Last Friday I did not have a Houses Cabal game because we were playing
Lacuna. One of the Houses player wanted to run a one shot of this game and we all thought it would be fun.
If you don't know what Lacuna is, and you probably don't, it is a role-playing designed by Jared Sorenson. The setting is Blue City, a bizarre ever changing world set in the minds of the collective sub-conscious of over 6 billion people. A dream world where nothing is what is seems to be.
You play Agents awaken and trained by
the company to be inserted into Blue City to hunt down and do away with rogue elements casing harm within Blue City. You have no memory prior to being waken up. So this means no backstory, no past drama in your life. You aren't even allowed to pick your own name. One is randomly decided for you. As well as your age and sex (determined by the sex of the player). At first I found this annoying. I like elements of backstory and angst ridden pasts. It's what makes the characters more real, more believable and frankly fun to play. To me this is the most important aspect of the character, any character. It creates depth, motivations, emotions, and it was all taken away from me. But then I told myself, You are playing
Agent Smith, not
Neo. Agents don't have emotions, they don't have motivations. They have the mission and that is all.
The next element of the game is your HP (Hit Points). There is no HP in Lacuna. That's no big deal, a lot of RPG's don't have HP. But they have sort of damage system. Lacuna doesn't have damage per se, because have you even taken damage in a dream? I know I haven't. I've hit my head while sleep waking as I dreamed. But it wasn't the dream that hurt me. Here's the catch, and I LOVE this, Heart rate. Your heart rate is your HP. The longer you stay within Blue City, the more you do in there, the higher your heart rate goes. If you reach your Max Heart rate, well, bad stuff happens to you. I love this because it creates the mood of being up against the clock. That if you don't hurry, you will fail your mission and you may even die. But the act of hurrying up causes your heart rate to increase faster. Thus amplifying the urgency. To me this was the coolest element of the game.
Next is the setting. We didn't get to explore the setting a whole lot, because we were too preoccupied with trying to complete are mission. At first I found the setting a little annoying. Any time you tried to do something, something that interacted with Blue City. Something as simple as trying to get into a car. You have to roll. The act of rolling causes your Heart Rate to increase. The number you got on your dice roll caused your HR to go up that much. So if I roll a 7 to try to get in that car over there. My HR goes up by 7. Oh and failed to get into the car. You need a 11 for all rolls to be successful. But lets say you are successful in that roll. That means your HR still increases. Instead of 7 lets say I rolled a 12. My HR would go up by 12. If by doing nothing in that hopes that the plot finds you, nothing happens. You have to do something to drive the plot. Now I said I love the HR system, and I do. What I found annoying is the simple stuff, the stuff that we normally take for granted in other games are not simple and requirer rolls. We quickly found out that there are no simple actions. But there are no complex actions either. There is only actions. And the physics that rule our world don't exist either. I coined the phrase, "Dream Logic", at the game. Dream logic is the logic is being able to do what you normally can't do in the real world. I could open a door enter a room and then exit the room from the same door and that door doesn't necessarily lead me back to the previous room I was in. I could state that I enter the room in completely different part of town. And I would be there, provided I succeeded my roll. In the real world this is not logical, but in Blue City this is completely logical, hence, Dream Logic. Once I figured this out, the game became a lot more fun.
There are few more elements to the game, but I won't go over them. They are more crunch bits to the setting. All in All I really liked the game. I don't know if I would like for a campaign, but as a one short it was a lot of fun and would play it again if given the chance.
