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Let's play City of Chaos - All voters welcome
Jam Warrior
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
CITY OF CHAOS!
Someone on the BGG forum for 7th Continent mentioned this obscure game and once I'd looked it up the passion to own it was intense. An Ebay saved search, a few months, a bit too much money, and here we are, it's all mine.
A mad passion project to rival Kingdom Death, but sadly with much less success, this mid 90s adventure was well ahead of its time and seemed to fall pretty flat on release. If you look up the BGG forum for the game you can find posts from both the authors (you will note, never in the same thread) that put together ARG style will paint a very sad tale of how creating and releasing the game pretty much broke them. It's a big old 'choose your own adventure' style game, with a unique style, a modular tile board, a giant book of numbered paragraphs like Tales of the Arabian Nights, and many, many cards.
Unlike Tales it seems to be trying to have quite a coherent plot and there are all kinds of 'clues' you can collect which seem to be guiding you toward the end(s) of the game. Or rather telling you what MacGuffins you need to find in the city to not reach a 'Your Adventure Ends Here' in the climactic paragraphs.
Anyway, having enjoyed running the 7th Continent Demo, I thought I'd ablate the sense of loneliness of solo gaming by trying to run this game as a forum voting game. I'll modify a few rules as we go, starting with the abolition of the dreaded 'roll and move' for a simpler system of just moving one tile at a time.
So without further ado, here's the intro:
And here's the starting tile. We stand at the City Gates. I'll use a faceless pawn for us for now. The game came with some bizarre pewter miniatures that represent the crazy guilds you can join in the game, so we'll sub in one of those when we actually find and join a guild.
So fairly meaningless question to begin. Which way will we go?
West - Agree
North - Awesome
East - Shiny
Someone on the BGG forum for 7th Continent mentioned this obscure game and once I'd looked it up the passion to own it was intense. An Ebay saved search, a few months, a bit too much money, and here we are, it's all mine.
A mad passion project to rival Kingdom Death, but sadly with much less success, this mid 90s adventure was well ahead of its time and seemed to fall pretty flat on release. If you look up the BGG forum for the game you can find posts from both the authors (you will note, never in the same thread) that put together ARG style will paint a very sad tale of how creating and releasing the game pretty much broke them. It's a big old 'choose your own adventure' style game, with a unique style, a modular tile board, a giant book of numbered paragraphs like Tales of the Arabian Nights, and many, many cards.
Unlike Tales it seems to be trying to have quite a coherent plot and there are all kinds of 'clues' you can collect which seem to be guiding you toward the end(s) of the game. Or rather telling you what MacGuffins you need to find in the city to not reach a 'Your Adventure Ends Here' in the climactic paragraphs.
Anyway, having enjoyed running the 7th Continent Demo, I thought I'd ablate the sense of loneliness of solo gaming by trying to run this game as a forum voting game. I'll modify a few rules as we go, starting with the abolition of the dreaded 'roll and move' for a simpler system of just moving one tile at a time.
So without further ado, here's the intro:
And here's the starting tile. We stand at the City Gates. I'll use a faceless pawn for us for now. The game came with some bizarre pewter miniatures that represent the crazy guilds you can join in the game, so we'll sub in one of those when we actually find and join a guild.
So fairly meaningless question to begin. Which way will we go?
West - Agree
North - Awesome
East - Shiny
Jam Warrior on
+8
Posts
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
"Fuck it; I'm out."
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Which means we also draw a location card to find out what lies within. Locations stay on the board and can be entered at will.
Intriguing. The Cube of Chaos is just a d6 with two of each of those symbols.
But before we can do that we must draw an action card for moving to a new tile:
We have no Witchfinder so agree to help or 'interact'?
Interact is further broken down into 'greet,' 'help' or 'threaten'. This then involves looking up a table of interactions in the Tome of Chaos, each choice leading to up to three different paragraphs via a roll of the Cube of Chaos.
Yes two of these options do seem identical. Go figure. I'm not telling you if the paragraphs are the same.
I'll cover fighting if it happens. Suffice to say we aren't particularly strong at the moment!
Agree - Agree to help
Awesome - Interact greet
Shiny - Interact help
Witness - Interact threaten
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Loot!
Very specific loot with not much wider use. Oh well, it's nice to have a quest I suppose.
Agree - Explore West
Awesome - Explore North
Shiny - Explore East
Witness - Encounter Naga, attack
Lovely - Encounter Naga, roll
Edit: Actually, it seems you draw a location card when entering a building and have to face it immediately.
So wizard first, then assumed location entry. We're doing something with this Naga whatever happens.
Witness - Encounter Naga, attack
Lovely - Encounter Naga, roll
1-2 = Star
3-4 = Moon
5-6 = Sperm
Geth roll 1d6
Easy come, easy go. We have no groats so goodbye scroll. 'Taking a head' is like a karma system. The more heads you have the worse your karma. The scroll will sit here for now so maybe we'll get it back later.
Agree - Explore West
Awesome - Explore North
Shiny - Explore East
Witness - Revisit the Naga.
Lovely - Stop asking which direction to explore in you fool! It's all academic so just try and explore in a roughly circular manner radiating from the gate for now.
Heading east then.
Ooh, a special location already. These don't cause you to draw an action card and get a larger location card that for some reason you're supposed to put in a standee.
Interesting, but essentially useless until we get whatever one of those is, so exploring on south.
A location. This time we'll do things in the right order and draw the event first.
We're still groatless so.
Agree - Take a head
Awesome - Complain
Shiny - Raspberries
Current map:
Also let me know if these cards are legible enough for you. I'm very lazily just photographing them and then cropping and resizing to 200 or 300 pix wide as that seems a good size on my screen. If they need to be bigger just say.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
We have none of those skills!
Geth roll 1d6
On to the location.
Consulting the fantasy nonsense word glossary, Vriandi: A horse-like beast. Ideal for transportation across the City.
Man we totally need to get some groats going on.
Agree - Greet stable boy
Awesome - Help stable boy
Witness - Threaten stable boy
Geth roll 1d6 for Cube of Chaos
That was... odd.
We can try again (remember each interaction choice gets one of three random results so helping again may lead to different results) or move on.
Agree - Greet stable boy
Awesome - Help stable boy
Witness - Threaten stable boy
Lovely - Explore on
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Geth roll 1d6 for Cube of Chaos
I'm going to make the wild assumption you'll be following.
...
Agree - Greet stable boy
Awesome - Help stable boy
Witness - Threaten stable boy
Lovely - Enough stable boy chasing already!
Agree- Kick
Awesome - Stay
So we're back at the gates hooray! Really starting to love that stable boy.
So re-traversing already explored tiles. For now I'm going to say we move tile by tile and take an action card for each one.
But where are we headed?
Agree - Exploring
Awesome - Back to the stables
Moving on west:
Agree - Dance
Awesome - Watch
Shiny - Greet
Witness - Help
Lovely- Threaten
Map:
You're holding back.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Now there's some investigative progress!
On to investigate our location:
Reporting a thief seems to be a multiplayer only thing where you sick the coppers onto another player. No reporting that thieving Naga sadly.
So we're left with the basic interactions:
Agree - Greet
Awesome - Help
Witness - Threaten
Agree - Greet
Awesome - Help
Shiny - Threaten
Witness - Explore on
I'll try to put up the obvious options but do post if you ever want to nominate returning somewhere or something.
Agree - Greet
Awesome - Help
Shiny - Threaten
Witness - Explore on
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Agree - Greet
Awesome - Help
Shiny - Threaten
Witness - Explore on
Action card:
Body points are HP. We have 10.
Location card:
Agree - Greet
Awesome - Help
Shiny - Threaten
Witness - Investigate wares
Map:
Inventory:
Chatty fellow...
Agree - Greet
Awesome - Help
Shiny - Threaten
Witness - Investigate wares
Lovely - Explore on
Well I guess it's nice to know what we can't afford.
And to be honest they look more than a little unreliable.
Agree - Greet
Awesome - Help
Shiny - Threaten
Witness - Investigate wares
Lovely - Explore on