Batman: A Very, Merry Hellblazer X-Mas

The GM: Jon

The Characters:

Game System: Call of Cthulhu

Game Type: One-Shot GenConCon of the NorthJonCon

Con Teaser::“T’was the night before X-Mas, when all through the night, a creature in Gotham ate all the light. The Batman is absent; our safety must rest, on his six greatest foes? Surely you jest! Meanwhile, Constantine and Blood, sad sorcerers of sin, smoking and drinking all madness and gin.” –Quothe The Mad Hatter

Synopsis:: The Batman has gone missing on an evil night in Gotham. Something has opened portals into the dreamlands. Something old and dark and terrible. Can Batman's greatest foes stop the doom that comes to Gotham? Will they even try? Players take the roles of: The Riddler, Two-Face, Scarecrow, Killer Croc, Posion Ivy and The Joker.

GM Notes: The first incarnation of this game the players were going to play Batman, Constantine, Jason Blood (Etrigan), Robin, Huntress and Zatana. But I realized there was just too much power in that group and the game would lose it's dark supernatural appeal when the heroes just started to fight the mythos creatures. Where is the horror in a big battle? So then I thought of making the players all non powered Gotham figures. Alfred, Gordon, etc, etc. But that seemed dull. Eventually I came to my senses and thought, "Villains!".

The story went through three incarnations. The first was based around an Alice in Wonderland type story. Horrible Mythos events focused around Gotham had similar story ideas to Alice in Wonderland with the Mad Hatter in the midst of things. This was run at Con of the North and didn't work as well as I was hoping.

I changed the story for my next play test. Ditched the Alice in Wonderland idea and focused on the dreamlands. It worked much better.

I ran the game three times at GenCon 2006 to full tables and a lot of praise.

The hardest part about running this game is to keep the villains in line. In the comics, the villains don't kill each off because, well, they just don't! But when you have six hard core gamers running the villains things get nasty real fast!

I think I'll keep this game for a while. I made super cool character sheets (in full color!). I have an eventual sequel: Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham! Which I have not yet written.