Sure, his 50th birthday was already a couple of weeks ago, but here we go. To celebrate the occasion, good folks at Monte Cook Games arranged an international gaming day. I participated with some of my friends and here’s the game report.
Getting the game on
First off, I have to say that a gaming event is a wonderful way to celebrate. Roleplaying industry and the roleplaying culture as a whole is often preoccupied by other things (like publications and buying stuff), but the actual gaming itself is the core. Many people have problems arranging game dates, so these kinds of events help by giving a special motivation. After all, it’s nice to be a part of an international event.
The idea was to play something designed by Monte Cook himself. During his 30-year career he has worked extensively with Dungeons & Dragons and lately with Numenera and its Cypher System. Both of these are largely unknown games to me; I never got on the 3rd edition of D&D and I have been playing the last 15 years predominantly rules-light indie games. It would have been nice to get familiar with Numenera, but I couldn’t find any introductory lite version of it and I didn’t have enough time to study the full version.
Luckily to me, Cook has written a bunch of D&D-scenarios, among which is a short A Frigid Demise. It’s an interesting adventure location with underwater caverns and a dragon. This was a fitting pick for a one-session game.
Of course, the scenario is made for 3rd edition D&D and for 13th-level player characters. I’m not a big fan of fantasy worlds, so I changed the location into modern-day Indonesia, where a group of cave divers are entering a dangerous place. Yeah, similar to The Descent movie. I used a streamlined version of The Black Hack for rules system, because we didn’t need anything aside skill rolls and hit points.
Finding players for this was easy. My gaming circle has half a dozen players, from which an actual gaming groups are formed for each campaign or one-session games. They didn’t know who Monte Cook is, but the premise of the game was enough to raise interest. Three players signed up and we were good to go.
Half of everything is luck
The scenario itself worked fine. As the characters descended into the dungeon and saw the approaching monster, they scattered: one returned to safety, another got trapped into a long shaft and the third went deeper into the caverns. This allowed me to show and use all the material the scenario provided.
The setup of the scenario (cave diving into an ice-cold lair of a dragon) led towards a horror game, but I decided to stick with the D&D-procedure. By that I mean rolling the dice at all times instead of just deciding what happens and when. This play style didn’t make the game as exciting as it could have been. For an example, I think it would’ve been more horror genre appropriate if one of the characters would have died after finding the cold artifact. But, as the dice rolls would have it, the golem didn’t manage to kill him and the character eventually got out of the whole dungeon alive. The other two characters weren’t as lucky: the one who originally got away returned to save his friends but found only his own death. The other one in the shaft made a dash to safety, but the monster got in a way. The dice-orientated play style isn’t dramatic, but it does produce unexpected plot twists and an organic feel for the game, where no-one knows what’s going to happen – and that is interesting in its own right.
All in all, A Frigid Demise provided an exotic location and its weird stuff created a sense of mystery, which summed up to a nice one-session game. Thank you Monte Cook for turning 50!
Dice, sheets and snacks
Efemeros 
Vastaa