Tales from Dreaming Spires #1

It's a fact about RPG events that it's entirely possible to find the entrance to somewhere you've never been before, just by arriving at the right time and following the trail of nerds.  This successfully got me through the door of the East Oxford Community Centre, and from there there were plentiful people in t-shirts to guide me.  I am loving the t-shirt trend.

This is the first time I'd attended an event with advance game sign up.  I was quickly directed to the table for my morning game.  A poster with the game name was up by the table, and a print-out with a list of names was on the table.  There were also pencils and post-its.  All very well organised.

The room itself was split in half with a set of dividers, with I think three tables on each side.  Round tables, which I consider vastly better than the usual long thin ones (not that venues give you any choice in the matter, in my experience.)  It was a little on the noisy side and I wonder how that could be reduced.  The Northampton event was quieter - could it be down to the gaming mats covering the tables?  Could the same be achieved with some paper tablecloths?

Game 1

My morning game was Sainted London - a game of supernatural horror in Victorian London.  I tend to sign up for things at conventions that I don't get to play elsewhere, so the setting was definitely of interest.  I love the Victorian setting, and I've run two campaigns of Victoriana before, but as the person in our home group who normally runs the weird games, I've never got to play in it outside of convention games.

This was a brand new game, still in playtesting.  The system is interesting.  At its heart is the same 2d6+skill with target of 8 that I've recently encountered in Liminal, but there are sub-systems for combat and magic, and an entirely different way of representing injuries.  It all works, and is put together in a thematic way.  My only concern is that it does require a hell of a lot of dice.  My combat pool was nine d6s in three different colours, and if I'd used my magical abilities I could potentially have needed two full sets of polyhedrals as well.  The GM was prepared, with enough dice for everyone, but I wonder how many people are prepared for something that dice-heavy.

Setting-wise though, I loved it.  It's an alternative history version of London, where religion has changed significantly and magic is both real and frowned upon.  What I feel are the key themes for a Victorian setting - things like class inequality, and the general technology level - remain intact.

The adventure we played through had us looking into not so much a mysterious death as a mysterious corpse desecration.  We didn't have all the answers by the end, but we had stopped a cult from wiping out most of London, so overall I'd call that a win.  All our characters had motivations beyond what we were sharing publically, which made for some interesting roleplay.  The GM told us our character's backstories privately before we began the game; I would have liked to have a handout to refer to as well, as my brain functions a lot better with both, but it was enough to inform how I played the character.

Overall a game I'll be looking out for, although it's possible I might ditch parts of the system in favour of something a bit less dice-intensive.

Timings were odd for the day.  Morning games ran 10.30am to 2.30pm.  Afternoon games didn't start until 4.30pm.  Cowley Road has plentiful eating establishments, but given the vast pile of bacon I'd been fed that morning, I decided to go for something a bit lighter and bought some food in Sainsbury's instead.

I filled up the remaining time with a chat with a fellow larper (although not one I've ever played with) and a visit to the historical weapons display.  There was a fair bit going on besides the RPG tables at this event, with a miniature painting stall and apparently some board gaming going on upstairs - not that I saw any of that because 4.30pm had rolled around and it was time to play Call of Cthulhu.

Game 2

What a great game!  It started with a plane crash in the Alps and got significantly worse as we had to compete not only with a mythos entity but the extreme conditions that we were in no way prepared to deal with.  By the end my character had lost 13 points of sanity and had had the most traumatic experience of any CoC character I've ever played.  From the plane crash itself to almost the entire party pursuing her through the woods intent on murdering her, everything went terribly for her.  She made it out alive, but is not going to be OK for a very long time.

One interesting bit of the game was a handout of some writing written in runes.  At this point I had to check with the GM whether he wanted me to be able to read it.  I only know a couple of letters of the Futhark, but as a cryptography enthusiast I knew that if I stared at it for a couple of minutes I'd be able to read it.

Fortunately that was fine (I don't know what would have happened if there hadn't been someone with that particular hard skill at the table) and while one of the other PCs had bizarre hallucinations, I wrote down a translation.  It helped.  It helped the other PCs conclude that the way out of there was to kill me.  Wonderful.

One of the best and most memorable games of CoC I've played.  And not just for the moment when one of the other PCs got killed with a biro.  A biro that one of us had given to the killer.

And then it was time to go home.  I think some people were sticking around to go to the pub, but it was 8.30pm when the game finished and I wanted to get home.

Reflections

This is the most expensive one-day game day I've been to, largely because of the parking.  While the actual event price wasn't much different, the most I've previously payed for parking is £5 for a day in Birmingham.  Oxford charged me £15, which seemed a little steep.  (There's also a park and ride, but once I'd figured out the price of that and considered the extra time it would add to the journey, I decided to stick with the nearby car park.)

Gender balance was relatively good.  I think most games had at least one woman in, and the ones I played actually had a 50:50 split of players.  Very nice to see.

My first experience of an event with advance sign-up was good.  While I like the spontanaity of Concrete Cow and its imitators, showing up knowing what I was going to be doing was pretty reassuring.  Everything felt very well organised.  The only thing missing was name badges.  I have absolutely no idea who I just met.  There were people I follow on twitter there, I know, but without badges I have no idea who.

I wasn't sold on the weird timing.  I didn't get home until past 10pm last night.  Starting morning games a little earlier and leaving a smaller gap between morning and afternoon games could have seen things wrapping up at 7pm.  I could either have got home in time for dinner at a vaguely reasonable hour or, if I'd known more people, gone somewhere for dinner in Oxford before driving home.

It was a pretty ambitious event, having all the additional stuff going on besides the RPGs.  I have no idea how that side of it went, but hopefully it got some additional people through the door.  And six or seven games at a first time event is pretty damn good already.

Overall I had a great day out, and hope to repeat it.  I'm told that Tales from Screaming Spires is going to be a thing in October - a similar event but with a focus on horror games.  I already have three LARPs in October, so may not be able to make it, but if it's a weekend when I'm free I'll absolutely be there.