05/26/2012
HEY LONERS
GET READY TO BE SCARED
by how much you don’t want to play this game.
Tom O’Keefe is our local Game Master here at lonercomics. BEHOLD his jaw-dropping collection of games.
Tom picked up Chill: Black Morn Manor at a thrift store for four dollars, and boy are we glad he did. Consider the game a misguided amalgamation of Clue and Go Fish and a scary story you made up when you were five. One player takes the role of the Master, a ghoul whose purpose is to haunt the manor for eternity. Everyone else plays a team of “Envoys” who bumble around the manor attempting to guess the Master’s identity (“Are you… Bat Lord and Friend?”). Throughout the game you must overcome various “Evil Ways” such as “ENORMITY” and “FLESHCRAWL” as you venture towards the Crypt where the Master lies in wait.
Despite these imaginative touches, the gameplay itself is fairly tedious and meandering. A large portion of the game involves picking up strange items such as “Glass Box with Man’s Head and Hands,” and then discarding the items when you realize they serve basically no purpose (I mean, what do you do with a glass box containing a man’s head and hands?). But we persisted with uncommon valor, and in the end, the Master was vanquished in a thrilling scene that went something like this:
Tom: Um, are you… The Deceiver?
Master: …Yep.
WE WON, GUYS!
I know you have a thousand questions. Why is The Deceiver’s mortal weakness “Steel Manacles”? Could he not continue to deceive us while in a manacled state? And just what is it about the bedroom that makes it Bat Lord and Friend’s favorite haunt? To complete this review, I spoke with Tom about the game’s myriad shortcomings.
Q&A with Game Master Tom
Maggie: So Tom, what is it about this game that’s so… off?
Tom: Well Black Morn Manor was produced by a role playing game company, and consequently I don’t think they understood much about good boardgame design. Like most hobby boardgames of that era (mid-eighties), it is based around a theme and experience without much consideration given to gameplay.
Maggie: There isn’t much competitive aspect to this game. The “Envoys” work together as a team called SAVE, which stands for Societas Argenti Viae Eternitata, or The Eternal Society of the Silver Way. I guess it’s meant to foster a fraternal spirit between players as they fight to expel the Master from the manor, but ultimately it just fosters boredom, and a feeling that your individual contribution to the game has no value.
Tom: I think Black Morn Manor’s unique failing is that while the players do make “strategic” decisions in the game, those decisions seem sort of trivial. Where do you place your tile? Put it in your path. Where should I go? Go towards the manor. What card do I play? Well, half of the cards force you to play them immediately, some you can’t play at all unless you’re a “Minion,” and the remaining few are useful only in certain conditions so it’s always pretty obvious when to play them.
Maggie: There doesn’t seem to be an ideal player for this game. It’s too lacking in stratagem to be stimulating for adults, but the rules are too diffuse and odd for kids to understand.
Tom: It’s true. As a rule of thumb, games with few decisions or easy decisions are best when the game is quite snappy. Longer games should give the players something more meaty to chew on, or else the whole thing can feel like a waste of time. Nobody would play Go Fish if it took as long as a game of Bridge. Black Morn Manor’s stilted pace, pre-programmed feel and length made it a truly dull affair from a gameplay standpoint.
Maggie: So let’s say we have a time machine, and our top priority is returning to 1985 to give the designers of Black Morn Manor a piece of our minds. What would you tell them, Tom?
Tom: 1) Cut the game’s length in half. 2) Give each character different special powers. Same with the magic items. 3) The process of discovering the master’s identity needs to be less tedious, and to involve more deductive skill rather than simply trial and error.
Maggie: Thanks for talking with us today, Tom. Your “bark” is truly venomous.
So that’s the word on Chill: Black Morn Manor. The truly great news is that there exists a Black Morn Manor-inspired book! “There are streets you should not walk down, doors you must not open, people you dare not speak to… So begins this anthology of 16 tales of terror.” I’m certain it’s worth the seller’s price of 100 dollars. I do so long to be chilled to the bone!
your friend,
maggie
Let me start that I am super excited for this story arc, whatever it truly is and wherever it may go.
I started playing D&D in middle school and kept various campaigns going through most of high school, but less free time meant that I ended up playing quicker table top games like HeroQuest, Catan and Risk Godstorm. This was all GMed by my then-advisor, who had a copy of this game amongst many others (and every book from Advanced D&D 2.0, twas a bookshelf to behold). And the fact that my first webcomic was the D&D/Final Fantasy parody 8bit Theater makes for an excellent combo of excitement and anticipation that has tickled my taste for adventure.
Brave forth into the darkness and emerge victorious!
(While I call up some friends and see if they’re down with rolling some characters for a game of Pathfinder.)
I think Godstorm is my favorite Risk incarnation. Have you played Risk 2210?
Also, The Mountain, do share this intriguing webcomic with the class!
I haven’t played 2210 yet, but I’ve seen it in game shops. Just on topic alone, it’s something I will absolutely eat up. High fantasy and mythos settings rock, but I was raised on spaceships, rayguns and the threat of alien invasion (if the robots don’t get us first). 2210 looks right up my alley.
If you haven’t played it yet, check out Diplomacy. It’s similar to Risk, but without dice rolls and everything hinges on your negotiations (and dirty backstabbing tactics). You don’t even need a copy of the game either, you can play it via email or online.
8-Bit Theater was a webcomic by Brian Clevinger that ran from 2001 to 2010. It’s a sprite comic based on the original NES Final Fantasy games, telling the thrilling tale of The (wrong) Light Warriors on their quest to save the world.
[img]http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/eightbitCast.jpg[/img]
A Black Mage with a taste for power and excessively destructive spells, a Fighter who neglects his intelligence score but thats ok because swords, a dirty Thief with a sly hand in everything and everyone(‘s pockets) and the Red Mage who multiclassed in everything from combat to decorative cake frosting.
I started reading it in the first year, and loved it till the end. It also opened the door to many many more RPG parody webcomics (The Order of the Stick deserves mention) that I have loved over the years.
[img]http://farm1.staticflickr.com/203/444843776_239c408188.jpg[/img]
It’s all on http://www.nuklearpower.com/, as well as some other great comics he’s done. Brian really hit it big a few years ago with his excellent Atomic Robo print comic, and he also does some writing for Marvel.
thanks The Mountain! awesome recommendation.
Risk 2210 is very cool, and arguably less flawed than Godstorm, though I find Godstorm way more appealing aesthetically. It’s so tempting in 2210 to focus a lot of energy colonizing the moon, but the lunar bids rarely pay off. So in most games the moon is just ignored. It mirrors the dysfunction of Godstorm’s “underworld”