The Good Friends of Jacks-con Elias 1

I was supposed to be LARPing.  A gothic horror LARP, where a desperate group of survivors huddle together in their small bastion of safety while a disease-ridden miasma blankets the world around them and memories of life before the plague are distant and faint.
Damn it.

Anyway, with LARP off for the foreseeable future, I signed up to play some games at The Good Friends of Jacks-con Elias, a convention based around the podcast of almost the same name.  With a couple of 'celebrity GMs' present in the form of two of the podcast's hosts, game sign-up was done via a lottery system.  I was lucky enough to get into one of the hosts' games, and several more besides.  Given the nature of the podcast, almost all the games running were horror, or at least horror-adjacent.

Game 1

I wasn't expecting to be playing in the 12 noon slot on Friday, but game slots were opening up throughout the weekend as people had to drop out, and I was there at the right moment to jump into Runoff, an Unknown Armies game in which I found myself playing an agriculture-based wizard trying very hard not to get killed with only his tabletop gaming group to help him.

The scenario was based around an entirely mundane environmental problem - a cyanobacteria bloom caused by agricultural runoff - and then blended small-town politics with some seriously dark magic. I was genuinely surprised when my character made it to the end of the story without getting killed.

Being thrown straight in at the deep end with no real idea how Unknown Armies works, I'm not sure I played the character to his full potential, but nevertheless I was playing with a supportive group and a GM who provided guidance when I was getting lost. It's a system I'd be interested in playing again.

Game 2

Knowing I'd have serious competition to get into Scott Doward's game on the Friday evening slot, I made sure I had a backup choice in my lottery selections.  I chose Exquisite Crimes Goth Detectives based almost entirely on the name and it certainly lived up to it.  If you want to play a goth detective, this is the game for you.  I was going to buy it, but when I logged into DTRPG it turned out I already have.

It's a two-page RPG, consisting of one page for the players with random tables to generate your goth detective, and one for the GM to generate an exquisite crime for them to solve.  A few dice rolls later, Morrigan Shroud, an exquisite goth able to alter her outfit at will and perform feats of mesmerism, was ready to make an entrance.  Which she did, at every possible occasion.  She may not have been the most useful member of Girk Dently's Gothic Detective Agency, but she certainly knew how to cause a distraction.

We played a scenario set in the Victorian era, starting with a murder in an absinthe bar and drawing on classic literature (including one of my all-time favourite novels, The Moonstone) for a suitably gothic adventure.  We found creative uses for our goth powers, had amusing manifestations of our goth hauntings, and overall did awesome goth crime solving.  I would watch this TV show.

Game 3

I bought Kult: Divinity Lost a while back, and have also spent far too much on their latest kickstarter, but had never actually played it before.  As a game focused on 'mature themes' it's not the easiest game to find a group for.  But at a convention full of horror fans, there were plenty of people keen to play, especially with Matt Sanderson as the GM, so I was very lucky to get in.  We were playing Matt's own scenario, Judgement, which is in the new scenario collection from the kickstarter.

Fortunately I had time to prepare for this game, as the character I'd picked was quite a challenge - an evangelical Christian.  Even with the chance to have a good read of the character in advance, it still took me a little time to get into her mindset, and it was hard to work out how credulous she should be of the weird things happening around her.  Things started to fall into place as the game went on though, and with a stellar group of players around me I think we did the story justice.

Game 4

I went straight from one game of Kult to another, this time the scenario Oakwood Heights.  This one is free to download from the Kult website, so I'd previously skimmed through it, but was confident I'd forgotten enough to still enjoy playing it.  Fortunately I was right, and the minor details that started to come back to me towards the end in no way affected the game for me.

This time I had a much easier character to play.   Without giving anything away about the scenario, none of the pre-gen characters in it are particularly nice people, and I'd picked one of the worst.  An uncomplicated kind of motivation, compared to the conflicted nature of my character in the previous game, and one I completely embraced.  It helped that the GM was doing a superb job playing the main NPC, giving us all the chance to play off this brilliant character throughout the game.

Having finally got the chance to play the game, I have absolutely no regrets about how much I've spent on Kult supplements.

Game 5

Sunday afternoon was my turn in the GM's chair, running my own Liminal scenario, Mother Said I Never Should.  I originally used this as part of my campaign at MK-RPG where it took two sessions to complete, but I was confident that with the tweaks I'd made to it that I could fit it into a 4 hour session.  And I got it pretty much spot on, ending with about 15 minutes to go before the next slot.

I don't normally write pre-gen characters for adventures.  Most of my convention games have been things like Scum & Villainy where I've had people create characters at the table, or the Liminal quickstart adventure that comes with its own pre-gens.  I could have just used the pre-gens from the core book, but for some reason I decided to make things harder for myself.

After dithering about names for a while during game prep I decided to let the players choose the names, which resulted in characters being taken in directions I didn't expect - which was naturally far more fun.  They threw several more surprises at me, meaning things went fairly differently to the previous run.  And that, of course, is the joy of RPGs in general and Liminal in particular.  I'm running this scenario again at my next convention (BurritoCon) and I can't wait to find out what's going to happen.

Post-Games

I hadn't booked any Sunday evening games, as I was expecting to be playing our Mutant Year Zero game.   With that cancelled due to technical issues, I went back to the discord server and noticed that the Bar channel appeared to be quite lively.  I dived in, and had a lovely chat with some lovely nerds that could only have been better if we could have done it in person.  A wonderful community has sprung up around this podcast and I'm very happy to be part of it.

Reflections

I really like themed conventions.  Sci-fi themed North Star was excellent.  While this one didn't have an official theme, the strong focus on horror gaming meant I got to do a lot of the kind of gaming I rarely get to enjoy.

I got to play with some amazing GMs and players from around the world.  Reports on the discord server suggest that I'm far from being alone in being thrilled with the people I got to play with.  As one of my fellow players remarked, it was also nice not being the only woman at the table for several games.

The organisers had a tough job, wrangling a pretty huge number of players.  (While I don't know the total numbers, the most popular game had 70 people wanting to play, so presumably more than that.)  The lottery system may not have been a perfect solution, but with several ridiculously over-subscribed games, I can't think of any better approach than the lottery and wait lists.

My one recommendation would be to have some gaps between the slot times - I was pretty worried about having two back-to-back games on the Saturday in case the first one overran.  Fortunately the only game I was in that overran was Friday night, where I had nothing booked in the following slot.  A half-hour or hour gap between slots would allow for a bit of overrun and also give people a chance to do things like eat dinner.  I was lucky enough to be brought dinner during Saturday's Kult game, but that still meant muting myself for a few minutes so I didn't subject everyone to crunching noises.

The organisers have rejected requests to do it all again a month from now, but I've put 1 in the title because while this was the first, I very much doubt it will be the last.

Right now I'm in that strange post-convention mood of being both very sad that it's over and absolutely buzzing about how great it was.  And there's no better sign than that.

Well, maybe the Elder Sign.