Agon play update

Played another episode of Agon last night. We finished our first island, with a few normal contests followed by an epic battle with Gorgos the giant. I felt that all of us have got a better handle on the tactics required, and the battle was notably harder fought all round.

The game has maintained the fun, although it's still primarily tactical in focus. I.e. we tend to omit scene-setting and in-character chat and move on to the next battle/contest/interlude quickly. I did try to increase focus on the colour this session, because I'm concerned it could turn into just a tactical game, which is not what I'm after. My efforts were only marginally successful, however. This may imply that we don't really need to change anything, I guess. It's possible I should just save up my creativity in this area for the next game (which I'm thinking will be Reign or maybe Cold City)

Lessons learned this week:

• Track divine favour, wounds and glory with counters next time! Also provide some new character sheets to replace the ones destroyed by continual changes to these values.
• The Antagonist gets Strife for all kinds of things, not just interlude scenes. Who knew? Mental note: read through the rules again.
  

More Agon: Isle of Gold 3

We worked through another quest and a half. Still a lot of fun, and our increasing knowledge of how the rules work made this game a bit more tactically satisfying (I even managed to defeat one of the heroes, using a 'everyone gang up on this one guy' strategy).

More Agon: Isle of Gold 2

We played another game of Agon. With a better handle on the rules (in fact, we have pretty much got them sorted now), it was a lot quicker paced. A few little things contributed to this, like a realization that divine favor is really useful and easy to recover. Use of armor this session made a big difference too!

Perhaps too quick - I skipped quickly through roleplaying in a lot of scenes, where maybe we should have played them out a bit longer before going to dice/battle.

On the other hand, the battles were fantastic. They fought ten scorpion minions and then the Obsidian Scorpion in a fairly epic end to the first quest. One of the heroes took a 5 wound in one of these fights, which was a nice warning to the players - everyone was a little more wary after that.

Then they finished that up, sacrificed the scorpion head to Hera as promised, and got the other two quests for this island. They have to keep the Diamond Spear until one of the bandit kings becomes king of all the bandits, and track down a statue stolen from Hera's shrine in the farming village.

The heroes set off to find some bandits and soon did so. The bandits (a number of minions) demanded the Spear and resisted an attempt at reasoning. They were then slaughtered, except for a final three who surrendered.

That took us to the end of the evening's play, so we'll finish those two up next time.

Again, everyone had a good time. Playing a more tactical game seems to be a good change for us.
I think we'll need to focus some more on ujst playing things out next time, though.

Agon Play: The Isle of Gold

We played a game of Agon today, and it went very well. I'd spent my lunchtime hunting down some miniatures, which added significantly to the feel (good work cheap plastic Greek spearmen).

Character generation went fairly fast and gave a solid, brief idea of each character. There's not much to differentiate the starting heroes, but what there is seems important. The achievements section at the end really helped here, as well as giving a quick intro to the conflict system.

Then I dropped them on the beaches of the Isle of Gold, and Hera informed them that they needed to go slay the Obsidian Scorpion for her. I had a couple of other quests sketched, but figured one would be enough for our first session. This one had three objectives - find out where it lairs and travel there being the first two, and the ones that we managed to play through this session.

In any case, our heroes initially split up, one looking for scorpion trails and the others off to talk to local farmers. The hunter turned up some tracks heading towards the mountainous interior of the island. The others found out that the local king had died and a funeral was being arranged. They convinced the town bard to tell them where the scorpion lairs in return for a promise of it's head as a funeral sacrifice for Hera.

The next morning they headed off to cross the mountains to the other side of the island to find the Scorpion. They met a couple of bandits who tried to charge them a toll. We played this as our first combat - they were pretty crappy minions of one of the island's bandit kings, and were rapidly dispatched. Dorothea the Amazon made a point of paying their toll afterwards - putting four copper coins over their dead eyes.

We had an interlude next, mainly so people could see how it worked. Some impairment was removed, and sacrifices were made.

Then we had a challenge to cross the bandit territory - I made this a basic obstacle challenge with a chance of harm. The bandits did some damage to our heroes on the way.

Then they reached the mountains, where a nasty ghost lived. She attempted to ambush them but was defeated - the heroes ambushed her instead. This fight was a lot tougher, and a lot of fun. Two of the heroes took some nasty damage before she was slain with a round of good results and a bunch of divine favour spent to imbue a spear with power to destroy her.

We were getting close to our session end time, so we had a final interlude and finished up. This interlude stood out for the first real use of oaths - one hero compelled another to heal him, and then the victim compelled him right back to be healed.

The combat was a really good level of tactics. There is plenty to do - much we didn't bother with due to it being the first game (like armour, which was totally forgotten for both penalties and resisting damage... so, retroactively, you were all in just chitons and sandals, guys). Everyone got quite into the positioning part of combat (I'm really looking forward to the next fight with loads of scorpions, for more of that action).

As a GM, it's fun to stat out and play the bad guys exactly as the heroes get run.

Lastly, at the end we totaled up legend and deeds for the session and immediately I saw that the competition between players will work well.

Good stuff - Agon absolutely delivered on the promises in the text. We're looking forward to the next one, and once they kill or are defeated by the Scorpion, I'll be interested to see how they deal with the more complex quests that follow it up.

Agon by John Harper

Another new game, this one is set in the mythic Greece of the Iliad and Odyssey. It's also a competitive game, with all the player heroes gaining Glory for every successful roll made (and even for just rolling highest on your side of a conflict).

Character generation is fun, and seems perfect to capture the kind of character that you see in Homer. You get an epithet (with associated bonuses), for example. There's also a section in which you challenge each of the other heroes in a contest of some kind, the winner being owed an Oath from the loser (more on this later).

The basic system is very tight. It seems like it's moderately complex on the surface and has some deeper stuff once you learn it. There's some nicely balanced rules that highlight tensions between succeeding yourself and ensuring the group overall does well (e.g. any time you help another hero, you get a temporary impairment in the ability you used. And they owe you an Oath too, whether they like it or not).

Oaths are a nice touch. If someone owes you an Oath, you can call it in any time to make them help you in a contest, heal you in an interlude or follow your orders in the positioning phase of a battle.

The air of mythic Greece is evoked well, with the stories being essentially parallel to the Odyssey, as your hero band journeys from island to island after the war at Ilium. The gods are present, and they give the heroes quests that must be completed. Monsters and strange peoples inhabit the islands, so there will be plenty to fight.

Your hero will gradually gain fate points, too. These will lead to greater ability in general but eventually you hit the end of them and the hero is retired. What happens to them depends on the amount of glory they earned. They are finalized on the score sheet and you create a new hero. Yes, I did say a score sheet. It's explicit purpose is to record which hero was the best. There's also a sheet for great deeds, so you can keep track of things like the highest roll made, most damage done, etc.

The GM (here, Antagonist) has a big pool of Strife points to build opposition from. There's also a big section on building islands and quests, that looks like it will make Agon a good low-prep option.

Overall, looks fantastic. I spent a lot of time many years ago reading the Iron Crown Enterprises Mythic Greece supplement, and never played it. Well, never very successfully. Agon looks like it should deliver all the things that old game promised by failed to.