Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

Some pics from Sunday’s game of One Last Job. 

This game is very enjoyable in many ways, and we had a great time yesterday, but it definitely needs to be tightened-up a bit mechanically. I suspect we’ll talk about it on this week’s podcast. 

Thanks to Daniel Lewis for prepping, and for everyone else who attended: Steve Mains David LaFreniere and Ferrell Riley.

So, for our third session of Grim World, I had a little dilemma: four of the six characters died in the second session, so how I was going to continue the campaign with a bunch of rando PCs dropped-in and it still make some sort of narrative sense?

The solution: start the third session 300 years in the future. 

In the previous two sessions, the characters had managed to wrench control of a semi-abandoned fort, called the Gray Pass, from a band of raiders. Many of them were subsequently killed trying to hunt a hill giant necromantess who had been an ally of the raiders. Fast forward three hundred years, and the two surviving party members have re-built the Gray Pass into a bustling little civilization, centered on the worship of a demon boar god. While it’s true that the code of laws in the Gray Pass is somewhat vague and/or arbitrary, and it’s also true that justice in the city means you are  killed and made a part of the zombie workforce, it is nevertheless one of the only standing settlements in this wrecked world, and people flock to it. 

And now the Gray Pass is being attacked by an alliance of evil races from the Everdark (duergar and drow, so far). The third session was pretty cool in that it all took place during a siege of the fortress. Can our ‘heroes’ break the siege? We shall find out next session!

Thanks to Ferrell Riley Daniel Fowler Gary Wilson Marcus Centurian Russell Benner and Scott Owen.

We’re making Burning Wheel characters. Look how much fun everyone is having!

Good time with Grim World tonight. 4 of our 6 characters died (!!). It turns out those awesome Death Moves (and they are awesome) can be a bit of a problem when they chain react. 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Scott Owen Russell Benner Jorge Salazar Gary Wilson Daniel Fowler and Ferrell Riley 

Every single spot for the Mandatory Fun Club in February is now taken. That’s what I like, people: brutal, exclusive efficiency.

There was a lot of really cool, free stuff in the Story Game Newsletter this week. Among those cool things was a link to a huge PDF of all the Golden Cobra entries from last year’s contest. It’s LARP-tastic!

http://www.goldencobra.org/pdf/golden_cobra_anthology_2014.pdf

Over the last couple of years (and hundreds of game sessions) only three games have completely blown my mind and changed my feelings about what a roleplaying game can be: Dungeon World, The Final Girl, and The Society of Dreamers. Well, after tonight, I’m going to add one more to that list: Cheat Your Own Adventure. 

Wow! 

It is so good. 

Here’s the thing: we were supposed to play Monsterhearts, but because of a few cancellations, we decided to do something else. None of us had played Cheat Your Own Adventure before, but I remembered hearing about it on The Twitching Curtain and thought we could try it out. To get started, you use a couple of tables to generate a Choose Your Own Adventure-style book title (such as “The Swamp of Despair”). From there, one person, the Reader, begins narrating the story in the second person. Once a decision point is reached, each other player offers an option, in the form of “If you choose to do X, turn to page XXX.” Whoever presented the option the Reader likes best rolls two dice. If he rolls higher than the lowest number on a sheet (from 1-12), then he becomes the new Reader and continues the story. If he rolls lower than the number, he narrates the character’s death. The original Reader then gets to ‘cheat’ and flip to a different page instead, and that new person becomes the Reader and narrates an automatic success. 

The game leads to some really terrific storytelling, and the options being presented by the players on each round can lead to all kinds of crazy possibilities. We played the game three times tonight. The first two times were very adventurous stories, filled with lots of derring-do and humor. They were terrific. But then . . . 

But then . . .

We had the idea to interpret the name of the story generated sort-of metaphorically. We wondered, ‘Could we tell a story that is more serious and dramatic?’ Does The Swamp of Despair have to be a literal swamp? 

In that spirit, Dan got us started on the third story by setting the scene between a woman and her dying husband. She asked her dying husband what his favorite memory of her was, and that was the first set of decision points to be presented by the other players. From there, the story we told was about one man going through the necessary motions of preparing for your imminent passing. There were visits to the hospital, matters of what to do with his stuff he’d be leaving behind, and the need to reconcile with an estranged son. It was a story that was just devastating, and very tough to get through. It had flashes of humor, as the dying man tried his best to cope with the situation with a smile, but these little moments of levity only made the overall story that much more sad. 

It was fucking incredible. Several people had tears in their eyes at the end. 

From a gameplay standpoint, there were several times when options were presented by the players which, if chosen, would take the story in very different directions, and I loved that about this game. Sometimes those options were very scary. Like, in the case of the dying man, there were times when he could have chosen a more embittered path, or we could have introduced elements of his past infidelity to his wife. 

Anyway, it was a magnificent time. Thanks to Daniel Lewis Russell Benner Kristen D Scott Owen Ferrell Riley and Gary Wilson.