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Marco Arnaudo

Auteur de The Myth of the Superhero

8 oeuvres 37 utilisateurs 2 critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Marco Arnaudo is a professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he teaches classes about game design, simulations, military history, mystery fiction, and Italian literature. He is a well-known reviewer of board games, with more than 1,000 video reviews.

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Œuvres de Marco Arnaudo

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Date de naissance
20th c
Pays (pour la carte)
Italy
Lieu de naissance
Cuneo, Italy

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Dawning Horror has a subtitle that parses strangely. It is in fact adventures for one: a supplement to the solitaire pen-and-paper horror adventure game Four against the Great Old Ones.

The slim book includes five discrete scenarios. Each of these is a smaller-scale challenge intended to serve as a prologue to the main game in the original Four Against the Great Old Ones book. I have only played two of these so far. "The Horror of the Mine" is focused on trying to free a kidnapping victim being held by cultists in an abandoned mine. "The Howl of the Mutated" takes place in a corrupted wilderness that reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's Area X. Each adventure took me a little under an hour to play, and my investigator characters were defeated and killed in both. There is no small difficulty in these adventures.

While the original game calls for the player to manage a team of four principal investigators and their various possible helpers, the scenarios of Dawning Horror each involve a single principal investigator with three assistants. The book also includes two new investigator classes, which can be started in the prologue scenarios or just dropped into the original game. These are the Archaeologist and the Redeemed Cultist. I have tried the latter of these, and I thought it worked well in play. It does however show a little softening of the game's former rigorous Lovecraftianism to include one of the common tropes of neo-Yog-Sothothery.

Like the core game, which features travel all over the United States, each of the Dawning Horror scenarios is organized around a map. But these maps are at a far smaller scale, and typically feature exploration in ways that make it a little odd that the investigator would have access to the map's information to start with. Maybe some of the scenarios I haven't yet played supply rationales for their maps. In any case, there is plenty unknown and much randomly generated during play, and the adventures are hard enough that I expect them to be still challenging when I return to them with new investigators and a certain measure of foreknowledge.
… (plus d'informations)
1 voter
Signalé
paradoxosalpha | Nov 15, 2023 |
Four Against the Great Old Ones is a horror adventure game for 1-4 players with an optional referee, but it seems mostly aimed at solitaire play. The game uses simplified tabletop RPG mechanisms to represent exploration of yog-sothothery in 1920s America. A single standard die (or even a marked hexagonal pencil) suffices for all randomization in the game, and a single sheet of paper can track all the characters. A full campaign can play out in a single sitting.

The setup allows for choice of four different character classes out of a field of eight, and places these investigators in a random US city to start their expeditions. Activities have a cost in days, and characters need to determine and arrive at their final encounter (which varies among a set of diverse Old Ones) before forty days have passed on the calendar.

The first thirty pages of the book present character creation and basic mechanics for play. The remaining fifty give information on the locations and encounters--effectively one big branching scenario. There are lots of entertaining details, and the lore of the game is entirely drawn from the literary corpus of Grandpa Cthulhu and his disciples--it is insulated from additional game "mythos" elements, particularly those built up in the Chaosium and Fantasy Flight games that dominate the Cthulhvian gaming scene. Still, the flavor is more pulp adventure with Lovecraftian foes than it is weird horror.

The prescribed method of play is to mark the book with a pencil as a record of encounters already accomplished and actions no longer available, and then to go erase all those marks before the next play. But there is an "encounter checklist" page that can be copied instead (or mocked up freehand--it's very simple).

During my first play, I only visited five of the sixteen mundane locations, plus a trip to the Dreamlands for one of my investigators. I didn't exhaust the encounters for any of those locations, and of course I only got to sample one of the six final encounters. As it turned out, my larger itinerary starting in Chicago brought me to R'lyeh for the Cthulhu final encounter. My team (occultist William Wesley Wakeman, spy Lizabet Solventi, detective Terry Sturgeon, and medium Madame Lemuria) overcame all the foes there for encounters 1 through 6, but exhausted the possible encounter roll bonuses without getting that necessary 7. So I resigned... to the inevitability of my characters succumbing to endless cultists and weird architecture. It was nearly a draw, certainly not a win.

There is clearly a lot of re-playability in this little book, and I'm sure I will return to it.
… (plus d'informations)
2 voter
Signalé
paradoxosalpha | Dec 15, 2020 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
8
Membres
37
Popularité
#390,572
Évaluation
4.1
Critiques
2
ISBN
9
Langues
2