Running Gaean Reach, playing Fiasco!

It was inevitable really - as soon as I start regularly blogging, all sorts of stuff happens to keep me busy and away from the thing for three weeks!

However! This isn't to say I didn't get any gaming in. I had my first games of Gaean Reach and Fiasco (not to mention two Shadowrun sessions and a game of D&D Next).

You destroyed my punch-cards!

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to run a game for a good friend of mine I rarely get to game with, and we chose Gaean Reach - it was going to be that or Night's Black Agents, but Gaean Reach seemed easier to set up on the fly. Also, we're both a little obsessed with the 1950s Space Princesses on Rocket Ships aesthetic!

We corralled an extra player and I improvised a plot - far be it for me to actually prepare a session! Neither player was familiar with Jack Vance's work, but the character creation system and basic pitch combined to create the right atmosphere straight away. The mostly-random character creation system served up a jaunty aristocratic type and a deranged bureaucrat, who proceeded to shoot and manipulate their way through a dozen sleazy gangsters and salesmen.

Quite aside from being a wonderful game in its own right, Gaean Reach also served as a great "lite" intro to the GUMSHOE system. I feel a lot more confident about running Night's Black Agents than I did before - I can't wait to add all the extra details, the "cherries" and additional skills, to the experience of playing a GUMSHOE game. In fact, my only criticism of Gaean Reach after actual play is that it lacks interesting mechanical options for players to aspire to as they advance through a campaign.

"I needed a drink… I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." – Raymond Chandler

Review: The Gaean Reach (Pelgrane Press)

Years ago, someone named Quandos Vorn did something terrible to you, and you've sworn to destroy him. Since that dark day, you've prepared yourself to hunt and confront this dread individual. Now you're finally ready. 

Pelgrane Press has a new RPG out, set in Jack Vance's Gaean Reach universe. I couldn't be more invested in a game, so it was difficult to write an objective review of the pre-order PDF! Luckily, I found a lot to like with only a few reservations. 

Notably, i'm judging this game by how well it reflects the original stories, since they're among my favourite novels. That said: given the violent, mannered atmosphere and the simple rules, I'd be tempted to use this for a game set in 1840s Santa Fe...

Most of the potential readership of this blog probably know Jack Vance as the writer of the Dying Earth series, an enormously influential fantasy short story sequence which had a huge influence on the early development of Dungeons and Dragons.

I'm afraid to say I've never gotten around to reading the Dying Earth, although I intend to as soon as possible. For me Jack Vance means science fiction: Araminta Station, the Demon Princes sequence, Ports of Call, Showboat World, the Alastor Cluster sequence. These books bear little comparison with other fiction (maybe Fritz Leiber's dry wit, maybe Ursula Le Guin's strange cultures, maybe Cordwainer Smith's wild re-imagining of the human condition...). In the Gaean Reach, characters devote themselves to politesse, artistry and mordant wit, along with one final motivator: revenge. Revenge comes in all shapes and sizes in Vance: from Kirth Gersen's sociopathic quest against the crime lords who destroyed his village in the Demon Princes through the very personal collision between family members in Trullion: Alastor 2262, right up until Myron Tany's frankly laughable vendetta against his great aunt in Ports of Call. 

In Vance's novels, to quote the RPG: "heroism unfolds within a spare, and unsparing, moral vision."

For myself, I have a vendetta against Pelgrane Press. Specifically, they keep taking my money. Night's Black Agents, Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars are all fine games - i'm an unashamed fan of the GUMSHOE system. I've never actually read or played the Dying Earth RPG, so this is my first experience with the Skulduggery system (this game combines the two).

After completing this review i'm going to locate Robin D. Laws by searching through an intricate archive of punch cards. I'll pursue him all the way to the interstellar masquerade down by Sailmaker Beach... where I'll probably die, because he's considerably more erudite than I.

EDIT: So a few times in the review I brought up formatting and proofreading errors. Chris Huth got in touch with me a few hours after I posted this and I quickly established that 80% of those problems were only happening in Nitro Pro 7 and not, say, Adobe. I didn't think to check because I've never had that kind of problem before. However! I feel I ought to state that those formatting errors might be unique to the 8 people reading this game on a weird piece of business document formatting software, and I've changed the review below to reflect that.