Actual Play

On Sunday we continuing the weekend of gaming, with L.B., D.B., T.A., E.A., and M.A. attending again.

Reflections

I was trying out some new technology (for me): using printable PDF tiles from Skeleton Key Games (SKG) for the battle mats. I especially like the SKG tiles for a couple of reasons. First, the tile graphics in the PDF files can be easily extracted (just right-click and choose copy) and munged to produce custom tiles. Secondly, the tile sets include thumbnail catalogs of the tiles, which can easily be extracted and added to the tilesets of programs like DungeonForge. This makes it a lot easier to design the map layouts to begin with (virtual tile flipping replaces physical tile flipping) and makes it easy to produce small scale maps for reference for laying out the tiles on the table by exporting the maps from DungeonForge as .PNG files and adding labels with the tile numbers with the GIMP. (This is especially useful when using wilderness tiles!) On the printed tiles I wrote the tile number on the back, again to make things easier when laying them out on the table.

Overall the tiles worked pretty well. The worst problem was that the tiles tended to curve up at the edges, a common problem with cardstock printed on inkjet printers: as the large surface area of ink dries the edges curl up. This didn't prevent their use, and curling them in the opposite direction before laying them out helped, but I think I'll try laminating them and see if that helps. My first map designs using the tiles were not as interesting as I wanted, but the tiles themselves looked good and worked pretty well. The kids occasionally dislodged the tiles a little, but that was easily fixed, and once while dealing initiative cards I accidently slide one under the tiles, which got a laugh.

After we played I redesigned the maps to give a more dynamic environment, since I'm planning on running “The Eternal Nazi” for another other gaming group. I got a couple more of the SKG sets, and used GIMP to make three custom tiles. This let me make a much more interesting environment. Part of the problem I had with designing the map in the first place was inexperience with the tiles, but part was because the tile sets I had were heavily slanted towards fantasy, and I was constructing something more out of the “lost race” pulp adventure stories, set in the 1940s.

One thing that I'd like to see is a bunch of tiles with items that could be dropped on top of other tiles, like piles of metal barrels and so forth.

DungeonForge has a couple of annoying bugs, but it's free and works well enough, as long as I remember to save often and not put tiles against the edges of the map.

Part 1: Character Creation

On Staturday the kids made characters while I used one of the Toon Adventure Generators to generate some adventure ideas and looked for interesting NPCs in the Toon books. T.A. created a helpful ghost named Jim and took ghostbusters as his natural enemies. I'd rolled the location to be a haunted house, so I told L.B. and E.A. they were ghostbusters and gave them a ghost trap and proton guns, and told T.A. that he was one of the ghosts haunting the house, a former sailor, “Salty Jim the Ghost” [1]. T.A. was worried that L.B. and E.A. would spend the whole time ganing up on him [2], so I told him that they would initially be at odds, but later they would have to cooperate. E.A. created Tanny the Ballet Bunny and took gardeners as her natural enemy, so I added a garden and gardener/caretaker to the haunted mansion, although they didn't get used very much. L.B. created Nicole the Chameleon. I decided they be facing an alien invasion and the Dough Boys would be the minions of the aliens.

Part 2: The Haunted Mansion

On Sunday we actually got to play. The ghost and the ghost busters spent some time trying to make each other fall down, destroying much of the foyer of the haunted mansion and turning up a plaque holding the spirit of Prof Winterbottom, the missing owner of the mansion, who in the course of a world spanning career had collected an enormous collection of weird items from all over the globe and then disappeared mysteriously. Once the initial player-vs-player slapstick had wound down I had a delivery truck crash through the front porch [3] and dump a load of cylinders of bread dough through the front door of the house, which burst and combined into Dough Boys from the Toon rulebook. The PCs then fled down a long corridor (on roller skates?) and crashed down the steps into the basement. I decided that the aliens would be extra-dimensional octopus-faced Cthulhuoid monsters called “pluggoths” named for their odd special effect of squeezing through any aperture (doors, mystic portals, etc.) as if it were a plughole only an inch in diameter. The pluggoths were using The Dough Boys to open a portal to to Earth in the basement of Winterbottom's mansion, since it was the only building with the necessary density of weirdness, and planning to launch their invasion using the house as a base. Luckily the PCs were hiding in the basement, and after the aliens did their inevitable gloating and explanation of there plans to conquer the world and suck out everybody's brains, it was up to the PCs to foil their schemes and save the world. After some entertaining efforts by T.A.'s Salty Jim using bottles from the wine cellar as simultaneously triggered cork-guns and playing on the octopus-faced pluggoths' fear of fishermen things moved on to a climax. E.A.'s Tanny the Ballet Bunny had, unbeknownst to me, taken dynamite one of her possessions and in a move echoing all those desperate Call of Cthulhu characters proceeded to set an explosive trap for the pluggoths and the Dough Boys. Unfortunately, she failed her Set/Disarm Trap roll and the resulting explosion completely destroyed the entire mansion, flinging the PCs and Prof. Winterbottom's plaque high into the air. Luckily the pluggoths and their extra-dimensional portal did not survive the blast. All the PCs Fell Down, and Tanny fell down out of the sky through the Gardener's chimney and right into his stewpot. The End.

Remarks

I find Toon to be difficult to run: I feel a lot of pressure to keep up the wacky slapstick humor we're familiar with from Bugs Bunny, the Roadrunner, or Tom and Jerry, and frankly that's hard. Moreover, I find it hard to think up things to do. Thank goodness Toon has a number of “Adventure Generators”; they really help me come up with ideas. In any case, this episode became more and more a slapstick Bugs Bunny cartoon Call of Cthulhu episode as it went on, with creepy voices and noises and villains whose ambitions were only overmatched by their slapstick weaknesses: I worked hard to keep things at a Scooby Doo [4] level of creepiness, saving only that the monsters weren't people in disguise but silly cartoon creatures. I was aiming at Bugs Bunny visuals and Scooby Doo creepyness factor, but not forgetting the Tom and Jerry slapstick and the Scooby Doo chase scene goofiness.

I wonder if Toon would be easier or harder with adult players?