Aeon Trespass Odyssey

I had my first “normal” battle in this session. It played out much faster this time as I only had to look up a few rules.

ATO has some interesting combat mechanics that make fights escalate, rather than having your fighters wear down.

Each Titan has a rage stat. It goes up by one very time they attack. If it reaches 9 they die, but up until then it unlocks more combat abilities as the fight progresses.

Similarly Titans have a fate stat which starts at zero. They can re-roll dice during combat which also increases the stat. Again if it hits 9 they die, and many monster attacks are more powerful when they target a Titan with fate above a certain value.

Finally Titans have danger, which replaces a hit point mechanic. The monsters hit the titan and raise the danger level. Then you draw a trauma card depending on your danger level. Half the cards are bad while half are good (i.e. a flash of insight lets you look at the top card of the monster AI deck). When your danger is above 9 the deck only has two cards. One is you live, the other is you die.

The result of these three mechanics is that your Titans get more dangerous in the later stages of the fight and it actually accelerates the pace of battle.

In the end I lost one Titan. My poor “tank” was killed just one round prior to the monster falling.

I re-arranged the gaming table. My four Argonauts each have a stand I made from fibre-board. I glued matchsticks to them to create small shelves that cards can sit on. These are placed at the back of the table and I can see nearly all their stats very easily without loosing table space. All the cycle 1 cards are now out the box on the table too.

As I was playing the narrative sections I came across and event that instructed me to add a new event to the cycle 1 random event deck. This was odd as the card was already in the deck. It wasn’t until about 30 minutes later when I was going through my first story adventure that I realised where I had gone wrong. At the very end of the tutorial I somehow missed the instruction to get the main campaign story card out. This had instructions to setup the random event deck with a very specific subset of cards. The rest get added later as the story evolves. This explains how in my last session I drew and encounter with the end of cycle boss. That card should not have been there. The deck is fixed now but I’m not going to try and undo the stuff I’ve done wrong. It’s all part of the story…

Exploration of Crete is now well underway and the monster that will be chasing me around the map has arrived. Just like last session, the map exploration mechanics were all new to me so I was doing it quite slowly. But I’m sure it will speed up as I learn from my mistakes and find the best way to ensure I don’t forget stuff.