This is Day Three of a five-day series of posts about Lost Fools of Atlantis that I’ll be releasing weekly on Wednesday.
Each post examines an aspect of the game or introduces new rules.Lost Fools uses the Balance Engine, which I designed to be easily adaptable to other settings and the foundation for future games.
To playtest the adventure in the rulebook, I (as Game Moderator), Adrian (Mister Green) and Tony (Merlin Lovecraft) took it for a spin over three two-hour sessions.
Below is the quick session reports I typed up and posted on the D101 Discord Server, on the Lost Fools channel (see d101games.com for a link to the server).
Session Zero
Morning playtest of Lost Fools of Atlantis over. Session Zero explaining the system and setting to the players and running a quick encounter to explain the rules. All seamlessly and effortlessly done on Role VTT (playrole.com) – which players thought was a good fit for the game.
Notes: The quick encounter was scene 1 of the adventure. The book was used as a script for explaining the game, especially the initial predicament that the Avatars find themselves in. Players took it all on board quickly and created Avatars easily enough.
Adrian played Mister Green,
Presentation: You just don’t recall. His appearance slips past your consciousness without leaving a trace.
Faction: The Old Ones +1
Golden vision of Atlantis: Power from the pyramid which rules all +2
Origin: Master of Acquisitions for The Eye +2, Power level 0
Methods
- Getting into places and things+2
- Climbs like a spider+2
- Knife fighting +1
Cover: Government Agent +2, Power level 0
Methods
- Convincing ID +2
- Access to records +1
- Black Ops +2
Tony played Merlin Lovecraft
Presentation: Tall, thin, and creepy
Faction: The Old Ones +1
Golden vision of Atlantis: Centre of the universe +2
Classes: Origin: Arch-Magus of Cosmic Knowledge +1, Power level 0
Methods
Cosmic Knowledge +3
Sipstrassi Stone +1
Handguns +1
Cover: Occultist +1, Power level 0.
Methods
- Deductive Reasoning +2
- Occult Books +2
- History +1
I used Professor Smithers (see Lost Fools, page 134) to provide a Villain for the adventure. He also came out of the cryo-tubes at the same time as the player characters, so he’s sort of a peer to them. Over time, I plan to have him as a recurring Nemesis.
Session One
More playtesting yesterday, as the gang and I started an adventure called The Bosworth Incident. A bit of a chatty session, but we knuckled under and ran the first couple of scenes – leaving the underground lab on Friesland where the Atlantean characters had awoken and being teleported to Leicester, UK to find the body of Richard III (an Atlantean of great promise killed in inter-factional fighting during the Wars of the Roses) in a car park. Much skulduggery ensued with the main reward, being the dubious honour of finding the Head of Richard III and bringing it back to life in a Head Jar, a technological wonder given to the party by the boffins back, and the next session will see the characters head off to the site of the Battle of Bosworth, to find the rest of Richard’s skeleton.
Session Two
Guided the reanimated head of King Richard, who thought his body lay where it fell on Bosworth Field, but Tony’s character (Merlin Lovecraft) stuck his hand on the king’s head and, using magic, guided the car to where the body had actually been dumped – up in a place called Richard’s Well. The actual well-being long conspired over, Adrian’s character (Mister Green) quickly whipped out a package of C4 left over from his days as a globetrotting assassin and blew it up! Merlin simultaneously threw together a Dome of Quieting spell from his Book of Cosmic Knowledge. This did muffle the sound so that normal mortal folk, like the army patrolling the area after reports of a UFO crash in the area, didn’t hear anything. But a group of rival Atlanteans, led by the criminal mastermind Professor Smithers, did hear and zoomed in above our hero’s fleeing car in their flying saucer. Battle ensued with Professor Smithers trying to pull up the smart car into his ship with a tractor beam controlled by his mind, and our heroes shooting at him to distract him. Which they did successfully, despite him dropping henchmen from the saucer onto the car to slow it down. Victorious the party zoomed off back to where they had started, just outside the carpark where they had found Richard’s head, and their contact Francis, opened the Portal back to the Atlantean base on Frisland. After teleporting back to the underground base there, the scientists successfully put Richard back together, ready to go back into the field.
A fun game, where lots of rules got tested, and a few tweaks got applied.
Next Wednesday, the Day four, Hacking the Balance Engine.
Has this post piqued your interest in Lost Fools of Atlantis?
