Well, I’m still running regular sessions of Reavers on the Seas of Fate – and session summaries are posted regularly. After we finished Wrath of the Righteous however, we decided to do a series of one shots instead of another campaign on the alternating weeks.
So far we’ve had:
Paul ran a Trail of Cthulhu scenario, Sisters of Sorrow, we were all German WWI U-boat crew. We liked the GUMSHOE rules fine, though less fine when combat started. The jury’s out whether plain BRP CoC is just as good. In general this felt like any Cthulhu scenario, which is good for those of us that like Cthulhu!
I ran a high concept game – XCrawl (dungeon crawling as modern spectator sport) using the Dungeon World rules. All the characters were tributes to recently deceased celebrities, so we had The Goblin King (David Bowie), Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), Rochefort (Christopher Lee), Mirror Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Rowdy Roddy Piper (himself), and LEMMY!!! (Lemmy Kilmister). It was fun, though of course very “dungeony,” we discussed that a campaign of XCrawl would need to have a lot of “between the crawls” segments to be engaging. The Dungeon World rules were good (game fiction focus, GM doesn’t roll) but we felt them kinda sparse for long term play, and the 2d6 vs flat # mechanic seems like it’ll tip to “succeed all the time” once a couple levels are gained. We enjoyed it for a one shot however, and I feel that like Feng Shui, this is a game you play to improve how you run/play other games.
Bruce ran “The Silver Mountain Shrugs,” a Runequest 6 adventure set in the Taskan Empire. This was also fun, though the pregen PCs weren’t totally balanced. The core RQ rules are BRP based so were mostly easy, even the spells, but then there were these “combat effects” that were a bit overcomplicated and also made magic seem flat in comparison. There’s “an app for that” apparently but I think the group overall isn’t totally sold on the ruleset. The Taskan Empire setting is fine, if turgid and overcomplicated in the usual way for RQ settings (we all just thanked the Lord it wasn’t Glorantha, mainly because Bruce’s completely incomprehensible Glorantha anecdotes cause several of us to start twitching).
Next week Tim is running Numenera, the game ‘we all want to like but have no idea how to run it because the setting’s so weird.’ Reminds me of Skyrealms of Jorune, anyone remember that? Well crafted but somewhat inaccessible.
And more will come, including Gaean Reach and Eclipse Phase! We’re not doing session summaries of all these, though we’ll try to do some.
Geek Related 