Well whaddaya know, posting my last post was actually the kick up the arse I needed - behold, Six Bullets for Vengeance, in it's current incarnation! The text is (almost all) complete, but has hardly been read through by people who are not me. I'd appreciate feedback on the text itself - does it make sense, can you envisage what the game looks like from the text, and so on - as well as playtesting of the game in general.

It's been a long time brewing, so lemme know what you think so I can kick this game into layout!

So yesterday I had some friends over and we had a quick playtest of Ordinary Angels, my game of angelic cops. Me and

drivingblind talk about it quite extensively here.

We were going to play it on saturday night but I suggested we watched the Prophecy to get in the right mood (for those who haven't seen it, it's Christopher Walken chewing up the scenery as a bad-ass Gabriel) but it proved to be such a big turn off we ended up playing something else. So sunday afternoon, with the Prophecy fading in our memory, we tried again.

One of the things that has come out of the past few playtests is the need for information about the antagonists and revelations to be presented clearly to all the players.

The revelation map was the first way of presenting this information, alongside all the information about a given scene, but this got confusing at times.

In the Spodley playtest I also introduced an antagonist sheet for each antagonist, divided into chapters to keep the information clearly laid out.

One comment was that the antagonists only used a small bit of their sheet, if any at all, so Malcolm suggested it be combined with the revelation map. I didn't quite go this far, instead rolling all the antagonist information and scene information into a single sheet. The protagonist has their own sheet, and the revelations have a sheet of their own, along with space for reward dice.

For the game I ran last week, I made a fancy protagonist sheet, antagonist sheet and revelation map, designed to be shared by all the players. They worked well in the game, and were used by all the players, so I'm pleased with how they've turnd out. Let me know what you think!

I playtested Six Bullets for Vengeance with my mid-week group last week and, to be brutally honest, it went rather badly. The game never really clicked, for a variety of reasons, and left me frustrated. But, every cloud and all that, it has proven to be a very useful playtest, as bad playtests tend to be, with plenty of food for thought and areas that need addressing highlighted in my mind.

I've posted a thread dissecting it quite brutally here. If any of my players are reading this, please don't think I'm singling you out or levelling any criticism at the group! The only person I hold responsible is myself.

Epilogue

The epilogue is one of only two scenes that the protagonist gets to setup and narrate, and is best thought of as the final scene of a movie. In past games it has showed the death of the final villain, but in this one it didn’t.

Malcolm narrated the closing credits: “James Pilgrim returned east and opened up a successful practice in New England.”

He then described the town in silence, with everybody huddled behind closed doors, and a small column of smoke rising from the mine entrance up on the mountainside. Pilgrim then appeared, walking purposefully through town with a rifle in one hand and a doctor’s bag in the other. He places it by the dead tree in the centre of town (which we added to the revelation map) and continues walking.

Chapter 5

The protagonist gets to choose the order he’ll fight the antagonists in, and logic dictated that the final antagonist would be the company boss, Thomas Deacon.

At the start of the chapter I grabbed 2 dice per player to use to create scene attributes and npcs, handing 3 to James and 2 to Jan and investing the remaining dice into the attributes “old mine equipment” and “darkened tunnels.” I also had my own dice to use for creating attributes for Deacon.

I began outside the mine, with Deacon telling one of his men, Mason (who James played) to stay outside the mine, and ordering the other to follow him into the mines. James had Mason hide behind a boulder ready to spring an ambush when Pilgrim showed up.

Having reached a natural pause, narration then passed to Malcolm to describe what Pilgrim did. This would be the pattern followed throughout most of the game – the antagonist would set the scene, describe what his character was doing and who else was there before turning to the protagonist to react to the situation.

I’m not sure if this is a problem, or simply the way the game proceeds. Malcolm explained the concept of different types of authority (as he does here) and how this needed to be made clear in the game text.

So Pilgrim climbs up the mountain path and Mason springs his trap, dislodging a boulder to crash down onto him, the first conflict of the game as well as the first problem. Both James and Malcolm set stakes, which in themselves posed a problem. After all, Mason couldn’t actually be successful and kill Pilgrim with his ambush, so instead they settled for the stakes “does the ambush alert Deacon or not?”

We rolled, Mason won and the boulder crashed down the mountainside, its echoes reverberating around the town and causing the townsfolk to flee indoors. Deep inside the mine Deacon heard the sound of the boulder but ordered his minion to “keep digging.”

Ok, so conflict one worked ok, but now that the ambush was sprung there was another conflict brewing. If you recall the previous playtest, we adopted a more gritty, close-up, blow-by blow conflict mechanism, which almost worked like rounds. It worked, just about, although I did feel at the time that we were struggling against the system somewhat. It didn’t work this time round.

Malcolm and James set stakes once again, but yet again Mason couldn’t kill Pilgrim with his shovel, so instead Pilgrim tried to persuade Mason to stand aside and go back into town. The conflict was whether he would have to shoot Mason or not to get into the mine.

Now this was a more juicy conflict with a much more interesting scope. It wasn’t about the inevitable, which was that Pilgrim would get past Mason and into the mines, but instead about how complicated it would be, what sacrifices Pilgrim would have to make. They rolled again, this time tying, which was a grey area of the rules. We decided it made sense that the protagonist should win ties, so Pilgrim talked Mason down and he returned to town.

This is where we took a time out. It became obvious that stake setting was very important, and couldn’t concern the inevitabilities of the game (which is that the protagonist survives til the end, he dispatches each of the villains and so forth) but instead had to concern complications, sacrifices, whether the protagonist had to get his hands dirty along the way. Considering up til now stake setting has a single line in the text, I think this needs expanding into a whole chapter.

The other issue Malcolm brought up was that, because dice are a commodity in the game, spent on dice rolls and traits and gained as rewards for winning conflicts and doing cool stuff, he was being forced to waste dice on dispatching a single mook. This led to the very real possibility that by the time he reached the real villain, Deacon, he’d have used up all his dice and we’d all be forced to fudge things his way. The quick fix was to say that minions only ever take a single conflict to deal with, one way or another. We came up with a much bigger patch later in the playtest, but for now this seemed to make things right.

I resumed narration. Deep in the mines, surrounded by chundering equipment and with his man digging a deep pit was Deacon. Narration handed back to Malcolm, who asked to spend his revelation token (earnt for taking part in conflicts and spent to add stuff to the revelation map) to find a big crate of dynamite. This was just part of the narration, not a revelation, so Malcolm got it for free, describing Pilgrim emptying out one of the tubes and hurling it at Deacon. Deacon did the heroic thing and hurled his henchman at it whilst he dove the other way. No conflict here, it just happened.

The next conflict saw Pilgrim take out the minion and told Deacon that he was here to exact his revenge for the townsfolk, and that he had evidence that Deacon was the reason women and children were dying – revelation token. We talked for a bit, scaring Janos who was sitting between us as we shot vengeful glares at one another, before Deacon laid out Pilgrim with a pickaxe handle, leaving unconscious whilst he finished digging. I narrated that I found a big chest and Malcolm spent another token – the chest was empty.

Whilst Deacon railed and screamed, Pilgrim had got up and had his rifle aimed at Deacon. Final conflict. Not whether Pilgrim killed Deacon or not, but whether Deacon died with dignity or not. He failed, and his end would be very undignified indeed. Pilgrim tied Deacon to the chundering, whirring machinery, tied a tourniquet round his arm and withdrew a huge syringe from his bag.

At this time James interjected, spending the revelation token he’d picked up earlier, declaring that “the machine has been killing the townspeople.” Both myself and Malcolm visibly recoiled at the idea – it jarred with my view of the game and Malcolm clearly had other ideas. But James had spent a token and his addition was valid, unless Malcolm disputed it with his last remaining token. We debated it for a bit, but both outcomes felt wrong – James’ revelation clearly didn’t fit with Malcolm’s idea, but Malcolm didn’t want to throw out a player contribution.

Instead we tabled the revelation and discussed it, with both James and Malcolm outlining what they were thinking. This should have been the way we handled it in the first place, as it led to a far more interesting outcome. Deacon’s mine was mining silver, using all the townsfolk to do so. The machine was washing the silver, producing mercury as a by-product that was poisoning the townsfolk. In a way, the machine was killing the townspeople.

Malcolm backtracked a little, narrating that Pilgrim filled his syringe with pure mercury and injected it into Deacon’s arm. He then emptied out the bullets from his rifle, from Deacon’s pistol, from his henchman’s sidearm, tossing them all down the pit so that Deacon knew there would be no escape from a slow and painful death. As Pilgrim left Deacon dying, screaming and blubbing and crying in pain and madness, he dynamited the entrance of the mine, leaving a pall of smoke behind him as he returned to town.

Which is of course where the epilogue began.

Questions and comments

Revelation tokens look to work, controlling the flow of revelations and rewarding people for taking part in conflicts, but I’m still not entirely sure whether there should be a mechanism for disputing them. On the one hand, I think there should be a way to counter a less-than-satisfactory revelation. But on the other hand, doesn’t that devalue one player’s contribution over the other. Do you think either are valid concerns?

Saturday afternoon at Spodley Grange I got to run a playtest of Six Bullets for Vengeance, I think for the 5th time. Each time it’s been with a subtly different set of rules and a different group of players, and this outing would be for the first time since I made the changes that arose from the Conception playtest.

Setup

There were 4 of us playing – myself, Malcolm, James and Janos. Everyone except Malcolm had played before, although only me and James had played with anything approaching the current version of the rules.

We brainstormed ideas for the setting and quickly decided to play it straight – ie as a Western. We wanted a subtly different feel though, and after brushing aside the idea of a Western set in Mexico, Malcolm suggested we go for a Pale Rider feel with a cold Western.

We set it in the mountains of Nebraska during winter, Malcolm suggesting a town swathed in snow with characters wearing thick overcoats buttoned up to the neck against the cold and hats pulled down over their ears.

We talked about what sort of settings and scenes we wanted to see and James suggested we go for quite a strong visual feel and have each chapter and antagonist confined to a single locale in town – the saloon, the hardware store, the church and so on.

After we’d settled on the setting, we threw about some ideas for characters. Malcolm opted to play the protagonist, James Pilgrim, a doctor.

We then discussed antagonists and I made it clear I wanted to avoid clichés with characters, so no corrupt sheriffs or the like. We decided instead to go for a town run by the mining company, with us all playing various characters associated with the company.

I was Thomas Deacon, the company boss, Janos was Bill Bishop, the corrupt union official, and James was Douglas Priest, the general store owner.

Because there were only 4 of us, and I wasn’t sure how long the game would take, we decided to play one antagonist each to start with, possibly increasing this to two towards the end. 

After the game Malcolm pointed out that 3-4 players was really the ideal number for the game, with 2-3 of the players taking on a couple of antagonists each, which was so obvious I’d managed to miss it.

After playing around with Everlasting Empires in the morning it became obvious that I needed a bit more structure in the setup, perhaps with some questions to get the juices flowing and give everybody a strong premise to begin the game with.

Last night I ran a playtest session of 1st Quest, Judd's new game. We played through the World Tree Pack tutorial from the book - essentially you play members of a wolf pack roaming the World Tree of Norse myth, fighting mythical beasts and trying to avoid the encroaching humans.

We ran through the tutorial that is included in the book, although re-tooled it as an extended form of character creation, which worked really nicely. So we came up with concepts and names and abilities, then framed a conflict scene apiece; then we picked banners, and framed a scene related to one of those to gain some xp; then we spent an advance on buying a ring and assigned pools, and played a related scene. Finally we played a scene for pool refreshment, and ended up by assigning scores to the rest of our abilities and spending the remaining advances.

As is customary for our games, I've made a wiki where we've got the characters up. So far we have Boo, the inquisitive runt who could talk with humans, and Minsk, the sly raven whose shrill cry could wake the spirits and gods of the Tree.

We started off with a first conflict with Boo where he tried to hunt a large beast through the forest, a giant elk with 4 great antlers, eyes like burning coal and hooves like sharp rocks. He failed, and found himself far from home and lost.

Minsk framed a conflict where he flew to meet a new pack that had moved into the area and negotiate some sort of peace with them. He succeeded, and well, and formed a friendship with their alpha.

As one of his banners, Boo had the Banner of the Human Friend, so we framed a scene where he found a human child playing in the snow, but as he nuzzled her the elk returned and tried to trample him and the child. Boo tried to scare the elk off with a loud growl but failed, getting trampled underfoot. Boo opted to make a stand and try to drive the elk off with his teeth, and successfully did so.

Meanwhile, as Minsk returned from his negotiations he spotted smoke rising from over a hill, and flying to investigate found it was a group of humans chopping down trees and burning a great fire. He flew close, hoping to scare them off by pretending to be one of Odin's ravens. The lumberjacks saw through his trickery and shot him with an arrow. Minsk opted not to make a stand though, and fled. When he returned to the pack he persuaded the hesitant and unsure alpha, Weren, to send some scouts to keep an eye on the humans.

Once Boo had chased the beast off he used his Ring of the Human Tongue to ask the child where her pack was, and was told that her father and his friends were busy chopping down trees not far away, to make fire. Boo didn't understand what she meant by making fire, but his curiosity was piqued and the girl told him about wild how men could tame fire. As they talked, Boo heard voices approaching so bid her farewell and ran home.

After speaking with Weren, Minsk used his Ring of the Gods' Howl to call up the Spirit of the Forest to find out more about what the humans intended. The spirit told him that the humans were defiling the tree spirits and causing great pain and suffering. Minsk reassured it that the wolves would drive them off soon enough.

Boo found his way back to his pack where he spoke to Elder Balder about humans and their ways, asking him whether it was true that men could tame fire (this was Boo's refresh for his civilisation pool). Balder warned him about such things as dallying with humans, telling him they were arrogant and ignorant, and no man (or wolf) could truly tame fire.

Minsk refreshed his Howl pool by picking juicy lice out of one of the wolf scout's fur.

So using the tutorial as a prolonged character creation session worked well, although I'm not entirely sure that's how it intended. It's created some good characters as well as setting up a fantastic conflict and dilemma for next week (do they drive the humans away, and can they do so without harming Boo's new friend?) when we play properly.