April Gaming Highlights (so far!)

April Gaming Highlights (so far!)

I’m having a really great month of gaming. I’m presently running two games, The Sprawl by Hamish Cameron and AW 2E by Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker, and I’m playing in a short campaign of Monster of the Week by Michael Sands. Here are some thoughts on each…

The Sprawl

We just wrapped our first mission in our new series of The Sprawl, and it was pretty great. We’re playing in a cyberpunk version of New Orleans, where the wealthy live in antebellum homes preserved in carefully managed arcologies, and everyone else lives in a city smashed against the side of a titanic levee. The team’s first target was Vianne Dubois (who I imagine looks like Thandie Newton), a performer who uses a retroscape AR system to recreate a smoky jazz club called The Purple Lotus.

I continue to be impressed with The Sprawl’s Directives method of gaining XP. The mission directives provide a reward for arriving at each critical step of the mission, but the playbook directives (often) provide a reward for disrupting that mission in some way. It creates a really fantastic tension, and within that tension is a huge amount of story. When I say The Sprawl is in a “corridor” rather than “on rails,” this is what I’m getting at. Fundamentally, the characters are moving from point A to point B, but there are a lot of interesting things happening on the sides, too. You can engage with those things on the side, but no matter what, everything is pushing you to point B. The difference is simply in what point B looks like when you get there.

Anyway, great fun so far. Thanks to my players: Maxime Lacoste Phillip Wessels steven watkins Michael G. Barford and Christo Meid

AW 2E

Apocalypse World is going pretty well so far. Our apocalypse is a world wracked by powerful, mercurial storms. And not just real-world storms, but crazy shit like columns of fire, swirling funnels of shrapnel, and chain lightning. Our survivors are a small caravan of folks who move within a mountain range in order to get shelter from these storms. They camp for a week, maybe two, before another storm comes and they have to pack up and move to the next side of the mountain.

My favorite thing so far about this series is the weird ecologies and culture that have developed because of these storms. We have mutant bears called “feast beasts,” so-named because of the bony, spiky protrusions on their backs, upon which smaller animals get impaled during the storms. We have a community of storm riders who use special gliders to catch the updrafts, and are always floating overhead, scouting the area below for supplies. Our own caravan, which is always gaining new members and leaving others behind, has developed a series of almost funereal rites related to the storms that mark these changes in the group’s composition. It’s all very sad and frustrating and beautiful.

Thanks to my players on that series: Jennifer Erixon, Steven, David LaFreniere and Phillip.

Monster of the Week

I’ll have more to say about this one on Episode 97 of The Gauntlet Podcast, particularly about my character and how I have chosen to play him, but for now, just a few stray thoughts:

-Michael is doing a really terrific job running the game. It’s the first time he has run MotW, and the first time he has run something for the Gauntlet. Combined with the normal sorts of jitters that come with GMing (along with the fact that I am a player in the game) and this could have been a fucking disaster. But it’s not! Far from it, in fact. He’s got great GM instincts and is totally cool and collected. I’m impressed.

-The players are doing a nice job exhibiting GGG behavior. Everyone seems genuinely interested in making sure everyone else gets plenty of screen time or are otherwise staying involved in what’s going on. It’s a small thing, but I appreciate it (I’ll have more to say about this on Episode 97, too).

-We have a romance between two elderly characters! First of all, just having two senior citizen characters is pretty rare in and of itself, but the players are going in further to develop a romance between them. It’s very sweet, but never cloying; they have a genuine passion for one another. I’m enjoying watching it unfold.

Thanks to everyone involved in that one: Michael X. Heiligenstein Gerrit Reininghaus Horst Wurst and Johannes Oppermann