Camp Nerdly 2012: Criminal, Villain, Tribute, Puppet

Camp Nerdly 2012 was a really great time. Thanks to all who made camp possible and run so very smoothly. I played a number of unsavory characters early in the con and then put on my white hat to finish off the convention on a positive note.

Friday night saw Kat, Remi, Georgianna, and me playing in Rachel Walton’s Burning Wheel game. It was centered on a group of young theives who had been captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to a life a slave labore in an overseas penal colony. I think that Friday night frayed nerves after hours of travelling were responsible for the tension and difficulty that reared up in the first half of the game. The inter-character conflict soared to eleven by the time we were shipwrecked on the beach. After a break, we came back and worked out how our characters fit into this new society: Could they make lives for themselves? In the end, my character’s brother, played by Kat, sacrificed himself to keep my hands clean. It was a sad, terrible thing, but I let him take the fall and felt like a worthless coward for doing it. Which is how a game about thieves should go, don’t you think?

Saturday morning enabled me to get in on a playtest of Dave Berg’s game In My Clutches. It’s a game of supervillains and their nefarious plans. It has rotating GMship, and each player portrays their villain as well as an NPC that is central to the story of another villain. My main villain was Captain Fahrenheit, who could control temperature. He had gone to the school of hard knocks and didn’t quite understand how to best use his powers for personal gain. He couldn’t even reconcile with his wife. Since his wife was a star reporter and devoted to noble causes like saving the planet and social justice, Captain Fahrenheit decided he would find a way to use his awesome powers to end global warming. However, he had to make her think that he had already had his powers surgically removed, because she would kick him out again otherwise.

It was a really fun game. I probably got more mileage out of playing my guest star: Captain Metropolis, champion of the city. She was being wooed by one of the other supervillains: King Orziman, a pseudo-Doctor Doom character. He succeeded amazingly well at his rolls and convinced her that he was walking the straight and narrow, purging the corrupt officials from his government that had led him astray. In the final endgame, it was revealed that his plan all along had been to sire a child with Captain Metropolis, and raise the child to … wait for it … TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

It’s a nice, tight little game that produces a lot of fun narrative constraint through play. I’d probably tweak the math a bit to make it easier to play a complete story in a single session, but that’s Dave’s call. Maybe an explicit “one-shot mode” and “extended play mode” or the like is called for, similar to MLwM’s “start with one Love and 2-3 points of Fear for a single session game” guideline. I’m really looking forward to seeing more of this game.

Saturday afternoon, I managed to squeeze into Arnold Cassell’s game of the Mountain Witch. I had never played before, and it was very educational. I can see now why trust mechanics were such a big thing back in the day. The giving rules weight to interaction between players was very nice. I suck at the whole “guess what other players’ secret agendas” are bit, even in board games. So, I ignored that part and just played my character. It was fun. We confronted the Mountain Witch about halfway through. He had all sorts of surreal demons and the like at his service, and lived in a palace that floated on a lake of magma. And his evil plot was … publishing books! I put an end to the Witch quickly, beheading him and revealing that I served another master. Unfortunately, one of the other ronin wanted revenge against me, and got it, blowing my head off with a blunderbuss. Highly charged testosterone-soaked action for the win!

Saturday evening, we played Kat’s new hack for Serial Homicide Unit, inspired by The Hunger Games. We we playing tributes in the first annual Hunger Games, a year after the end of the war. We did chose our tributes based on our district, and detailed what was special about us that would make the odds in our favor. I was from the livestock district. My name was Buck and the odds were in my favor because I could handle large animals. We then added why we needed to live. For Buck, it was because he had just gotten engaged. Then, we each listed one reason why the odds were not in our favor, and passed our sheet to the left where that player added another obstacle to our success, and so on. Buck had all kinds of problems: He didn’t think very quickly. He couldn’t stand lizards. We then played out little scenes where our tributes faced these challenges. To resolve the scene, we chose one of two cards. Underneath the card was either a silver parachute, to show that this experience would help us in the arena, or a firework, to show us that this experience would bring us closer to death.

Once we had played some tribute scenes, we all added a detail to the arena. This time, the arena was the urban wasteland that had formerly been the capital of district 13. It was filled with still-burning fires, flying lizards that spit poison, mutant rats that hunted in packs, unexploded mines and sinkholes. On the first round, all the tributes names were put in a fishbowl. One was drawn out, and that one would have to face one of the terrors of the arena. Just when we were about to see whether they lived or not, we would go to the cards. Remember the cards we were building up during the tribute scenes with the parachutes or fireworks on them? Well, we’d shuffle those cards, and add a random one from the deck and then choose one to see if we survived the obstacle. I died pretty quickly, diving for cover into a nest of flying lizards. It was tragic. A very good game and I look forward to Kat developing it more.

Sunday morning, I finally got to play Puppetland, after wanting to do so since I first bought the game umpteen years ago. It was a lot of fun, building on the game that the other players had done last year at Camp Nerdly. I was a lumberjack marionette named Jack Timber that could chop things with my axe, inspire others to do their work, and could not lie, not even to spare someone’s feelings. Dave’s puppet, Splotch Flaggy, had eaten several of Punch’s evil minons in the last game and was slowly being corrupted from within. I plainly stated that to anyone who asked, including an innocent little finger puppet who ran off crying (to her death!). It was sad and heartbreaking. I like the narrative constraints of speaking differently for players versus GM. I’m very glad I got to play.

And I’m very glad we went back to Camp Nerdly.