7TV Dracula Campaign Playthrough

In Bram Stoker’s novel, the ill-fated Demeter arrives in the sleepy fishing village of Whitby, its crew missing and its only passengers a horde of rats and a giant dog the leaps off into the night. For 7TV Dracula this chapter is a bit more action-packed, with heroic customs agents facing off against vampire sailors and reanimated corpses in addition to the aforementioned wildlife.

The goal of the scenario is similar to chapter one, except this time the forces of evil need to get their main character, The Great Dog (a transformed Dracula), across the board to safety. To assist, the Dracula player has a selection of undead sailors and two swarms of rats.

I went with papercraft buildings again, and while the scenario rules made allowances for a flat board, I decided to construct a multi-level board as close as possible to what is pictured in the scenario book. Most of the buildings and the ship, as well as the grass and rock textures, are from David Graffam Models again, with the docks and dockside buildings coming from Fat Dragon Games, all PDFs by way of DriveThruRPG.

I was able to use stock Crooked Dice models for the policemen (moonlighting as customs officials), and most of the sailors (painted up to be more vampiric), with Reaper again making up the difference by providing a larger-than-life Harbormaster and Chief Customs Officer, plus a small horde of zombie pirates. The Great Dog and the rat swarms are the only models in this chapter that are specifically from the 7TV Dracula Kickstarter.

In theory, all the Dracula player has to do is get the Great Dog from the ship to the other end of the board. However, the 2×4 board means that the dog has more ground to cover than Jonathan did in Chapter 1, and the multi-level nature of the battlefield creates several bottlenecks moving from one level to the next.

Another huge disadvantage is that a large portion of Dracula’s forces start at the very edge of the board, in water that slows their already slower than average movement. by the end of the game I had barely managed to get the zombie pirates to the center of the board, and none of them had actually done anything other than move. I must admit, however, that this problem may have been at least partially of my own making, as I chose to set up the docks part of the board a little differently than what was pictured in the rulebook.

The Agents of Light player started with all their forces at or near the center of the board. My opponent made short work of the two rat swarms, and was able to stall the rest of my forces at the bottleneck where the dock meets the land. The Harbormaster has an ability that allows him to place obstacles on the board, and unfortunately a misreading of the rules for moving past obstacles made this a much bigger impediment than it should have been.

Eventually it occurred to me that the Great Dog could just jump from the beach, but it was a little too late. The dog made it past the blockade, but then got mobbed by villagers, although he did manage to take a few of them out before his ignoble end.

As a reward for my opponent’s victory, she’ll have the initiative at the start of the next game, and one of Dracula’s co-stars will be delayed by a turn in chapter 4.

While I think this chapter was a little difficult for the Dracula player, I do have to concede that a lot of that was probably user error on my part, and we both enjoyed the game in any event.