Another successful play test of Missions & Mayhem.
Even though the rules aren't complete yet, I used the Cryptids & Conspiracy module to prepare for today's play test game.
I was inspired by a board game I had as a kid, called Dinosaur Island. There's a newer game with the same name, riffing off of the Jurassic Park franchise. The 80s game wasn't a very good game, but as an 8 year old, it was fun. The idea is that players go around the island, trying to get the best photos of dinosaurs. The player with the best photos at the end is the winner. No need to hash out the problems with the original game (which even as 8-10 year olds, we realized wasn't that fun after one or two games unless we put some toy dinosaurs on the board to spice things up).
The concept was good enough. I grabbed an island map made by the Welsh Piper (thanks!). Then I started to make some random encounter charts, but I realized I needed a rationale for why an island full of dinosaurs would be undiscovered in 2026. So one LOST style anomaly and a missing expedition party later, I had my set-up.
In C&C, I have a suggested organization that Heroes can work for, the Fortean Investigations Association (FIA). In my game, it's an NGO but I suggest it could be a governmental organization, or even a loose collection of amateurs sharing findings, depending on the campaign. The FIA sent a team to investigate the anomaly. They found a way through, but their signal was cut off. The final message was one of the team members saying, "Is that a dinosaur?"
The Heroes were sent in to try to find/rescue the first party, and also collect evidence of any dinosaurs, cryptids, or other weird things.
I won't go into too much detail, because I will probably include the adventure as an example in the finished book. But of course their first encounter with a dinosaur on the island, via random roll, was with a T-Rex!
No one has been eaten yet, but we stopped in the middle of the adventure and will pick up more next time. They all had fun, and we got to test out the money/shopping system (semi-abstract seems to work well), the encumbrance rules, a chase (with gambling), a little bit of combat, some investigation work, some exploration, and some clever thinking.
