[GenCon] Mortal Coil at Games on Demand

[Anna Kreider]

At GenCon, I was fortunate enough to get in on a game of Mortal Coil run by Brennan Taylor. I had heard vague things about it previously, but didn't even know what it was "about", so it was a bit of an interesting experience going into the game with no real idea of what to expect. Thankfully, it worked out well. My fellow players were Travis, Max, and Krista. I use player names here because I didn't write down character names, and I can't remember them. Alas.

One of my favorite parts of the game was actually the world-creation that happened at the beginning. I pleasantly surprised by how smoothly this went off, since it's something that has kept our group from playing other games that require world-creation. (We recently tried to do PTA and wound up giving up and playing Grey Ranks instead for this very reason.)

Initially there was some hemming and hawing, but once I took advantage to proclaim that I wanted elves if there weren't any strong objections things seemed to get moving. From there we decided pretty quickly that it was a low magic setting where good magic was mostly gone, and what good magic there was didn't always work. To contrast this, evil magic was powerful and always worked. To provide antagonism, we decided the force bringing evil magic back were avatars of the seven deadly sins.

Character creation went reasonably smoothly from there, with some memorable characters as a result – though people did struggle a bit with deciding their passions. Travis played a young farmer who was more interested in getting in the harvest than in magic. Max played a gun slinger, somewhat in the vein of the hero from the Dark Tower series. I played an elf who was driven by her (forbidden!) love of the high priestess of the elvish moon cult, who was sworn to remain pure. And Krista played a dwarf who was a magic scholar, and who "used evil magic because it always worked".

The setup for the story was pretty easy. There was a dark tower that sprang up in the ruins of the magic academy that used to be there before magic had disappeared, and all of us could sense evil magic there. So we met at the bottom of the mountain and journeyed up together. As Trav pointed out, it wound up turning into a weird dungeon-crawl format, but composed of hippie-gaming weirdness. But it worked well for a one shot, so we went with it and had fun.

Also, when we got to the tower, Brennan(?) spent a power point to establish that the tower itself was alive, and had an actual fleshy heart. This was neat, because the closer we got to the top, the more "alive" the tower was. It made for some nice creepy atmosphere.

Each level of the tower had its own avatar of a deadly sin, that posed a different sort of challenge. To condense a bit, we faced:

*   The Avatar of Lust, who tried to distract our characters by... well... being lusty. Krista wound up spending a magic point to say that magical compulsion couldn't force someone to break a cultural taboo. We eventually managed to break the illusion of his(/her) devastating sexiness, and he(/she) buggered off.
*   The Avatar of Wrath was trickier. We heard screaming and charged up to find the Avatar of Wrath. Each of the characters put lots of action points into attacking him, with peripheral attention to defense. And then Brennan spent a magic point to say that the Avatar of Wrath couldn't be killed by violence. Whoops.

The conflict was short and bloody, with the Avatar of Wrath breaking the hip of the moon priestess – who had tagged along. Krista's dwarf collapsed a ceiling on him and we agreed that letting him starve to death wouldn't be violence.
*   The Avatar of Sloth was pretty straightforward – he was surrounded by a sort of aura that made people want to sleep. When Brennan spent the magic point to establish this power, we made the exception that it didn't affect people who were in pain. This wound up handily wrapping up the need for conflict, since I was now carrying the moon priestess who had a broken hip. We figured she poked us back into wakefulness before we went on.



We'd been playing for quite a while at this point, so to speed things along we passed through the level where the Avatar of Gluttony would have been were he not missing and went straight to the top of the tower. There we found the remaining Avatars of Envy, Greed, and Pride, along with a desiccated sorcerer and the giant fleshy heart of the tower. The Avatars squared off one-on-one with the characters, leaving Travis' farmer to deal with the sorcerer, which lead to some awesome mini-conflicts.

*   I squared off against Envy, who tried to do a mind job on me by asking how was it fair that I couldn't be with my love when the humans could love whoever they wanted. Thanks to Krista's previously established fact, I was able to resist the temptation essentially "for free". I wound up putting everything into attack, nothing into defense, and hacked him into tiny little pieces while sobbing that life wasn't fair. Awesome.
*   Krista squared off against Greed, who promptly tried to convince her that she should take the tower and all its power for herself, and become its master. She managed to sidestep nicely, and successfully convinced the Avatar of Greed to reveal the weakness of the tower.
*   Max wound up getting hypnotized by Pride briefly, who tried to convince him to forget all this and start his own gunslinging academy. He broke free but had to wait for Travis's turn to act again.
*   Travis spent a magic point to say that sorcerers who had never used evil magic could create cleansing fire in their hands. He then did that, and throttled the evil sorcerer to death with said cleansing fire.
*   Back to Max, who spent a magic point to say that his guns never ran out of ammo. Ever. Color Pride riddled full of lots of little holes.

That left the tower to be destroyed. There was a bit of argument, but ultimately my character volunteered to destroy the heart of the tower. Krista's dwarf stayed behind, ostensibly to help – but really to try and take the tower and it's library for herself. Between the two of them, they managed to destroy the heart. My elf managed to escape, though was badly injured by falling rocks. Krista's dwarf was crushed, which the characters were hard-pressed to feel bad about since we knew she was using evil magic anyway.

All in all it was an entertaining session, though there are a few things that I think I would need to read the rulebook to really grok. The one-round nature of most conflicts was kind of confusing when combined with being able to split points to do two things at once. I wound up struggling with how to prioritize and often wound up completely ignoring defense because I had trouble figuring out how to make it work.

The other difficulty that was encountered was with the Avatars – when Brennan spent magic points to establish their powers, the players really struggled with what to state as exceptions to those powers. I'm not sure if it was a lack of familiarity with the rules – since only Brennan and Krista were familiar with them. It also felt like we might have left the initial world creation off a little too early. The Avatars were kind of a footnote at the end of our conversation, and they wound up being a central part of the story.

One thing that was disappointing was the fact that my character wound up being so much more important to the story than everyone else's. I talked with Travis about this, and he speculated that his character concept didn't fit with the rules very well. But I'll let him come to his own conclusions.

Anyhow. Much thanks to Brennan for running that for us.

~Anna

[Travis Farber]

Thank you Anna for doing a write up of this game.  The one thing that I really ended up liking about this game was I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a dungeon crawl.  I definitely look forward to actually playing this game with a better familiarity of the rules and more than just one 3-4 hour session.

While I was a bit disappointed that my character wasn't as focussed as it needed to be for the session, I was more than happy to sit back and watch your story unfold. 

[Brennan Taylor]

Thanks for the writeup, Anna!

I think some of the spotlight issues and plot problems fall squarely on me as a GM. I did forget one of the most important parts of character creation, which is to make sure that player passions involve the other player characters, which ties them together before play. You can get away with forgetting this in a longer game, but for a convention one-shot it is pretty essential. What happened then is that I struggled a bit to get the group together, rather than everyone running their own little thing on the side, and the "big bad" style threat was the technique I used to do that. That necessarily eclipsed some of the individual player agendas as expressed by passions. So, this was definitely a misstep on my part.

I did have fun, however, and I burned through most of my tokens, which I view as a success.