Dracula's America-Dagon Rising!

 

Myself and Luis had the seventh and final game in our Forbidden Powers campaign set in the Swamplands of the Deep South. We played this as a one-off campaign not in association with the campaigns in Shadows in the West or the Hunting Grounds sourcebooks. I will calculate Destiny Points for this campaign in case we do move on in the future with another Dracula's America campaign. Although it was not really stated at the beginning of the campaign, I would think that Luis's Cultist Posse represents the Alliance of Chaos while my Nephilim represent the Alliance of Order.

To date Luis had won 4 of the previous games and I had won 2, the Infamy accumulated were quite close with Luis have a 2 point margin. Really though the Cultists were trouncing my Nephilim in most of the games. I believe I really only had one significant victory. The Cultists have much more seasoned veterans who are better equipped.

This scenario was set in a dry area in the middle of a swamp, with Dagon's Pool in the middle with monoliths placed around it. Each posse can claim a monolith with a character using an action utilising one of their grit dice. With a successful throw they can claim it, if the Alliance of Chaos claims 3 of the monoliths then a Minor Servitor of Dagon appears. If at the end of turn 8, if the Servitor is on the table then the Chaos Alliance wins the game. The Servitor can appear anytime after turn 3. Simple enough!

Game Summary

In my recent Saga game, I mentioned that I had incredible dice while my opponent was absolutely abandoned by the dice gods. In our last Dracula Americas game the reverse happened to me to a point where even Luis felt sorry for me. Unfortunately, it was very similar in this game, just terrible dice and yet again my Seraphim once on the table is knocked down by some random event and never gets to engage the enemy. But time to stop whining!

We had 10 characters each, I started in the left lower corner (southwest) while Luis was diagonally across for me. Winning the game was dependent on me not letting the Cult capture 3 on the monoliths. Clearly the one next me should be easy enough to get early in the game, so I sent 3 characters to the east and 3 to the north. I kept Astaroth back with Malpas, who was half dead anyway, as well as the Bokor. I also kept Uzza back but advanced him toward the pool so he could make a run for the SE and NW monolith as need be. I also had to consider trying to win the campaign as the margin was just 2, but knowing that Luis was a much more experienced player, I made this secondary.

Luis advanced his characters to the same monoliths but more to the SE monolith, so I set up the Undead Drifter there on Lookout while 2 veteran hired guns advanced to claim the monolith. By turn 3, Astaroth had captured the SW monolith and in turn 4 or 5 the SE monolith was captured. I was surprised that Luis did not put capturing the NE monolith high on his list. So essentially more than half way through the game I had 2 monoliths and Luis had zero. In turn 6 and 7, Luis started to turn the tables on me and captured 2 monoliths and near the end of the turn 7 was aggressively trying to capture the 3rd. By now I had lost 5 of my characters, although I had killed a minor entity that Luis had spawned as well as banishing a Shogoth that had spawned.  I believe Luis had lost 2 characters including one with an infamy of 4.

I am not sure if Luis had missed it, but he started Turn 8 with only 2 monoliths, so I had won the game as there was no Servitor on the table. A surprising victory as I had not played that well. But the real shocker came in the post game process, Luis's character Mr T with 4 Infamy was deemed killed. He lost these points so the final Infamy total was 39 for the Nephilim and 36 for the Crossroads Cultists. I had won the Forbidden Powers campaign winning 3 out of 7 scenarios. 

I am not sure when we will play more Draculas America as we are moving on to Pulp Alley next. I did go ahead and made a post game Posse sheet for the Nephilim as who knows when they will appear again. Just is case we play another DA campaign I did calculate the Destiny Points. The Alliance of Chaos has 4 for their 4 victories while the Alliance of Order has 5, 3 victories and 2 extra for a campaign win.

I have to thank Luis for setting up this campaign, he really put terrific tables together and he has an amazing collection of figures. It was a lo of fun. In respect to the ruleset, I do find it difficult to play and I continuously made errors and missed things. There is a lot of moving pieces in this ruleset, I think I also found the swamp terrain difficult to navigate as LOS and cover were never very clear to me, but the terrain did look terrific. Playing 7 games over 13 months was really not enough to keep the rules fresh in my mind. Hopefully the next time we play, I will be able to play more frequently.