Initial player-established War details were wicked awesome: The war is an “undeclared foreign war” against “massive hordes of unwashed primitives.” Despite their side’s use of “rolling dreadnought tanks with massive 100+-member crews,” the war was ultimately lost, the home economy across the sea ravaged, and the soldiers were all stranded there with “nothing to go home to.” The locals are usually known by their derogative nickname, “the shitweeds.”

The First Founding featured four soldiers in a moment of crisis: The war is lost – do we follow the suicide charge orders, or do we retreat to live and fight another day? The Sergeant tried to convince everyone that this charge was their destiny, their duty as soldiers. The Recruit dissented, having a family back home, but was quickly insulted by the Sapper. This provoked the Recruit into lashing out, which spawned a vicious explosion-heavy fight between him and the Sapper. The Recruit ultimately took the Sapper’s head, but the fight was so traumatic that he then simply fell to his knees and wept as The Enemy ran him down. The Sergeant and the Veteran, meanwhile, finally agreed that this was indeed a waste of their lives, and they rode off into the night, retreating from the charge.

This resulted in their Pack’s First Founding being colored by the following three grabs: Desertion, Regicide, and Survivors. Ouch.

Character creation was next. Sarge and the Veteran remain in the pack today as Den Mother and Trail Blazer respectively, along with a new Leader (the Road Captain) and a Masked member from the local populace (The Enforcer). A nice variety of Bikes and Fighting Styles were chosen, although the group’s off-road capability is very, very limited.

Following that the players laid out the actual details of the Pack itself. Calling themselves the War Pigs, they all wear masks styled after demonic boars, which are required attire when astride their bikes. The leader’s command icon is an old bleached skull from a massive pig-monster which once almost wiped out the entire Pack. Called The Boar by the pack, each member has also secretly given it its own name that no one else knows. This skull is mounted as a standard on the leader’s chopper, and frequently adorned with trophies from fallen enemies. Attaching these trophies is called “feeding the Boar” and one of the Pack’s taboos is that the Boar must be regularly fed, or bad things happen to them. They ritually partake in copious amounts of drugs, frequently going on peyote-like spirit quests, guided by the Boar. They don’t care about hairstyles, as long as their facial hair is curled into Boar Tusks (one of them even has similar facial tattoos). Finally, they have a taboo against sleeping in the same bed twice, unless they are “on furlough.”

Their prospect-initiation ritual is rather gruesome. Upon being first allowed to ride as prospect, the newcomer must wear a mask made from an actual boar’s face, tanned and stinking. This mask must be worn until he makes his first solo kill of a marked enemy of the Pack. There was also discussion of the Prospect having to eventually stew and eat the mask, but I’m not sure if those details got hammered out and committed to Pack law.

I look forward to seeing The War Pigs in action in the coming sessions.

Post-Session Musings

The default “suicide charge” First Founding scene seems to work well enough, but I’m thinking it might not be fully apparent that committing to the charge doesn’t necessarily mean the characters are doomed to die. Believing that they are might factor into their decision.

The basic conflict mechanic worked out well, but needs some in-the-face clarification. I need to make a cheat sheet and print it on the character sheet itself, just a quick bullet list of things to consider (like the two ways in which Ki can be spent for bonus cards).

Some dragging aspects of the Pack Creation system were very immediately apparent. Sacrifices were too many, and took too long to come up with and then write down. Going forward, I’m changing it to a stripped-down, more group-inclusive process: define one sacrifice for yourself, and one each for the guys to your left and right.

There are too many initial Grabs. Revision: First Founding survivors get two free Grabs (those they inherited from the first scene). All characters get one free grab attached to each of their three Trappings (Role, Style, and Bike). The Pack as an entity itself has three Grabs as well, established at the end of the First Founding. Undecided if players can then nominate one last bonus Grab for the player next to them.

Also, the Rank bidding system is confusing and ultimately unnecessary. I’m stripping it out and replacing it with simple group discussion.

As far as my table-topping goes, I’m in the middle of at least two games, with two more on the horizon. First is my Old School Palladium Fantasy sandbox game, which has had four gatherings so far and seems to be maintaining everyone’s excitement pretty nicely. This game is really doing a good job of reinvigorating me, both as an arbiter of events and as a creator of spontaneous content. I haven’t run this seat-of-the-pants in a long, long time, and it is quite simply titillating my gamer imagination. I go into each session with a mental picture of all the events happening in the world within a 20-mile radius of where the characters are, and as they move around, those events progress of their own accord. So far, the players have managed to hit up most of them quite nicely, and get themselves directly involved of their own volition. It’s wonderful.

Next is the Song of Ice and Fire game (loosely using the system, of the same name, by Green Ronin), for which the Torch of Arbitration has been passed on to my pal Sixten. We kicked of the new chunk of the campaign a coupla weekends back, and it looks like the next session is this coming weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Also this weekend is a meet-and-greet session for potentially starting up a new Unknown Armies game. I don’t have much to say about that one just yet, because we haven’t discussed it as a group, but I want to see a story of normal folks from different walks of life brought together by mutual exposure to the Occult Underground. More on this as it unfolds.

Further down the road, probably after the Palladium games comes to its natural end, I’ve got an idea to try a Shadowrun variant in which all the magic is removed, and replaced with simple conspiracy. Magic has always been my biggest complaint about Shadowrun, as it just never seemed to fit right. I was introduced to the setting during the transition from First to Second Edition, and the art back then (some by the always-amazing Tim Bradstreet) depicted a far grittier thing than the more fantasy-inspired Shadowrun of today. Old School Shadowrun was like Ghost in the Shell, while modern Shadowrun feels more like Cutey Honey. My thought now is to remove all the magic from the setting, and replace it with mostly-unexplained conspiracy. Like the Great Ghost Dance, for example, wasn’t a magical event. For some reason a call came in from High Command to just let them go, and the US forces complied – and to this day, no one knows why. And Saeder-Krupp isn’t ruled by lofwyr, but merely an entity known as The Dragon. Is it a person? An AI? A cabal of conspirators? Something else?

All this Shadowrun-minus-magic is in my head thanks to my current obsession with the new Deus Ex: Human Revolution game, of course. Very few games have ever affected me as deeply, or tickled that Fun Spot so furiously, as this one. I’ve been taking a primarily non-violent, stealth-based approach to this game, but the story is so good and the characters so realistically portrayed, that there have been moments where in-game narrative events have successfully swayed my decision. “Fuck. That.” I’d say aloud, before switching from trust stun-zapper to armor-piercing guns and brutally taking out every last motherfucker in the room as an act of revenge that I didn’t know I wanted until only seconds before. The character Jenson radiates this almost-tangible aura of cool boredom that personifies him as the ultimate Gibsonian cyberpunk bad-ass. Every inch of the game emanates a complimentary coolness and enforces a setting-appropriate dirty dismalness, creating what I feel is the most amazing cyberpunk gaming experience to date.

Going back to the subject of Tabletop gaming for a monent, I want to take a moment and talk about two services which have revolutionized my game-scheduling: Agree-a-Date and Doodle. These are online tools that allow you to send out a poll of sorts to a group of people, letting them pick which of the arrayed dates are best available for their attendance. As an adult with a full-time job, an active social life, budding romances, and other hobbies, this makes scheduling gaming sessions much, much less of a headache. I’m moving away from Agree-a-date towards Doodle, because it’s less restrictive and not constantly advertising itself to me. But aide from that, Agree-a-Date has served me very well for small-gathering social functions.

I’ve recently set up a profile on RPGGeek, and have begun posting my plays there. Feel free to friend me.

Finally, the current design project codenamed Hagakure 66 has had some great new developments. I can’t share them just, yet, however. I want the revelation to be damn awesome. It’s on its way, though, most definitely.

The first one takes place in the small holding of Sludge Pump, an age-old water treatment plant that is now a fortified fountain with some hard-ass raiders inside it’s concrete walls. I’m taking on the role of CJ, a tough sumbitch gunlugger with an old west code of gunslinger’s honor. The two other primary players on the scene are a hocus named Dust and an angel named Key. Dust leads a rabble of filthy Armageddon-obsessed psychopaths, while Key does her best to keep folks alive while she plays at pulling the strings of internal power. So far, it’s set up to be something of a violent go at the game’s themes.

The game I’m actually MCing has been named “Graceland of the Wasteland” by the players, and it fits very well. I’ll go ahead and post one of the player’s basic notes here:

Red’s Notes:

Boxer Doom. Gunlugger. Abandoned by parents at 17. Has a letter from his parents which he can’t read, but knows that it explains that he isn’t wanted and is now on his own. He’s got a customized assault rifle, shotgun, hunting rifle and 9mm pistol, as well as a streak of bad luck.

Clover. Operator. Had a great gig (for Barker?) but blew it and now she’s scraping by on odd jobs.

Fat Elvis. Brainer. Looks like fat Elvis. From a tradition of Elvises; he’s the the King in New Memphis and has a legion of devoted fans. I know he’s got Unnatural Lust Transfixion (that’s how he gets all the ladies) and a pain wave projector, for when Elvis needs to leave the building. Is Fat Elvis’ hypnotic power over the fair sex the reason why Vega prefers female lieutenants? When he opens his brain to the psychic maelstrom, he hears static, and bits of music, until he can tune in to the song that tells him what he needs to know.

Vega BBQ. Hardholder. The description: casual wear, aristocratic face, cool eyes, tall spare body. He gets his last name from his penchant for barbecuing his enemies (does the gang eat them?). I picture him affecting a preppy J. Crew style and casual manner at odds with his status as a vicious raider with a big gang of bloodthirsty psychopaths armed to the teeth.

HX Setup: The by-the-book history options we chose: Boxer thinks Clover’s the prettiest. Boxer thinks Fat Elvis is the smartest. Vega left Boxer bleeding. Boxer stole from Vega. Vega knew Elvis and Clover before the holding. Elvis let Clover down. Boxer helped Clover out of a jam.

It’s implied that Boxer thinks Clover’s the prettiest due to a serious lack of competition in the holding. Vega, Elvis and Clover all lived in a holding controlled by Barker (Parker?); Vega, as a lieutenant, overthrew Barker and led some of the holding away. He recruited Elvis as a cultural leader for the people, promising him a New Memphis: the Graceland of the Wasteland. At some point in New Memphis, there was a bartender named Bar, who worked at the holding’s bar, also called Bar.

I can’t remember the exact infraction, but Clover pissed him off somehow, which devolved into a general shootout. Boxer pulled Clover’s fat out of the fire by blowing Bar’s head off; this however was considered a theft by Vega, who’d decreed that Bar be immolated. The details are unknown, but the episode ended with Vega abandoning Boxer bleeding; although he apparently either retained or earned lieutenant status since that incident.

I’ve had this for a couple of weeks now, and have been itching to give it a test run. I wasn’t expecting to break it out in full game mode so soon, having only read the player book and most of the GM book (and not even touching the magic books yet). But when the call came in, it was the first thing that popped into mind, and in hindsight, I think it was a great idea. Despite none of us having any real experience with it, the end result was a very positive one.

Setting it All Up

Although this was an impromptu game, my hope was that if everyone involved enjoyed it, we could actually continue it a couple of times and play out a complete adventure. The boxed set came with such an adventure, but alas, no ready-made characters with which to play it. But these guys were all fairly experienced roleplayers, so I figured we could go ahead with a round of character creation and still have time for an hour or so of play.

Breaking out the game and getting the characters hammered down (pun intended) took a couple of hours due to smoke breaks, beer runs, and general “how ya been, bro?” chit-chat. There were a few small snags (see Criticisms, below), but all things considered the flow was simple and straight-forward, and most important it was easily digested by first-time WFRP3 players when presented by a GM who had never run it before (me). That’s always a big plus in my book.

I want to make a special note here to fans of the “old ways” of Warhammer: Random Creation is still an option in WFRP3′s character creation system. The default method is to pick your own careers, but it also includes an option to have the Careers and Races determined completely randomly, which I opted to enforce for this game. I used a method of my own devising to accomplish this. First I laid out the cardboard stand-ups for all of the careers and had each player pick three which looked interesting to them, going around the table picking them one at a time. Then they got the career cards for their chosen three, and each decided upon a single career. Once chosen, they rolled dice per the printed rules to pick which of that career’s available races they could play. The resulting four characters: a Reiklander Dilettante, a Reiklander Barber-Surgeon, a Dwarven Mercenary, and a Dwarven Trollslayer. Two warriors, a healer, and a socializer. Wicked.

With four characters ready to go, another round of beers¹ on hand, and our bellies filled with delicious freshly-grilled hamburgers, the game was ready.

The Game in Play

In basic implementation of the hobby’s usual concepts, Warhammer FRP 3rd Edition played a lot like any other mainstream RPG. There are two basic modes of play: Story Mode (wherein all of the free-form roleplaying occurs) and Encounter Mode (where you fight things). Sure, the latter mode can be used for debates, but its primary purpose is to provide a fair flow to combat. Plus, Social Encounters seem more easily handled by the sole application of the Progress Tracker (see below). Focus flits back and forth between the two, with Story mode being a lot more open and abstract. All of this should be familiar ground for anyone who’s played a mainstream RPG in the last decade.

The game uses dice for resolution of all in-game conflicts and tasks, and its dice are entirely custom-made for this game alone. These numberless dice run the D6, D8, and D10 ranges, are colored according to their purposes, and each have unique symbols that must be scryed to determine in-game effect. Upon an initial look some might find that this could make things confusing, but once you roll two or three times, it all makes complete sense. It’s also a nice touch that the symbols are all tied closely into the setting’s own history, symbology, and lexicon. For example, a roll of a Chaos Star implies that terrible things might happen to you, while a roll of the twin-tailed Sigmar’s Comet could bring great and unexpected fortune upon you.

The types, numbers, and results of the dice you roll for any given situation are determined primarily by what particular Action Card you are applying. Pretty much everything your character will ever do, mechanics-wise, is represented by an array of custom Action Cards. Some of these will be generic and thus available to all characters equally. Others are more specific, matching with your career, abilities, gear, or other chosen enhancements. Some cards can be used quite frequently, while other (frequently more powerful and/or dangerous) cards require a cool-off time between uses for them to recharge their usefulness, which is represented by ticking off one or more counters placed upon them. Your character’s array of other effects, such as Talents, Racial Abilities, Fatigue and Stress levels, and so on can also affect the dice pool and its interpreted results.

In addition to the characters, another team-oriented game element factors in heavily to many aspects of the characters’ mechanics: the Party Card. I absolutely love-love-love the Party Card. This mechanic essentially turns the entire group of heroes into a character-like unit of its own. Players can take their characters’ own Talent Cards and actually “slot” them onto the Party Card, allowing them to apply the effects of that Talent to the entire party due to their character’s own assumed guidance and initiative. Imagine if D&D characters could just as easily apply any one of their feats to everyone in the party? That would totally rock. Additionally, the Party Card applies special circumstantial bonuses to its members, and also keeps track of any escalating levels of inter-party Tension. That last part is really nice to me, because it actually turns character squabbles, social mishaps, and massive failures into another tangible mechanic. The core set comes with a good handful of these cards, with names such as “Brash Young Fools” and “Swords for Hire” and so on – the core set does a good job of covering most of the classic party formats, in my opinion.

But I want to go back to the action cards. When I first saw people using special Power Cards in D&D 4th Edition, I immediately fell in love with the concept. Whereas D&D’s cards were merely an optional game enhancement, WFRP3 makes them an integral part of playing the game. The use of these cards reminded me a lot of my time playing Tyler Tinsley’s then-named Upright Criminals game at this past Gamestorm². The Action Cards in WFRP3 cover pretty much all basic actions you will ever want to try with your character. Each player gets a set of eight basic actions, and can then select one or more extra cards from the stack supplied by the set. There are quite a few in there, covering a wide range of enhanced abilities, most of which actually have different in-game effects if your character is in a “Reckless” or “Defensive” stance focus.

Let’s talk about my single most favorite element of this game: the Progress Tracker. This concept isn’t really a new one, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it implemented so well, and so pervasively. Basically, there are many times in the game in which you set up a Progress Tracker, which usually consists of eight or ten or so sequentially-connected puzzle-pieces (supplied by the box). Most often one or two of those pieces will be special “event markers” – usually the midpoint and far end. This tracker is then used to gauge the progress of the characters as they seek to attain a goal of some kind. It can also be used to track two or more opposing parties seeking conflicting and potentially exclusive goals. Each party or other such force of interest involved in the tracked situation is represented by a token placed upon it, and as the tokens move along the track we get to see who is closest to achieving their goals. The event markers usually signify that important things happen, depending upon who reaches them first. One interesting take on this, provided in the rules materials’ own text, is the use of the Tracker to resolve social combat, using it to show how close each side is to achieving their intentions.

The implications here should be obvious: the possibilities for implementing the Progress Tracker are nigh unlimited. I love the concept of the Progress Tracker so much that I have decided to incorporate it into pretty much every single RPG I ever run. Just this past Monday night I used twice it in a Savage Worlds game, first making a planned skyship dogfight much more exciting and dramatic than the methods promoted by that system’s own rules, and then later using it to play out the party sneaking across a war zone in a city with survivors in tow. Both turned out to be quite exciting.

Our own play time was limited due to a late start, but we got to do some roleplaying, try some simple tests out, and enjoy a viciously dramatic combat with some gnarly beastmen, in a scene that seemed a good fit for a Vin Diesel action flick. Everyone had a good time, and we all agreed to meet up again and continue the adventure. Personally, I’m glad we didn’t get any further, because the stopping point was right about as much of the included adventure as I had read. Phew!

Criticisms

I have a few problems with the game’s layout. First off, the process of picking Action Cards and Talents during character creation is not very conducive to the quick establishment of game play. There’s really no easy way that I can see to present to brand new WFRP3 players their available choices, other than passing them the entire stack of cards (minus spells in most cases) and telling them to go to town. The creation process could benefit immensely from a few lists, examples, and career-tailored recommendations of useful action cards and talents to take at that crucial “first level” of the game.

Second, like all Fantasy Flight productions, the reference material designers chose to focus too heavily on production image, sacrificing mid-game readability and citability in the process. Quite simply, finding the rules that you most need on the fly is a complete pain in the privates, an issue it shares with Tannhauser, Twilight Imperium, Call of Cthulu, and every other Fantasy Flight game that I own. As with all of their products, there is no index, and I was only able to find certain extremely important rules mid-game because my prior experience with their other products gave me the foresight to tackle my first reading of the rules with a highlighter in hand. While I praise them for having a game product which, I dare say, looks damn sexy in every aspect of its style and tangibility, I lament the growing trend with Big Game Companies (TM) to attain these lofty presentation milestones by casting aside the actual mid-game usability of their rules materials. The cards definitely help to keep some rules handy and in-your face, but the meta-rules that guide those more situation-specific cards are sometimes lost in the void of poorly-referenced source material.

Third and final: this game takes up about as much space as Twilight Imperium, or maybe a tad less. While the lack of a central gaming board or combat grid helps to condense this, the hundreds of pieces and cards that need to be separated into easy-to-access bowls and tubs at the table present a logistics challenge I’m not used to with my tabletop RPGs. I’ve seen a few others echo this complaint on FFG’s official forums as well, and while most of the responses to those complaints have been friendly, few have really helped to resolve the issue. There are a few ways that this can be mitigated, mainly by planning ahead and preparing a game site most conducive to the spread of components. Had this particular session been played at my own home, I would have had a Dave³ and a good number of foldable TV Dinner Trays to help each player keep their stuff separate from the main gaming table, and I doubt the clutter would have been noticeable. As it was, though, the table was nigh overwhelmed with the character sheets, cards, tokens, and tracks alone, and we barely had room for the central play area for combats, locations, handouts, and extra pieces.

The Final Word

While I warn you to keep in mind that this is only a first-play review, with no insights into the Magic and Advancement systems, I must still recommend that you…

Buy This Game. Fantasy Flight has taken the Warhammer setting and made one kick-ass RPG for it. From my perspective as someone who found the previous editions cumbersome and whiff-tastic, this edition improves the game by leaps and bounds. Despite a few issues with presentation and the first game start-up flow, the pieces and mechanics fit together to let your group play a finely-turned game of dark (and sometimes darkly comedic) Old World adventure. If you like unique mechanics, lots of fiddly bits, card-based actions, and high production values, this is the game for you – especially if you’re a long-time fan of the setting who is open to new ideas.

One final idea came to me as I packed everything back up. This game could also be easily interchanged with the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin – another recently-published boxed set game that I’ve been itching to try out for the first time. There are a lot of similarities in the settings and their focus upon dark fantasy adventure. I’d be interesting to see one system used to play the other’s setting, and vice-versa.

Footnotes

¹ I recommend Ninkasi Believer Double Red
² Dammit, I keep forgetting to write up my GS2010 post. Adding that to the blogging agenda now.
³ Every gamer lair should have one of these, especially if you have a laptop. It has revolutionized my home gaming experience.

I first got to play it at Guardian Games last weekend during the May of the Dead zombie celebrations. I only managed to get int a couple of turns, because I was busy dealing with Cannibal Contagion and socializing with a lot of awesome new people. But the few turns I did play quickly seduced me into wanting more.

An old gaming buddy of mine was in town this very past weekend, and we all met up at a friend’s house last night for an evening of beer and board games. As a nice stroke of good fortune, someone showed up with this game in tow, and we got in two good six-player sessions of it before I had to leave. There was a lot of stumbling here and there as we got used to some of the more specific rules, but for the most part, everyone took to the game very easily and we all had a blast. I figured I would take some time today and write up a review-like post on my experiences.

Game Premise and Mechanics

From the very first time I played it, it reminded me of a more professional and better-balanced revision of the zombie game Maul of America. Both Last Night and Maul are your classic stories of a group of strangers stuck in a secluded location, surrounded by a hungry zombie horde. To me, the main difference is that Last Night seemed to have the benefit of a heckuva lot more playtesting and professional design than Maul, and it certainly showed in the final product.

The flow of both games are quite similar, right down to the move-search-shoot turn flow and the one-square-shamble zombies. The game is split into two sides: 14 zombies (maximum) and 4 heroes. Depending on how many players are there, up to two players will split the zombies between them and up to four players will take on the individual heroes. There are a good number of predesigned heroes for this game, based on classic archetypes from zombie movies. Each hero has their own mini-figurine game piece and a full-color card with all their pertinent unique information. I’m glad to see that all the characters were represented artistically by actual people, with stylistic photographs on all their cards and game reps.

The game goes back and forth between the zombies and the heroes, and I really enjoyed the more strategically-encouraging free-form flow of the turns, in which the heroes can act in any order they wish. Just like in Maul, zombies and heroes alike can draw special faction-specific cards, with the heroes getting items and one-shot empowerments and the zombies getting a wide assortment of abilities that let them screw with the heroes. Some of the powers and the rules relating to these cards could use a bit more clarification, but most of them were very easy to understand and use.

Each session took between and hour or two to play, which was perfect for the location and the company. I love a good fiddly-bits board games that can be played in less than two hours, even with a full table of players. This game definitely fits that bill, and worked well despite all but one of us having never played it before.

The Epic Movie!

Our second session last night was just plain epic. We actually played it with five hero players and two zombie players, and I think having the fifth hero might have unbalanced it just a bit. But regardless, the game ended two passes before nightfall, and was non-stop intensity right from the get-go.

In fact, the whole session played out like a pretty awesome zombie movie. It started with Billy and Sally, alone together in the high school, realizing their passions for one another and just jumping each other, the rest of the world be damned. That’s when the Nurse and the Stranger busted in, and they all set to fortifying the school and raiding the principal’s closets for hidden weaponry. Meanwhile, we frequently cut back to scenes of the lone Sheriff, running desperately through town, skipping from house to house, searching for supplies and the keys to that old jalopy in the middle of town.

In the end, the heroes were molded into a trauma-hardened group of vigilant survivors, who worked together to get everyone to the truck and out of town, including the bitten-and-infected Sheriff… perhaps that is the foundation for a sequel?

Last Words

As you could tell, I love this game. I’m making a point of getting it as soon as I can, and I’d love to try out the other different game scenario variants. I can see this one becoming a staple of my future Board Game Nights.

This past Gamestorm (GS11) was host to many wonderful moments of gaming, and I am proud and delighted to say that one particular game rises above all others of my recent memory in sheer awesomeness. That session was the Jesus Camp Massacre, a demo game I ran of Cannibal Contagion.

This post has taken me a long time to get up for a variety of reasons, one of which is that I keep coming back and re-editing and re-writing it. It has to be perfect – the session was just that awesome. So now, several months later, I’ve decided to re-write it one last time, and come hell or high water I will be posting this AP review today. I’ll warn you all now: This review will likely offend some people. Read at your own risk.

For GameStorm, I designed three distinct demo games to run, and Jesus Camp was the last of the three. In this game, I set up the Contagion based on a supernaturally-infused variant of the infectious contagion that is Jesus’s Love. In this scenario, I decided to set up seven pregenerated characters and put them through the horrors of a twisted Jesus Camp. Six players showed up, but fortunately one of the characters was easily left out. The results, as you will see, were awesome.

The Six Survivors:

• Sadie – The Goth Girl, in love with Bross
• Missy – A pregnant Cheerleader, In love with Devon (the kid’s father), dating Bross
• Bross – The Football Hero, dating Missy, in love with Devon
• Devon – The Reformed Ex-Gay, worshipper of Jesus, father of Missy’s child, in love with Bross
• Mitch – The boydyke outcast, in love with Missy
• Zeke – the gamer nerd, secretly plays D&D with Bross, in love with Sadie

I created them each with loving care, and set up a pretty complex network of relationships. As you can see above, there’s a lot of conflict, and the extra work I put into setting up these interactions and backgrounds beforehand really made the game all that more fantastic.

The game was played out over the span of five mostly action-and-drama-packed scenes. I’ll give a quick run-down of them, with some highlights of the things that I loved the most.

Scene 1: Drunken Masters

The game opened on the last night of Jesus Camp. Tomorrow morning would be the Grand Revival, followed by refreshments and then everyone being picked up by their parents and taken home. The Goal of the Scenario: Survive the Night!

When the curtain opened, the players were just leaving the Saturday night revival. All the prayer groups were old to go find somewhere and reflect together upon the evening’s lessons, and their group (the Exodus group) snuck off to sit around a distant tree and drink some snuck-in beer with their buddy Pablo (an Ally, also part of the prayer group). They had barely cracked open the case, however, when the bitchtastic all-girl Genesis prayer group showed up and caused a ruckus, threatening to “tell on them” to Youthpastor Cody (the director of Jesus Camp operations; aka “YPC”).

Led by the gung-ho Mitch, the team proceeded to beat the everloving shit out of the Genesis girls – killing one of them, in fact. That really set off some major tremors among their group. As the remaining Genesis girls ran off screaming in bloody fear, some of the Survivors tried to find a way to deal with the body, some cried, and the lovely Devon went to go tell YPC what happened.

Devon didn’t get too far, though. Just a short job from the Tree of Death, he saw the genesis girls get surrounded by dark figures which came out of nowhere. They were quickly subdued and taken away. Devon tried to follow, but was shortly surrounded himself by these figures, which he realized were the members of the all-boys Ecclesiastes prayer group. Their eyes were all fucked up and their skin was dark and veiny. They looked pissed. Devon tried to talk them down, but they didn’t liste, and quickly jumped him while he screamed like a girl.

The other Survivors heard the scream and ran to the rescue, and once again Mitch’s boots kicked some ass and helped save the day. The Ecclesiastes managed to get away after a few rounds of cards, but they also took the Genesis girls with them.

The scene ended with them all running off to find YPC. By the end of the scene, half of the Survivors had already descended to the second stage of Madness, and a few had taken wounds. Nice!

Scene 2: Cody’s Cabin

In this short scene, the Survivors met with the always-pleasant Youthpastor Cody in his small office. They tried to convince him that there was violence going down, and that something was wrong with Ecclesiastes and Genesis. He seemed pleasant and unshaken, and assured them that he would contact the nearby sheriff’s station to send Ol’ Jake Hornsby down to check on matters.

I seem to recall there being some joke with one of the characters being nicknamed “Penis” and that being a hilarious moment during the radio chat with Jake Hornsby, but the specifics now escape me. Anyway, this scene primarily served as a segue to the next one, with a bit of situational establishment and intensification of the background conflict.

Scene 3: Stalking the Vestibules

The scene opened with the Survivors in their “vestibule.” Now, Imagine, if you will, a Jesus Compound. Rows and rows upon rows and rows of bunkhouses, veritable streets and alleyways between them, each on cinderblocks and lacking windows, with a lock on the outside of the door. These were the vestibules of YPC’s Jesus Camp, each containing another prayer group.

The characters had been escorted to their vestibule, and shortly afterward a couple of junior Youthpastors showed up, requesting to speak with the girls (Mitch, Missy, and Sadie) separately. The gals were taken off, and a moment later the boys heard the sound of their vestibule being locked from the outside.

A few moments later, there were two major simultaneous conflicts. The Ecclesiastes showed up again, this time far more disturbing than before, and tried to take Mitch and Missy out into the darkness. Meanwhile, Sadie had run back to the vestibule to let the boys out, but was stymied by some creepy monster-looking girl grabbing at her from under the vestibule. Several rounds of cards later, Missy is much further down the depths of lunacy, Mitch is covered in blood, and the rest of them have gathered outside the vestibule to try and help the dying girl underneath it. Turns out, it was one of the escaped girls from the Genesis group, and her belly insides look as if they’ve exploded everywhere.

They made a plan to escape, and the scene ended.

Scene 4: Moonlit Lakeside Romance

Oh my. This truly epic scene involved a dramatic argument while treading water in the middle of the lake, a thrilling motorboat chase, multiple people getting whacked with oars, an attempted drowning suicide, and more. But the best part? Definitely the time when Sadie tried to drown herself, and Zeke rescued her, and tried to turn mouth-to-mouth resuscitation into a hardcore makeout only to be punched in the face by the now-conscious Sadie. Oh no, it was when Bross and Devon admitted their gay love for each other and missed on the beach. Or was it when Mitch called Missy an evil bitch and an insult to women everywhere, and Missy slapped her for it, and then they had violent lustful angsty teenage lesbian dry-humping on the waterfront?

Oh wait, it was all three of them, because they all happened at the same fucking time and provided the perfect end to the scene.

Scene 5: Golem Jesus

In the Grand Finale to the game, they face off against Youthpastor Cody’s grand creation: Golem Jesus. The giant Buddy Christ statue in the middle of the grand pavilion broke apart, and from it stepped a gigantic flesh golem made from the bodies of all the other Jesus Camp attendees.

By this point all of the Survivors were either quite insane or very close, and as such the battle was quite intense. There was head-biting, people-eating, fist-pounding, flying kung-fu dyke combat-boot flying-monkey face-kicking, and more. Missy went nuts and gave birth to a demonic Jesus Spawn, while the belly-less corpses of the Genesis Group tried to strangle everyone with their flailing intestines.

In the end, Golem Jesus killed everyone and stomped off into the sunrise with Baby Demon Jesus perched on his shoulder, although it’s rumored that Sadie might have somehow survived.

Aftermath

Seriously, Fuck Yeah. This game was so awesome that all other games in the room with us were visibly jealous. I think we annoyed a lot of people with our loudness, but sweet golem jesus above, it was worth it. I made some good personal connections with fellow gamers in this session, and look forward to meeting up with them again in the coming days.

The Future

Coming to GameStorm 2010: Jesus Camp Massacree 2 – The Rise of Golem Jesus!

It all got started after the fabulous-amazing Jesus Camp Massacre session of Cannibal Contagion. After leaving the scheduled gaming room, I ran into Nick and Gilbert, and we all three had about an hour to kill. I blurted out “let’s play Quad” without thinking, and a few moments later we had started on in. After a few minutes of deliberation over what number-generator to use – for some reason they were both hardcore against using dice right then – we settled on a deck of cards. The built-in random scenario generator quickly laid out the basics:

• Setting: Ancient Earth (we decided Egypt)
• Location: An Institution (we decided a Temple of Training)
• What starts it all off: A natural disaster (we decided on an Earthquake) kills all the priests in the temple leaving only two survivors

The characters were created quickly enough, each being only a small list of good and bad Merits. One was a fairly inept acolyte conman, the other was a Pariah being beaten for the crimes of heaven or some such. I like to call them Harold and Kumar, as their dynamic was equally hilarious.

Once the core scenario’s conflict was established and the characters introduced, we quickly went to town. Nick and Gilbert were both experienced story-gamers, and thus took to the game’s mechanical concepts quickly. Within a few minutes, the mechanics were in play and more conflicts were introduced. I think for the purposes of the Pick-Up style of game play, the simple mechanics worked very well to move the game quickly along.

The temple guards took both the characters into protective custody, and one of them quickly managed to convince the guards that he was the Chosen One and the other character was his faithful Companion. A series of Sacred Rites of Testing were then undergone, which included eating (and stomaching) terrible foods, surfing the back of alligators while blindfolded, an epic game of Madden BC-199, and more. My favorite of the trials was definitely the game of Five-Card Draw, played with giant stone slab cards carried on the backs of teams of slaves. Each time a card was discarded, the stone was smashed to bits and the slaves carrying it were thrown to the crocodiles.

And there was much death by crocodile in this game. From Nick’s character’s lost arm to the gobs of sacred virgins they fed to them post-coitus, the crocodiles played an unexpectedly crucial part in the session. In fact, at the very end, when Gilbert’s character castrated himself to prove that he was in fact the REAL Chosen One (claiming the title by default, as he prevented Nick from winning), he was then fed to the crocodiles to appease the angry gods.

Within the span of an hour, we had run a pretty damn awesome game session, consisting of at least a dozen hilarious conflicts and a large handful of scenes. For me, the hardest part was actually coming up with the Seven Sacred Rites, but once the game started moving along, those came pretty easily too.

All in all, a damn fantastic session, one which all three of us have laughed about many times since.

Also, while playing this game I noticed a lot of similarities, play-wise, that it shared with Cannibal Contagion. Apologies in advanced if I make frequent comparisons, but that’s where my mind is, and their similarities really helped me put the game into a few perspectives, which I appreciated.

Setup:

All I originally had heard about the system from various folks was that it was “Starship Troopers: The Movie: The Game” – meaning, space marines murdering space bug with full-on bloody space action. In space! I love space, it’s awesome, and so was 3:16. Nick Smith (co-author of Classroom Deathmatch, one of my favorite games ever), assembled this session, with three total additional players (Myself, Joel, and Evan). He laid the basic premise out pretty effectively, and since said premise was simple enough to understand, we easily jumped right into character creation.

In 3:16, character creation is delightfully quick, and this was explained to us as being so because your character will likely die (and quickly), and when that happens you’re supposed to be able to quickly jump right in with a new one. Cannibal Contagion has the exact same mentality, so it was easy for me to grasp, and I was eager to give it a shot.

After jotting down some quick color basics (name, nickname, reputation), we assigned points to the two core stats. That’s right, only two, and they’re totally appropriate: one for killing things (called FA), the other for doing everything else (called NFA). That seemed easy enough to understand, but later I noted some potential balance issues with these stats, which I will discuss much further below. My character was named James Jimson, aka “Double Jim,” and his FA and NFA were 3 and 7, respectively. I don’t remember his reputation, but it was something about being the only survivor of a terrible massacre.

Once we wrote our stats, Nick informed us that those stats are now used to determine our initial rank. The higher your NFA, the higher your rank, and my character had the highest, netting him a rank of Sergeant (the highest you can be at creation). This allowed me to give some more commands to the others, but gave me a few more (mostly-narrative) responsibilities. I’m not entirely sure if “narrative responsibility” is a worthwhile or even tangible mechanic, but it wasn’t a big deal in the end. I also got a cooler assortment of weapons to pick from, as well as an Evacuation pod.

We wrote down our weapons and health levels, and then jumped right in.

Actual Play:

I got the impression that my own recent experiences with more cutthroat-style games of betrayal and factions affected my interpretation of this game, and it seemed that thus was true of the other players as well. We all immediately got into a “shoot your allies” and “kill your superior officers” kind of mentality in one fashion or another. I would like someday to replay this game, and take a more dedicated, less cutthroat approach to the story. That being said, the approach we took was a whole lot of fun, so don’t think for one second that I’m complaining!

Our group consisted of three characters. Mine was a hard-but-resourceful Sgt, Evan’s was a soldier known for high ratios of friendly fire, and Joel’s was a do-what-it-takes “junior officer” who had no respect for inept senior officers. We went forth on a series of missions to destroy these gigantic dinosaur-monsters who carried massive building-sized laser guns. I won’t go into too many details on the scenario, but I would like to talk about some of the mechanics.

I liked the basic ideas behind the core dice mechanic. When you want to kill things, you roll a d10 and try for less-or-equal to your FA score. When you want to do anything that doesn’t involve killing, you roll likewise against you NFA score. For a Spaceship Bughunt kind of game, that’s really all you need! When you succeed in a kill, you subtract a single token from the somewhat ambiguous token pool that represent’s the enemy’s strength. While pretty vague in its implementation, it is extremely similar to Cannibal Contagion’s “Threat Score” mechanic, so it made total sense to me.

When you succeed in removing a token, however, you also roll a number of dice determined by what weapon you are using and how far you are from the enemy. This determines your “kills,” which in fact mechanically only determines how much experience you gained from that action. I don’t remember this being clearly explained to us at the beginning of the session, and don’t recall learning about what exactly “kills” did until the end of our test encounter. I can see the given explanation of Kills and their mechanical importance as needing some initial clarification, at least for the purpose of setting a good frame of mind.

The actual dice mechanic is a basic “Win versus Fail” roll. If you achieve success, you get to roll your Kills, scratch off an enemy token, and then go wild describing how you won and what you did. Thing is, as it was explained to us, there are no real bad consequences for your own failure other than having to wait an extra round or two for the enemy to die. Each character can remove at most one single token from any enemy encounter, so failure simply means that one less token can be removed during this round of the battle. While that means that the enemy could of course then be allowed to survive for another round and thus potentially do more damage, it seemed that all it really ended up happening was that we were either Killing, or Waiting. It might have been a bit more suspenseful if the enemy didn’t have to use any mechanics to hurt the characters, thus making its prolonged survival a much more threatening menace.

That being said, describing the kills was a blast. We had a good mix of veteran story gamers on board, so we all took to that aspect of the rules with glee and gusto. Sadly, I understand there were a good number of mechanics that we just weren’t able to employ, due to the one-shot nature of the gathering. We didn’t get to use vehicles much at all, and we only briefly and shallowly dipped into the numbers behind the specially-empowering Flashback mechanics (see below for some notes on that). I do particularly enjoy the per-mission advancement mechanics; I find that being able to mechanically invest in your character as soon as the first couple of encounters makes games a whole lot more fun, and makes for an ultimately more rewarding play experience.

Some Nitpicks:

Awesomeness is not often unmarred by some minor level of boo-ness, though. I’ve got a few tiny gripes about the game and the session we played. First, NFA needs clarification. The NFA (non-fighting ability) stat is too vaguely powerful, at least as far as we were able to interpret. As written in the rules, there is nothing at all preventing you from using the NFA stat to do everything, resulting in lots of kills and lots of discarded bad dude tokens. This was a point of heavy discussion during the game session, when we realized that several players were just using NFA to narrate how they “cleverly” took out groups of bad guys without directly shooting or stabbing them. In my opinion, there needs to be some specific clause in the text that states exactly if/how NFA can be used to affect kills and bad dude tokens. We looked and looked for something like this, but found none.

I was confused about the Strength Flashback mechanic. It was explained to us that you only get one, ever. Well, this being a one-shot game, I used mine in the very final conflict. I think that this mechanic should be clarified a bit to prevent that, unless no one else really cares. In the earlier incarnations of Cannibal Contagion, there was a mechanic called the “Agsomafa” finishing blow, which was a once-only-ever ability each character had, which allowed them to just win any one single Showdown. Problem was, in every playtest using this mechanic, the players waited until the very last encounter with the Big Bad and just chained them together, taking out the Big Bad with no sweat. That mechanic, needless to say, is no longer present in Cannibal Contagion. I think 3:16‘s flashbacks might benefit from a bit of tuning to make them more compatible with convention-style play. Cons seem to be the bread and butter of indie game promotion these days.

Also – and this might just be a situational nitpick and not something wrong with the game itself – there should also be some narration limits inherent to the guidelines. I noticed that some players would really go totally overboard not only when declaring their actions, but then again when their declared action succeeded. If you spend five minutes narrating what you are going to do, then spend five more minutes narrating how what you did succeeded, the game is hampered – unless, of course, everyone is doing this and they’re all on the same page. I got the impression that the mechanics were meant to move fast and bloody. Our session wasn’t as fast, but I’m also sure that a lot of that had to do with all of us being new to the game. Perhaps the rules could benefit from a quick guideline, such as “when stating your action, just give a quick statement on what you’re trying to accomplish; wait until you succeed to go all-out.”

Final Thoughts:

I had a really good time with this game. I always love playing one-shots of these games at mini-cons like the GoPlay! events, and this was certainly no exception. I think it would work best with a short-run campaign format, though, and should Nick every want to run such a game (HINT HINT), I want in.

In closing, usually when I review books, movies, and video games, I use a four-tiered rating system: Buy it, Rent it, Borrow it, and Avoid it. I know I said that I don’t consider this to be an all-out “review,” but I’ll apply this here just for fun. Buy this game! I may have given it some minor nitpicks above, but consider this: if those are my only nitpicks from a brand new game, that’s saying a lot about how awesome that game is. If you enjoy killing space bug monster things with big explosion kill-guns, this is your game, accept no substitute.

- NPC