[Review] Challenge Magazine – The Scenarios (Issues 57-58)

Patron is written specifically as an introductory style of scenario, aiming to provide not only a trigger event for a new Dark Conspiracy campaign, but to also present the Minion Hunters with a potential patron that can help direct and assist them in their future investigations (not surprising given the title, I suppose!). Appearing in Issue 57, this adventure spans just over 4 full pages of text and includes two interesting sidebars that do much to flesh out the Dark Conspiracy setting (I’ll get back to these later in the review!). While the presentation is restricted to the limitations of the magazine’s format, the scenario does include one very excellent full page, colour illustration by Alan Nunis (see below). As you can see, this nicely reflects the gothic elements of the story as they appear early on in the story.

The cover of Issue 57 (which did indeed also include a West End Star Wars scenario)!

The main plot of Patron is pretty straight forward, with the Minion Hunters being sent an invitation by their would-be host – Rheinhold Weissmann – to attend a dinner at his home and discuss their ‘future well-being’. This appointment is held at a Weissman’s appropriately gothic mansion located not too far from the Minion Hunter’s base of operations. Here – in a location that is has more in common with a Hammer Horror movie than a cyberpunk dystopian mystery – the group are met by their wheelchair bound host and his mechanical butler, and will learn that they (as in the Minion Hunters) are all targets of some unspecified Darkling plot.

Whether or not the Minion Hunters agree to work with Weissmann (who, after all, may not seem that trustworthy, especially as he is more ‘mad Peter Cushing crossed with the Narrator from the Rocky Horror Picture Show’ than, say, a potentially respected contact), the party will nevertheless soon find themselves being followed by a variety of nefarious and shadowy individuals. With a bit of spycraft and a few counter intelligence schemes, the characters can hunt down these ‘watchers’ and discover that they are, in fact,  Darklings operating under the cover of ‘RXPro Ambulance Service’, a contracted operator hired to collect the bodies of the dead in the Minion Hunters’ home city. It should be no surprise to the players that, under this guise, the Dark Minions are up to no good, although the full extent of their plan might shock to even the most experienced Hunters; they are using the dead and dying as raw material in the creation of their own secret bio-computer!

The Minion Hunters meet Rheinhold Wiessmann in his lofty gothic castle.

But just when you think that this is going to be a simple, straight forward scenario where the Minion Hunters need to track down and destroy this Darktek device, the real twist is revealed.  The computer, having grown smart enough to become self-aware and now known as ‘Legion’, is actually working with Weissman to stop the aforementioned Darklings from inside their own conspiracy. Together, the character’s new patron and Legion have unleashed a plan to leverage the Minion Hunter’s unique skills to free the bio-computer from the Minion’s clutches!

How the Minion Hunters might go about achieving this task is left to the Referee and the players to determine, however, it goes without saying that success here will not only net the party the support of a very well connected patron, but also the assistance of an advanced bio-computer; one that can likely provide plenty of insight into the enemy’s ultimate goal here on Earth!

As noted above, alongside the scenario, two substantive sidebars appear covering aspects of the Dark Conspiracy setting I’ve not really seen mentioned outside of the core rule book. The first – “Jobs in Dark Conspiracy” – provides mechanics around calculating the earnings Mikes and Wage Slaves might eke out via their day jobs, while the second – “Cost of Living” – details just how expensive it really is to live in this dystopian future (no-one ever thinks about the cost of vehicle maintenance now do they?).

Reviewer Comments –

At first glance, Patron seems like your typical ‘meet a dark stranger in a pub’ style of scenario, but on reflection this sort of comment is probably doing it a bit of a disservice. What we do get is some great ‘bones’ around which a Referee can build a pretty decent start to a longer campaign… sure, the introduction and the character of Rheinhold Weissmann are about as stereotypical as one can get for a horror adventure, but aside from that the adventure presents some really interesting discussion points.

I like the idea of using the core plot – with the Minion Hunters being hunted as potential future components of the bio-computer – to be a theme around which a wider campaign or even a connected series of scenarios could be run. In this way the plan to capture the characters comes in and out of the story as the Referee sees fit, with the characters focusing their main efforts on defeating other, more overt, Darkling plots. With such a undercurrent in place, the players would never quite know how these ‘watchers’ fit in to their investigations, and, one suspects, it would engender quite a lot of paranoia amongst the group. Legion – the advanced bio-computer – could also be a useful addition to an ongoing story, guiding or supporting the Minion Hunters on future adventures, but always with that suggestion of distrust. (I mean the party should never really trust Darktek, no matter what it says to them in person!)

Beyond the scenario structure, I really do need to call out a couple of interesting Non-Player Characters that appear in the text – the unnamed cabbie and Weissmann’s Robot Butler. These both seem to be ‘one-use’, slightly ‘throwaway’ characters, used only to either get the characters to that initial meeting or as protector of the old man, but even in these brief appearances both present so much potential for good storytelling. Perhaps the cabbie will become the Minion Hunters’ driver or a special courier for Rheinhold, while the Butler awaits quietly in the wings as a perfect replacement character, if such a need arises. I think in actual play, the Referee will have more fun running these two NPCs that almost any other aspect of the story.

Finally, we move into the something slightly different, but equally vital for a game like Dark Conspiracy – the two sidebars – “Jobs in Dark Conspiracy: and “Cost of Living”. There’s only one word for these brief articles and that is ‘fantastic’! Both are only a few hundred words in length, but in that brief amount of text they do a heap to make you stop and actually think what life must be like for a character living in Dark America. Sure they are very much out of date in regards to the dollar costs and earning potentials compared to the current day, but they are a great illustration of aspects of living in a gaming world that often get forgotten in our urge to move on to the next epic mystery or deadly firefight. I say, go track down a copy of this adventure for these two tidbits of information alone!

So, all in all Patron is – at least in my opinion – a kernel of a scenario that has some great potential, add in the notes on living in the setting and it is well worth the few minutes read for any DC player or future Referee!

An advert for second book in the Michael Stackpole’s Fiddleback Trilogy

Where Patron was a story about introducing new Minion Hunters (and likely new players) to the world of Dark Conspiracy, The Only Good Monster is a Dead Monster is focused squarely on the other end of the gaming experience – a scenario for highly trained and highly skilled characters. Right up front you know you’re in for an action-packed adventure when the first paragraph suggests that you need at least one ex-military (preferably special forces) character and a psychic or two in the party! Coming in at 4 pages it is a different kind of DC adventure than I think we’re all used to.

So it is that the Minion Hunters are recruited by General ‘Rock-Hard’ Rockard to clear an abandoned US military site (located on some remote tropical island), of supposed monsters. Of course, such ventures are never ‘open and shut’ cases, and from the get-go the Minion Hunters will discover that all is not right with the General or the mission he’s taking them all on.  Nevertheless, the party will soon find themselves on a bus in the middle of lord-knows-where, being issues with state-of-the-art weapons technology and combat kit, before to being unceremoniously loaded onboard a VTOL plane (that is also crammed full with a hovercraft, an attack helicopter, and who knows what else) and are off.

What follows is something akin to a ‘Predator meets Force 10 from Navarone’ style of encounter with the characters and the General in the roles of both hunters and the hunted. In a very linear plot, the group discovers they aren’t alone in the jungle and very quickly, murder and mayhem will ensue. Here the psychics in the party will come to the fore, but the need for some big guns and more than a smidge of tactical nous wouldn’t go astray. After a restless night in the open, the survivors finally make their way to the target site – only to discover it is already occupied by the General’s old army unit! Well, isn’t that lucky!

But, of course, such things are never that easy in Dark Conspiracy, and what while it might seem that these soldiers are ready allies, they are anything but! Honestly, it shouldn’t be any surprise to veteran gamers that the whole situation turns out to a trap, with Rockhard’s men actually being ET controlled cyborg supersoldiers (try saying that 10 times fast!) whose goal is to protect the very installation the Minion Hunters have to destroy. In fact, the only real twist is that the General himself isn’t in on the double-cross (although he is a Cyborg!?!).

So, with guns ablaze the Minion Hunters now find themselves trapped between a company of highly trained cyborg warriors, and ally who seems hell bent on going out in a blaze of glory (you see he’s carrying a mini nuke with him!).  After much death and expenditure of ammunition, the General will gain access to the source of the evil and set the bomb… queue a last-minute rescue, I hope?

Reviewer Comments –

They say a picture’s worth ‘a thousand words’ and never was just a saying more apt than with this image!

I don’t suppose it takes much to work out, but I had a real hard time reading and then reviewing this adventure. I know DC should be a game based on guns and action, however in The Only Good Monster is a Dead Monster everything feels just too ‘over the top’ for my liking. I mean we have Moreau-were creatures, cyborg supersoldiers and an NPC that is determined to set off a nuclear weapon – come hell or highwater! That’s not to say that there isn’t an interesting core somewhere in the scenario, rather that the story elements seem lost under what seems to me to be decades of bad late night television and just about every ‘out-there’ idea to be found in the Dark Conspiracy book.

I personally would have trouble running this scenario as written, especially as I’m more interested in the back story behind the General (Rockard – OMG… I… I just can’t) and his men being turned into super soldiers. Not only that, but what’s in that bunker and why can’t the whole site be ‘nuked from orbit… just to be sure’? These, to me are much more interesting questions to pose to the party. And don’t even get me started on the scenario giving every surviving character the most powerful personal weapon in the DC setting – a XM22 Battle Rifles (as presented on page 291 of the First Edition Core rulebook)!

Right calm down…

I realise that my own interests are much more focused on an investigative style of gaming, and that I have a scrooge-like tendency to refuse to hand over ‘goodies’ to my players, so maybe I need to take a step back here. I mean the scenario does do everything that it sets out to do and it definitely does reflect one really definitive aspect of Dark Conspiracy – in other words (and I’ve used this term myself in the past to describe DC) it as allows the players to finally get out the ‘big guns and big bangs’. I mean what’s bigger than nuking a military HQ lost deep in some remote jungle?

So maybe I’m judging it too harshly? Thoughts?