This is the Chinese Garden by South Seattle College in West Seattle, on an almost deserted Thanksgiving weekend during covid.
Things to find if you click to enlarge: a giant carp called the dragon carp (from the legend that any carp that could climb the cascades at Dragon Gate on the Yellow River in Hunan would be transformed into a dragon), two terra-cotta generals, the downtown Seattle skyline, and two lions.
I enjoyed John Harper’s
original version of AGON, but I never ran or played that version. I’m
quite a bit happier with the second edition. My capsule review would be: “AGON
is as much fun to play as it is to look at. And it’s gorgeous.” A tip of the
helmet to the illustrator and layout artist—oh wait, that’s all John Harper
too, ennit? Well, a tip of the helmet to co-writer/designer Sean Nittner and all
the Evil Hat people and other friends who helped get the game out, then.
I’ve been running two
campaigns, both for six players. Well, seven players if you use AGON’s counting
method, since the ref counts as the Strife player. AGON mentions that the
system creaks a bit with over five players, but both groups have been going
well. It’s possible that it’s working smoothly because neither group has high expectations for speed. The Stormcrusher group
(and no, Zeus wasn’t happy about the name of that ship) has two players who are
entirely new to roleplaying, so explanations and deliberation are a natural
part of the session. The other all-veteran group loves to chew the scenery so
AGON’s extended storytelling riffs have kept everyone entertained.
It’s also true that I’m running
the game differently than I would for fewer players. I’m adding more threats to
the Battle sequence, so that there’s more at-risk even though the higher number
of players makes it more likely that at least one of the heroes will win. I
thought I’d frequently split the party during the Trials stage, but the players
have resisted that, sometimes for roleplaying reasons and sometimes because
they’re metagamers. Instead I’ve spun out separate microstories from the same
challenge with the understanding that some challenges play out over long periods
of time. I’ve also skipped entire phases of the battle and jumped past 50% of
an island’s possible story to keep things on track, but no one has noticed a
problem so although the system may be creaking, it’s not audible to the
players.
Mostly the tone has been
delightfully archaic. I had to suffer through a few installments of the Tales
of the Silently Gliding Prius, the result of asking the veteran crew to
name their ship ‘something Greek,’ but last session, Jonathan Tweet's hero, WEIRDTALKINGKETALOS, failed to prevent a
giant serpent from smashing the Prius to bits, so I’m looking forward to the
next installment of the campaign now known as Tales of the Serpent’s Fang.
