Heresy of Angels in Review

Before the game, we were discussing impressions of "Black Crusade" as a whole, and the general feeling could be summed up as "I really want to like it a lot more than I actually do". The book is exceptionally well-presented, it contains probably the most polished variant on the ruleset, and it's built upon a very good setting with a lot of flavour. But...

That same impression really sums up my feelings about the one-shot itself. There wasn't much technically wrong with it, but I was left feeling I could and should have done a better job with the material. And yet, the group seemed to have a good time, and there were questions as to whether there would be a "part two". So it's an odd one, really.

(Before I go on: the rest of this post may seem rather negative. It's not, really. The purpose of this review is not to beat myself up, or complain about the cruelties of fate, or anything like that. Instead, the goal is to help things go better next time - the goal is to do more of the things that went well and to fix the things that went badly. Ultimately, I'm reasonably pleased with Saturday's game... but it's given me a lot to think about.)

What went well:

• Despite having several players who knew the system, and three copies of the rulebook at the table, there weren't any big rules disputes. And that despite one or two... questionable... calls on my part. Plus, the game didn't lag badly at any point, despite the book requiring extensive reference (and not having a good index).
  
• Most of the players were manifestly having a good time. There was plenty of banter, a good atmosphere around the table, and it was generally fun.
  
• The moment where the Sorcerer decided to use his Doombolt on 'push', thus causing a guaranteed psychic phenomenon, was brilliant. There was a very small chance that the character would be annihilated outright, with no chance of recovery. Indeed, in campaign play, that's the sort of thing people would love to talk about, but that most GMs would promptly fudge. Naturally, the dice fell just right, and the character died. Oops!

What didn't go so well:

• Too much combat. I mean, I was able to keep the combats fluid, and I think they were suitably varied, so that combats themselves weren't the problem. But the balance between combat encounters and non-combat challenges was off. And when some characters are combat monsters and some are comparitive weaklings, that's a problem. (And that's my biggest concern with "Black Crusade" long-term - with a mixed party, how do you ensure everyone gets a fair crack of the whip.)
  
• One of the players seemed bored. Now, I don't know him terribly well, so I might have been mis-reading the situation, but if he was indeed bored then that's an issue.
  
• The "mature themes" thing was a waste of time. The game was only marginally different from anything else I might have run. I don't think that's actually a problem, since I'm happy with the tone, but I think I'll be removing that tag from the corresponding game next year.
  
• I prepared way too much material. Fortunately, because things could be hit in any order, the party skipped to the most likely climax at just the right time, but it was still a little unfortunate that so much had to be skipped.
  
• Speaking of skipping stuff, I failed to bring out most of the storyline. There were distinct hints about the rift in the Sisters of Battle, and the players managed to pick up on quite a lot of it, but not enough to save it from feeling a bit too much like a disjointed sequence of combats. Part of that was due to the PCs managing to miss just about every "exposition" roll throughout the game, part of it was that I had too much material (so they missed interacting with either of the two big groups of SoB), and a lot of it was that there was too much combat and not enough roleplay.

Overall, I think the game was a moderate success, but it certainly wasn't on a par with the Mirror Universe "Star Wars" game that was my previous one-shot. And, probably more importantly, there is an awful lot that I think I can do better next time.

Regarding "Black Crusade" - there's a lot of interest from people in playing this again. I'm halfway inclined, though, to add it to the list of games that I'm leaving to other people to run. I just don't have the grounding in the setting that many others do. On the other hand, there's something there that I really like. So I'm torn.

Some specific things:

• The game desperately needs some sort of "Monster Manual". And it probably needs an in-depth "Setting Primer", and probably significant expansions to the lists of gear and psychic powers. Oh, and a much better index, and PDFs of everything.
  
• The character sheet is a disgrace. I was using a PDF form, which made creating the characters reasonably easy. The problem is that the sheet is designed with a lovely, ornate border, and a detailed background image, and a section of white text on a black background (which only applies to half the characters, as well). The net effect is that a filled sheet is 2.5Mb in size, for 3 pages! What this ultimately meant was that printing the sheets was a major hassle - what I ideally wanted was to open all 10 sheets, set up the printer for two-sided work, and print pages 1-2 of each sheet in turn. But that overran the memory available for my system, causing the whole thing to work for several minutes only to conclude that it couldn't print! Add to that that the sheet really didn't make it easy to include all the required information on the sheet directly...

  Basically, it's probably the worst character sheet I've used recently. If I find myself running this game again, I'll have to do a redesign (which, fortunately, shouldn't be too bad).
  

• I'm sorely tempted to pick up the pre-generated Adventure Path for the game, to see an example of how the writers envisage the game being used. The only major problem with this is that another GM may want to run that campaign at some point, and if I were playing I wouldn't want to have read it. So that's a difficult one. (Shame there's only one Adventure Path out there...)

It's a fascinating, frustrating game. Perhaps "Fantasy Flight" are evil geniuses...