Furnace XIX

 It's a credit to the organisers of the excellent gaming con that they are now in their nineteenth year and still going from strength to strength. This year saw nearly 70 people playing in fifty different games over the weekend, making use of the armoury, the dungeon and the jailhouse of the magnificent Garrison Hotel. It really is one of my favourite locations for playing games, without some of the noise issues of larger cons in big halls. 

After an introduction from organiser Graham, everyone found their assigned tables with minimal fuss. I was down in the armoury running a game of Tales of the Old West from the Quickdraw rules. I'd billed this as a potentially gritty setting, but the players leaned into their characters and had a great time. Using poker chips to track faith points, playing cards for initiative, and a toy gun to demonstrate how the shooting rules worked really added to the atmosphere. They picked up the rules quickly and I was able to improvise a few additional elements on the fly with no problems. The scenario was a tale of revenge for a murdered compadre and built up to an epic showdown with the bad guys, using a lassoed cougar and a fistful of dynamite.  Yee-haw!

Table bling

Your friendly neighbourhood gunslinger

The posse!

After lunch from Morrisons, the afternoon game was the intense and unique Alice is Missing, hosted by Peanut. This scenario involves a missing teen in a Pacific North West town in the middle of winter, and the responses of her five friends as they talk to each via text messages on their phones. After a explanation of how the game was going to run and setting up a WhatsApp group chat, a timer was started on a laptop with music playing. At ten minute intervals, different players would turn over their event card which gave instructions on revealing locations, suspects, clues and secrets to bring into the narrative. As the clock ticked down, the conversations became quite intense as the situation became increasingly desperate and the conclusion left us all emotionally stunned as the in character voice mails that we had sent to Alice were played out. This is something that everyone should try if they get the chance.

How it started ...

How it ended.

Sunday morning was The Temple of Artemis, run by Sue Savage, one of the best horror GMs around. She set the scene of a run down Edwardian country house that had been inherited by one of the characters and the ghastly secrets that were hidden within. The rules were simple using the Cthulhu Dark D6 system, but the atmosphere was like an MR James ghost story as we unravelled the story. Her softly spoken narration made the jump scares all the more effective when she dropped them on us. Sue is working on this one for publication and it's worth looking out for if you want to be spooked on a dark evening.

The final game was a run of one of the dungeons from the Dragonbane starter set, GM'd by Debbie taking great glee in unleashing monsters on our unsuspecting adventuring party. I really do enjoy this system and setting, and the maps and figures included in the box are of excellent quality. The final battle with a giant water serpent was a close run thing with half the characters reduced to zero hit points or being knocked off the raft we were trying to fight on and nearly drowning. An excellent conclusion to the weekend!

All in all, another amazing weekend of gaming, thanks to Graham, Dom and Elaine for organising it all! See you next year!

DCC The Temple of the Carnifex

In a most uncharacteristic fashion, we approached this one cautiously, scouting out the entrance to the temple using our map. Descending to a platform and crossing through a deluge of water we evaded a giant spider on the ceiling trying to snare victims with threads of webbing. The next area gave us a choice of ascending or descending a spiral staircase, so we went up first find a calcified corpse trapped in rubble that Grimbol the dwarf concluded would be risky to move. 

Down next into a chamber where we were attacked by shadows that proved almost impossible to hit (although Grimbol somehow managed to hit and kill the first one) and had a nasty ability to drain attributes. We realised that they wouldn't attack anyone with a lantern so we regrouped around the lights and found a secret door that was opened by placing wafers into mouths on pillars in the room. This led us through into another chamber where we found a highly valuable reliquary containing a grimoire and other treasures. At this point we decided to beat a tactical retreat to heal up for a further assault on the temple.

Dragonbane

Picking ourselves up after the battle with the spider, Krisanna was keen to push on to find the treasure that had to be somewhere nearby. A locked door opened on to a short tunnel and another door into a bed chamber where a middle aged woman was fast asleep and not responsive to being shaken awake. She was wearing a very shiny gold necklace, but Orla intervened to stop Krisanna from pinching it.

Another door and a staircase led to a wizard’s chamber, where Longstride the wizard seemed somewhat surprised to see us. A quick explanation (and apology for killing his spider) before we handed over the mushrooms and apples to make the elixir for his sleeping wife. Krisanna managed to persuade Orla to ask for the necklace as a reward.

A couple of days of rest and sandwiches while Aodhan studied some of Longstride’s grimoires, learning some very useful spells in the process, before we decided to head for the coast as an easier route to the north (and an excuse for a paddle). We gathered a couple of new companions en route - Roderick Redbeard the Dwarf and a Wolfkin called Garth (or Doggo) before arriving at the temple where the skies were even more ominously dark because, as we found out, someone had already stolen the Sun Stone!

Cy_Borg

Picking up where we left off last time, we made our way further into the plant to find the control room. Some frankly excellent hacking rolls allowed us to set the reactors to overload and repurpose the defense turrets dotted around the facility to attack anyone that wasn’t us. Sweet.

The next order of business was to set explosives in the bottling plant where the nano virus was being loaded into containers for distribution. After a moderately tough battle with some hench henchmen, all that was left was to check the remaining rooms leading off from the area, which is when things started to go south. I tried to immolate a mutated corpse to dispose of it, and accidentally breathed in some of the fumes which somehow granted me the ability to commune with the nannite gods, but at a terrible cost. 

Things got even worse when we attacked by the hideously mutated form of the CEO of the whole corporation, leaving us all perilously close to death until we remembered the rocket launcher that we had been toting around the whole time. Oh well, better late than never. BLAM. CEO got fired.

A hasty escape with big Dave, the tiger, and most of our limbs as the plant simultaneously melted down and exploded. Due to a significant miscalculation on our part, this sent a large cloud of radioactive zombie nano virus particles over a large swathe of the city killing 1.4 million people and incurring a six billion credit bounty on each of our heads. 

Season 1 of CY_Borg complete!

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

This novel is set some time after an unexplained visitation by unknown aliens that left six zones scattered across the Earth, each one changed in bizarre ways. They are compared to the aftermath of a rowdy picnic by a road, leaving bits of rubbish and discarded items behind to the bafflement of the ants that live there. The zones have been quarantined and cautiously studied by scientists who are no closer to understanding the exotic technologies that are to be found in the zones than the mercenary stalkers who raid the zones for profit. 

  One such stalker is Rodrick “Red” Shuhart, now working as an advisor for the Institute studying the zone that used to be his home town before it was transformed. He is tempted back into taking on one last stalking mission that goes horribly wrong when his companion stumbles into one of the many gruesome traps that litter the zone. 

The novel was originally written in Russian as a veiled critique of the Soviet government and this translation restores some of the material that was censored on its original publication. It is both a cracking adventure story and an intriguing bit of sci-fi as the miracles of the alien technology are explored (but never fully explained). 

 The book has inspired a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, a series of video games and a table top role playing game. The idea of exploring a dangerous landscape for rich rewards is an evocative one that has an immediate appeal to gamers. I enjoyed this immensely and the ambiguous ending really made me wonder what would happen if we encountered such unimaginably advanced technology. 

 

DCC - The Emerald Enchanter

The final battle with the Emerald Enchanter was very nearly a total party kill. His magic missiles hit everyone except for the thieves that were hiding, killing two and knocking out the rest. Fortunately a well timed backstab combined with a stinking cloud spell took him out allowing the rest of the party to escape. 

Farewell Ramen the fighter, and hello to Grimbul the Dwarf as we head for the big city!

Dragonbane

More wandering in the wild woods, exploring a glowing fairy ring of mushrooms that of course turned out to be a portal to another realm where we had to talk our way out of an encounter with the Troll King. No treasure to be found, much to Krisanna’s disappointment. We harvested some of the mushrooms for Longstride the wizard.

Next was a trip to an island in a lake rumoured to be a source of the amber gold fruit that we needed to complete the elixir. After getting lost and falling in quicksand, we reached the lake and lashed together some tree trunks to make a raft and crossed the water avoiding a dangerous looking water serpent. Apples picked, we headed for the other shore noticing that the sky was turning a worrying dark colour. 

The wizards house was guarded by a thorn maze and we discovered an interesting looking pit that Krisanna’s treasure sense told her was worth exploring. She abseiled down on a rope and started exploring, finding five corpses wrapped in webbing … oh. It was a close call as she was stung and knocked down, but fortunately the rest of the party rescued her from certain death.