AAR: As Thou Commands Fantasy Ed.
After-Action Report for the Megagame “As Thou Commands: Fantasy Edition”
When: Saturday August 6th, 2022 @ Gencon
AAR By: Tony Dougherty
Background and pre-game
I honestly didn’t know much about the game, I sort-of picked it randomly based on its timing! I like morning events at Gencon because it gives you the afternoon and evening free to hang out with your friends and play board games and drink beer etc. What I did know is that I think it's important for designers to play lots of different styles of MegaGames and not just control them. That said, this was my third game I experienced as a player in a MegaGame (the others being Watch the Skies and Den of Wolves).
As it turns out, I ended up learning a little about it from the designer himself, Peter Nixon, when he appeared on the podcast The Great Game. He talked about his experiences running it at OMG Con a few years ago: The Great Game
Interestingly, he describes it as closer to a LARP (but the definition of a MegaGame is a nebulous one at best!) Even so, I think that descriptor highlights the designers frame-of-mind and helps you understand the goal of the game design.
Weird disclaimer time: Peter is one of the MegaGame coalition organizers so he and I worked together to get WTS: New Materials set up this year at Gencon.
Between the podcast and the documentation that Peter sent out before the day, I had a pretty good feel for how the game might go. I know the boardgame “Kings Dilemma” was an influence and knew I’d be representing one of the advisors. With that in mind, I put some thought into what characteristics I might embody to make an interesting game. Knowing it was a fantasy setting I knew there would be magic. I also knew that all those Gencon geeks would be all over magic so I thought it’d be interesting if I was the guy who hated magic and prohibited it in as many ways as possible! I had no idea how that might shake out but it was a good start. Besides, I always feel like the “bad guys” in stories always make for more interesting characters.
I’m splitting this AAR into 2 halves only because that’s very much how the game feels. It has a mechanical beginning which gives way in the second half to “pure” roleplay.
Half 1
At the beginning of the game, we were all brought together around a central table where Peter went through the first steps and initial mechanics. There he began by asking questions about the make-up of this world we are collectively creating - what’s the geography, how old is the kingdom, how does magic work, what races are there, etc. With that, he talked about the first mechanics, where each player at each Duchy (table) “drafts” assets that will make up their individual region they’re overseeing. Once that is done, you place them out on your Duchy map and draw relationships between your assets and the other Lords/Ladies assets - ones that complement each other and ones that go against each other.
Once we were back at our tables, we had to delegate a Duke/Duchess, then select our family crests and our titles. Further down, I’ll post my “character sheet” and how it ended up. One of the best parts of the game is being able to define attributes/customize things. That begins with your character sheet where you get to write some things that are public knowledge about your house. Time to begin my master plan of hating magic wherever I can! For the first bullet point I put “Prohibits Magic”. For the second I put “Pro Church Inquisition'' as I thought that might be adjacent to my goals and for the third bullet I put “Pro Money'' because I had to be able to fund all my extremist views.
After we did a first round of drafting, we put down our first connections (which you have to negotiate with the other Lords/Ladies). On the drafts, I selected “Security and Prosperity” and “Trade Levies”, to which I added some detail along the lines of “Road checkpoints to inspect for magical reagents”. One of the negative relationships I had was regarding how my “well regulated” trade routes had a negative impact on someone else’s desire for free trade which seemed to fit nicely.
I forget exactly the timing of things but essentially, after we’d done that twice, we then went into the “Dilemma” phase. Here, control read out to us something going on in our corner of the kingdom and we voted on it. The most memorable early dilemma we had was around “lewd” pictures being permitted. I decided that the church probably wouldn’t look favorably on that and that we should be concentrating our efforts on putting down filthy magic users and not waste our resources on “art”. I was obviously shot down but I did find an ally in my Duke (a highly pious man).
After the pass/fail result, Control hit us with the ramifications of the decision. He looked at all the assets in play and determined which he thought would be adversely affected by the decision. Those assets would then be “disrupted” and any links stemming from those assets also affected. At the beginning of each turn, the number of active assets and the quantity of links each had determined how much you had to spend on voting that turn.
Between rounds, we were free to walk around and see what other Duchies were up to. I learned that some were throwing parties and some were fighting dragons. I spent my time attempting to find allies (who were hard to find) and I did find a few. Their goals were adjacent to mine but I brought them along to my line of thinking with the rationale “Magic was the cause of the old Kingdom's ruin” and that “Magic should be reserved for the Gods, not wielded by mortals” which brought the Religious zealots to my cause. One of my comrades gave us the Moniker “The Elders against Magic” which I very much appreciated.
The Elders Against Magic
Basically, the game continued like this for several rounds until we’d all received 4 assets and a bunch of different connections. Most of the dilemmas we were dealt with were not super interesting to me and I lost most of them anyway! I was still having fun though.
The Duchy of Verona. I was house Aldona on the far right.
Half 2
What made the second half feel different was the change in dilemmas. Instead of drafting assets, we were now drafting additional connections, extra resources and choose-your-own dilemmas. From a storytelling perspective, this is where the game got way more interesting and I could create dilemmas that forwarded my goals.
The first domino that fell was the dilemma I proposed along the lines of “A goblin caravan has been captured sneaking into our borders with what they claim are magical reagents to sell at our markets. Do we arrest them for illegal smuggling or do we let them continue on to the market to sell their wares?” Obviously I voted for the former and weirdly I had the majority agree with me for whatever reasons made sense to their roleplay (legal trades only, trespassing through hunting forests etc.). When control resolved it (I think it was him), he indicated that they’d be executed to be made an example of. I thought that was GREAT and decided to incorporate that into my story - that Goblins were magical creatures, ergo, they were scum!
My character sheet in it’s final state
What made this particularly spicy was that some players were roleplaying Goblins and worshiping Goblin Gods etc. On the next turn, we had some goblin players come to our table and I let slip what we had done, telling them it was completely legal because they were smugglers. They were not particularly happy with us. I got the impression that they had nothing but positive storylines before they came over to see us (stupid parties on the moon and other nonsense)!
Anyway, when the next turn came, I got another custom dilemma and decide to up the ante. My next dilemma goes like this: “I put forward a proposal to ban all Goblins from our borders and expel any who are already in our region due to their being untrustworthy etc.”. Suffice to say, when the votes were revealed this time, I had way less support than the previous vote but I had thrown my lot in on this one. Everything I had not spent on the dilemmas I didn’t care about previously I was using it all up right now. And I got it passed!
There were some “press” players who were nearby and they were excited to tell me something that was going on. I said “you might want to hear what I have to say first” and I let them have it - I knew it was going to be juicy.
Like a child running to tell their mommy on me, the press guy, forgetting what he came to tell me, hightails over to the goblins to tell them of the news and within 5 minutes, Peter is calling everyone together for a massive civil war - the Goblins and their allies are at our borders!
Peter had the room split into 2, the goblins and their allies on one side of the room and the Elders against Magic and our allies on the other. Suffice to say, we were massively outnumbered; It was probably 4:1 against. The goblins selected champions from each race so they ended up with 4 but we were only allowed 2 fighters to represent the overwhelming odds against us. One at a time they were to play Rock Paper Scissors and the loser would be defeated and replaced with a remaining fighter. We got first blood but lost 2 in a row immediately following. Just like that, the Goblins were victorious - smashing around in our houses and looting our riches. Hearing some of the things they were saying was funny because I was recording everything for when I went to other tables as a harbinger of doom (“they said this when they were looting and pillaging” and “If they can do this to us, then who is next?”)
I was fully prepared to pack up my stuff and move to a more secure region but shortly after the attack, the game ended.
Final thoughts
I didn’t mind at all that we had lost the war. The fact that I was fuel for the fire made for an amazing story. Me and my cronies were the bad guys that the goblins and their allies all rallied against. I talked to the “Goblin priestess” the next day and asked if she was OK with how it all shook out (fearing that I was ruining her fun) but she thanked me profusely for the story because it truly did give her something to drive towards. I think it was her and her friends that initiated the war as a response to my actions.
For the actual game mechanics, I thought they were pretty decent. I love how they gave way to something more story-driven. Peter will be the first to admit that there are some things that need tweaking so I don’t think he’ll mind me highlighting a couple here:
Addition of a turn-order cheat-sheet
Cleaning up/redesigning the player UI sheets (the ones that track income/turns/etc.)
Doing more to interconnect the dilemmas across the kingdom
I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes with these changes, I know he’s already working on them!
As a final thought, you might be interested to know that ATC isn’t a game I would consider running here locally, at least not in the near future. Not because I think it’s a bad game - it’s an excellent game, I just think it requires a certain type of person to appreciate the game and make the game work. Those types of people are in great supply somewhere like Gencon. Locally, we have a good supply of much more traditional gamers who might find it tricky to fully invest. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that I could do in a few years, once locals have played a bunch of different MegaGames and they understand how they work (i.e. player-driven).