The Crew 2

The Crew 2 was Ubisoft's answer to Forza Horizons, with hundreds of vehicles, events and challenges spread across a (slightly condensed) map of the whole USA. It's an online, massively multiplayer world with other players showing up for races, but you can effectively play it as a single player game if you want. It follows the classic formula of driving to icons on the map (or fast travelling in the menu) and competing in various sorts of races, time trials and stunt challenges. As well as cars, there are also motorbikes, monster trucks, off roaders, speedboats, hovercraft, and stunt and racing planes. 

I picked this up as part of my PS+ sub, and as well as the base game there are literally hundreds of free DLC events and extra content drops, but in the end I mostly stuck to the story missions which are effectively scavenger hunts where you are given a postcard style clue to a location and tasked with working out where it is and driving there to unlock the next stage. After twelve or so stages, you are rewarded with a shiny new car. These missions give you a good excuse to criss cross the USA and take in all of the iconic locations across the vast map. 

The graphics are pretty good on the whole - perhaps the cities aren't quite as detailed as those in the Watchdogs series, but the wide open landscapes, small towns, mountains and woods can be spectacular as the day/night cycle progresses and the weather changes in real time. The driving/flying model is mostly arcady but feels satisfying enough, especially from the in car cockpit view. 

I think that I'll keep this one installed for a while, just as something to drop into when I fancy a drive.

No Man's Sky - Aquarius

 To take advantage of the dramatic new ocean tech in No Man's Sky, we now have an expedition themed around a new fishing mechanic with some interesting challenges along the way. I particularly liked the new fishing skiff which is a little floating platform with a built in storage area that you can place in the middle of the ocean and cast your line from. This is one of the few expeditions that I have completed on Switch and PS5 versions, simply because it is a relaxing way to spend a bit of time catching weird fish on even weirder alien seas.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer has one of my favourite opening lines of a SF novel. 'The sky was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel' manages to be evocative and futuristic, whilst also showing how technology has changed since the book was written. Instead of a fuzzy grey, a dead channel is now a nice, clear blue, so the line still works both ways. 

The novel is set in a dystopian near future, where nation states have been superseded by warring zaibatsu corporations conducting their business in cyberspace, most people eke out miserable lives in slums and shanty towns whilst the super rich live in orbital enclaves. The protagonist is a burned out hacker called Case, who has had his ability to jack into the matrix removed after a previous bungled assignment. He is hired by a mysterious patron called Armitage, a veteran of an assault on a Russian data centre, and aided by Molly Millions, a street samurai razor girl with permanently implanted mirror shades for eyes, and tasked with bringing down an AI with high grade Chinese virus software.

The opening section, summarised above, hooks you in with things that have now become established cyberpunk tropes - body mods, matrix hacking, cyberdecks - and hits you with new ideas at a dizzying rate. Apparently Gibson had started writing this book and almost gave up after seeing the opening scenes of Blade Runner because he thought that people would assume he was copying its style. Fortunately, he kept going, and this book, along with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash have become the foundational texts of the cyberpunk genre.

There are some bits that read awkwardly now - all of the dialogue for the Rastafarian character Maelcum - pilot of the space tug Garvey - who appears later in the book, is cringeworthy in the extreme. Some of the technical references feel slightly dated - Gibson didn't really know what a modem was, and he thought the 3 Megabytes of hot RAM was a lot. To be fair, the ZX81 computer that was roughly contemporaneous with this book only had 1K of RAM on a good day unless you splashed out for the wobbly 16K RAM pack. It also amused me to read about the implantable slivers of code call Microsofts in the book. Even if I were a cyberpunk, I'd probably think twice about sticking one of those in my cranium

In summary, this is a book that still holds up well, and still has much to say about the way that we relate to technology and AI in particular. It's telling that we've never managed to build a cyberspace that's as beguiling as the one in this book though.

Matrons of Mystery

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!

Furnace XIX

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!

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 Temple of the Carnifex

 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.

Kehaarcon

 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!

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!