On Friday, I was perusing livejournal of the creator of Story of the Century, Fred Hicks, and he had post about a game of SotC at DC Gameday in danger of being canceled and calling for interested players near Alexandria, VA. I’ve been wanting to actual play a game before trying to run SotC and while I was going to be running a game Nephilim Song in the evening, my morning was free.
I waffled a bit, you know gaming with random people, never sure what you’re going to get, but eventually signed up.
That night while prepping for Nephilim Song I made a character as an NPC that clicked and sadly I didn’t see her having a major role in the campaign unless I did some strong arming to bring her into the story where she didn’t belong. She was within striking range of pulp, so I wrote her up as a SotC character to use at the game.
The really odd part about the whole Gameday thing is where it was. Turns out they lost their original location and one of the participants offered up his work location, the work location happened to be the new location of the Motley Fool offices, and the person in question was Tom7, who I knew when I used to work at the Fool. It was a bit odd being back there.
But back to the game, I played Sashira the gypsy seeress with stolen eyes, well she didn’t have them anymore, because they were stolen. She had a history in the circus as a blind knife thrower and used her seer abilities to get around being blind. We did the novels and co-starring parts of character creation at the table. Sashira’s novel was Sashira Semper and the Escape from Death Island. You’d be surprised how many mystic rituals really benefit from the eyes of a true seer.
I was pretty happy with here especially since she was my first SotC character ever. I need to work on my aspect creation, I didn’t have much that could be generally compelled. I had stuff that could be used, social complications for begin a gypsy, circus performer, etc. and aspects that bad people would want to use her seer sight or her eyes for nefarious purposes, however since one of the other characters was an intelligent gorilla, he got the outsider compels. There were other things that I thought could be used for compels, but I think they were too vague to be used positively or negatively.
One of the other players did a write up for the game on his live journal. He liked my use of the I learned things in the circus to get on board a ship trying to exit. My favorite was the end where one of the other players tagged my aspect Seeress of the Gypsy to give me a vision of his success.
It was a fun game, though I do now see what some people complain about it being meta-gamy. I enjoyed it a lot and I still intend to run it, but sometimes the reaching for aspects felt unnatural. I thought in actual play there would be more maneuvers and declarations which would have flown better, but sometime the attempts to justify use of aspects was jarring to the action.
On the other hand I made an impassioned speech and got two minions to give up the fight. The thing that was really interesting is that no point during the game was deadly force used. I was throwing whatever happened to be around, I had daggers but It didn’t seem right to thrown them at people so I used my stunt which allowed me to use improvised weapons to throw debris lying around the dock. My companions used fists. So in the entire session no PC really used a deadly weapon. I tried to block the giant snake by throwing daggers, but that was about stopping the snake not damaging it.
Another thing I just realized was the players created the endgame in way usually not possible in traditional games. Our explorer made a declaration that temples like the one we were in have traps that destroy the whole temple. Gran’ok our intelligent gorilla took out the pillar bringing the ceiling down, blocking the bad guys in while we escaped.
All in all very fun. I would have liked to do something in the afternoon session, apparently there was a Truth and Justice game which I’ve heard interesting things about. However, as I mentioned, I was running that evening.
Perhaps next time.
Gaming, Life