Review: “The Key of Fey”
Key of Fey, published by Emerald Press, is a GSL-licensed module for a party of first to third level Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition characters. While Key of Fey can be played “straight” like any other adventure, it is designed for a mode of play the authour calls mercenary. At the beginning of Key of Fey, the PCs come (for their own, individual reasons, but on the same transport) to a town that has been overrun by orcs. Each character has severed ties to their previous lives, and they are drawn together by their common need for work and amoral willingness to take any opportunities that present themselves. This leads them into conflict with a Feywild-related cult and quite possibly leads them in over their heads.
Mercs
Before getting into the meat of the adventure, I want to discuss the “mercenary” – or, as the module mostly calls it, merc – mode of play that I mention in the introduction, since it offers context for the content. While it is possible to play Key of Fey in the standard heroic mode of Dungeons & Dragons 4e, this adventure is designed as the first installment in a merc adventure path, and other modes of play require some small tweaks, at least to tone. The merc lifestyle suggests that the PCs are most concerned with getting work and getting paid, while matters like ethics and morality will be, at best, a secondary consideration. [Read the rest of this article]
The New D&D Starter Red Box: A Chatty and Nico Review
Through some obscure manipulation of the gaming industry ether, I was able to secure a pre-release copy of the much talked about new D&D Starter Red Box. Nico and I have been playing around with it and I thought I’d share my thoughts.
Chatty’s Ultimate Capsule Review
The first product of the D&D Essentials product line, while likely to be the target of hordes of people who will complain that it is not what it could never be… is what I wished I opened in 1986.
It is an introduction to the D&D game that goes directly to the heart of things:
Here, let us show you how to make a PC while reading a “be your own hero”story, learn about skill checks and let’s end it with a tactical fight. You liked that? Get 4 more friends, make basic characters and play this level 1 adventure that brings you to level 2. Want more? Here’s material for the DM to create adventures to (almost) bring you up to level 3.
Welcome to D&D!
The Box…
…is beautiful. It features the same Larry Elmore art that featured on the last edition of the Basic Red box (Mentzer edition) from the 80′s and scores a direct hit to the nostalgia part of our gamer lizard brains.
It contains softcovers Player’s and Dungeon Master’s Booklets, a sheet of 2-sided counters (PCs and monsters, including 2 dragons and a Gelatinous Cube) printed on thick cardboard, a set of opaque, white-inked black polyhedral dice, a foldup battlemap, 4 blank simplified character sheets and several sheets of punch-out power cards made of thin cardboard.
Nico, my 8 year old son, had lots of fun punching out the counters while I read the players book intro real fast to start the game. I was so looking forward to this…
The Solo Game
The box expects one player, presumably a kid who got the box as a gift or an adult curious about the game, to create their first D&D PC through reading a “choose your own path” adventure. The booklet guides the reader to make a few fundamental set of choices that will lead to a completed character:
- Class: Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, Cleric
- Race: Elf, Dwarf, Human, Halfling
- A preferred power (or two)
- The PC’s Skill Set
Lets be clear here, as I know this will anger many who clamour for “Basic D&D 2.0″, the starer is what is says on the box, a starter set. It is a complete game, but not a complete game system. Beyond picking among 4 basic classes and the same number of races, a handful of powers and skills, character generation is arguably anaemic (but better than the previous 4e starter set). The task resolution systems (skills/combat) are also simplified while still being very much 4e.
Nico and I played through the players book in 2 sessions. He grew bored a few times as he found we were spending more time setting up the PC than actually playing. He also got frustrated a bit that the skills we choose for his wizard never came into play in the skill-checks part of the adventure.
Nico: Why did you chose these skills if they don’t help me run after the fleeing goblins?
Chatty: Wizards are not very good at running in the wild, trust me, it will get better soon.
I’d suggest parents playing with pre-tweens to make the PC beforehand (with input from your child) and start the solo game with a fully fleshed out PC and ignore the char-gen parts.
Once Nico got to choose the spells (mostly fire-based, as can be expected from a geeky 8 y.o.) and fought against the goblins in their lair, things picked up for him and he loved casting Burning Hands over much of the map.
Speaking of maps, three are supplied: a previously published “monsters lair” from D&D miniatures, along with “‘The crossroads” from the same starter set and an exclusive dungeon map made of tiles reproduced on a full-sized battle map.
Once the lone player has played through the first Player’s playbook, he/she has 2 quests, a basic grasp of the game and a guide to teach it to up to four others (which implies photocopying the power cards if you want to allow multiple players to pick the same classes).
The Full Starter Game
That’s where the second book, the Dungeon Master’s, comes in. It presents the game’s rules, in a simplified form (ex: gone are some conditions like restricted) and with a lot less skill/combat options (ex: no rule 42 charts, no traps, no alternative combat moves like Bull Rush and no skill challenge rules). It also includes a fully fleshed out dungeon adventure covering about 10 encounters featuring goblins, kobolds, drakes, a dragon.
Finally a D&D starter where there is both a dungeon & a dragon in its prepared material!
The book included tips and tricks to run games and does a very decent job to explain what the DM’s responsibilities are. After the adventure, the book provides rules to level up all classes to level 2 (with appropriate power cards). It also describes how to create further basic adventures, including a decent bestiary and dungeon design advice, that can bring PC to the cusp of level 3, including a little DC chart, a list of lvl 2 Treasure parcels and a 2 page gazetteer on the Nentir Vale region, the core D&D 4e setting.
To summarize, the new Red Box is a 20$ starter set that introduces players to the D&D 4e game. The game delivers a 4e-lite experience that most likely should succeed in teasing those interested by the game’s structure of play. It is very much 4e (auto-hit Magic Missile that Nico absolutely loves) with many of the fiddly bits removed.
Oh and there’s a bonus solo adventure you can download by entering a code on the Wizards of the Coast website before the end of the year. That’s a nice little bonus.
Trial by Ice Baby!
I’ve started playing the second part with Nico and my “I’ve never tried RPGs before” wife Alex (Elven Rogue). They both were awesome roleplayers trying to come up with a plan to invade the dungeon by distracting the guards with illusions and trickery.
When my son declared that a halfling wizard’s Second Chance power (monster rerolls attack on a hit) allowed his PC to turn back time a few seconds and dodge a White Dragon’s breath attack, this power’s flavour text instantly became canon.
Later, when Alex’s Rogue attacked the bloodied Ice Wyrm and missed, she triumphantly invoked her Elven Accuracy power and cried “yes!” noisily when she rolled a 19 on her d20. Not bad for her first RPG session ever.
The Blemishes
Some dark spots appear on this otherwise very well thought of product. Some incoherences in the rules appear due to what I assume to be incomplete editing. For instance, the rules on teleportation mention what happens to immobilized and restrained creatures that teleport, but the section on conditions makes no mention of the restrained status.
Similarly, the Magic Missile spell mentions that it can be used against up to 2 targets while my sources informed me that this has already been changed by the recent Magic Missile errata to one.
Nothing major… but these easily spotted editing issues are a continuing trend with Wizards product that can and do annoy customers.
That being said, I’m highly satisfied with this product and I would have bought it had I not been offered a review copy. I feel that it’s biggest shortcoming will be its impossibility to meet the inhuman expectations that the emotionally charged community will place behind it. I predict the Internet will ignore the “Starter” tag on the box and try to compare the new Red Box to its legendary progenitor.
This Starter Red Box is not the first step into a parallel line of D&D products, like the 198os editions of boxed D&D were in regards to Advanced D&D back then. The new box is what you should buy your nephews and nieces after they spend an afternoon playing with your minis in the basement. It’s what you should suggest to your coworker who’s always wanted to try D&D but was daunted by the number of books at the game store.
From there, the Essential line will feed this new generation of customers because, let’s be honest here, while we can all enjoy D&D as a game, it remains a brand that pays the salaries of the designers, writers and marketers that put all of this together.
I don’t know about you, but I much prefer an approach like Essentials, which I can stay away from if I so choose, than getting tricked into another 3.5. But that’s an editorial for another time.
Final Score?
Now Nico wants to get his friend Felix and Charles to join us as we get ready to storm the goblin-infested dungeon again. Hell even Alex is more than willing to give it another try, provided the party has a fighter she can depend on to flank monsters with.
Mission accomplished Wizards. I can’t say anything more.
(Update): It turns out that there is a skill challenge in the introductory DM-tun adventure. It is broken down in simple terms to run it but doesn’t tell the DM how to build more.
Review: “DC Adventures: Hero’s Handbook” RPG
My only major purchase at Gen Con was the DC Adventures: Hero’s Handbook RPG, which is an updated version of Mutants and Masterminds. After playing in a demo run by (I believe) game designer Steven Kenson, I was certain it was just the superhero flavor I had been looking for many moons. I haven’t run my own adventure yet, but I did play a demo. Here are my thoughts:
Critical Hits
- Emphasizing Style Over Crunch: Make no mistake, this system is EXTREMELY crunchy. There are rules for the entire gamut of comic books, but the game does a great job emphasizing the difference between mechanics and the in-game explanation of powers. If you shoot a bolt of energy, it doesn’t matter if its fire, lightning, awesomeness, or willpower, it all has the same basic framework with tons of modifiers to suit your fancy. [Read the rest of this article]
Review “Happy Birthday, Robot!”
The HBR lettermark
Gamers with young families perennially wonder how best to introduce their little geeklings to gaming, especially the non-digital kind. While Candyland (and its German, less boring relative, Gulo Gulo) and Snakes & Ladders are traditional starting places, roleplayers usually have to wait until their kids are nine or ten to share their hobby. While it is not a roleplaying game, Daniel Solis‘s newest game, Happy Birthday, Robot! is now an option for gamers who want to introduce their kids to collaborative storytelling as they are old enough to write a basic sentence with a little help from their parents. It can also be played as a party game by adults who are comfortable with their inner child, or as an activity for mixed groups of adults and children.
Simple Premise – There’s a Robot, It’s His Birthday, and His Friends Want Him to be Happy
In Happy Birthday, Robot! (HBR for short), the players work together to write a short story that emulates the form of a children’s story. The story is written one sentence at a time, with three players having input into each sentence. [Read the rest of this article]
Barf Forth Apocalyptica! Review: Apocalypse World
What started out as a short review ended up being a 1500 word text where I try to summarize what the game is about so I can run it next week. Feel free to read the Capsule Review and then jump to “So Chatty, what are your thoughts”
The first new RPG I bought at Gen Con 2010 is Apocalypse World by Dogs of the Vineyard designer Vincent Baker. I met him early during the con and he made a great pitch while I was looking for a post-apocalyptic game for my gaming group. Our mutual interests collided and I left with a beautiful, autographed, pocket-sized paperback.
I’d likely play it next week with my gaming group so here’s a chatty style review.
Capsule Review
Not for the faint of heart from both a thematic and playing philosophy point of view, Apocalypse World presents a very clever and apparently engrossing game. It’s main focus is not so much on player accomplishment or setting exploration(although the PCs are complete badasses) but rather the relationships that form between PCs and the constantly mutating loyalties and rivalries between them.
If you’ve started enjoying story games that thrive on failures like Mouse Guard and Burning Wheel but want to explore a darker, very adult theme, Apocalypse World is well worth giving a try.
Buying the book+PDF: Click Here
The Core Play Philosophy
As can be expected from a Lumpley Games RPG, Apocalypse World is first and foremost a Story Game focusing not on collecting whacked out technological gear while fighting mutants. Rather it’s very much about the loyalties and rivalries that form when exceptional, kickass beings (the PCs) band together against a merciless, you’ll-get-screwed-no-matter-what world of decay, scarcity and multiple threats coming from everywhere.
Play focuses on players getting into trouble and how they resolve it (usually by getting into more trouble, leaving behind numerous dead NPCs). The PCs follow their own agendas for survival: performing tasks, raiding groups of NPCs (or even those of other PCs) to gain resources and acting on obligations that often crop up.
Play also follows meta-plots, called Fronts, where events and/or major NPC groups move in the already busy schedules of the PCs to make things more interesting and prevent players from establishing too much stability in the world.
For example, a new cult can move in near the PCs holding, bearing a strange viral plague that reprograms people into new fanatical converts before they die horribly of some form of brain cancer 3 months later.
Finally, the game forcefully tells GMs (called Master of Ceremonies or MCs) to refrain from prepping stories and adventures. Prep focuses on keeping NPCs and organizations created through play straight (there are plenty of tools available online for that) and organizing the game’s fronts.
The Implied Setting and World building
The game’s implied setting starts unspecified yet remains very specialized:
Here be the post-apocalypse and some serious, undefined shit is brewing in some ethereal entity called the psychic maelstrom.
The world takes shape as the players flesh out their characters while the MC innocently peppers the discussion with questions about the PCs pasts, current location, make of vehicles and names of every NPC around them.
The answers of such questions, with healthy doses of “Just make it up” whenever players falter, create the world as the MC notes relevant details on the very elegantly designed 1st session worksheet.
Character Generation
Characters are presented to players as playbooks: a combination character generation rules, character sheet and character specific rules. Each playbook represent an established Post-Apocalyptic badass archetype and two players can’t play the same since each represent a unique exceptional individual.
Some examples:
- The Angel heals people, and has a medical clinic with staff.
- The Battlebabe kills and intimidates everyone with her custom whacked up weapons.
- The Gunlugger is the ultimate killer badass with more guns than shorts.
- The Hocus is a religious leader prophet controlling a cult of NPCs (think Season 4 Gaius Baltar).
- The Brainer screws with people’s brains with her psychic abilities.
- The Hardholder is the leader of an established community of variable size .
And so on.
The playbook outlines all the choices that players make to create the PC, from names, look, equipment, and stat range so it is a clever, self-contained document.
Oh yeah, and thanks to Ron Edwards’ influence (among many other Indie luminaries), the PCs have special powers when they have sex with one another.
Yeah, that kind of game.
The Game Mechanics
Mechanically speaking, the game is an exchange of narrative “moves” where a move describes an action/event/game element with a significant impact in the game’s fiction.
All characters have basic moves like “Going aggro” and “Read a Situation” and character specific ones like the Angel’s “Healing Touch”. Establishing success of such moves (when significant) requires a player to roll 2d6 and add a relevant stat (which usually goes from -2 to +4). A 7-9 is a soft success (i.e. it works but something goes wrong/different than planned as described by each moves) and a 10+ is a hard success.
While the player will use the terminology of their moves (basic and character-specific) to clearly indicate to the MC what they are attempting, the MC will ask the player to fictionalize said move to make it cooler by saying, over and over again: “Cool, how do you do that?”
The Master of Ceremonies
The MC is guided by a set of formal narrative principles like “Barf forth Apocalyptica” and “always respect the logic of the game”. He also has very specific moves like”Announce Future Badness”, “Separate them” and “‘take their stuff away”. In essence, the MC announces that something happens whenever he makes a move and asks players to react with moves of their own. For example:”A bad guy slinks away behind you and loops a steel wire around your neck, what do you do?”
Most everything the MC does in the game is make moves that lead up to the “what do you do” question, the MC almost never rolls dice. PCs get hurt (Shot at, drugged, strangled, etc) when they fail rolls. It’s the move players choose reactively that either gets them out of trouble, lands them into different trouble or leaves them lying in a puddle of blood.
The MC must also makes crap up on the spot (NPC moods, appearances, actions) while narrating. When well done, players don’t notice anything other than an apocalyptic tinged fully interactive story that remains internally consistent with both the rules and the apparent onscreen/offscreen logic…
Things become really interesting when PCs either miss a roll or give the MC a golden opportunity to screw with them… thus the MC is invited to go to town and make the most heinous-yet-interesting-for-the-PCs move he can think about. A bit like Mouse Guard’s failure mechanic… only not G-rated and guided by the MC’s list of moves (and any custom ones that fit the game).
The MC also names everything so that all NPCs gain a semblance of substance… but never so much that he gets to hesitate to get them killed, maimed, destroyed at the players whim.
The game’s fuel is the MC’s questions to the characters (not players). Those questions (and answers) build the world and shape where the action goes. Many (if not most) of these questions should be embedded in the MC’s moves or in response to players Moves/questions (i.e. turning player questions back to the group).
Chatty: You’re reading this awesome review, What does it remind you of? What does it make you feel like?
Exactly like that.
So Chatty what are your thoughts?
After reading the book and going over the game’s forums, I definitively want to try it for a few sessions. This is NOT Fallout the RPG. There is very limited space for armour, explosives and advanced weaponry. What it is about is scarce water, savage gangs of bikers/cultists, warlord raiders, driving through the desert in search of medicines and trying to decipher what the hell is the Psychic Maelstorm before it rots everyone’s brains.
Oh and see if you can get in Marie’s pants before she makes a move on Roark.
I’m completely intrigued by a game with no formal planning and especially by the “you don’t roll stuff, the players do”. It makes me feel the game is hard to master for both players and the MC. There are a LOT of little bits here in there that can be easily forgotten.
I’ll spend the week thinking of some visuals and sub-themes so I can barf forth the appropriate levels of Apocalyptica.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask… this is a hard game to describe.
Buying the book+PDF: Click Here
The Left Hand of God: Review and Contest
Background
A nominally young adult novel set in a dystopian world that mirrors our own past, The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman is a book of impressive vision and puzzling inconsistencies that ultimately provides a gruesome, but highly enjoyable read. The book follows the trials and travails of a young boy named Cale raised in a brutal dogmatic monastery of a twisted parody of Christianity. His life is forever changed upon witnessing a deed horrifying even to his own warped perspective.
Setting
The world has a religious martyr named the Hanged Redeemer, but this isn’t the cuddly Crucified Martyr we all know. The followers of this religion are engaged in a bloody civil war much like the Reformation period. Very little information is given about what the differences are between the Redeemers and the Antagonists (who don’t appear on camera), but we can loosely assume that the Redeemers are dogmatic quasi-Catholics and the Antagonists are revolutionary thinking quasi-Protestants. The Redeemers are headquartered at The Sanctuary, a place where children are taken from parents to be turned into brutal lifelong soldiers. There they eat boiled feet (?), are made to recite prayers that lose all meaning, and suffer constantly brutality under at the hands of the Redeemers. The book moves from the Sanctuary to the world at large, which is terrifying and awful in its indulgences rather than its depredations. The ambiguous quasi-historical nature of the book is intriguing, if occasionally puzzling, while some of the plot holes in the cultural fabrics that inhabit the world is puzzling in a more aggravating way. We’re told that the children eat terribly (and the feet of cadavers, potentially), yet they grow strong. The world’s most powerful nation is made up of heavily armored nobles that refuse to field archers or siege weapons, but have virtually conquered the world. These strange points annoy me, and perhaps will be answered later, but for now are quizzical stray steps from and otherwise dark quirky world.
Story
The story progresses linearly, with certain plot points withheld until they become relevant. Other plot points are dangled at astute readers, but end up resulting in nothing. Hopefully, this is because they become relevant in a sequel, but it’s frustrating when they’re handled so brazenly. As for the parcels of story that come abruptly, the characters reluctance to disclose their full past is well-explained, but a few times this lack of information comes across as cheap. It’s easy to forgive a bit of chicanery, as the characters are interesting. The protagonist struggles between the harsh lessons of his life and the emerging gentler visions he sees. His comrades are amusing, though more archetypal than well-developed. The plot whisks along fast- sometimes too fast. Again, huge plot points drop on the reader like exposition filled anvils from the sky. It’s unsubtle, but it keeps the book from being dull. The climax itself is bizarrely devoid of anything but forced character involvement and oddly precise compared to the brutal and visceral violence early in the book. Yet, the aftermath of the book sets up a sequel in an interesting, and unexpected, way.
Overall
B-. As with many fantasy series, this book exists as much to set the stage as tell a story on its own. Despite my gripes, I found myself liking the story more the more I read. Similar to The Darkness That Comes Before the book is not without its faults, but it does plenty enough to pique my curiosity for reading its sequel. Check for a contest to give away some free copies of the novel.
The Left Hand of God Contest
You may have read the preceding review, or you may not have. It doesn’t matter either way, because you can play the contest regardless. The book’s title sound suitably fantasyish, doesn’t it? Well, that my friends is the basis of our contest. Come up with a description for “The Left Hand of God” to be used in an RPG setting. If it impresses our judges enough, you win a copy of the novel! You can make it a plot hook, crunch it out as a 4E item, or even make it an NPC (perhaps it can hang out with the Atropal). Just leave your entry in a comment (or a link to your entry in a comment) to enter.
Contest opens today and ends by the end of Friday, August 20th. Panel of judges will select their top 5 entries, and each of those entrants will win a copy of the novel Left Hand of God. Entrants must provide a valid email address to be eligible so we can contact the winners. Entries can be disqualified at our sole discretion (especially if they infringe upon existing content.)
Review: New Dice from Q-Workshop!
At this point, if you haven’t heard of Q-Workshop, then you’re missing out on some of the best dice that are being produced today! We are lucky enough to have gotten a chance to look at, roll around, and generally admire three of their sets of dice – Celtic Dice (pictured right), Forest Dice, and Elven Dice.
All three of these sets of dice are the same high standard of quality that we’ve come to expect from Q-Workshop, the Celtic and Forest dice are intricately detailed and incredibly fun to play with while the Elven dice are more elegant and simplified in their design. The only issue that we have with the Celtic and Forest dice is that because they are so detailed, some of them can be hard to read which interferes with the basic function of dice. This issue, however, seems to be something that the company is improving on as they continue to produce dice, creating a balance between intricacy and readability that will result in some truly original and highly functional dice.
The Forest dice (below left) seem to be the first step in the direction of higher readability while still retaining much of the detail of sets like the Celtic dice. Very similar to the Dwarven dice set that I reviewed back in December, the Forest dice set is a well themed and beautifully crafted product that can be a great element to bring a bit more of your character or your personality to the table. Simply rolling the Dwarven dice makes me want to play a classic D&D dwarf again, and I can easily see the Forest dice being something fun for someone playing a Druid or any nature based character to have at the table. The same can be said for the Elven dice set (below right), which differs from the other two in that they are semi-opaque dice with red numbers in a very subtle elven script. These dice have the obvious benefit of being as easy to read as any other dice, but still provide a more unique and personalized feel to them. [Read the rest of this article]
Movie Review: “Inception”
Inception is a wildly entertaining summer blockbuster wrapped in the packaging of a sleeper hit science fiction thriller/heist film. The film excels due to the stunning combination of well executed directing, inspired writing, spot on acting, and seamless production. Though primarily billed as a Leonardo DiCaprio movie there was a large majority of the movie that the ensemble cast took the reins, including a great performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt who didn’t threaten to outshine DiCaprio’s but provided an excellent balance to the movie. Inception is one of the first high concept sci-fi thrillers that should be accessible to a wider audience without relying on the appeal of spectacular gun fights and martial arts. If you want to see a technological and intellectual movie that pulls you along for one hell of a spectacular ride then Inception should be at the top of your “must see” list!
I decided to see a midnight showing because I am a big fan of supporting original, non-gimmicky (read: 3D) properties and I sincerely hope that this kind of movie gains popularity in Hollywood. Inception was not only directed by Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, Memento) but it was also written by him and is not directly based on any specific book, comic, video game, or any one previous movie. The movie is being compared to films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix, but I believe these comparisons are less direct and more based on similar themes, matching tones, and the shared moods that can be elicited by the films. For example, the style of storytelling that is used in Inception is very reminiscent of Blade Runner and it very clearly leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the viewer. [Read the rest of this article]
Fiasco, It’s Not
Critical-Hits has run a review of Fiasco and an Origins report that included it, but I’m here to report as a Fiasco player. I played with four other veteran gamers, a few among us industry pros. Logan Bonner got us together and learned the rules with us. For the record, I have read on bits of the Fiasco rules, so this report is purely experiential and relies heavily on my memory of events. I’m also trying out a Chatty DM style post for a change. (Mimicry is flattery, Chatty.)
The Setup
First, we chose the “Tales From Suburbia” Playset. Guided by that, we had to make up characters and their related accouterments. Here’s a sketch of what we came up with.
Toby Grace (Logan Bonner)
The teenage Toby is gaining some fame as YouTube’s Bat’leth Boy, filming and uploading his mad Klingon sword skills. (I liken him to Kazookeylele.) He’s, more or less, a typical teenager, shy, with a part-time job at Max Reginald’s women-only costume shop, the Well-Dressed Lady. He dislikes his stepdad, Gerry. Toby desperately wants to be famous. Although he has no girlfriends, past or present, he’s pretty sure he’s not gay.
Gerald “Gerry” Grace (Derek Guder)
Gerry is a self-loathing gay man who married Toby’s mother, Bethany, for the money and a life of leisure. He drinks way too much, and he acts out of desperation and instinct more than reason. (Read: He’s an idiot.) Toby is the object of Gerry’s idle ire, because Gerry hates himself and suspects Toby, who has never had a girlfriend, is gay.
Alex James (Chris Tulach)
Alex is Gerry’s former lover. Impeccably dressed and groomed, Alex drives a black Cadillac and has all the latest gadgets. Something suggests he doesn’t really need money—maybe he made some cash in the 90s dot-com boom. He wants Gerald Grace out of suburbia and back in his arms, so he has gotten involved in a plot with his cousin Rory James.
Rory James (Chris Sims, me)
Rory is fresh out of the army and the Middle East. He’s a young, ex-military anti-tax Libertarian radical educated by conspiracy rags, first-person shooters, and Fox News. Rory believes not only that certain liberals are leading this nation to ruin, but also that the government is against the people. The IRS is after Rory, who needs money quickly to stay ahead, collect guns, and keep his jacked-up 89 Bronco running. Rory has a single usable grenade.
Max Reginald (Andrew “Doc” Cunningham)
A community activist and local Freemason Worshipful Master, Max Reginald owns a women’s only costume shop (the aforementioned Well-Dressed Lady) in the heart of the historic downtown area of this suburban town. He seems to have a penchant for teenage girls, which he hides behind a mask of overzealous vigilance against pedophiles. He knows Rory James through the local Masonic Lodge.
Other Characters
Here are a few important non-player characters that made their way into the plot.
Bethany Grace: Toby’s mom, who’s dying of cancer. She’s bedridden and lives upstairs in the old Grace house, a historic site on the edge of downtown. She’s also addicted to pain meds.
Randy James: An aging hippy lawyer who lives on the outskirts of town. He works for the Graces, and he’s Rory’s estranged father.
Holly: The teenage grocery checkout girl whom the younger Toby has the hots for.
Mister Bubbles: Rory’s yellow lab, named for the character in Bioshock.
Act One
The movie opens in the morning with Gerry—half naked, and carrying an adult toy like a weapon in his drunken rage—berates Toby while “Bat’leth Boy” meant to be filming his kick-ass moves. Instead, he gets the indelible record of his inebriated stepfather’s tirade. Toby uploads the film. Was it a mistake or fate?
Gerry later sits by Bethany’s bedside, failing to notice she drops a syringe on the floor. He hears a noise and goes to the window. A black Cadillac drives away from across the street. Gerry thinks nothing of it.
Alex drives away from the Grace house, a medical phial rolling on his floorboard. He receives a phone message from Rory and pulls over to catch it. It’s Bat’leth Boy’s latest film, starring Gerry Grace. Then Alex calls Rory, cryptically saying, “It’s done.”
In a rented house bereft of much in the way of furniture, Rory is sitting—barefoot and shirtless, in camouflage pants—at his computer after talking with Alex. Mister Bubbles scratches at the door to herald the coming of the mail and all Rory’s past-due bills. Rory gets the mail and curses at the Mexican gardener across the street.
Meanwhile, Max comes out of his house and notices Alex parked in front, just across the street from a playground. Max confronts Alex, accusing him of “watching the children” because “nobody parks to take a phone call.” Alex drives away. Max notes the pedophile danger for later.
Each of the above represents a player’s first turn, with that player setting up the scene for other players to resolve or resolving a scene others have set up. The outcome is good or bad, success or failure, for your character, resulting in you taking a white (good) or black (bad) six-sided die. In Act One, you give the die to another player. You keep it in Act Two.
Without telling the whole story, the rest of Act One played out. Salient details include Toby finding out Holly likes him. Gerry discovers Randy James is helping Bethany write Gerry out of her will. He doesn’t know James is also working for Max. Rory and Alex are working for Max to ensure Bethany dies shortly after her will is changed. Max alone knows that the Grace house is the final point of a geographic pentagram he is building. He needs to own to property to seal his occult power over the entire historic downtown area.
Tilt, Act Two
Elements of the plot go awry, of course, in what the game calls the Tilt. Randy James, pothead that he is, was lackadaisical in making Bethany’s will official. He hadn’t finished finalizing it by the time Rory and Alex manage to kill Bethany. Gerry finds Bethany dead at the same time he finds the new will. Smart guy that he is, he attempts to eat the document. Max becomes infuriated when he learns Randy James failed, and Rory and Alex were a bit too efficient. Alex discovers that the money envelope Rory provided is stuffed largely with grocery coupons. Toby, it turns out, stole the money from Rory to help Max buy the Grace house.
Like a film that Tarantino directed the first half of and Rodriguez directed the second half of, the character development and interaction degenerated into bloody conflagration by the end. All the main characters, in one way or another, end up in a serious confrontation near the Grace House. Mayhem ensues.
By the end of Act Two, Alex is wounded at the hands of bikers who are helping Max (it’s complicated). Half a dozen bikers are dead or dying. Mister Bubbles has given up the mortal coil, along with Rory’s Bronco, thanks to that grenade mentioned earlier. A flying tire from the exploded Bronco hit Toby’s new girlfriend, Holly. Toby is unconscious on the street, Holly’s d’k tahg next to him, thanks to Rory hitting him with a shotgun butt. Gerry, half-naked again, is bleeding on the street. The Grace House has been blown to cinders. Rory is speeding out of town on a stolen chopper. Max turns into an occult master right before everyone’s eyes.
Aftermath
Each player has a small pile of dice by the end of Act Two. Turns out you use these dice to find out what happens to your character in the end. This was the most confusing and unexpected part of the game to me. See, you roll the dice, subtracting the black form the white. The result determines how well it goes for your character in the end. I expected that my small “white” result to mean a minor victory for my character. Nothing to the contrary prepared me otherwise, but as is common when one is first learning a game, especially without having read the rules for oneself, my expectations were wrong.
It turns out that the closer your result is to zero, black or white, the worse it is for your character. Had we all known that, we might have played differently. We stacked a lot of negative results on Gerry, thinking he’d pay for his idiocy in the end. He didn’t, as you’ll see.
As an aside—reminding readers I’ve read only portions of rules, such as in this preview, because I don’t own the book—I wonder why lots of black dice result in a positive outcome for the character? It seems counterintuitive to me, the uneducated novice player. Maybe it makes sense for genre reasons or something else, but I still fail to get it.
So I was expecting to tell the story of how Rory rode that stolen Harley, eluding the cops, all the way to Central America. Maybe he spent the rest of his days in Paraguay as an American exile. His views on American politics became irrelevant. Maybe he married a nice mestizo woman and got over himself. But, no!
Instead, my low white result meant Rory fled the scene only to attract the attention of a traffic cop on a motorcycle. Rory took a shot at this “fascist,” and the officer jumped clear of the bike as it flipped and hit Rory’s cycle. Rory died in a blaze of glory, the last thing seen of him being his burning rank patch. Good night, sweet corporal. I like to think life would have been too dismal without Mister Bubbles anyway.
With a similarly low result, Alex died at the end of a Bat’leth in Max’s hands. All the other players got high black or white results. Toby, with Logan’s higher result, goes to physical therapy with Holly, and they later start a costuming company together. Bat’leth Boy becomes famous. Gerry’s wounds cause him to need organ replacements, including his suffering liver. He survives, accepting himself and his stepson, as well as enjoying the provisions of Bethany’s older will. He also sells the Grace house property to Max, who gets away scot-free and completes his pentagram.
After the Aftermath
Fiasco sells itself well and truthfully. We five newbies played a highly entertaining game in about three hours, some of that spent stumbling around the rules clumsily. (The rules aren’t clumsy. We were a little.) The outcome does depend heavily on who you game with, though. It seemed like we all enjoyed the darkly ridiculous nature of our imaginary movie. We were all up to the freeform nature of the roleplaying and storytelling.
Either of these elements might turn some off. For instance, my wife enjoys playing a barbarian in D&D 4e, but she dislikes Coen brothers’ films (okay, she dislikes sad endings, full stop) and is new enough to roleplaying to want some guidance. She’s also not partial to dark stories and foul language. Fiasco is definitely not a game for her or someone like her. Part of the book I did read (“One Last F[edit]ing Thing”) spells this out, which is a fine bit of honesty.
For me, despite my feelings about the resolution system in the aftermath, it was a cool way to spend a few hours with buddies. Fiasco tests your spontaneous imagination and invites you to take chances. It rewards player trust and going with the flow. I can’t help but wonder if it could be a useful tool for honing roleplaying skills for players of other games that have more structure. It could work well as a team-building exercise.
It’s certainly worth a look-see . . . if you have the stones.
Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips eBook
Full-on disclaimer time: Mike Shea, who runs the Sly Flourish blog, is a friend of mine. He’s written for Critical Hits. I’ve played in games that he’s run, and we’ve even been on panels together. He’s recently written a book that is a guide for 4e DMs. It features the distilled wisdom of not only his blog, but many others (including some of my own concepts.) Thus, it’s fair to say that there’s no way for me to be anything close to what passes for objective about the book.
However, here’s what I can tell you: I believe this is 73 pages of solid, grounded DMing advice from start to finish. As the book says up front, this isn’t a guide for the brand new DM. Nor is it an in-depth guide to higher level DMing/storytelling concepts like Robin Laws’s book: most topics range from several paragraphs to a single sentence. For DMs who have been playing 4e D&D for a bit and are looking to get a variety of tips to improve their game, this is the book to get. It’s a very practical guide, ranging from a checklist for planning your next adventure to keeping combat going at a good clip to what household materials you can use to track conditions at the table. [Read the rest of this article]
