Perilous Tales: Blast the Blasphemous Bog!

Last night I returned to Planet Smasher Games' Perilous Tales after far too long a hiatus; seeing Mr. Martin taking the game for a spin and having some filmed games show up in my YouTube recommendations again got me inspired to give it another whirl. 

This time around, General "Cappy" Boyd and his mercenaries delved deep into the sinister swamp, haunted by the spectre of - VOODOO! Their objectives were to 1) Retrieve the MacGuffin, 2) Kill the Master, and 3) Set the Explosives. So they had to get across into the villain's side of the table, search the terrain pieces for the MacGuffin, plant explosives on three of the terrain pieces (so the cabin, the hangman's tree, and the standing stones) and kill Murder Legendre, the Voodoo Master.

It ended up not going that well for Cappy and his boys - although some of that is due to mistakes on my part as I refamiliarized myself with the rules. I goofed on the first Threat Check of the game, rolling more dice (and thus getting more successes) than I should have, escalating the threat level faster than should have occurred and hampering the heroes with a series of horror checks that they shouldn't have had to make. 

The way things panned out with villain deployment didn't help either - a pair of lingering environmental threats popped up right in front of the cabin and the standing stones, causing anyone who approached to either risk falling down, or being hit by a Skill 3 attack, respectively. The third environmental horror was also right up front, hitting one of the heroes with a devastating Skill 7 attack right before a zombie shambled into him. 

Once the villains started being revealed things started to get real messy. Murder Legendre appears with a giggling, animated voodoo doll that prances around terrorizing heroes (and being incredibly difficult to kill) while Murder holds back in the shadows, and the villains just kept rolling absurdly well while the heroes just didn't. As long as Murder held back near an unrevealed threat marker, zombies kept popping up to threaten heroes, and these zombies were attacking with Skill 5 versus the heroes' Skill 2. Hero after hero went down under the pounding fists and gnawing teeth of the walking dead, though one did run into Murder's assistant - who immediately clubbed him down with a human femur!

The game ended with Cappy trying to plant the dynamite at the standing stones but having two zombies spawn directly in front of him while Murder Legendre watched and chuckled. It didn't go well for Cappy.

I may re-run this one again later this weekend and see if I have better luck with a different arrangement of threat tokens.