The shopkeeper from Back East? His wife isn’t really his wife. He’s the procurer and she’s the available woman. Their marriage is a front.

Your brother’s son, your nephew, is fourteen years old. He’s been stealing money from his father, your brother, and taking it to visit this woman.

Your brother is in a bitter rage, humiliated by his son’s thievery and grieving his son’s lost innocence. He’s going to shoot her.

What do you do?

If you read my AP report on Buckets 2010, you’ll have noticed me all but gushing about Hamish Cameron’s game of Dogs in the Vineyard.

To be brief: Dogs is a game about God’s Watchdogs, who travel from town to town in pre-Civil War Utah, keeping the peace and teaching doctrine to the faithful. They’re answerable only to themselves, and they have the authority to do pretty much anything they like. If they decide that they need to threaten an old woman so she’ll tell them gossip about the town, no one has the right to tell them otherwise. If they decide that the best course of action is to shoot down the Steward of the town in broad daylight, they technically have the right.

The game itself is designed to be episodic – the Dogs will arrive in town, be greeted by its people (who are generally happy to see them), unearth its sins and plots, solve them in whichever way they see fit, and move on. A particularly big town may take a couple of sessions, but in general you want to keep moving.

Birch Hill was an example of a small town. Brother Levi, the town’s Steward (a combination of religious leader and mayor) had forbidden his son, Brother Elias (everyone is “Brother” or “Sister” someone) from marrying Sister Miriam, as Levi had heard rumours about her purity. There was something of a rift in the town because of this – Elias and Miriam were both morose, and Sister Miriam’s father, Brother Adam, was angry at Levi. The only one who was still happy was one Sister Tabitha, who had eyes for Elias and had started the rumours in the first place. To add to the confusion, Brother Adam’s cows had taken sick, and no one knew what was wrong with them.

When the Dogs rode in, however, everyone was acting happy, with Elias and Miriam out of sight. Brother Levi asked the Dogs to come to a dinner that evening, and it was there that things started happening. Sister Talitha (played by Rachel H-O’C) cornered Brother Elias and started asking awkward questions. Within minutes he was storming out of the Village Hall. Brother David (played by Matthew H) saw Sister Miriam leave soon after, and decided to follow her (along with Sister Talitha). She lead him to a barn on her property, where she met up with Brother Elias again. Deciding that the couple should not be allowed in such a place unchaperoned, the two announced themselves. Moments later, Miriam emerged, telling them she was checking on the farm’s horses.

The two took her inside, but when Brother Adam saw the shadow of Elias slipping out the back of the barn, he intercepted the boy. Separately, David and Talitha worked the story out of the two villagers – even though they had been forbidden from marrying, they had been meeting up after dark, and had slept together.

In the meantime, Sister Lavinia (played by Rose) had cornered Brother Levi at the Village Hall, and was asking him some hard questions. It took some time, but he finally caved to her, and she got him to agree to give Elias and Miriam a second chance.

The next morning, the Dogs convened on Brother Adam’s farm. They’re interested as to why the cattle were sick – Brother Deocles (played by Alan D) suggested that perhaps it was someone jealous of Elias and Miriam’s romance. Brother Levi turned up shortly thereafter with some feed for the cattle, and Deocles used the opportunity to berate him about his past actions. Levi tried to reason, but Deocles was a hard man to reason with. Levi finally gave up, and was coerced into offering his resignation to the village.

Only one order of business remained for the party – Levi had asked them previously to open a new wing for the Village Hall, and the ceremony would be that night. During the afternoon, Deocles started hunting down whoever had started the rumours about Miriam. Eventually he was lead to Sister Tabitha. Tabitha was no match for his fire-and-brimstone sermon and was soon reduced to tears, especially when he let her know that Elias and Miriam were permitted to marry again.

That evening, the Dogs opened the extension to the Hall. Following that, Levi publicly blessed the marriage of Elias and Miriam, and offered his resignation. Deocles doled out the Dogs’ punishment for Elias and Miriam – for while they were in love, they had slept together out of wedlock, which is still considered sinful. The two would go on a religious pilgrimage for six months before their marriage, to prove their worth.

The next morning, the Dogs left for Bridal Falls. Just before they left, Brother Adam arrived in town from his farm. Apparently the sickness was abating from his cows – they were eating again, although only time would tell if their health improved. He suggested that it could have been the feedstock that Levi had given him. Deocles, however, opined that the cows may simply have been suffering from the sickness of sin that the village was under.

Dogs is a very interesting game to GM. It’s structured (quite deliberately) differently from your average dungeon crawl. There is no set sequence of events – instead, the GM is instructed to make a village rife with dissent, grudges, pride and sin, and ensure every member of the village wants something from the Dogs. Then, when the Dogs arrive, it’s time to throw villagers at them and see whose side they’ll take.

Nor is the GM supposed to hide the sins of the town. After all, if the Dogs wander into town, ask everyone if there’s anything wrong, and everyone says that it’s all fine, they’ll just keep going. Dogs isn’t supposed to be about rolling to find clues – instead it’s about moral choices, tense conversations, and deadly gunfights. Similar to the GUMSHOE system, the players are encouraged to uncover the clues (or even the entire crime) quickly, and debate what to do after they know the facts.

Overall, Dogs in the Vineyard isn’t your average, everyday RPG. It’s immersive, it challenges you, and (when GMed well) it should ask you hard questions about your characters and their relationships. I’m looking forward to GMing it again at some point – now I have a village under my belt, I’m interested in letting the sin run deeper, the complications become more twisted.

And, of course, giving the players choices where no answer is right, and they have to choose which path to take.

Interested in posting your actual play online? Email the webmaster and request an account!

Live Action – Funeral for a Don

I was running this, so I’ll let Will Howard (Carlo Galante) tell you how it went:

It was with some trepidation that I showed up to the game, I’d mostly forgotten to preregister for the LARP, and while I’d had my character sheet for a couple of days, it was sparse, and I hadn’t read it that closely. I was to be Carlo Galante, who lives in the shadow of his vicious father-in-law, Frankie.

But the anxiety faded as more people trooped in, and I started to feel there’d be enough people around to make the game go well. We formed into our families, tying ribbon or kerchiefs, ties, to identify our affiliation. Many of us looking out of place in our suits. So here’s the brief story recap.

The criminal underworld was gathered to pay its respects to Don Vito Falcone, who had been brutally murdered. The Italian familia, Falcone, Sabatino, Marconi and Gallante were joined by the two outsiders, the Rileys and the Odessa mob.

We mingled, stilted, odd, finding our way into the relationships of the city, since the old power structure had completely evaporated. And then the revelations started coming out. Christie Riley stood up, and accused Frankie Gallante of the murder of her husband, he denied of course. The resulting vendetta struck the first chord of violence. The second public performance was Bruno Sabatino denouncing Carlo Gallante as cuckolded, followed closely by Ricky Marconi accused of the murder of the Don.

My own experience gelled on Bruno’s denouncement of my own character. I bristled, and I think I surprised my wife’s player by smashing utterly the plastic glass I’d been drinking from. They called it method acting, I call it what felt right for the rage I felt, righteous, that someone would have made up such slander about my wife. Followed quickly by my marching to slug Mikhail Kosov, and publicly declare that the words about my wife were slander.

There were of course, ongoing auctions throughout the night for properties, and we had scored ok to start, but after Frankie’s outing as a snitch, it went downhill. I spent an hour bargaining together an alliance of the other Capo’s against Frankie, to depose him and put me in his place as Capo of the Galante.

In the end, he acceded to demands to step down, his own daughter was against him, and I was thrust into the world of the Capo’s. At about the same point, Andy Maroni and Maria Sabatino were making their love known. Maria was lobbying to be Don, but while I paid the alliance lip service, Ricky Maroni had tried to manipulate me, Bruno Sabatino had accused me of cuckoldry and shamed me in front of the leaders of the city, and Mikhail Kosov had slept with my wife.

It was a foregone conclusion that I would vote for the widow Falcone and betray my word to support Maria.

Well worth playing as a game of backstabbing, betrayal, and political maneuvering. While there being actual defined victory conditions in a LARP was odd, and I think, encouraged some metagaming, the underlying auctions and money aspects were excellently handled. Similarly characters were sparse on their writing, but written with just enough hooks to let everything play out wonderfully.

The Kosov family

Grand Strategy – The Colossus of Atlantis

The various factions of Atlantis vie for power across the four continents of the Old World, trying to simultaneously gain military might, appease the gods, keep the constitution in check, and build their giant brass colossi. This time I was only helping out, so I got a bit of a better view on how the event went.

I got to take the role of Secretary, which meant that I did all the shouting for the Archon in the Assembly. It was a fun role, especially as I was told by Dillon early on that my job was not to enforce the constitution. Large amounts of power, and no responsibility…

The politics themselves were excellent (and almost worth making their own grand strat with), although it was somewhat disappointing that they didn’t affect the map in any way. It was a bunch of fun to watch the teams break the constitution and then realise in the next few turns that, you know, that rule was there for a reason.

Overall, this section of the game was well done. I can’t say anything for the map section of the game, which I never touched after setup, and this was possibly one of the drawbacks of the game – it was effectively two games, where neither section affected the other. Nonetheless, I had a great deal of fun, and at the end of the night the rules changes did affect the Victory Point totals (although I must apologise to the Conservative and Tyrant factions – their second and third placings didn’t reflect the amount of power they wielded in the Assembly or the extent to which they managed to mangle the constitution to their own ends).

Roleplaying

I’m a dirty hippie indie gamer. That’s why for me the highlight of the con was Hamish Cameron’s Dogs in the Vineyard. Vincent Baker‘s classic game of morality and hard choices in pre-Civil War Utah had the party investigating an impending marriage in the village of Nazareth Summit. Lex demonstrated the means by which one may escalate from talking to gunfire as Brother Jebidiah and Brother Cyrus has a disagreement about scripture in a deserted barn, and the session ended with the Dogs heading back to Bridal Falls with a reluctant young man in tow. Perhaps six months of religious training will stop him sinning.

Battlefleet Gothic, run by Jesse

Overall

Buckets of Dice 2010 had a good turnout and, thanks to Rose’s organisational skills, a great selection of games written up and ready to sign up for on the Saturday morning. While I was ready to run a pick-up game if need be, I ended up playing in every session simply because of the quality of this year’s games.

I’d like especially to thank the following folks:

• All of our GMs, for running games. Without you guys, we wouldn’t have a con.
• Dillon, for running another wonderful Grand Strategy.
• Seriously Board and Comics Compulsion, for their support of the event.
• Rose Nichols, for organising the whole thing this year.

Got a great story from Buckets? We’re always looking for stuff to put into Out of Character, our periodical magazine. Email our Publications Officer with your tales. If you took any photos on the night, feel free to add them to our Flickr group.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty snowed under right now, so the full report will have to wait a bit.

Got something you want to share with the club? Had a particularly excellent game? Email it to me and I’ll put it up here with my report. Who knows? You may even see it in our next Out of Character!

If you’ve come here from the article, then welcome to SAGA! If you’re interested in meeting up with us and playing some games, come to the Lower Common Room in the UCSA building, University of Canterbury, on a Tuesday or Thursday evening from 7pm onwards. For more information on who we are and what we do, check out our welcome page.

The original intent of ASoCE was to get new people to GM, or to get experienced GMs to experiment. So when I’d found that most of my time this year had been taken up with a rather standard game of Diaspora (not that there’s anything wrong with Diaspora) I thought I’d better turn things up a notch.

I’ve been looking at some pretty hippie indie story-telling type roleplaying games over the past few months, at least partly due to joining the excellent Story Games forums. I decided that it was time to kill two birds with one stone – I’d bring along some low-prep games, get a GM by means of a dice-roll, and test out the various systems.

So far we’ve played a couple of these, both by John Harper. Both are completely free and available for PDF download. Both use only six-siders, so you can even draw your non-gamer friends (or flatmates) into the game without having to spend the required five minutes telling them that yes, these dice have twelve sides, yes, they are cool, no, no one actually uses them for anything.

Ghost/Echo

Ghost/Echo is a simple two-page game using the Otherkind system. The system is pretty simple – whenever you come up against an obstacle or do something dangerous, you must name a goal and at least one danger. For each goal and danger, you roll a dice. You get to roll a bonus dice if you’re well-prepared for it. High rolls are good, but you must decide which roll goes on your goal (where high rolls mean success) and which roll goes on the danger (where high rolls mean you avoid it).

Anyway, enough about the system, more about the story. The lineup:

• GM: Mike Madamba (second time running a game!)
• Players: Myself, Ursula, Rachel, Sam, Alistair

Our story was one of paranormal investigators. We were sent to retrieve a valuable manuscript from an old estate in rural New York, abandoned and rumoured to be haunted. We got our first taste of the supernatural when, as most of the party looked for the manuscript in the library, IDemon (myself) noticed the room darken. He went to look out the front door (that our resident gothy magick girl, Grip (Rachel) insisted was cursed) when the chandelier fell on him and monsters emerged from all the exits. We beat a fighting retreat and Grip set up a quick ward on the door. We decided to get the hell out of town, only to find the bridge we crossed before had gone, so we headed to the nearby town of Cathedral Hill.

The place was abandoned, so we headed for the Cathedral. Grip told us of visions she’d had, of someone being lowered into a fire in this cathedral. We were about to enter when suddenly a number of hawks landed nearby. One stared at the forest below before flying off. Vixen (Ursula) took a look through her binoculars and spotted a trail of smoke from a small clearing. We piled back into the car and made our way, but halfway there we got mobbed by a number of large men, their heads covered in sack-cloths and wielding hatchets. We escaped on foot, and managed to make our way to the clearing.

We were met by an ancient American Indian, who called himself the Warden. He told us that we were in the Ghost World, which was inhabited with the souls of the damned and the cursed. The Cathedral had once been the site of a ritual sacrifice, as the owner of the estate tried to gain immortality. The sacrifice was interrupted by an American Indian tribe, who wiped out the inhabitants of the estate and laid the curse on the place. The gate between the world was the front door of the estate – but we had to hurry back as he didn’t know how long it would stay open.

We rushed back, and hid in the bushes on the edge of the estate. Looking out at the buildings, Vixen saw a shape in the window, pointing as us – we’d been found out. Demon stayed behind, using the jerry-rigged ghost-detecting equipment on his laptop to provide a distraction. It turned out too effective – just as he set it up, he was grabbed from behind and a bag shoved over his head.

The rest of the party got to the door of the estate to find a host of cursed souls waiting for us. Demon was hanging from a rope, above a fire-filled pit. As the fight broke out, Vixen managed to rescue their comrade under the cover of Hull (Alistair), Coil (Sam) and Grip. Demon wrestled with one of the souls, a lady with a twisted and distorted face, but in a moment she’d drawn him close and kissed him, sucking his soul out. As his last action, he grabbed her around the waist and toppled into the flames.

The party mopped up the rest and got through the door, into the real world. After that, they just had to flee the estate, down one party member and with nothing to show…

Where to start with this? This system is wonderful for making things happen. Every roll has a danger, and you always get to choose what the danger is. If you don’t want your character to die, character death is never a danger. If you want to go out in a blaze of glory, make that a danger. It also means that players influence narrative – if I want a particular bad guy to get the spotlight, I just make all my dangers revolve around him. The system is fast and loose and even without having skills or traits or anything we fell into particular roles. You can always say that someone who’s skilled is prepared for the task, granting an extra dice, but in general is just works. Mike did a great job GMing this, especially given he had about five minutes’ preparation. He kept the suspense going throughout, and provided us with more than enough weird monsters to occasionally shoot at and generally run away from.

Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe. She hired a smuggler skyship, The Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover: the pirate king Uriah Flint.

HOWEVER, just before reaching the halfway point of Haven, The Owl was pursued and captured by the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow, under charges of flying a false flag.

EVEN NOW, Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and the crew of The Owl are detained in the brig, while the Imperial commander runs the smuggler ship’s registry over the wireless. It’s only a matter of time before they discover the outstanding warrants and learn that The Owl is owned by none other than the infamous outcast, Cyrus Vance.

How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape the Hand of Sorrow?

What dangers lie in their path?

Will they be able to find the secret lair of the pirate king? if they do, will Uriah Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride? By the time they get there, will she want him to?

• GM: Rachel (first time GM, also only have five minutes’ prep time!)
• Players: Myself, Sam, Ursula, Alistair

We started in this case in Captain Hollas’ quarters as he ran our registry over the wireless. This soon devolved into a fight, and once we’d tied up Hollas, Cyrus Vance (myself), captain of The Owl, and his engineer Kale Arkam (Sam) donned the uniformed of a couple of captured guards. As guards, we escorted Lady Blackbird (Ursula) and the goblin pilot Snargle (Alistair) to our ship, which we managed to escape on.

While the Hand of Sorrow gave chase, we were able to lose her in the corrosive Lower Depths. We emerged several hours later, our instruments in bad shape, and limped along to the smuggler’s haven of Nightport. Once there we took on supplies, with Vance commanding Lady Blackbird to stay on the ship at all costs. As Vance and Arkam looked for supplies for the ship in the town’s many markets, Lady Blackbird grew bored and eventually convinced Snargle to show her around the town. While Vance learned about the dark secrets of Uriah Flint and Arkam arranged for supplies to be delivered to the ship, Snargle and Lady Blackbird dined in a goblin inn just off the docks of Nightport. When Vance got back, it was to find the ship empty. When Lady Blackbird returned, Vance blew his top, yelling at her and eventually retiring to his quarters to fume in private. Lady Blackbird was caught off-guard by this, completely unaware of the secret love Vance harboured for her. Snargle and Arkam, meanwhile, kept well away from the captain’s quarters for the next few hours.

I realise upon writing up this adventure, that we didn’t do nearly as much in this as in Ghost/Echo. But boy, did we get some interpersonal drama going. Admittedly, Lady Blackbird’s cast is written to encourage this – Vance secretly loves Lady Blackbird, but his engineer feels a duty to deliver her to Flint. Lady Blackbird’s bodyguard, Naomi Bishop (who didn’t appear in this game) would of course take her mistress’ side, and in general things will get ugly as soon as this comes to the fore.

There are two system things that I find cool or interesting, and that I’ll talk about here.

The first is the idea of Keys. Simply put, keys are motivations for your character. Vance, for example, has the Key of Hidden Longing. He hits this key whenever he does something because of his feelings for Lady Blackbird. Whenever you hit a key, you gain XP. Whenever you hit a key and it puts you in danger, you gain two XP. Each key has a buy-off – the dramatic scene where you shock everyone with stunning revelations. The buyoff for the Key of Hidden Longing is when Vance reveals his love for Lady Blackbird. This buyoff nets you 10XP, but loses you the key. (For reference, buying any new keys or skills in the game costs you 5XP).

The second interesting trick is the refresh. Simply put, you don’t recover until you have a refresh scene with someone. Then you get to refresh your dice pool, lose conditions like being injured, and even regain some of your awesome one-shot abilities. A refresh scene is a “down-time” scene, where you ask questions about each other as a way of bonding as a group. Of course, sometimes you just want to have a refresh scene to plant ideas in another character’s head, or to try and get them on-board with your plans. The idea is great, but I think it suffers depending on the pace of your game. If people are eager to get to the next scene, sometimes you’ll be left hanging as you try to set up a refresh scene, and have to start the next scene with conditions hanging around.

This adventure, incidentally, is probably going to be a two- or even three-parter, and if the GM wanted to they could probably stretch it out into five or six sessions. The characters in this have so much room to grow (and the ability to sacrifice keys to gain advances means that as long as you have some suitably dramatic buyoffs you can take your character in whichever direction you want) that I can see them developing wonderfully over the course of a few months real-time. Unfortunately, due to time constraints on two of the players (Ursula is returning to Germany next Wednesday, and I will end up in Australia for a few weeks later this month) we’re likely going to finish this game soon, which means that Vance’s intricate plans won’t be as intricate as he’d hope, and the simmering sexual tension between himself and Lady Blackbird will reach boiling point before too long.

Looking for something to occupy your time during the holidays? Don’t forget that Buckets of Dice 2010 is coming up fast! Register today to receive your $5 discount.

Hey all, some great news. I’ve been talking with David Taylor, from Seriously Board, a relatively new web-based board game store based in AucklandTauranga, New Zealand. David’s offered us a very generous deal: a 10% discount off of all of their merchandise! All you need to do is enter the coupon code “SAGA” when you check out. While this doesn’t apply to shipping, buy more than $125 of stuff from their website and shipping is free!

Want to buy something that isn’t on their website? Contact them, and they’ll see if they can get it shipped in for you. The 10% discount still applies to items that you order.

I’d like to thank Seriously Board for the generous offer. It’s great to see businesses like this springing up in the New Zealand gaming scene, and I highly encourage you to take advantage of this offer.

Jan-Yves Ruzicka

President

The event made a sizable profit (for a SAGA event, anyway), which I hope to inject back into the club in the form of new asset purchases. Currently we’re looking at a couple of boardgames – if you have any ideas for club purchases, please don’t hesitate to contact our quartermaster with your suggestions.

I’m keen on repeating the event later in the year – we have Buckets of Dice in July, obviously, but we’ve got the whole of the term 3-4 holidays in which to do something fun. I’d be really keen to run an event over three days (letting those all-day wargames and board games have enough time, while letting you still play in your favourite RPGs and board games), but that might require a bit more work.

Once again, thank you everyone who turned up. I’ll catch you on our usual Tuesday and Thursday game nights.

Jan-Yves Ruzicka

President

We haven’t had one in years and here it is, once again! April 10th and 11th! Let’s make this one a success!

Please check out the Minicon page in the list on the left for details and the such. There are some games that will be running requiring pre-registration, so do take a look and contact those GMs that are requesting such.

If you have a game you want to run or such, email secretary@saga.org.nz and I’ll add it to the list!

Mark