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DORK CONSPIRACY
Dark Conspiracy was released by the now defunct Game Designers Workshop in the Mid 90`s, and to our group who liked mild horror, and had played Shadowrun compulsively for the past couple of years it sounded perfect. A mixture of cyberpunk society and technology, alien conspiracies to take over the earth, and evil horrors trying to destroy humanity.
However the truth of the game turned out to be somewhat different, the combat system used GDW`s standard rule system, which turns out to be a little flawed, which caused more than a couple of problems.
GRENADES, MACHINE GUNS AND DEATH RAYS
The characters we were playing I`ve forgotten, as I have the plot of the adventure, however one scene sticks in our minds. We were standing in an alley at night, when we were attacked by a group of vampires. This in most horror games might be quite scary, however Dark Conspiracy is also a cyberpunk game, so we were armed well enough to invade a small nation.
However, due to the flawed rule system in Dark Conspiracy our armaments turn out to have been harmless enough to distribute to small children. As combat broke out, L`s character fired a grenade from his assault rifles underslung grenade launcher as a called shot against the lead vampires head, hitting. One explosion later, the Vampire is standing there with minor wounds.
Deciding that this may just be a flaw with the way grenades are handled by the rules, R`s character fires a burst from his heavy machine gun, having little to no effect on the Vampires, The vampires then tired of this and ran away, managing to move out of the range of all of our guns within one action (to us this meant they were outrunning our bullets). R later worked out that his own character would require all of the bullets on his heavy machine guns belt to kill (around 400 bullets from an M60 equivalent).
However we weren`t letting these pesky vampires get away that easily, so we sprinted to the end of the alley, and saw the vampires piling into a limousine. L pulled his death ray (an alien weapon that his character had as a starting benefit from being an alien experiment victim), and shot at the limousine, going straight through its armour and killing an occupant, then going through the armour on the other side and the wall opposite. Apparently human weapons were pitiful, but alien weapons kicked ass.
R has been in touch since I wrote this, he seems to remember that the incident with the Grenade was a different encounter, and that it was against a normal human. Which I think only shows even more the puniness of human weapons in the game.
THE FOREST OF INSTANT DEATH
This occasion was during a later adventure, a one shot published in the GDW magazine, Challenge (which at its height was one of the best Gaming magazines ever). I have no clear memories of our characters, except both me and R were playing Androids, hulking powerful alien machines which just happened to look human. We had chosen to play androids, since they could handle more damage than a small tank, and their punches did more damage than a burst from a heavy machine gun. Also K was playing an Empath which filled the group out well, since Androids had no access to empathic abilities at all.
The set up was the group had been kidnapped and left in a farm house in the middle of the country side, and we had to escape. However the adventure made the crucial mistake of expecting the players to be knowledgeable about the game and its background, good at picking up on clues and working things out, and ....well.... competent, something that we most definitely aren`t.
Missing out on the clues that the car in the garage was controlled by a spirit we had to control to move the car, and that the local townspeople were actually various monsters in human form. We ended up escaping by ....err.... walking off down the road (since we had located a map and now knew that there was a major road only a few miles away).
However walking down the road seemed a bit dangerous, me and R decided to walk through the forest which bordered on the other side of the road. The forest we had avoided before since K`s character kept getting flashes from his empathic sense that the forest was dangerous.
Me + R: We`ll walk in the forest, so we can hide in the bushes if anyone is coming, also we`ll be able to see anyone hiding in the forest more easily than those on the road.
GM: You have a bad feeling about it, and don`t think that the forest is safe.
Me + R: We`re only going into the edge of it, we`re not wandering through the deep forest, we won`t even be out of sight of the others.
GM: Make a save against an empathic attack if you really want to go into the forest, you`re being compelled to stay out of it.
Me + R: Errr, we`re androids and immune to empathic attacks.
GM: Okay, as you enter the forest, you get filled with poison arrows, you die instantly.
Me + R: WHAT ?!?
GM: the Dark Elves hiding in the forest kill you with poison arrows.
Me + R: Errr, we`re androids, there isn`t enough flesh on us to be poisoned, we`re pretty much immune.
GM: The adventure says that anyone entering the forest dies instantly from the poison on the arrows, so you`re dead.
Incedentally, everyone else got rescued by a leprechaun who just happened along the road. (Dark Elves and a Leprechaun, in the same adventure made me think we`d stumbled into Middle Earth instead of a dark horror cyberpunk game).
"I SHOOT THE WOLVES"
I wasn`t present for this one, so all of this is second hand, I was working during the day and heading up to L`s for the game that night, everyone else didn`t work saturdays so got together during the afternoon for an extra game.
The Players were C, K and R, with L GM`ing, they had been playing all afternoon, and the adventure was coming to a head with them sneaking into the villain of the stories lair. The main entrance was blocked, but a cave led into it, so they climbed through the treacherous entrance into the cave.
GM: You climb through the thin tunnel, having to go single file as you emerge into a larger cave. The light from the entrance illuminates 30 sleeping wolves, resting throughout this cave, there is an exit at the far side.
K: I`ll sneak across to the exit, trying to avoid waking the wolves {makes rolls and succeeds}.
R: I`ll do the same, but I`ll take a different path, if we`re spread out we won`t alert the wolves too much {makes rolls and succeeds}.
C: I`ll shoot the wolves {makes rolls and succeeds}.
K + R: WHAT ?!?
GM: Okay, you kill the wolf you shoot at, and as your shot echoes out across the cave, the 29 remaining wolves suddenly become aware of your presence and leap to the attack.
Result, party massacred by wolves.
Dark Conspiracy is a game we haven`t played for many years now, for reasons that you should now be aware of, but we gave it a try and had a laugh at the same time.
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