So many ghosts! So much punching! Tacticon was this weekend, and it was full of gaming goodness! Friday night I ran my first actual session of Ghost Punchers for a fun bunch of players who really got the the mix of horror and humor I was going for.
As promised, the adventure was a haunted house as a dungeon crawl, with an excellent “haunted house” map supplied by the fine folks at Fabled Environments. (Seriously, as you can see, the map was top-notch, and a couple players even said “Is this Fabled Environments? I love their stuff!”) There were many highlights of the session, including the moment when a PC opened the door to a side room… and I dumped a double handful of “ghost” miniatures onto the map. The table gasped. “It’s full of ghosts,” I said. “And they’re all dancing.”
From a game development perspective, the modified Enchanted Fist power (which increases damage by a die type for each raise) worked well, and the power-tracking cards (those things with the fists on them in the image) were useful if a little fiddly. On the GM side, running the ghosts was a bit too much record-keeping and not enough fast/furious/fun, so there’s work to be done there before I let someone else try to run the game.
On Saturday, I ran two packed sessions of a Karthador adventure featuring a rag-tag band of rebels fighting their way out of an Ursicor bazaar, then sneaking into a royal ball. Neither session went exactly how I planned, but both had incidents of players obsessing over the guards’ hover vehicles and trying to figure out how to sneak a riding bear into the city. (“If we put it in a tutu, we reduce the chances of the guards shooting at it.”)
Tacticon is always a good time, and this year was no different. I’m looking forward to doing it all again next year!
