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Okay so now that Mizal's forum game experiment is over, we'll try something else. I'm setting this up since I've been wanting to see how well this will work on here.

Escape The Dark Castle is a CYOAesque boardgame (Well mostly card game) with a set of rules so it's less free form than the mafia/fagpire/werefag stuff we've had on here.

You can probably think of this as a more elaborate version of the forum CYOAs we've had on here, this is just going to have a few more things like stats and such. Really though, you lot won't have to worry about the rules since I'll be tracking everything for you and letting you know what's important, item, events and the like. For extra IMMERSHUN, I'll also be posting pics of the events.

Also for the purposes of this forum, I'll be altering the rules anyway. (Pray I do not alter them any further)

So the premise of the game is you lot got thrown in the dungeon of a Dark Castle and you're trying to escape. (Exactly what it says on the box) You'll go through a series of encounters/events until you eventually get to the boss (Or one of them at any rate). Kill the boss, and you escape. Pretty simple.

Ideally there will be a group of 4 to start with, but there are 12 characters to choose from, so up to 12 people sign up. I'll also be dividing people into groups if there are too many (Can't have 12 of you fuckers stumbling about together) So if there are enough people, I'll be running multiple escape paths (There's more than enough encounters, it's a big castle after all)

Now if we start out with less than 12 (or even less than 4!) that's fine, I can add people later if someone decides they want to participate. They can choose one of the remaining characters and I'll probably have them go through at least 1 encounter by themselves before they can join up with a group.

Dead is dead however, so if a character dies, they're gone for good.

As I said, I'll be mostly writing any encounter descriptions, background, mentioning the choices, and basically being a dimestore GM. I'll also be keeping track of your stats, rules, items, etc. If you want further "crunchy" info during the game, you can PM me.

I'll mention right now though on the character cards: The fist is strength, the eye is cunning and the star is wisdom.

You guys are free to write whatever amusing banter between your characters and amusing backgrounds of your characters, it won't interfere with anything mainly because all of you are going to die no matter what you do.

That's about it for now. Here are the characters. I'll leave this here awhile and see who (if anyone) signs up.

EDIT:

Mara Avery - Tanner

Corgi - Miller

Thara - Smith

Mizal - Hunter

Coins - Butcher

Berka - Mason

Ninja - Bishop

Micro Mizal - Tailor

Enter - Abbot

Cricket - Fletcher

Chris - Cook

Sent - Shepherd

CAN I PARTICIPATE? I like the tanner

Everyone can participate as long as there are victims characters left.

And naturally Mara picked the "hottest" prisoner out of the bunch. She's got the Tanner.

Lol End, You know me well. Stat wise I am more like the Tailor but no way I will role Proper woman the bald. toothless lady. So the tanner at least is young and have tits.

I'll take the butcher. 

Suppose Ill take the hunter 

Please fuck yourself.

I want the Hunter, please.

Smith.

Okay guess Ill pick the crackhead Miller

Boo.

I like the cut of the Mason's jib. Sign me up for that character.

I thank Berka for picking someone nobody else picked and not resulting in a internet fight.

Berka is the scary black man.

Right On Bruthuh!

Tailor please

I'll take the hunter/miller, whatever Corgi didn't pick.

Miller and Hunter were both picked.

Damn thread didn't update fast enough. Abbot Enterpride it is.

Both of those are taken

Okay, that was an unexpected rush of picking characters.

The cook and the shepherd are left.

Fuck it, Shepherd.

Okay so Sent said something in the discord about the Shepherd, so unless someone REALLY wants to be in this, I'll just press gang Sent into this activity if nobody else signs up officially in a few hours. (Though Sent can still sign up officially as well)

EDIT: Nevermind, we got everyone.

Okay, that was quick.

I'll try to at least set up the beginning today and divide you all up. Dividing the groups up into balanced chance for survival is typically the best approach though randomizing it could be amusing.

Also, keep in mind, you lot ARE supposed to be struggling together. Going around trying to kill one another isn't really in the rules:

However I thought about this and if there is some REALLY compelling reason you lot want to make escape even more difficult for yourselves, I'm sure the rules can be altered further since far be it from me to make things less lethal. (I imagine this will involve sneaky PMs to me at some point)

If you're more of the lawful evil sort and don't want to just engage in murder for the shits and giggles, you can still be an asshole to your fellow escapees by not giving them healing items you've found while they're dragging their ass around like a half dead person for example.

Okay, so I've gone ahead and divided the groups. I'll list them here, but I'll also post a pic of the group in the official game thread.

Now there's going to be three threads, because I know people like to talk and it'll be easier for me (and everyone else) if I can just focus on 4 folks at any given time.

Here are the groups.

Group 1

Cricket - Fletcher

Mizal - Hunter

Thara - Smith

Mara - Tanner

Group 2

Coins - Butcher

Chris - Cook

Berka - Mason

Sent - Shepherd

Group 3

Enter - Abbot

Ninja - Bishop

Corgi - Miller

Micro - Tailor

Group 2 was sort of based on all of them being the "old guard" of forum games, so seemed fitting to put all them together. Group 3 are all a little newer here. And Group 1 is for the lols. All of you are more or less balanced though.

Feel free to give your group some amusing name if you want. I'm just using numbers to keep track. All groups are going to pretty much start off the same in the beginning with the intro with the minor difference of the pic with your characters.

Okay, looks like some are already off and running. Unless I get all 4 people answering for a thread, this will probably be the last update of night as far as the game is concerned. I know people got different schedules and such. Already took the pics for the next encounter, so that's set.

EDIT: Wow didn't expect so many updates tonight.

God damn, fucking British timezone! >.<

Yeah, Orange missed out too. End wasn't expecting this to fill up so quick.

But the game moves pretty quickly so maybe once he gets done killing off a group he'll be willing to set up another one for the people who missed out.

Yey! ^_^

@Avery_Moore

There is an opening to play as the Tanner! Respond if you're interested.

Yippie! ^_^

i wish you a lot of fun with my ex character. Hope end not ending triggering you hard as well.

Welcome to Group 1, aka Group Certain Victory.

What happened to the Tanner?

Like I was triggered by End terrible idea to force my character to rape others. I left the game and Briar will take control of the Tanner.

Don't worry. I have no problem raping people ^_^

Lol

In any case nobody got raped, and you can easily get caught up on what's going on by reading the Group 1 thread in CC. The Tanner is just starting to recover from her temporary insanity so personality changes are easily written in due to her ordeal.

Right now we're deciding how to handle getting Cricket's character out from under some collapsed rubble. Rape strictly optional, but probably not super effective in this matter.

She came right off of writing about your character getting horny and grabby without your input to ragequitting over End as the DM doing the same thing to one of hers, basically. Because it's silly and funny in one scenario but horribly offensive and triggering in another exactly like it.

This is why Tristram is a MGTOW.

Very unfair, sad! 

I didn't grab your character at all I didn't rape you either. And suggest that rape victim is a rapist is cruel. If you felt raped you should have told me and I would stop at that moment.

I didn't realize all it took to stop a rapist is to tell them to stop raping.

Mara, we basically don't mind your tendency to throw around innuendo and sex stuff where it really isn't warranted (Well okay some might, but they'll get over it because they aren't CoG faggots) Generally speaking whenever you do it, everyone just goes "Oh well that's Mara." and might make a joke about it, and move on with their lives.

But seriously you can't really do stuff like that and NOT expect someone to start playing as "rough" as you do. (Or rougher I guess in this case)

I mean you had your character stripping off her clothing and laughing about her getting naked along with mentioning you tend to play whore characters. I mean knowing what you know about me AND how I write, what did you expect was going to happen in a DARK CASTLE?

Now I could have just waggled a scolding finger and said "No, you can't do that." because nobody ELSE in the group really wants to engage in sexual innuendo. If anything that's one reason why you were put with 3 other females since I figured it would curb it and I know Thara, Mizal and Cricket are easily able to deal with such things. Before this game even started I was getting various male members saying they didn't want to be paired up with you for fear of getting molested Martha style or whatever.

However I'm not going to automatically say "No you can't do that." because I know how to incorporate actions into the story without it getting out of hand or at least in an amusing/entertaining way. Hence why I wrote it the way I did.

Obviously nobody was going to get RAPED for realisies.

Don't worry I didn't know that it wasa issue. I will never role anything suggestive or similar anymore. This could have solved better if People told me in my face that didn't want play. with me.

If you can get your mind off the RAPE track for a moment, I'm just pointing out that writing about someone else's character having sex with yours without asking them first, then doubling down on it when they say 'no, that didn't happen' has nothing to do with rape at all, but it can be a little creepy and uncomfortable. And regardless, I know you've roleplayed before (at least that's what I gathered while you were telling us repeatedly how there's no point to RP unless all the characters are having sex and that we're all BORING NUNS, etc) and so I'm sure you realize that among Serious Role-playing Faggots it's like the ultimate no no to dictate another character's actions.

But in that case no one made a big deal of it because the thread was silly and fun. Now we're on a second silly and fun thread and you decided to quit because something similar happened to your character.

Now if I were really in the mood to argue I'd point out it's REALLY not even all that comparable in this case, because we have dice rolls determining everything and it's a given going in that the DM is going to sometimes describe how events effect our characters. End was playing off events that were already happening in an amusing way--the tanner ripping off her shirt and the hunter running away in terror over his celibacy vow.

But you said you wanted to quit after that and that was fine, no one stopped you or criticized you over it or expected you to justify your reasoning at all, and that seemed to be the end of it. But now it's got to be a minor scene on the forum too I guess, so here we are.

It can get a little frustrating...and tiring...and bewildering... how one moment everything is funny with everyone joking around and then next somebody is all caps screaming with no indicators and nothing at all in between. This seems like a lot of unnecessary stress when all anyone is trying to do is procrastinate and bring about the unholy resurrection of Forum Games again in our plague-induced boredom and madness.



E: blah blah whatever, everyone made up of screen now and is bffs again

It would be cool if we could join up with the other parties, as we got killed off and our numbers thinned out.

Tbh restoring our group numbers like this may be the only way anyone makes it to the end at this rate.

Well I had fun.

In case anyone is wondering, the game was actually made less lethal since you were getting more choices than average with some of those encounters. Plus in the original game, if ONE person dies, then everyone loses automatically. 

Most of you did way better than expected. G1 did the best having managed to at least reach a final boss. Even extremely divided by that point, they almost escaped. A little more group unity would have worked in their favor, in fact I knew I was going to have to be a little more active in trying to divide them.

The first major opportunity was trying to get them to kill off the Tanner (or leaving her) by emphasizing what an unpredictable element she was. The blood chalice seemed to be a pretty good way to do that, though nobody jumped at that idea unfortunately.

Then the guard showed up and given what a moralfag Mizal’s character was playing, I figured it might be better to focus on Thara and Cricket and encourage them to kill the guard for extra life especially since Thara’s character was almost dead.

That worked out pretty well since Mizal started toying with the idea of leaving the group. Just in time too since they encountered the Witcher, who was going to make their party even stronger. (Or so we ALL thought) I of course encouraged that she should follow her RPG desires and that it would be no problem for me to run the Hunter separately. G1 was pretty strong, splitting them up was definitely the way to go.

Happily the dice took care of the Witcher pretty quickly and bad card draw fucked up the Hunter. As soon as she lost that ability to use the axe, Mizal was pretty much a walking dead man at that point.

The rest of G1 was still pretty tough though, I sort of thought they still might make it, but then Cricket hilariously started backstabbing everyone at the end by abandoning Thara completely and not even giving Briar a potion to assist her in the final battle (Might not have mattered, but still.)

G2 and G3 I was less concerned about. After Berka killed himself, I figured G2 wasn’t long for the game, but some good rolls and card draws helped them out very well. G3 kept muddling back and forth through mediocrity though I’d say after losing Corgi and Ninja getting saddled with the curse that made him fight all the time probably was the beginning of the end for them.

Going back to G2, I didn’t expect them to get the Spirit twice (Let alone so quickly) and given Mizal’s character had met a spirit in her recent encounter, I figured it would be a good opportunity storywise to unite them. This also ended up tying into a story idea I suddenly got with the Fletcher a little later.

When Mizal took over as the Tailor, she probably made the opposite mistake she did as the Hunter. I checked the rest of the deck she would have had to go through alone and it was vastly easier than joining G2 (which still had more encounters due to them back tracking) She didn’t even have any major combat encounters, they were all skill tests and in one case, it was just item draw. 

Not sure if she would have defeated whatever boss she might have picked up, but I believe she probably would have at least reached it.

G1 was dead at this point and I was going to have a gloating epilogue specifically for Cricket since she’d behaved so delightfully treacherously. But then looking at the Fletcher’s card and the Spirit, and I thought “They look a bit similar, and G1 never interacted at all with the other groups, this will work if it happens.”

So when Mizal joined G2, I figured it would be perfect to have the Spirit actually be the long dead Fletcher still “helping” others, but not actually doing so in the long run. Bad card draws and dice rolls worked out in this regard.

Thanks for running this End! ^_^

This was a lot of fun. Thanks End.
No ragrets.

Same here. No rugrats. ^_^

While unlucky with the encounters, group three was lucky to have the best characters around and Cassandra. Thank you for running this, I really enjoyed it.

Meant to ask everyone, did people like the card artwork?

I know that was one of the big draws for me to get the game. I'm old so I grew up with that late 70s-early 80s crude fantasy drawing artwork you'd see in old RPG books or metal album covers.

It's disturbing in an interesting way, and fit the mood of the supernatural dungeon abandon-all-hope maze. Probably more accurate than most fantasy artwork out there, too, in that the characters seem real (if slightly exaggerated in grime and grit) and not everyone is a 9-10 in hotness. They drew my eye, though I was too late to join in the shenanigans, so I read some of the adventures as they were going on and was amused.

I did! ^_^

I really enjoyed the artwork, the encounters more than the characters. I mean, look at these two cannibals. One is a straight-up mix between a Soviet war machine with no neck and a Maori amped for battle with that crazy look going on. The other one is what the crackhead Miller would look like in several more years; he looks like a living skull.

Same. I was indifferent to the characters, but the encounter artwork was gritty and cool and full of personality in a way that really defined the game. Reminded me of the black and white sketches you used to come across as illustrations in paperbacks.

And I appreciate it now more than ever any time I come across art that just looks like something someone drew instead of some slick overproduced shiny thing.

Yeah, definitely old-school pen & ink going on there!

It really added a lot to the grimdark setting, I enjoyed it.

I didn't care for the characters themselves too much, since aside from maybe the Abbot and Mustafa, they didn't have a whole lot of personality and all had the same sort of gaunt expression. It was hard for me to tell pictures of people apart if they weren't on my team and I was looking at them more often. Though I suppose a little less personal identity is the point of the whole grimdark struggle thing.

I did love the encounters, however. It knew how to be gross and evocative, and the crude aspects gave it a sort of primal 'realness' that you don't see a lot nowadays because everything uses cartoonish lines and shapes to look cool nowadays. I would buy one of those big lumpy barrel-chested minotaurs beating the shit out of your typical stylised Superhero Body with a Cow Head more than the other way around.