Actual Play – Sleeping Serpent (7/17/2010) at Good Omens Con 4

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Karen, Loyd, Justin and Xavier
System: Agon

Description
Agon is an action-packed roleplaying game about ancient Greek heroes who face brutal tests from the gods. With bravery, cunning, honor, and strength, one hero will prove to be the greatest and secure immortality in legend.

Agon supports fast-paced, competitive play, with mechanics designed to create an even playing field for players and the game master. Oath-swearing and trash-talking are highly encouraged.

Okay, I’ll finally admit this a month later. I took the entire week off work before Good Omens Con to prepare for both the con itself and my Dresden game. At noon on Friday before the con it finally hit me, CRAP, I’m running TWO games at GO CON! I had an audition game at four in Berkely so I figured I had at least a few hours to prep it. Then I looked at my calendar and was reminded that I had a hotel to tour for Big Bad Con in Pleasanton at 2:30. Which gave me exactly one hour to pack up all my stuff into the car and prep for Agon.

I was SO happy that a) Agon is relatively low prep and b) all my normal props (character tents, power chips with matching portraits, and my Greek Tarot deck) were quick at hand. So I printed off a few more character sheets, crammed it all into a box and raced out.

Then after a day of touring the Four Points by Sheraton and playing in Justin Mitchel’s Iron Kingdom’s game, I schlepped over to my sister in-laws house to finish creating Good Omens dice bags and write the adventure. Thank you, thank you, thank you John Harper for making such an easy adventure creation system in the back of the book. Roll some d12s, keep what you like, chuck the rest and weave it all together. Sure, we’ve got a couple of different communities. Ares wants war, Hermes wants a crown stolen and Artemis wants a hunt. What would each of these establish? That took some thought… and bam! Each of these actions (whichever happens first) will dictate the king or queen of the Island and promote the god that gave them that status to the favored one on the island (god’s are always motivated by self-interest).

As usual I told the heroes that they would have three major objectives but that I left the specifics up to them. In this case they chose to find an oracle, defeat the gorgon and take the crown and then use that to choose a leader to start the war (effectively completing quests given by both Hermes and Ares but only appeasing the latter because they did it in his name).

What rocked

Agon, as always was a ton of fun to run. I take simple tasks like “let’s go talk the oracle” and fill them with cryptic assassins, snakes, spirits, collapsing tunnels and an ornery old hag. It means we’ve got plenty of challenges, lots of strive and tons of glory.

I got players to shout their names. I love that.

Karen was the only player who chose to play a human (not a demi-god) and she had the highest glory at the end, much to the chagrin of the half gods.

I loved having daddy and mommy come down from the heavens to mess with the heroes that weren’t following the. Ah the hubris of man, and how fun it is to smack them upside the head for it.

Lots and lots and lots of smack talk and competition between the heroes.

Openly defying the gods. Loyd took a statue of his mother (Artemis) and used it as target practice with his bow. WOAH!

I was dressed appropriately

What could have been improved

The quests probably would have made a bit more sense of I had thought them out a bit more and not been so rushed.

I kept rolling crazy high. I swear my average roll on 2d8 (keeping only the highest die) was a 7.5. I think it was kind of demoralizing for the players. But on the up side it just meant they spent three weeks in the woods having a drunken bender to recover.