| Title | : | Alas Vegas |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1906402175 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781906402174 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 324 |
| Publication | : | Published December 1, 2017 |
You wake in a shallow grave in the desert. It's night. You have no memory of how you got here, or who you are, or the location of your clothes. A scar of neon in the shape of a city squats on the horizon. There are answers there. And trouble.
ALAS VEGAS is a dark journey through a bizarre and terrifying casino city where everything has a cost. Caught in a war between the Rat Packers who run the place, the players must find allies, the truth, and a way to escape. Memories are recovered, secrets are revealed, old debts are settled, and nothing is what it seems.
Your character sheet starts as blank as your memories, but your character gains skills by having flashbacks to their previous life, so as the game progesses their backstory does too - and intertwines with other characters', and with events that happen in the game, creating a complex and twisted story.
The mechanics are based on the casino game Blackjack played with Tarot cards, creating high-tension showdowns, and spinning the game's narrative from the cards that come up in play.
'Alas Vegas' itself lasts four sessions, structured like a high-budget HBO miniseries, leading to a revelatory final showdown. It’s Franz Kafka’s Fear and Loathing. It’s The Hangover meets The Prisoner. It’s Ocean’s Eleven directed by David Lynch. It’s like nothing you’ve played before.
PLUS THREE MORE CAMPAIGNS
ALAS VEGAS runs on the Fugue game system, built to tell stories of characters with amnesia. It uses Tarot cards and rotating GMs to create unique, high-tension adventures, heavy on character and narrative. The book contains ideas, background, and game-running advice by some of the finest RPG designers alive, and three extra Fugue campaigns:
YET ALREADY, frantic time-travel to save a chaotic, collapsing universe, written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan;
WARLOCK KINGS, paladins returned to life as generals of a dark army, by Allen Varney and Johnstone Metzger;
REMEMBERING COSMIC MAN, in which you play two characters: one of a gang of superheroes whose leader has just been found dead, and one of the police investigating the crime, by Laurent Devernay and Jerome Larre.
All the Fugue mechanics are included, of course.
PLUS A HOST OF STARS
ALAS VEGAS also contains articles by some of the finest games writers of the last two decades:
Kenneth Hite contributes a complete stand-alone story-game set in the blood-red heart of classic Vegas, 'Killing Bugsy Siegel';
Robin D. Laws tells you how to use tarot cards to create game narratives on the fly in 'Tarot-Jumping Other Games';
Mike Selinker adds a bizarre casino in which your characters can place bets on their own chances of success in the adventure;
Matt Forbeck details the ins and outs of running gambling games in RPGs ;
Richard Dansky expands the Alas Vegas setting in 'Grifts, Scams and Making it';
John Scott Tynes serves up cocktails in 'The Guide To Drinking Heavily In Vegas';
Eye-popping interior art by World Fantasy Award-winner John Coulthart and Dennis Detwiller;
John Kovalic contributes an exclusive in-game comic strip!
And Sean Smith describes how to... but you have to let us keep a few secrets.
Alas Vegas Reviews
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Bundle of Holding Indie Cornucopia #7
Logline: Characters wake up in a desert outside Vegas with no memories, and the system focuses a lot on flashbacks that both fill in their stories (and relationships) and also fills out their character sheets.
Oh, so this is a comedy like The Hangover? No, it's more a comedy like Mulholland Drive: things are weird in this Vegas and very particularly so. Rather than an open-world sandbox or even a collaborative narrative game (where everyone plays a part in fleshing out the world), Alas Vegas has one story to tell, and as such, I won't spoil it here.
I'll spoil it here: .
There's four chapters to this story, and curiously, the game is structured so that each chapter is meant to be GMed by a different member of the four-person playing group. Why? Not clear on a skim. What is clear is that Wallis has a story to tell and has little patience for players who aren't on board, which seems like a very old-school approach.
Also of note, but probably not related: this was a Kickstarter project that was very delayed.
Did you enjoy it? Yeah, it was fun to read through, the Vegas-themed Tarot cards are amazing in context (and can be seen
here, though less amazing out-of-context).
Would you play it, or any of the additional story games in the book (time travelers, Nazgul remembering their former lives, superheroes and investigators)? Maybe, but more than most times I have to wonder: Why is this a game rather than a novel? -
Un one shot con sistema propio compuesto de 4 partes, preparado para que cada partida la dirija un narrador distinto, y en la que los personajes han perdido la memoria y se despiertan en una tumba improvisada en mitad del desierto.
Una premisa extraña para un juego muy original, en la que la rotación del "master" genera un interesantísimo diálogo sobre formas y recursos narrativos. Una experiencia fabulosa, con un sistema, especialmente de conflictos, un poco mediocre yq eu no acaba de funcionar.
El libro está acompañado de una serie de ensayos y ayudas para la aventura principal (Que curiosamente contienen muchísimos spoilers y nadie debería leerse hasta al menos la 3ª partida) y varias otras aventuras con el mismo sistema.
Una obrá única que disfrutaras especialmente en la mesa de juego. -
Alas Vegas, Alas… A review of Alas Vegas: Flashbacks, Blackjack and Payback, the storytelling roleplaying game in four Acts designed by +James Wallis Wallis and published by Magnum Opus Press/Spaaace.
http://rlyehreviews.blogspot.co.uk/20... -
Esto como juego de rol no tengo cojones a explicarlo.
Como obra me parece la hostia. -
Notoriously late in release after its 2013 kickstarter, this game was always going to have to excel if it wanted to impress.
Alas (Vegas), it does not. The truth the players are set to explore is really not all that interesting at the end of the day, and the adventure reads a lot like some of the worst 90s adventures: overly impressed with the coolness of the writer's setting and NPCs, and not willing to give the actual players any real agency or ability to disrupt things. In fact, the text is frequently dismissive of the intelligence and common sense of the players, with a very adversarial tone.
Mr Wallis is apparently also writing a novel based on the premise. Perhaps he should have just done that to begin with, and skipped the game entirely.
