Dave Phipps, Pulp Alley author and altogether good guy has been busy working on a Magic Supplement for Pulp Alley. I was very excited to hear about this, I can see loads of potential for skirmish / semi rpg based games with D&D characters, Frostgrave style warbands, Hogwarts heroes and of course games in the altogether magical world of Ozz. Dave sent me over some of his work in progress notes and we gave it a go.
John and I decided to play ‘The Fog’ scenario. This always gives a particularly challenging game. Each player fields half there league, so if your league normally has seven characters you field four and the other three sit this one out. As the aim was to test the magic rules, and the ‘witch’ skill is available to level three characters we decided to use League of Legend style leagues with four sidekicks. The free, downloadable Pulp Alley Ozz character card PDF has been updated with lots of witches and other characters.
John decided to field the Purple and Green Witch and I fielded the Black and the Yellow Witch. The witch ability allows you to choose two spells that the character can use. Each character had one additional skill and was equipped with a wand. A wand is very handy as it allows you to discard a Fortune Card from your hand to gain an additional dice for rolling for spell success. An example spell (and one of the most useful in this scenario) was ‘Ab Scutum’ It is cast using Might needing only one success, each success generates a token which is placed by target. Each time caster activates a token is removed. As long as spell is powered by a token any enemy that comes into contact with target is moved ‘X’ away. Very handy when being swarmed by giant spiders!
The Green/Purple league rolled up an ally as a scenario event, a dog that was inevitably soon eaten by the giant spiders!
The forest was surrounded by a mysterious orange, glowing fog that was slowly (3″ per turn) extending towards the centre of the table. The whole table was dark and dangerous (meaning that moving more than 6″ per turn necessitated overcoming a peril, and visibility was restricted to 12″).
Scattered around the table were four small shrines (minor plot points). If the associated peril and challenge was overcome a guardian spirit was summoned that aided in banishing the fog. Unfortunately, lurking near each shrine, knowing that they would act as a food magnet were giant spiders (level 2 denizens) who rushed and fought the nearest character within 12″.
The mysterious glowing fog was a perilous area that crept inwards at 3″ per turn, meaning that anyone overtaken by it had to pass a peril each time they activated within it. As is this was not challenging enough, the scenario also has a scenario deck of additional nastiness that occurs on the activation of the first character from each league. The nastiest card in the scenario deck is ‘Dagon’s Call’ which forces you to draw an additional two scenario cards. My leading character managed to turn that card for the first three turns, even although the cards were reshuffled at the start of each turn. Scenario event cards caused characters to take horror checks as they heard something scary, face random perils as they came across unseen dangers or place additional giant spiders or even worse the level three denizen the ‘Giant Pumpkin Head’ on the table.
It was not long before there were a lot of scary things on the table. Both the giant spiders and the Pumpkin Head were Horrors, causing lots of horror checks. Slowly progress was made by working together and using some characters to lure denizens away from the shrines to enable other witches to attempt to unlock them.
Once the Giant Pumpkin Head appeared we found the ‘Ignis Ictus’ spell very handy for combating it at a distance. It is cast as a casters might vs defenders cunning challenge and each success causes the defender to take a health check. The great thing about it is it can be cast from up to 24″ away and does not trigger return fire in the same way that a shooting attack does. In this sort of setting shooting attacks are of course minor, ranged magical attacks… magic missile and the like!
The game was a lot of fun, in the last turn the witches prevailed. After activating the four shrines a magical gong (major plot point) was discovered near the centre of the table, the sounding of which, with the aid of the unlocked guardian spirits banished the magical fog and the sunlight streamed through the trees to clear the dark and dangerous aura too!
We are both looking forward to more play testing of Pulp Magic next week.
Useful Links:
Pulp Alley Free getting started Rules.
Pulp Alley Free Wars of Ozz character Cards.
Wars of Ozz Skirmish Packs (one to three figure packs for games like this)
I wonder if the magic rules would work as psionics in a sci-fi game?
Yes, the magic rules would be perfect for psionics!