7TV Dracula Campaign Playthrough

In case you were wondering why Lucy doesn’t have the usual blonde hair and white nightgown, I wanted her to look like the cover artwork to the 7TV Dracula Episode Guide.

Here are a few more images from Chapter 3 that I couldn’t quite squeeze into the main entry.

In the novel, the heroes face their first crushing defeat when they fail to prevent Dracula from feeding on the innocent Lucy Westenra and eventually turing her into one of the foul Un-dead. Soon after she is supposedly laid to rest in the Westenra family crypt, there is a rash of disappearing children in a nearby village, and reknowned vampire hunter Van Helsing knows who is responsible. He assembles a team of stalwarts from among Lucy’s many suitors to steal into the graveyard, find the missing children, and put Lucy’s soul to rest.

What this means for the game is that there is quite a bit more going on in this scenario. The model count is smaller, with 4 models for the heroes and 8 for the vampires, but each side has to accomplish a lot more that just getting one of their characters to the other side of the board. The heroes get victory points for rescuing the kidnapped children — some have been pressed into service by the vampiric Lucy, while others are locked in crypts scattered across the board. They also score points for permanently removing Lucy from play, a task that is a little more difficult than merely defeating her in combat. Meanwhile, the villains score their points based on how many children go unrescued, plus a large bonus if Lucy’s fiance Arthur Holmwood ends the game with the “bitten” status.

Using print-and-assemble papercraft terrain proved to be a huge advantage in the setup for this chapter. I needed five crypts, and it was an easy matter to just print out five copies to assemble. Even better, the David Graffam PDFs usually come with a fair number of different options for textures and details, so I was able to make each crypt look a little different from the others.

I do find that, while it’s great for solid buildings, papercraft tends to look a little flimsy when used for walls and interiors, so I decided to step up my terrain game just a little by buying some 3D low stone walls (which should be useful in a lot of different games). Additionally, the 7TV Dracula Kickstarter campaign came with an add-on for some gothic walls and pillars. They look great on the table, but after spending an entire weekend painting stone walls I’ll be happy to get back to pre-colored buildings…

I haven’t spoken too much yet about the Diurnal Deck. For those of you unfamiliar with 7TV, it’s a deck of cards that serves as a timer for the game, and also spices things up by introducing a random effect at the start of each turn that can be to the benefit or detriment of either or both players. My opponent won the initiative automatically since she won the previous chapter — her first Diurnal card was “Race for the Setting Sun,” which forces both of us to only give movement actions to all of our models for the first turn. She decided to use that to her advantage by making a beeline for the first crypt — clearly she’s going to focus on rescuing the children rather than engaging the vampiric forces directly.

Another fun wrinkle in this chapter is that each time a heroic character ends a move action near a gravestone, my opponent has to roll for a possible effect. The first such roll produced the “nails and splinters” effect, which allows me to move my Un-dead model closer to the affected hero.

I decided, perhaps foolishly, to try to score the extra points for biting Arthur Holmwood, so my first moves were pretty agressive, moving my Mesmerized Gravediggers in to engage my opponent’s forces while I sneak Lucy around the first crypt to make a beeline for Arthur. Even under a restriction that disallows use of his firearms (must be quiet in the graveyard, after all), Quincy Morris, the heroic Texan, made short work of my Gravediggers, and before long I’m left with only a handful of semi-vampiric children to support my star. No matter, if Lucy can just score one hit on Arthur Holmwood he’ll have the Bitten status, and she can use her “Diabolical Sweetness” Star Quality (a unique special ability) to Dominate Arthur, which means I’ll take control of him, giving a boost to my depleted forces.

I spent a few turns maneuvering Lucy into position, but when I was poised to make my move, my opponent drew the Diurnal card “Red Eyes, Yellow Moon” which prevents all models from using their Star Qualities. Drat! The events in the Diurnal deck had a much more decisive effect on this game than in either of our previous chapters. The restrictions certain cards placed on our turns guided strategy for both players, forcing us to adapt to a changing game environment, and this was also the first chapter where the game ended entirely due to the Diurnal deck running out, rather than by one player decisively achieving their objective.

The game went downhill for me from there, with a series of bad rolls on my part and smart tactics on my opponent’s part wearing Lucy down. In this scenario, when Lucy would be defeated she instead is relocated to her crypt, which she can no longer leave. The heroes can destroy here for good by entering the crypt and destroying her coffin, but seeing that time was short, my opponent elected to focus on rescuing the childrem instead, which landed her a Marvelous victory. She’ll get a head start on her tasks in chapter four, which looks to be an interesting one…

I’m beyond thrilled to receive a Golden Button award for this project! I’ve been watching the Weekender for years but I’ve only recently made more of an effort to participate in the community. Thanks Ben and the rest of the team!

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.

The campaign consists of 5 two-player games, the Agents of Light and Their Allies vs. the Un-Dead and Their Servants. The first scenario concerns Jonathan Harker’s escape from Dracula’s Castle with the help of some Transylvanian villagers.

This scenario takes place in a quaint eastern European village. Luckily I had some papercraft buildings left over from a 7TV game I did several years ago based on the 60s TV series The Prisoner, so the only new piece I needed for this was a church. All the other buildings are from David Graffam Models, and luckily he had a pretty impressive church model available which I was able to print and assemble without too much work.

The original idea was to use print-and-assemble papercraft buildings so I could just throw them in the recycle when we’re done, but I have to admit that so far I’ve held on to everything. We’ll see how quickly I run out of space…

The Kickstarter for this scenario pack provided most, but not all, of the miniatures needed for the scenarios. 7TV has always been a miniatures-agnostic game, and the assumption is that players will already have basic figures like villagers, priests, and the like. However, the overwhelming majority of my collection consists of science fiction characters, so I had to scramble a bit to make up the difference.

These three fellows came from Reaper Miniatures (we’ll meet the fellow on the right in chapter 2). The Reaper figures are a bit larger and more cartoony, but since the conceit of 7TV is that we’re playing out a made-for-television movie, I reasoned that some of the minor characters might have been cast with American comedians in an effort to boost the movie’s appeal in the lucrative US TV market…

For the Transylvanian villagers I borrowed some generic-looking villagers from the Monolith Conan board game.

The scenario is deceptively simple: Jonathan Harker has to get across the board to the river in order to escape. Along the way he can try to pick up objective tokens that will improve his player’s score but also put a game effect into play. These effects start out helping the Dracula player but eventually start helping Harker’s escape.

One thing that made this scenario tricky for the Dracula player was that the Un-dead (his two most powerful characters) couldn’t come within two inches of the church, which was dead-center on the board. It made maneuvering a little complicated, and as the Dracula player I had a hard time keeping up with Harker since my opponent decided to skip most of the objectives and just race for the finish line.

In spite of the Countess Dolingen von Gratz’s best efforts to blockade the river, the kindly villagers were able to keep her busy long enough for Jonathan Harker to escape across the river, resulting in a win for my opponent and the Agents of Light.

The game uses a deck of cards, the Diurnal Deck, to mark the passage of time through dusk, night, dawn and day (important distinctions for a game about vampires) and add an overarching game effect at the end of each turn. My opponent’s victory means that the Diurnal Deck for the next game will have one fewer night card and one additional day card, which will surely be a disadvantage for the forces of evil…