[Poison'd] X marks the spot.

I bought the Poison'd ashcan because I instantly fell in love with the little blurbs Id read across the web. Pirates? Sin, violence and moral issues? Fierce competition? That sounds brilliant!

Plus, the price for the pdfs was more than just affordable. It was enticing.

Once the game was mine, I started pondering how to get my group to want to play it. Luck was with me when my regular DitV game was interrupted because one of our players had to go away for the weekend. I pitched the game to the rest of the group, they loved the concept and we were off!

The group consisted of three of the players from the regular group and a new addition, a friend of mine (and of one of the other players) whom I have gamed with in the past, mostly WoD stuff. None of them have had any exposure to indie games before, with the exception of a single session of DitV for the three members of my regular group. They were eager to play.

Character creation was fun. We laughed and talked about the various sins, smiled knowingly at one another when we thought up cool stuff we wanted to include in the game and generally had fun with the simple, intuitive system of descriptives and corresponding numbers.

The game was a blast. It didnt turn out the way I had expected at all, but it was a blast. The players didnt latch on to the deeper aspects of the game, and didnt show any interest in exploring moral issues. What they did latch on to was the system. We played that sucker hard, collecting Xes and laughing out loud at the brutality and wickedness of our pirates, calling for fights left and right and cheering each other on as escalations and Xes flew across the room.
It was a gamist extravangaza, and we loved every second of it.

Not that there werent any memorable and disturbing moments that affected us (or atleast affected me, I cant speak for the other players and we didnt have time for a proper after-game chat because we kept it goint until 1 in the morning!).

My favourites were:

When two pirates got into a brutalfist fight over who would get to rape a terrified young native girl. And the loser returning to her later and smashing her face in.

When the new captain was assassinated in his bed with a grenade, but survived by bargaining with the Devil.

The first one was just downright chilling. The second was raw, undiluted awesome.

All in all, Im thoroughly happy with the game, and I cant wait to play it again!