Tuesday 31 March 2015

Forgive Us - thoughts on play

On the weekend Team Anti-Capitalism, the years-old spurts and fits Unknown Armies game I'm part of met up from the different corners of the British Isles for a long awaited get together. Except that +Pete Wolfendale was suffering from velvet brain worms or some similarly horrific mental complaint, so instead I ran Lamentations. I didn't have prep time and also before the game I had to move half a tree and a bunch of gravel into a skip, so what happened was I ran Forgive Us by Kelvin Green.

Spoilery thoughts below:

1. This is a Warhammer Fantasy Role Play module, right? Everyone knows this? It's not on the cover but that's what it is. I mean, that's a great thing. Nurgle is the best plague God. Who even knows about other plague Gods? Except old testament Jehovah I guess. But he doesn't have Plague Bearers. There are no Plague Bearers in this module yet but you could fit them in. It would be like taking apart an Ikea bookshelf and using it as a standing desk or a cupboard or what have you.

2. This is a really perfect module for a one shot. I read it in about twenty minutes and the players went from plot hook to clusterfuck in about three hours. That included the players reloading their save after they got to the end and Nottingham was a flaming hellscape with face-fucking tentacle monsters everywhere and they hadn't got a clue what was going on and they didn't even go in the vault. So we reversed time, let them fiddle with the vault, then two of them died in a pit trap and one of them ran screaming into the chalk caves below the city. Pretty good.

3. This module has the structure of a three panel comic. Panel one - hook the PCs. Panel two - they explore the Dog and Bastard. Panel three - The Thing. Keep it snappy and don't forget the point of panel two is to get to panel three. If your players really chaff at losing characters maybe don't drop this on them? Because surviving this module would involve not experiencing it.

4. You could start a campaign off the back of this module. That would be good. The mooks who die in this one are only there for the prelude. Then run the campaign using All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

5. Don't skip out the second adventuring party. My players didn't even say hi to them, but having this other group of jerks rummaging through the thieves' complex helped keep the players nervous and honest and on point. Also good for visual things - torches lit in the other buildings, a man with wounds down his arms after an (unseen) encounter with the dog thing.