dungeon+magician impossible+tandhjulets krav=1 review

As a service to mainly Danish role players I've decided to post a short sweet review of the scenarios I got to play at this year’s Fastaval Role Playing Con.
First up its "Dungeon" by Lars Andresen.. Lars is one of the grand old masters of the Danish scenario tradition and has won several of the coveted Otto-awards. - And it shows. The craftsmanship is absolutely first rate. Both the visual design and the editing are beyond criticism. Actually you could use Dungeon as a textbook example of how to do that. Except for a twist and one turn: For obvious reasons Lars has decided to emulate the original Dungeons & Dragons design from before Eve ate the Apple. And quite frankly it wasn’t that great then and hasn’t improved since. But it’s a gimmick and it’s ok. The other reservation is about the player characters. I think their descriptions are a little too long and complex looking. Witch might quite simple makes working with them unnecessarily cumbersome.
The biggest problem from a design view is the fact that the game mechanics doesn’t work as advertized. There are cards that the players can ‘earn’ when their characters mature during the game. The cards are actually potentially very powerful within the game-reality while there’s no mechanism or guide to handling that power. So when the player uses one his cards to say “I can kill stuff!” The GM has to go completely Obama on his a**… (yes you can! but not right now...)
Personally I had a great experience running this game. It’s got an overall feel of high quality about it. It’s extremely easy to read and Lars Andresen shows (again!) that his got a sharp eye and a deft hand.
I ran Dungeon as a GM.
:o)x5


Then I was lucky enough to play Magician Impossible by Kristian Bach Petersen. There’s not a lot to say - but in a good way: it was a very satisfying experience. As the name suggests "MI" is a follow up to last year’s Reservoir Elves, and the concept is quite simple: you take a famous Hollywood action movie and add classic D&D fantasy with lots of elves and magic and stuff.
Highlights were good clean action and fun, Brilliant handouts, very useful magic cards. – We had a number of spells and were given little cards with a short description of their effects. Within the con framework were you don’t know beforehand your players level of D&D-proficiency that was a very handy tool. It didn’t hurt that the plot was very cleverly constructed.
The only downside I could see was that the Olsen Banden- effect didn’t really work at all. Something about virtual music that wasn’t there.
:oJ
Very highly recommended
I was a player on Mission Impossible.
:o)x5


I’d signed us as a GM on “Tandhjulets Krav” [=”The Demands of the Gear”] by Carsten Andreasen and Martin Horn Pedersen. Due to unfortunate circumstances Saturday morning it didn’t come off.
The writers start out by starting that they want to investigate the way players imagine NPC’s and have chosen to do so in a steam-punk setting... I’m a very great fan of that genre and have written a couple of Steamy and smoky scenarios myself. (Nightworx and Flashworx). I was therefore rather disappointed to find that they really, really didn’t. There is not a lot of steam punk in TK, there’s little attempt to investigate the imaginative process – at least as I see it. – What we do get is a traditionalist Marxist analysis of post-Victorian capitalist society.
On the flip side: some very interesting game mechanics and well written characters I think would have worked quite brilliantly within the setting. Furthermore it should be noted that TK is a reader friendly text that can be easily read and understood with little effort.
If I was the author I’d make the effort of a v. 2.0 or do some sort of follow up. TK shows lot of potential.
I’ve read Tandhjulets Krav in preparation for GMing it.
:o)x2,5