We were two players down for DCC tonight, so I offered to run Matrons of Mystery using Miro for a murder board. This game is always fun for a bit of cosy crime solving with little old ladies investigating the sudden death of a celebrity gardener at a recording of a popular radio gardening show. Of course, everyone seemed to have a motive for wanting him dead and there was plenty of opportunity from bottle of weed killer, poisonous mushrooms and other clues to put together. What larks!
It's a credit to the organisers of this 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!
Back to the temple for another raid, but this time the guards knew we were coming! A tense stand off, boiling oil poured downstairs and a mysterious statue to investigate.
Andy Clarke aka Clarky the Cruel aka Kehaar is one of the stalwarts of the UK grog scene, so it was only fitting that his 50+1 birthday was marked with some gaming and celebration. The drive over to the Wirral was reasonably smooth, apart from a diversion through the back streets of Manchester thanks to some roadworks. I found the pub where we were meeting and settled down for an excellent game of Traveller 2300 GM’d by Tim Farnworth. This was a new setting to me, with a near future hard SF vibe, although the rules were still familiar from the days of the little black books of the original Traveller box set.
The scenario opened with a crew of survivors from a previous game (actually run in 2019) who found themselves with a cargo of stolen drugs to off load while staying under the radar, literally and metaphorically. We made our way in-system, running quietly when we were pinged with sensors, and choosing not to raise the alarm. This might have been a mistake. When we arrived at our destination we found that it had been attacked by alien raiders and we were now in the middle of a war zone and an ongoing refugee crisis.
We weighed up our options for offloading our cargo and went with a group of Texan mercs who were offering a hefty up front payment in gold. Our contact set up a meeting where we were double crossed and everything went south very quickly. Some very lucky rolls saw the team escape with the gold, minimal radiation burns and a cargo hold full of refugees willing to pay for transport off world. Hopefully the story will be picked up sometime soon!
The evening do was a proper shindig, and it was an honour to be there with oodles of cake, beer and an entertaining live band. We’ll not talk about the overnight accommodation, but I will remember to check the one star reviews on Trip Advisor in the future!
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.
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!
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!
