This should be character-driven, rather than relying on problems like life support failing to propel them into the crosshairs.

The other force at play is . . . I’m not sure. It’s been long enough since I started that sentence up above that I can’t remember what I was thinking.

I will say that I honestly had a period of time during this session where I mentally sighed and resigned myself to a band of sociopaths running amok through time and space, about when Airfor gunned down poker players in a hail of flechettes. Things looked up, though, when Airfor’s player remarked out of character that he saw her as needing someone to provide moral guidance. I felt silly after that for doubting there was a motive behind the decision. Jon’s got a character arc in mind for Airfor, so I can leave that to him to explore.

Next session, I want to open things up. It’s time to leap off the mudball. And lay out some background details.

Betrayal at House on the Hill Warpgate Continues: Is the End in Sight?

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This simple brown box contains so many delightful horrors.

A package arrived Wednesday evening via FedEx. The logo on the return label caught my eye: this was from Wizards of the Coast. The long-awaited replacement tiles for Betrayal at House on the Hill finally arrived!

Beneath a brief letter from Wizards of the Coast’s customer service department apologizing for the original problem and expressing thanks for their customers’ patience was the typical shrink-wrapped pack of tile sheets, very securely packed in layers of bubblewrap. Tearing off the wrap was, I have to admit, anti-climactic. I don’t know what I expected, to be honest. The whole point of the replacement tiles was they be exactly the same as the original batch, only without twisting and warping.

First printing on the left, second on the right. But you already could tell that.

So far, they seem good. The tiles came out of the package flat. As you can see by the picture comparing the first and second printings of a character tile, the cardstock is almost identical in weight. It’s simply that the one on the right is warped. So trait sliders will be loose as ever; perhaps now that character tiles can lay flat, though, those clips will be slightly less prone to moving unexpectedly.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the customer service. Wizards of the Coast was prompt in replying to customers, but the fix took months — which I can understand, as they had to arrange for a whole new print run of tiles — but it hardly satisfies a customer’s sense of entitlement to having a problem made right speedily.

I should clarify that Wizards of the Coast’s response is speedy when it comes to email or phone. Their snail mail response was miserable: a letter sent in early October wasn’t answered until December 28th. Granted, we live in a world increasingly dominated by electronic communication. However, I’ve gone by the rule of thumb that a written letter is more likely to prompt a response than an email that gets lost in the avalanche. That was not the case here.

Additionally, there is the fact to consider that this happened at all. Wizards of the Coast has a good reputation for quality physical components in their Dungeons & Dragons map tiles and the Castle Ravenloft board game. I wonder what went on in the process here that tripped them up: different development staff? Different printer? Different materials to cut down on costs?

For sure, I will strive to be more circumspect about snapping up a game from them in the future — doing double duty in resisting the acquisition imperative — even if it’s a reprint of something I know I love, like Betrayal at House on the Hill. Early adopters are mine canaries, in essence. I’ll let them take on finding out everything wrong with games.

Semanticores

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“Mad” Lawrence Miles, who’s a usually grumpy old man when it comes to new Doctor Who that he didn’t write, just put up an interesting post on his blog about a type of creature called “semanticores.” He takes a most likely unconscious cue from Unknown Armies, as I don’t think he’s ever shown any knowledge of the role-playing hobby, saying that “[a]ll demons are products of humanity; all versions of Hell are built on the belief that Hell exists.”

From there, he tells us about semanticores, “monsters twisted out of shape by language.” A nightmare didn’t start out involving female horses, but the visual pun in Fuseli’s The Nightmare created and spread the image, twisting nightmares come to life.

And then there is the pandamonium.

[Tuesday Night Board Games] Aye, Dark Overlord

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For Tuesday night board games this week, I grabbed a hodge-podge of smaller, less frequently played games. Of them, I wound up playing Captain Park’s Imaginary Polar Expedition and Chrononauts. The latter was fun as always, particularly in contrast to last week’s Back to the Future.

Captain Park’s Imaginary Polar Expedition is one I’ve played a few times before, in a sort of perfunctory way. We play it, and people don’t actively dislike it and then someone wins. This time was kind of like that in that someone abruptly won with a whopping ninety point fabrication. But people also said they liked it, so that was good. I should probably bring the Cheapass stuff more often. I still have games from that company I’ve never played; or game, at least, by the name of Spree!

Oh, Your Munificent Horribleness

After that, Jon and Nonny wanted to try out Aye, Dark Overlord, an improvisational storytelling game. It’s been in Quarterstaff’s demo library for years now, but never actually made it to the play area of the table, down to it not being much of a mechanical game. Jon and Nonny have always been the theme-driven types, though, so I figured they were the best ones with whom to try this one out.

It was . . . confusing. Players cycle through two types of cards, cues that they draw on to weave a story of why they failed to do the dark overlord’s bidding, as well as cards used to shift the blame and duty of story-spinning over to another player. But how and when those cards are drawn, I have no clue. Nonny usually prompted me to pull some more. And that worked out pretty well.

What really confused me was how the stories we concocted frolicked all over the place. They jumped from cue to cue, frequently without weaving those cues together. I think that’s where the player in the role of the dark overlord comes in. Someone who gets the flow of the game would jump in and demand more clarification and poke holes in things more than either of our overlords did.

In short, Aye, Dark Overlord is more of an exercise in collaborative improvisational storytelling than it is a game in the hobbyist sense of the word. It’s very similar to Once Upon a Time in that regard: best played in a group of friends sitting around the living room.

It Always Was Going to Have Been This Way

While I think it plays much more smoothly than Back to the Future, Chrononauts still has its own issues. Like that mini-expansion that came out a couple years ago, The Gore Years. It doesn’t do a whole lot, because so few of the identities in the mix have anything to do with the four or five events it adds to the timeline. Having Lost Identities permanently added to the pile doesn’t help, of course, because that must have doubled the number in the pool, so those added by The Gore Years are more or less drowned out.

It’s still fun to play, though, and a mostly immaterial addition in Chrononauts takes up significantly less room than, say, a dud Arkham Horror expansion.

Mail Call!

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I received two bits of game-related mail in the last couple-four weeks, one of them markedly more welcome than the other. The first, which arrived sometime ago, shortly after the start of the new year, was a letter from Wizards of the Coast. Dated December 27th, it came in response to the physical copy of the email in which I originally expressed my displeasure with the warping tiles found in the new printing of Betrayal at House on the Hill — and yes, that date stamp is correct; I sent that email-letter combo back on October 25th.

Sadly, the letter didn’t have much to say, beyond apologizing for the problem and that they hoped to get the replacement tiles sometime in the first quarter of 2011 — i.e., now. Elsewhere on the web, namely Boardgamegeek, one European player reports that the customer service representative with whom they spoke said the tiles were available for shipping. So if Europe’s getting them, that’s a good sign for the US.

The much cooler piece of mail was Christian’s new handwritten zine, One Square Equals Five Feet. It’s a neat, two-sided, one sheet zine with adventure seed material to plug into one’s fantasy campaign. What I really dig about this is it really is handwritten the whole way through. Christian says that’s in part because he needs the deliberate process involved in making a zine, as opposed to bashing out blog posts as so many of us do.

Once again, Christian’s example gives me ideas and wishes that I’d like to live up to. As that happens, I start to perceive what may be a part of what Christian describes: in writing blog posts, you don’t do as much as you might have.