One thing that's challenging for me about playing over Skype is the lack of face-to-face interaction. Roleplaying itself isn't a problem, because I know the other players so well. It's more that my brain is incapable of doing less than two things at once. So I find myself drawing a lot during our sessions, because I need to occupy the half of my brain that isn't roleplaying.
I did drawings of people's characters during the first session (although sadly one player's character is not shown here because he joined a session later).
That's my character on the left, there. For some reason, I tossed out the idea that Bronka was too poor to own shoes, and that was a total hit. Weirdos. My husband's character is Zodiak, the dumb mouthy kid.
The first session was more introductory in nature, even if a minor character did get killed by the Germans for pretty much no reason.
Chapter Two brought out all new levels of horrible. In our most recent session, we had (in no particular order)
* a burning building full of prisoners who were shot by the Germans as they tried to escape being burned alive
* Mar, one of the PCs, get beaten to within an inch of his life
* A contingent of the home army drowned when they got trapped behind a rockfall in the sewers while our characters listened to the screams from the other side.
* Nena prostituted herself to a German soldier to get information about where Mar was being held. Then later, when she ran into him while trying to rescue Mar, she shanked the guy without saying a word.
* Zodiak, upset that his 13-year-old cousin Teresa was dating Crombie and not him went crazy and raped her. Crombie walked in and when Zodiak attacked him, Crombie shot Zodiak, and ended up killing Zodiak and Teresa by accident.
...The worst was that last scene, where Kit destroyed Teresa just because he could - not even to try and achieve any kind of goal. I did drawings to try to capture the awfulness, and wound up discovering that the captions are almost more important than the drawings.
* a burning building full of prisoners who were shot by the Germans as they tried to escape being burned alive
* Mar, one of the PCs, get beaten to within an inch of his life
* A contingent of the home army drowned when they got trapped behind a rockfall in the sewers while our characters listened to the screams from the other side.
* Nena prostituted herself to a German soldier to get information about where Mar was being held. Then later, when she ran into him while trying to rescue Mar, she shanked the guy without saying a word.
* Zodiak, upset that his 13-year-old cousin Teresa was dating Crombie and not him went crazy and raped her. Crombie walked in and when Zodiak attacked him, Crombie shot Zodiak, and ended up killing Zodiak and Teresa by accident.
...The worst was that last scene, where Kit destroyed Teresa just because he could - not even to try and achieve any kind of goal. I did drawings to try to capture the awfulness, and wound up discovering that the captions are almost more important than the drawings.
It's been a good game, if tough to get through at some points. I'm interested to see what's going to come out of my pencil next session, since these have all been pretty stream-of-consciousness drawings.
None of this is to say that Grey Ranks is a bad game, mind, because it's quite the opposite. It's a very good game. But you definitely need a good group to tackle it.
1 comment:
I know that this is way past, but I was just thinking about the game or Grey Ranks. Looking at the picture of Mar carrying Stefan's body put a sad smile on my face. What a fantastic game.
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