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Pete
United Kingdom
Oxford
Oxfordshire
Brofist
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox
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I played Montsegur 1244 over the weekend at IndieCon, a convention held annually on the south coast of England.
A Quick Overview of the Game
Montsegur 1244 is a collaborative, GM-less, fortune-less story game in which players take on the role of adherents of the heretical Cathar faith that are holed up in the fortress of Montsegur by besieging Catholic crusaders. The game progresses through four Acts, starting with the assassination of a Catholic Inquisitor at the hands of the Cathars, through the early stages of the siege, and ending with the fall of Montsegur. When Montsegur falls, the principal characters have one of three possible fates: at most one character can slip away quietly into the night, to renounce their heretical beliefs and live, and at least one character can stay true to his or her Cathar beliefs and burn.
The progression through the Acts of the siege provides a colourful backdrop and situation for the individual stories of the Cathars to play out against. There are twelve playable characters in Montsegur 1244, and with 5 of us playing we each had one principle character and 2/3 secondary characters. The extremely limited scene economy means that you are pushed into narrating punchy scenes that tell the story of your principal character.
The game provides story support by doling out Scene Cards to players, one at the start of each scene. Each Scene Card contains a bit of colour such as "torches in the night" which you can choose to incorporate into your scene narration. At the end of your scene, the scene card becomes a unit of currency that you can cash in during the narration of another player's scene in order to assume narration rights. This requires some trust from the other players, but we found it to work well enough considering that we were playing with folks that most of us had never gamed with before. The game also doles out Story Cards at regular intervals: Story Cards describe an event or the introduction of another character, examples of which include things like "An Inquisitor Arrives", "The Holy Grail", and "Witchcraft!" These Story Cards are great fuel for the imagination, and can be used to take the story in unexpected directions.
The Actual Play
So on to our game. I facilitated the game, supplied the game board, cards and reading matter. I'd never played before, and was motivated to run Montsegur 1244 based on reading some awesome AP reports on Story Games. I'm not keen on folks who just facilitate games, so in addition to facilitating - which was easy - I played too. Yay! The principal characters were Garnier, Pierre, Phillipa (Alex F), Arsende (Graham), and Cecille (me). Cecille are Arsende are at different ends of the spectrum with regard to their role in the community, so there was friction there from the get go. Pierre, Phillipa and Arsende also have a love-sex-hate triangle built in, so we had plenty of fuel to burn.
I'll cover our story briefly, because I don't much like reading long "What Our Characters Did" posts. Arsende took the story straight to sexy stuff, convincing young Esclarmonde to seize life's flickering opportunities by sleeping with Garnier. Cecille's story was all about filling the heads of the younger women of the community with the glories of Heaven such that they walked down the mountain trail to be burned for their beliefs before the fall of Montsegur itself. Smoke and the stench of burning flesh thus hung over the castle for many days prior to the fall. Arsende did the right thing by her wards, the orphans Faye and Amiel, by surrendering them to Cecille. Faye sadly was sent down the mountain trail clothed in white to burn, and Amiel was racked and burned by the play of "The Inquisitor" Story Card. It was tough being an orphan in this game. Cecille denied Arsende Consolamentum in the final Act too. Such a bitter defeated old woman. Pierre renounced his Faith, Cecille burned, Garnier burned, Phillipa burned - er, I think, darn, can't remember -, and Arsende renounced her beliefs and in her final narration wandered into the Crusader camp to sell her flesh which was a rather depressing "life goes on" denouement. Great!
Thoughts
I had a good game. It wasn't an awesome game like the AP reports I'd read. I was a bit divorced from play, mainly because I'd never played a fortune-less RPG before and I was in detached observer mode. The other guys used the narration-right-stealing Scene Cards and Story Cards to good effect, whereas I didn't use even one. They work well. I thought some of the scenes dragged on a bit because of some "let's explain how we get to the start of the scene" preambling. I'll be more explicit about framing aggressively next time I think. Also, the more LARPer-ish players defaulted into acting out the emotions and dialogue of their characters which wasn't a play style I was expecting. I'm not an actor, so I just said my dialogue and narrated stuff like "Cecille looks scornfully at you, her thin body shivering in the winter wind" and suchlike. Different strokes for different folks I guess. I liked the device of reading out a small page of text at the start of the Acts to communicate the setting. I haven't read text out loud for an audience since high school. It was also, um... interesting to listen to some folks struggle to read certain English words. I don't know what to make of that actually. Funny odd.
I'd love to play Montsegur 1244 again. The situation, themes, colour and characters are gold.
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The Harnish
Germany
Duisburg
NRW
Cult of The Harnish Leader
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Montseguar 1244 was the other game running in the Sunday morning slot that I really wanted to play in but I was already signed up for Lady Blackbird.
I had a LARP-like game the night before (Landston), which was my first experience with that style of play (at least so explicitly) and I had a ball with it although it did take a bit getting used to. 
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Richard
Greece
Marousi
Athens
RPGGrEEK Guild, γινετε μελος εδω:http://rpggeek.com/guild/1256
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I am pleasantly surprised that someone has written a review on RPGG.
Today I listened to a brief review on the ''Have games will travel'' podcast and it sounded very depressing and very interesting (like several story-type games  ). Wishlist 1.
edit: How is the board implemented in the game?
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Pete
United Kingdom
Oxford
Oxfordshire
Brofist
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox
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Hi Richard
Boards of Games wrote: How is the board implemented in the game?
Here's a picture of the board that I uploaded earlier.
The "board" is composed of 4 individual A4-sized boards that you place together. You need to print out the board yourself, using freely downloadable content provided by the author. I printed mine onto nice thick paper, then lightly glued each board section onto really thick cardboard, and finally I laminated the board sections. The board looks good, and takes up ~roughly~ the same amount of table real estate as your regular Monopoly board.
In terms of play, the right hand side of the board is used to track the progress of the game through the Prologue, Chapters, and Epilogue. I use a chess "rook" piece to indicate the current chapter, which unfortunately I neglected to include in the photo I took. The right hand side of the board also includes two small "slots" behind each of the chapter banners where players can place story cards as they are played. This works, in that everyone can see how many free slots are left per chapter into which to slot a story card, and you can always see what story cards have been played.
The left hand side of the board is broken into two sections: one has slots for the scene and story cards, and there are also slots for the face-up scene cards. This section of the board works in that it keeps all of the play pieces together. The bottom half of the left hand side of the board is a map of the besieged castle and its surrounds. It's black lines on dark green though, so that didn't print out too well... it's really difficult to see what's on that portion of the board. In play, we placed the reading cards on here, just because we could. It's a bit of dead space really.
So yeah, the board is okay. Certainly you could play without it, but it's nice to have, and it looks polished - especially if you take the time to create a laminated thick card version like I did.
I hope that answers your question, cheers!
Pete
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Richard
Greece
Marousi
Athens
RPGGrEEK Guild, γινετε μελος εδω:http://rpggeek.com/guild/1256
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Thank you!
You did a great job again
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Brofist
