Players: Caroline, Ben, and Collin
When and Where: Thursday January 20, Gamma Ray Games

Alien signals have been transmitted to the international space station. When the earthlings start broadcasting back the aliens panic, freezing everyone aboard in stasis, including the beautiful Julie.

As Earth ponders this mysterious occurrence, the seemingly young Adam Carter begins to suspect the truth--his alien race has returned for the first time since the days of pyramids and Pharaohs. Adam is actually Seker, a god banished to an eternity of loneliness on Earth.

Earth is invaded and one year passes, seeing the destruction and strip-mining of most of the planet's surface. When we find humanity at the precipice of extinction. Only rag-tag groups of humans survive. One is being led by another outcast god, Osiris. Osiris isn't content to see his brethren occupy and control Earth--he wants it for himself, regardless of how broken it now is. With his obsession Julie in tow, he attempts to raid the enemy base, but the group is suddenly captured by a rival gang of humans who have their eyes on Julie. We sort of drew the veil over that one.

We fast-forward to the alien ship where Seker has been taken prisoner and is awaiting his sentence. His friend Phase is shapeshifting among the viewers, awaiting an opportunity to save him. Seker has become so much of a human that his counterparts see him only with disgust. Although Phase manages to free Seker from the bonds that hold him, Seker dismisses him as a lesser being--someone not capable of helping anyone, much less the great Seker. Although Phase is hurt, he saves Seker from the death-blow of the Cosmic Judge and carries him back down to Earth.

As we fade to black we see that Seker, lying peacefully in his friend's arms, has been dealt a heavy wound. And yet there is a smile on his face as he says "At last, I am finally human."

It was my and Collin's first time playing Capes and I gotta say, the mechanics were very confusing for me. It took several trips around the table for me to sort of get the hang of it, but even by the end of the night I still don't feel like I mastered the basics. Clip-and-lock rocked, but the dice and the chips and the story coins were a bit overwhelming. I feel like another round of the game could produce more role-playing as the mechanics became more fluid to the players.

Maybe it's just the way we played it, but I think Capes might have a tendency to create somewhat disjointed games if you aren't used to the system. I felt like we were sort of hopping around, which was fine, it just makes a write-up difficult :)

Great game everyone! It's always fun to try something new, and I want to give a shout-out to Collin for diving right in. I had a great time and I hope everyone else did as well. I think we should integrate craft-time into all our future games!

"Decrypting first discovered radio signals from another planet. Message appears to be in ancient Babylonian."

I forgot to do it, but I meant to set up a dichotomy of the returning "judgment" space gods using Babylonian names, versus the outcast terrestrial space gods who had Egyptian names, just to make Pat happy. But otherwise we're 2/2 for meeting the demands of absent players.

I really liked the story we put together. Very Kirby New Gods / Eternals feel. Space gods! Ancient Astronauts! Cosmic superheroes as living myths!

- Big kudos to Collin for fast-forwarding a year and wiping our society as we know it. That's how you play story games!

- For Seker dissing Phase, I was going for more of a "I'm the big brother, you're the little brother, you shouldn't have come here because you're only going to get hurt, I can handle it without you" vibe, but the atomic speak / roll of Capes breaks up the flow quite a bit and makes it hard to get those kind of ideas across sometimes. The "tell us what Phase is feeling?" moment was excellent, and made that whole scene work for me, but again, that was us choosing to break the rules of Capes so we could explore the good stuff.

- I loved Osiris, just the whole idea that there were bad guys exiled on Earth as well opened up so many possibilities. I totally wanted to go back and dig into the millennia of rivalry between Seker and Osiris (yeah, I'm seeing a whole Microscope game here).

As far as Capes goes, like you said Caroline, I can't help but wonder whether the system held us back more than it helped, or whether we would have been able to do even more with our ideas with another system. There were definitely times when I think we would have been happier just free roleplaying the interactions and not using the dice, or (like most systems) saving the dice for conflict resolution, instead of resolving conflicts in micro-increments during the whole scene. In hindsight I probably should have drawn a big diagram with the nested scene-page-action-reaction loops to make it easier for you guys (yes, that's four nested play order loops). As soon as we got caught up in the story (i.e. having fun) it was too easy to lose track of where we were in the rules.

We didn't use some of the really fun parts of Capes that much (like stealing characters other people previously played, or introducing new characters in the middle of scenes), but I think that's because absorbing the basics was taking everyone's brain power. I was really hoping someone else would steal Seker and play him in that last scene, but when no one did I had to bring him in.


(I'm already brainstorming games that would involve more craft time. But good craft time, not evil craft time. Nobody likes evil craft time.)