Character Creation: Feng Shui 2nd Ed

OK, I've got about 30 minutes before the game tonight, but the last thing on my to-do listed today was "make a character," so I'm gonna do one real quick. And that means I need a quick-ass game that I know well.

The Game: Feng Shui 2nd Ed
The Publisher: Atlas Games
Degree of Familiarity: Quite a bit, now, at least with the system (the metaplot continues to elude me)
Books Required: Just the one.

 

OK, so I made a character for the first edition this game back in 2009 (JESUS), but my policy is to make new characters for new editions, so here we are. The game didn't change all that much in terms of tone and backstory (the backstory got updated, hence my "metaplot" comment). But, it's still down to the same process: Pick an archetype, apply a coat of paint, good to go. No numbers required. Literally the most time-consuming part of this process is going to be scanning in the sheet.

But what would I like to play?

Well, if you've been keeping up, you know I like jumpy-flippy characters, but I also enjoy stealthy characters. And so I choose the Ninja. All I need is a name, a concept, and a melodramatic hook.

I think I want my character to be from the contemporary juncture, just because it'd be easier to play. I don't have to be a literal ninja, I'm just a stealthy-assassiny type of person. So I'm gonna say my character was a famous actor. He wasn't famous for acting; he was a martial arts badass and had kind of a Jet Li thing going in the States (more famous in China). He learned, however, that the studio to which he was under contract was doing hella shady things (this is going to be his melodramatic hook). He's already rich, but he's under tight contract and he's well known as a good guy - does charity work, shows up at hospitals and all that. He knows that if he were to just cut ties, the studio would discredit him (or worse; see "hella shady" earlier).

So instead, he wears all black, breaks into their subsidiaries, steals damning documents, photographs their execs in compromising positions, and otherwise works against the studio (and their subsidiaries). He doesn't even rise to the level of "Masked Avenger" because he doesn't want anyone to see him; he knows that even his fighting style would be a giveaway. So he is a phantom, a shadow...a ninja.

His real name is Wo Dan (or "Dan Wo," in America), and the concept and hook, I've covered. There, that's me done. Easy-peasy.

Game Prep: The Train Job

Sounds like Leverage episode, is actually a Firefly episode.

And this image is from Snowpiercer, which I haven't seen yet.

But really, this is all for Feng Shui, which I'm running tonight and procrastinated on the prepping of. So!

Board Game: Dead of Winter

Yeah, we're making a concerted effort to play more board games.

The Game: Dead of Winter
The Publisher: Plaid Hat Games
Time: An hour or two
Players: Me, +Michelle, Al, +Matthew, and +John

Apocalypses are messy.

Game Play: Dead of Winter is a zombie-apocalypse game in which you're trying to survive the winter and achieve a goal. Each individual player also has their own goal, which might be adjacent to the main goal, or might be a "Betrayer" goal that requires the main goal to fail. Achieving the main goal might require killing zombies and collecting samples from them, or might require accumulating a lot of a given supply.

But then on top of that, every round of play introduces a crisis - an outbreak of illness (collect a bunch of medicine), a cold snap (collect a bunch of fuel), etc.

And then, every round, your colony of people eats a certain amount of food. You don't have enough, you take starvation points. Plus, there's the whole "the zombies come and try to eat you" that happens, and if they overwhelm your location, they kill survivors. Any of those things cost the team Morale, and if that hits 0, you lose (like we did, both times we played, but the second time was Michelle's fault).

The game is hella detailed. Everyone starts off with two characters, one of which is your leader (draw four, keep two). The characters have names and special powers, and a certain capability for fighting and searching. You pick one character to be your group's leader, but you can control them all on your turn; you send them to other buildings to fight zombies or search for supplies.

I WOULD FOLLOW SPARKY INTO HELL.

On your turn, you search for stuff, you feed cards to the crisis (only one round, so if you get two Crises in a row that ask for the same resource you're kinda hosed), you can make extra noise while you search and get more stuff, but of course that's risky. Attacking zombies or moving anywhere risks exposure, which can result in nothing, a wound, frostbite (which sucks because it does more wounds every round, and you can only take three before you die) or infection (which kills you outright and may spread).

So, this game has a lot of moving pa- oh, hang on. At the beginning of your turn the player to your right draws a "crossroads" card, which may or may not activate during the turn (they all have different triggers), but might present you with a choice like "let a bunch of new survivors into your colony but then you're short on food" vs. "shine them on and then find them all dead tomorrow".

Chinese food and board games. Where were you, huh?

So, this game has a lot of moving parts, and the rules aren't especially clear in some cases (though there's an FAQ on the company's site that address some things). The main objectives that you play through have a running story that appears to be in chronological order, and they're separated into short, medium, and long (which I appreciate, but even "short" is 45 minutes minimum).

The end of our first game, or as I call it, "everyoneiszombiefoodville."

Opinions: So, I actually really like this game. Yes, it's complex, but it's so detailed, you can get a lot of replay out of it. Once you know how to play it's deep and layered and great as a coop game because it takes into account that someone might be a betrayer and it builds in systems for masking who that might be. And, of course, there are little winking pop culture references here and there. Plus one of the survivors is a golden retriever.

Keep? Heck, yeah.

Board Games: The Haunting House

Another game we played with the kiddos. Here we go!

The Game: The Haunting House
The Publisher: Twilight Creations Inc.
Time: 30 minutes or so, depending on the cards
Players: Me, +Michelle, Al, Kai, and Cael

Spooky!

Game Play: The game "board" consists of 36 tiles in a 6x6 grid, showing the hallways of a bigass house. One corner has the way in, the other has the way out. Your figs are people trying to be the first to get through the house to the exit, but the hallways keep moving. Every player has a deck of cards (every deck is the same), with cards that make hallways switch or rotate, let players move or switch places, or even move the exit tile.

Ruh-roh, Raggy.

Every turn has two phases. In the first, the player to your right picks four of your cards at random and lays them out in the row. Starting with the first player, you go around and play your cards in sequence. The next phase, you get to choose four cards to play, but it's the same setup; I play one, then you, then you, etc.

A-like so.

What this means is that it's very difficult to get any strategy going, because anything you do can get screwed with by other players and by the vagaries of random chance before it has time to materialize. That isn't to say it's impossible, just that, like Fluxx, any strategy you enact is going to be pretty short term.

Opinions: I like this game well enough, though it can drag on a bit if the cards don't cooperate. As it turns out, it's one of those games that you can actually make someone else win (because you can't choose not to play a card, and sometimes the only legal play advantages someone else). It's pretty and simple, once you get a handle on it, and it has enough agency that it doesn't feel frustrating.

Keep? Sure.

Movie #360: Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak is a Gothic romance/horror film directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Charlie Hunnam, and Jim Beaver.

Edith Cushing (Wasikowska) is the daughter of a wealthy New York industrialist and a budding author. She believes in ghosts - when she was little, her mother (who had just died of cholera) returned from the grave to tell her "beware of Crimson Peak." Now, as an adult, she meets the handsome and mysterious Baronet Thomas Sharpe (Hiddleston), who is in Buffalo attempting to drum up capital for his mining machine.

Edith's father (Beaver), who isn't necessarily opposed to seeing his daughter woo'd (though he might prefer their ophthalmologist friend McMichael, played by Hunnam), feels off about Sharpe, and has him investigated. Whatever he finds induces him to pay Sharpe and his prickly sister Lucille (Chastain) to leave town, but he is brutally murdered shortly thereafter. Thomas is there to comfort Edith, they are married, and he whisks her off to the ass end of England and Allerdale Hall, a decrepit mansion slowly sinking into the clay.

Of course, the place is haunted as shit, and of course, the sordid truth comes out - Lucille and Thomas have been incestuously in love for years, they murdered their mother and Thomas' three previous wives. But Thomas never loved any of those other women, and his affection for Edith becomes the real point of conflict (Thomas is, perhaps, 20% less crazy than Lucille).

This movie didn't do especially well, I don't think (I mean, I haven't run numbers or anything, but it kinda came and went), but like, it's a Gothic romance and it's trashy and bloody and sumptuous and just everything a Gothic romance should be. The costumes are amazing, the set is fucking incredible, and Hiddleston and Wasikowska (and holy shit Jessica Chastain) are incredible in their doomed relationships. Charlie Hunnam, too, works nicely in the role because he's not really the hero; a less director would have devoted more time to his character, but as it is he's established as a kind of amateur detective early on.

Like a lot of del Toro films, this one does a great job of making the central setting feel like a character (and since that's actually a running theme of the movie, that's good). If I have a complaint, it's that the CGI isn't quite as convincing as it could be (the ghosts are so red, which I recognize was a conscious choice, but it's a little jarring), but that's minor.

My grade: A-
Rewatch value: Medium-high

Next up: Little Women

Board Game: Get Bit

Sounds a bit rude, dunnit?

The Game: Get Bit
The Publisher: Mayday Games
Time: 10 minutes or so
Players: Me, +Michelle, Al, Kai, Cael

Cael is being a shark. Michelle is just being.

Get Bit is a simple little game if which robots are swimming the hell away from a shark. Players get a hand of cards labeled 1 through 7 (you don't use the 7 card if you've got more than four players). Every turn, everyone chooses a card, you reveal at the same time, and then starting with the lowest unmatched number, you move your robot to the front of the line, away from the shark.

For reference. Binder clip for scale. 

If, after resolving the cards, you're closest to the shark, you get bit. That means you lose a body part. The robots can lose hands and feet, but you can just right to arms and legs for a shorter game. Once you've played a card, it's gone for the round; once you've played all your cards, the round is over, you grab your cards and start again. So the strategy in the game, such as it is, is keeping track of who played what so you can play a card that will move you away from the shark, or, conversely, a card that won't move you so that you stay in a nice secure middle position.

Kai and Al, pre feeding frenzy.

Opinions: When we buy kids' games, we try to buy games that kids can play but that ultimately aren't boring as hell (see: Candyland). My kids have always enjoyed Get Bit; it's fast, it's got enough strategy that you can think about it but if you just want to play random cards, that's actually a somewhat viable strategy, too. And there's cool little robots and shark figures to watch get smaller and smaller...

Until all that remains is a torso.

Keep? Yep.

Character Creation: Unwritten

Got a little time before my players get here to play Chill, chili's in the crock pot, why not?

The Game: Unwritten: Adventures in the Ages of MYST and Beyond
The Publisher: Inkworks Productions
Degree of Familiarity: Some. I've run it once, and it uses Fate, which I'm pretty familiar with.
Books Required: Just the one.

 

I played MYST once years ago, but there's a whole expanded universe that I'm now, like, slightly more familiar with. I just wrote a review of the game for RPG.net, and it'll be up in a couple of days, but it's pretty favorable - I like this game a lot.

Now, if we were actually playing a game of Unwritten, I would be creating a whole framework with my other players. Since it's just me, however, I'll just assume the same framework that we used when we played the game recently (though not necessarily the stuff specific to what we did). In order to make a character, I start, as usual, with a concept.

Well, if I were playing this game, I'd want to spend my time going through different Ages and chronicling things. Rather than playing a naturalist, though, I think I want to play someone who's obsessed with Yeesha (one of the important figures of the setting; she could do things with Writing that no one else could). My character is writing The Chronicle of Yeesha, and is convinced that by following her journey through a particular set of Ages, he can unlock her messianic message for the world. He's also superstitious about learning any Writing - he's happy to use Linking Books, but he doesn't believe he's worthy to go making Descriptive Books himself (that, I think, would be a fun character arc).

So my High Concept is Chronicler of Yeesha. His name is Leslie Ruck.

Now I do my Journey. This would involve picking two prompts from a "steps along your path" list (formative experiences) and two from a "crossing paths" list (dealing with other PCs), but given that I have no PCs, I'll just have to make up other characters, I s'pose. And then there's an Aspect attached to each one.

Well, for the my steps bits, the obvious one is that he believes, above all else, that Yeesha can save the world. He believes that Yeesha's journey throughout the Ages was a pilgrimage, but he also believes that figuring out where she ended up won't help - the journey is just as important. I think this all came about the first time he went adventuring in an Age. He Linked into an Age called Hystek; it was dark and underground and at first he thought he was still in D'ni somewhere. And then he found it - a huge mural, carved (and signed!) by Yeesha. He copied it into his book, and that's what he references whenever he gets stuck. I think that book makes for a decent Aspect, so I'll take My Magnum Opus, the Chronicle as my first Journey Aspect.

Since I want Leslie to be experienced and enthused about jumping from Age to Age, I'll describe another Age he visited and what happened there. He visited an Age called Plateau, which, when he got there, was just a featureless expanse - no puzzles, no life, no nothing. And then he kept walking, for days and days, and reached the edge. The bit that he Linked to was the dead center of an immense plateau (hence the name), and over the edge was a pulley and lift that lowered him down into a lush jungle with amazing, vibrant plant life and plentiful food. This taught Leslie that if someone went to the trouble of making a Linking Book, there's something there to see. The Aspect is Every Age Has Wonders.

Now I need a couple more Aspects. I could make up other characters to have Leslie have crossed paths with, but eh. I have a pretty good sense of his personality.

Well, he's definitely fit and clever, because he goes traipsing off into Ages alone. And he was willing to walk for days rather than Linking home, so he's dedicated as heck. I'll take Just A Little Further to represent his stamina and perseverance. Finally, I picture Leslie as being rootless. He owns very little, seldom stays in one place for long, and though he returns to D'ni often, it's mostly just to plot his next move. I'll make that Aspect You Own Nothing You Can't Carry.

Now, Skills! I get one at Great, two at Good, three at Fair, and four at Adequate. Well, Surveying is unquestionably my Great Skill. My Goods are Athletics and...hmm. My gut says Survival. That's probably wise.

My Fairs are Research (gotta learn about those Ages first!), Rapport (he's personable) and Craft. His Adequates are Empathy, Engineering, Will, and Notice.

Now, stunts. I get three, unless I want to lower my Refresh, which I don't.

Well, I know I want a stunt to boost my Research with regards to Yeesha's journey. So I'll call it Endless Search: I get +2 to Research using a Discovery action about an Age that shows up in the Chronicle.

I'll make one up called Trust the Journey: If I spend a Fate point to declare a Yeesha-related detail about a scene, I get a +1 to Create an Advantage based on it.

And finally, I am Extremely Dedicated: I get a +2 to oppose with Will if someone is trying to talk me out of going to an Age or something else related to my quest.

And I think that's it, actually.