Touched by Darkness: a megagame

In July, I travelled down to Patriot Games in Sheffield to play my second megagame, Touched by Darkness.

Touched by Darkness

Touched by Darkness is a megagame for up to 47 players designed by Ben Kanelos and run by Paddy Rose and three helpers. I think we had around 40 players, most of whom had never played a megagame before.

Here’s the pitch:

The Dark One's eclipse has blotted out the sun. Darkness has swallowed the Empire and is coming for your outpost next! You and your teammates must gather resources, perform arcane rituals, and attempt to survive. But beware! The shadows that attack your outpost are not the only threat. The Dark One may have corrupted the mind of a teammate, meaning you can no longer trust them. Can you hold this last bastion of humanity together and banish the Dark One?

Pennine Megagames run three games a year, usually one in Leeds, one in Sheffield and one in Manchester. I went to Fae’s Anatomy last year in Leeds (read about it here).

Logistics

I went with Megan, who hadn’t played a megagame before. We drove down to Meadowhall and took the train to Sheffield station, where we walked to Patriot Games (about a 10-minute walk). We got there just after Patriot Games opened, which gave us time to browse the store and have a cup of tea and cake in the café, before joining the other megagame players.

(Patriot Games is really lovely. Possibly the nicest games store I’ve been to – large, airy, with a café and plenty of tables for playing games.)

Luminarians - Temple of Light

Megan and I were playing Luminarians. Our faith was the primary religion of the Empire, and our clerics purged the Dark One during the last Eclipse.

The Luminarians had two subfactions – Mistfalls and the Temple of Light. Megan was a steward in Mistfalls, while I was the Chaplain (a healer) in the Temple of Light. As my boss failed to turn up, I promoted myself to Chief Physician.

We were the main healers in the game. Some other factions had some limited healing, but we could heal more people at once. (Or at least, we could once I had trained enough clerics. My first few turns involved training clerics.

Action time at our faction board - some players wore costumes.

Other factions

Other factions included the Stonegrip Clan (the source of ore), the Rosethorns (irritating druids), the Alchemists Guild (the only source of crystals, needed for the magic rituals to banish the Dark One).

Oh, and there were an unknown number of traitors, working for the Dark One to foil our rituals.

Turns and phases

Turns were roughly 30 minutes long. They started slightly longer, and as the game progressed and we knew what we were doing, they all got a little shorter. I’m not sure how many turns we had during the game overall, but we played from 11 am to about 4:30 pm with a short break for lunch.

Each turn was broken into four phases.

Action time

The longest phase, where everyone can move between locations, activate their boards, trade and negotiate with everyone else, and perform rituals to banish the dark. The council sits during action time, and a Shadow attack can happen during this phase (at which point those with military powers move to the battle board while everyone else returns to their table).

Faction time

A short few minutes at your faction table to discuss what happened during the previous phase and to plan for future phases. (Often a good time to take a comfort break.)

News

Megagames include heralds, players whose job it is to find out what’s going on and report that to everyone during news phases. At the end of the phase, Control awards bonuses to various factions based on the reported outcomes.

(I like this – it’s something that freeforms could probably learn from. Players often dislike being reporters – but reporters become more interesting when they have a mechanical effect on the game.)

Resolution

An upkeep phase. Reset your workers and make your morale check. And if morale slips too far, start making riot rolls.

Morale checks are modified by events such as Shadow attacks or damage to your boards, and more significantly if you fail to feed or water your people. (Trading water and food is a big part of Action time.)

And then it all goes around again.

Freeform actions

All that sounds like a gloriously complicated board game. What makes a megagame different are the freeform actions that people can take. Which are literally anything. In ours, the druids began to grow a sacred tree while the Stonegrip clan held a morale-boosting rock concert and the alchemists seceded from the Empire. We started creating paladin cavalry units to help defend against Shadow attacks.

How the game went

The game was busy. During the first few sessions, I built up my team of clerics. I started with one and a couple of workers, and could train a worker each turn. Then, after the first shadow attack (where we had a lot of casualties), I could help heal them.

Megan, meanwhile, was negotiating and trading madly to get us the food and crystals she needed. She would berate me when I was too generous with first aid, telling me to drive a harder bargain. (That really didn’t work. I’m not as ruthless as she is.)

As the game progressed, I had no problem keeping the Temple of Light’s morale up, but we were losing ground to the druids in the battle of the faith. We discovered they had converted almost everyone else, and we couldn’t convert anyone back.

We had a second shadow attack, which we fought off more successfully. Towards the end of the game, I had expected a third attack, which never materialised. (Control ran out of time – too many other things going on.) That was a shame, as I was poised to assist for a battle that never arrived.

Start of a shadow attack

But apart from waiting for a battle that never arrived, Megan and I had a great time. The day was busy, and we met loads of lovely people. Lots of people had clearly signed up in groups, or had started plotting and scheming beforehand. (We signed up about 10 days in advance, when I realised that the weekend was going to be free after all.)

I think I was probably the oldest player – I would guess most players were in the twenties or thirties.

Did we win?

Honestly, I don’t know how we did. As a faction, not so great. All of the other factions converted to the druidic faith (they were very convincing with their sacred tree – we should have countered with a burning bush, or something).

And I’m not entirely sure whether we beat off the dark. Not that it mattered – we had lots of fun trying, which was the main thing.

Overall

Anyway, Touched by Darkness was a lot of fun, and both Megan and I would play a megagame again.

Next time, I will try and think about potential freeform actions before the game. I know I’m unlikely to imagine them during the chaos, but perhaps I can think of something beforehand.

The next Pennine Megagame is Henry VI Part 1 in Manchester in October. I’m not sure if I can go yet.

Good Society: second editon

A second edition of Good Society, the ttrpg that lets you create Jane Austen-style stories, is coming to Kickstarter soon. You can read about it here, and if you follow their campaign, you can download the playtest packet and see some of the planned changes.

So that’s what I did, and this week we wrapped up our short but very satisfying two-cycle story. These are my thoughts.

First edition revisited

I’ve written about Good Society before on my blog. I played in a game a couple of years ago, and I’ve run one-shots at Furnace and AireCon, with a third one-shot (with the updated rules) planned for Continuum next week.

Much as I like Good Society, it’s not perfect, and I found a few issues with it:

Resolve tokens

Two problems with resolve tokens. The first is that there are too many. You can get resolve tokens from characters, rumours, reputation tags and more. It’s not long before the table is covered in resolve tokens. Worse, I find I often don't use them. Resolve tokens are used to “force” a character to do something they might not otherwise want to. But in so many cases, the players I play with quickly see the drama in whatever is presented and say “that’s a great idea,” and so spending the resolve token becomes unnecessary.

(I do wonder if that’s a structural problem with meta tokens like this. Resolve tokens work fine with players with a “my character wouldn’t do that” mentality – but I haven’t seen anyone like that in many, many years – if ever. Most players I see are happy to put problems in their character’s way – especially for a light game like Good Society.)

That means (for us at least) a surfeit of rarely-used resolve tokens.

Reputation

Reputation doesn’t do very much. Characters can gain a reputation, which has a mechanical effect (more resolve tokens), but is mostly just a roleplaying aid. But only if you pay attention, and in my experience, reputation isn’t something anyone pays much attention to. 

Fiddly character sheets with teeny font

I found this when I ran Good Society at Furnace (I mostly play online), but goodness, the character sheets are fiddly. They look nice, but each character consists of a basic character sheet, a family sheet, a desire card, and a relationship card. Oh, and two connections (more cards). And the font on the cards is tiny – my ageing eyes struggle to read it.

The table at Furnace. It's all a bit chaotic. And hard to read.

Part of the problem is the huge image – which is lovely, but condenses everything else. For AireCon, I completely rewrote the character sheets to be more legible. (And moved the image to a table tent.)

Second edition changes

So while the second edition preview does nothing about the character sheet (although it did introduce a very nice online Google sheet character keeper), it does change resolve tokens and reputation (and some other points).

Resolve tokens

While the rules for resolve tokens have not changed, there are fewer of them because they are no longer generated by reputation or rumours.

Reputation

The biggest change is reputation. There’s an alternative way to earn reputation tags, and during the reputation phase, they now trigger reputation consequences that might be good or bad. (These are great, more on them below.)

Rumour and scandal

Rumours now start as whispers, and the main change is that there’s a new action: overhearing a rumour. So you can roleplay hearing the rumour, which works well. You can also spend a resolve token to turn a rumour into “the talk of the ton,” which is a nice touch.

Epistolary phase and upkeep

These are tweaked slightly but didn’t affect our game much.

Play materials

Finally, the pack includes revised characters, family backgrounds and a playset.

Our game

Our game ran for five two-hour sessions. One session zero, followed by four sessions of play. We completed two full cycles, and we were in our third when we reached a satisfying conclusion.

We had three players: me, Thomas and Terry. I facilitated the game and played a major character. We played online, using Discord and the new Good Society character keeper.

I didn’t use the included playset because it’s the one we played last time, so I chose Family Matters from the rulebook. That was slightly awkward as Family Matters uses the Heir (not part of the 2ed pack), and so I replaced the Heir with the Hedonist from the second edition preview.

We spent a full session on session zero, and we needed that to get the characters and background sorted properly. (I reflected after Furnace that creating a coherent backstory in under 30 minutes is a challenge; I’m not going to try that again!) Even then, we ended up revisiting part of the background later on.

Family matters

The heart of our story was a feud between the Bainses and the Hardwicks.

Terry played Captain James Baines (Careerist, New Money).

Thomas played Solomon Bains (Dependent, New Money), the disinherited son (and previous friend of Eleanor).

I played Eleanor Hardwick (Hedonist/Heir, Old Money), who wanted to bring the families together.

Our minor characters included:

• Arthur Bains (played by me), stern father of James and Solomon
• Marley Jones (played by Thomas), James’ assistant
• Horatio Flinders, Lord Mountwick (played by Terry), Solomon’s benefactor
• Henrietta Bourbon (played by me), Solomon’s friend
• Lizzie Hardwick (played by Terry), Eleanor’s younger sister
• Miss Charlotte Collins (played by Thomas), Eleanor’s friend

Our story

Over our three cycles of play, our story involved Solomon and Eleanor repairing their relationship (after the slight that Eleanor caused), James and Eleanor getting engaged (yikes – she’s engaged to the wrong brother!), Solomon impressing his father and regaining his inheritance, and, finally, James breaking off his engagement to Eleanor (at his father's behest), leaving Solomon to propose to Eleanor.

Along the way, minor characters Lizzie and Marley threatened to steal the show by courting and becoming talk of the ton. 

It was delightful to play, and it felt like a proper Jane Austen-style story with setbacks, complications, and a happy ending. Towards the end, I was aware that I was thinking “And now we need a scene with these characters…,” as if I was an author, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

The new rules and mechanics

Resolve tokens

Even with fewer resolve tokens, we rarely spent them.  Maybe two or three a session? Most often we used them to seal a decision already made. I think that’s fine, and it’s useful to have them in the rules as a fallback – as long as you’re not expecting them to be a big deal.

Reputation

We used the new “reputation by fashion” rules, which sound great in theory but were a bit odd in practice. These work by selecting two reputation tags which represent the current fashion in the ton. The playset includes a table of sixty tags (eg plain or rigid), from which we randomly chose. This meant some headscratching to work out which character best embodied them. Maybe choosing tags shouldn’t be random.

On the other hand, the reputation consequences were great, adding drama to our story. For example, at one point I decided that Eleanor’s father had cut off her allowance, forcing her hand. (I found the consequences that cause your character trouble are more interesting than the others.)

We found that as we approached the game’s climax, we didn’t want to trigger new consequences because they didn’t support the flow of the story. (We had four reputation phases, but only triggered consequences once each, early in the game.)

I don’t think that matters (triggering consequences is always optional), and I wonder if that’s a common experience – focusing on the story rather than the rules as the story approaches its climax. (We did the same with one epistolatory phase as well, when we realised we didn’t have any letters to write.)

I guess if the trajectory hadn’t been so obvious, or had we wanted more complications, we could have triggered more consequences to see what would happen. But it felt unnecessary.

Rumour and scandal

The new rules worked well, particularly having a character overhear a rumour.

My thoughts

So that was Good Society second edition. The new rules are an improvement, especially reputation consequences. I’m not sure how much I would want to play a longer game of Good Society – the game we played felt just about right. 

So, am I going to get the second edition? I am torn between wanting to support the publishers, but not wanting more stuff that I don't actually want (like a book that is 80% the same as I already have, or the alternate settings in Good Society's second volume, which don't interest me much and no doubt will be part of the new set).

And while I would like to play more Good Society, it’s not the only thing I want to play.

So we’ll see. I suspect I'll end up backing it, but probably only at the pdf level.