THRILLING TALES OF ADVENTURE!
PLAYTEST REPORTWe had the full complement of five players and started at around 1:30 pm on a Saturday afternoon. After setting up the map, the Hero records were passed around the table and each player chose a Hero to play. The starting roster was:
THE REAPER, Masked Crimefighter (Rich) started in New York City equipped with his starting Weapon, “Twin Automatics.”
CAP’N JACK SNAPPER, Master of the Seven Seas (Roberta) started in Dublin with his Ally “Mister Mate,” a mischievous monkey.
THE BLUE FALCON, Ace Aviatrix (Steven) started in Paris with her faithful Biplane.
ROCKWELL JONES, Ace Private Detective (Dave) started in Chicago carrying his starting Item, “Lucky Dice.”
LA GAUCHA, Argentine Vigilante (Melanie) started in Buenos Aires with “Fuego,” her black stallion, and her trusty Bullwhip.
PROLOGUEBefore the game proper begins, players carry out a preliminary setup stage to get the first Plotline into play. Each player is dealt two Hooks, then must discard one and fill out his or her hand to seven cards. Play goes around the table with players discarding, drawing, and building their Plotlines until one player completes a Plotline, at which point it is made “Active” (is put into play on the map). The first player to do so becomes the “First Player,” and the game begins in earnest.
This prologue stage was added after the last playtest as a way to quickly get the first Plotline on the table. During this stage, Heroes may not move or take any actions; the world is untroubled. I was concerned that it would feel like too much preparation just to set the game in motion, but it went pretty quickly and people seemed to enjoy focusing on putting a Plotline together. Each round of the Prologue, players can discard 1-2 cards for Plot points, so they begin to increase their PP pool. The tension is between trying to get a Plotline on the table before the other players have too many PPs, while trying to accumulate enough PPs to deal with another player’s Plotline should it be made Active first.
Rich quickly assembled a 3-card Plotline (the minimum length) and put it into play. When Rich activated his Plotline, he conducted several routine steps. First, he collected 1 PP per card in the Plotline (3 PP total). Then, he set the Plotline’s turn Timer to “3,” also equal to the number of cards in the Plotline. Finally, he drew 3 City markers blindly from a bag (you always choose 3 -- this number is unrelated to the number of cards in the Plotline), chose one, and placed it on the Plotline. A City marker has a City’s name on one side and the City’s Region on the other. The Author places the marker on an Active Plotline with the Region side face up, so the other players know what part of the world the City is in, but do not know exactly which City it is.
THE GAME IS AFOOTThe specifics of the early part of the session are a little hazy to me now, since I was concentrating on communicating the rules and didn’t have time to take many notes as we played. It would be too much to cover every Hero's journey in detail here, so I'll just describe the trajectory of one character, Cap'n Jack Snapper. He saw a little more action than the other Heroes, but his journey through the game was indicative of the general experience. Plotline cards are indicated in allcaps and italics.
THE TALE OF CAP'N JACKRich’s Plotline was somewhere in Russia, so Cap’n Jack and the Blue Falcon, being closer than our Heroes in North and South America, started a race to be the first to uncover it. After sailing through the Baltic and disembarking at Riga, Cap’n Jack made his way to Moscow and spoke to his contact there. In a stroke of luck, Moscow turned out to be the City he was looking for, so the Blue Falcon aborted her journey and turned her biplane back into European airspace, since another Plotline was starting up in that Region.
Cap’n Jack’s Plotline started with
STRANGE NIGHTMARES, which the players interpreted as being had by Mister Mate, Cap’n Jack’s pet monkey. In these nightmares, Mister Mate was haunted by images of a
SUNKEN CITY, somewhere out in the mid-Atlantic. He communicated this to his master by drawing pictures in the dirt, convincing Cap’n Jack that they should investigate. Back at Riga, they reboarded the Hibernia, their Tramp Freighter (CJ's Special Ability), and set out for the high seas.
Alas, mere leagues from the spot Mister Mate kept pointing to on the nautical charts, the ship's engines were sabotaged (by Rich playing a card for its secondary effect) and time ran out on the Plotline before the sunken city could be investigated. Rich collected 2 Villainy points for the last, unrevealed card in the Plotline, a (coincidentally) Russian Artifact called the
SILVER FEATHER.
After repairing the ship's engines, Cap'n Jack decided to head to the Far East (where another Active Plotline awaited, this one created by Dave). A long sea journey ended in the port of Peking, where Cap'n Jack and Mister Mate overheard rumors in a waterfront dive about a
RAIN OF FROGS in the wilds of China. Never one to pass up an opportunity to appreciate the world's wonders, Jack asked around and then set out to investigate.
Maybe the frogs had never fallen, or maybe they fell somewhere else. In any case, when Cap'n Jack and Mister Mate arrived at the
DEAD TREE which marked the spot where the locals said the strange downpour had occurred, they were ambushed by a
ROGUE TANK! Had the good Captain been lured into this trap intentionally? There was no time to dwell on the thought, since the tank had opened fire.
I won't go into the Challenge (combat) mechanics here. Suffice it to say that each player involved chooses a Tactic (Might, Speed, or Wit), Tactics are revealed simultaneously, dice are rolled, results compared, and outcomes determined. It's sort of a rock-scissors-paper system (similar to that in the original edition of
Fury of Dracula) with various effects that mix things up. It worked well and as designed in this playtesting session, but needs improving in a few areas.
Roberta lost a SPEED play against Dave's MIGHT, resulting in a WINGED result (1 Wound). Leaping away as the cannon blast obliterated the dead tree, Cap'n Jack was injured by shards of shrapnel, and Mister Mate ventured into the fray to save his master. The clever monkey lured the tank onto rocky ground, where it threw a tread (or where Mister Mate peed in its gas tank, depending on player interpretation), but this wasn't enough to spare our seafaring hero; another blast from the tank narrowly missed Jack and blew him back into a narrow ravine, where he lost consciousness. The tank crew made some hurried repairs and fled the scene, leaving Cap'n Jack for dead while Mister Mate watched from cover in the underbrush. This paragraph summarizes about 5 Challenge rounds.
The monkey slapped Jack back into consciousness and brought him food to help him recover from his injuries. By morning, Jack had patched himself up and was back on his feet. The two companions set out to follow the tank tracks that wound their way through the Chinese countryside. They soon found themselves at the mouth of a
CAVE ENTRANCE, into which the tracks descended. Girding themselves for danger, the sailor and his shoulder-riding shipmate crept cautiously into the darkness.
After a short distance, the tunnel opened up into some sort of
UNDERGROUND HANGAR. What had they stumbled upon? From the safety of the tunnel, Cap'n Jack and Mister Mate took in the scene: supplies and equipment lining the walls, enormous mechanized hangar doors standing shut at the far end of the vast, cavernous space. Suddenly, there was a noise in the darkness behind them. Whirling around, they found themselves facing the terrifying
COUNT KRAELUS!
The battle that ensued was epic (6 rounds long -- the maximum) and ranged throughout the hangar, ending only when Mister Mate managed to activate the mechanism that opened the hangar doors, letting in a shaft of sunlight that burned the vampiric Count to ash.
Brushing the remains of the Count off of his pants, Jack went looking for his monkey friend, and found Mister Mate unlocking the door to a holding cell adjoining the hangar. The woman inside rushed to them in gratitude, but Jack took a step back in dismay, recognizing her as the notorious
MATA HARI. "You must to trust me! I'm on your side!" pleaded the known double agent. Reluctantly, Jack agreed to escort her back to Peking.
THE ENDGAMEWhile Cap'n Jack had been undertaking his adventures, the other players were doing the same. Just after Jack rescued Mata Hari, Dave (playing Rockwell Jones) actually won the game by gaining enough Heroism points. Everyone wanted to see how the Thrilling Climax would play out, though, so we just let Dave be the Arch-Villain and started the final act of the game.
I don't want to give away any spoilers or explain the Thrilling Climax in detail at this point, so I'm not going to describe the final episode of this installment of Thrilling Tales. I will say that the Arch-Villain was defeated, but not before hypnotizing Mata Hari into joining his side for the final showdown, and bringing Mister Mate to a tragic end in a pit of scorpions.
ISSUESOverall, the game played better than I expected this time around. People enjoyed themselves and had a lot of good feedback and suggestions. Among them:
* Collecting Plot Points can occur in several different ways. These ways need to be made more consistent and intuitive so there's less confusion about when this can happen.
* Dave suggested doing away with Action Points entirely and just using Plot Points. Action Points are there to regulate the amount a given Hero can use in a given turn, but they bring an extra step of fiddliness to the proceedings. For the next playtest, we'll just have PPs and cap their total at 10 (for this session it was 20). This should have interesting results.
* Drawing from six different card decks was a bit of an issue, so some sort of six-deck card shoe is called for. I intend to make one from scratch before our next session.
* There are lots of Weapons and Items in the cards, meant to be used to outfit the Heroes, but the method by which a player can bring them into play is too convoluted. No one used even one! So either the method to bring them into play will be extremely simplified, or they will be removed entirely.
* Cap'n Jack's Tramp Freighter and La Gaucha's horse and bullwhip did not prove very useful over the course of the game, so their effects will be changed or they will be removed. On the other hand, Rockwell's Lucky Dice, Blue Falcon's biplane, and the Reaper's abilities all proved useful and satisfying in their execution.
* For the sake of consistency, the revealing of a card in a Plotline should always cost the investigating Hero 1 PP and give the Author 1 PP when it is revealed. Additionally, when a hero attacks an Agent or the Arch-Villain during the Thrilling Climax, it should cost the player 1 PP.
* The option to build Plotline from back to front might be useful, since a few players found themselves doing it within their hand. This might be too fiddly, but we'll try it in the next session.
* There was some confusion around the various Active Plotlines in front of different players -- who was on which Plotline, what card was currently active, what location effects were applicable, etc. I've drawn up a small Plotline Mat with places to hold the different cards that should clarify these points.
* Every card has a secondary application usually unrelated to its primary function, but these were rarely used. Part of the problem is that there's so much text to take in that players founds themselves ignoring the secondary use, but these uses are also perhaps too varied in their effort to convey thematic flavor. The secondary effects will be simplified and tagged with larger icons so players can sort them more easily.
* Dave suggested that the Heroes be more customizable, perhaps by integrating optional Abilities/Allies/Items that can be chosen at the outset. however, I designed the Heroes to be thematically connected to their starting resources, so I probably won't make them more customizable.
* Rich though that the simultaneous-play nature of some turn steps jarred with the sequenced play of the Hero Action Step, so turn-taking might have to be more regimented from step to step within a turn. The trade-off is time -- the steps in question go faster when everyone is doing what they need to do at once.
* The victory point goal at the outset was 20, but we changed it to 15 after a few hours of play. I will likely make this variable at 10, 15, or 20, allowing players to decide how long of a game they want to play. On the plus side, scoring seemed pretty competitive, especially near the end.
* Defeating the Arch-Villain was too easy and too fast. Arch-Villains will require a lot of balancing and scaling in order to offer an appropriate challenge.
Posted Tue Feb 20, 2007 7:52 am
