A Plague of Spiders: Recap

For the this week, I'll be presenting a convention game I ran for DunDraCon 2014. Entitled Retrieval Team Zeta: A Plague of Spiders and using the new World of Darkness 2nd edition rules, it features a cell of Cheiron Group hunters as they engage in one of their first missions as a team. As might be expected casualties may be high. A full listing of available articles on this adventure can be found here.

Today I want to review how this worked out in actual play.

Best Laid Plans

So the first thing that went wrong was a scheduling mix up where the adventure was slotted the day after the second adventure. That somewhat weakened the narrative forced me to change the mixture of expected characters, messed up tactics and so forth. Plus the second adventure was the weaker of the two.

Giving each character Aspirations was really fun and helped a lot with developing the character's personalities better. I just wish I could have rewarded the players with something better than points of Willpower. normally resolving a Condition or fulfilling an Aspiration earns a character Beats but those don't work for a convention game. My compromise was restoring Willpower but something KublaCon's KublaBucks might have been more satisfying.

I think for convention play I might try streamlining tactics. The main issue was working out who could participate, who could be primary, and what additional people were needed. When you have a set cast, it is easy enough. But with 12 characters of whom any 6 might be selected (or have survived), tactic usage become messy.

Recap

The actual play can be found here. In short things worked out much better than expected.

There was only one causality, though me being a softy, I let one of the character stave off his bleeding before he died. The group was very smart and cautious, gathering information on the layout and surveilling the hotel and mall to find its weak points.

They managed to use tranq rounds to take down the mall security and then infiltrated the hotel to save most of the captives.

Even so most of them finished the game fairly mangled. The Wallcrawler's boiling goo and the Mimic's paralytic bite took out the overconfident field scientist and injured two others. A third character, the cryptid specialist, barely survived an encounter with the Scorpion, being rushed to the hospital after being stung.

The head of security fled into the night but they rescued the property manager and killed the Mimic (who turned into a giant mass of spiders). The Scorpion also escaped.

Amazingly they actually captured the Wallcrawler alive with good use of the Net tactic and copious usage of tranquilizers.

Conclusion

Overall the game worked really well. I wish I could have had more time to debrief them but it was action packed to the end. I hope others get similar enjoyment out of it.