A Weekend With Good Friends 2023

I've been part of every A Weekend With Good Friends convention, but covid significantly reduced my participation in the previous event. This time I was back in full health and ready to do as much stuff as I could fit in. Which on this occasion included a number of panel discussions. We've not had them at previous AWWGF events, but it's been a popular request. The guests were a mix of industry professionals, authors, podcasters and GMs, including me.

Game 1: Relics of House Dragonfly

I've been seeing Exuviae: Relics of House Dragonfly at various conventions for a while now, but never actually played it. I decided it was time to change that. This was a slightly different variation on the game, using a D6 system instead of the original game's playing cards, which was certainly easier to manage in an online game.

The premise is that it's the 1940s, and you live in a bayside city that's controlled by an insect cult, and you've decided to do something about it. Character creation was a simple matter of figuring out what kind of person you are, how you found out about the cult, and why you want to stop them, plus the significantly more difficult matter of choosing a name. So a nightclub singer, an up and coming actress and a cryptographer set out to investigate the cult, found some horrible things, and very nearly rescued my character's best friend, only for a bad dice roll to ensure that only the cryptographer got out alive.

One unusual feature of this game is that instead of voice chat we played in text. Having played MUSH games for some time before I ever played tabletop, this was a familiar style of RP for me, but also one that I'd not done for over fifteen years. It was a fun reminder of how we did things in the days before ubiquitous internet voice chat. According to the GM it's taking off again in the FKR movement. All the same, while it was fun for a one-off, I don't think I'll be making a habit of it.

This is another game I own but don't remember buying, meaning I almost certainly picked it up in a charity bundle on DTRPG. If you also bought those bundles I strongly recommend checking this one out. It's ideal for low prep intrigue, and could probably be very easily reskinned for something other than an insect cult. I hope to give it a shot myself some time.

Games 2-4 were all me GMing things I've talked about before so let's skip over those and go straight to...

Game 5: Delta Green

An original scenario, "The Violence of Pure Reason", written by one of the GM's home group. This was truly excellent. I like when the mythos gets tied in with real world phenomena, in this case a notorious information hazard which hinted at what we would eventually encounter. We selected from a number of pre-gens, which meant that none of us had the occult skill, which seemed like a hindrance to the characters but ultimately we were able to find other ways to the information we needed.

None of which particularly helped when we did encounter an unnatural entity, while thoroughly unequipped to deal with it. Final death count: 2/4.

Games-wise, I think this was the highlight of the convention. Everything I want from a Delta Green one-shot. Properly creepy, lots of scope for investigation, freedom to follow up different leads while still getting where we needed to be.

Game 6: Quietus

Game 6 should have been a game of Call of Cthulhu, but with the GM too ill to run it I was happy to spot a free space in my second choice of game. Quietus is a game of melancholy horror, inspired by films like The Babadook, so I had a fair idea what I was in for, even without having played it before.

We began with character creation, which starts off with a simple question: what have you lost? There was one other player, and we decided to tie our stories together, so we decided Richard and Violet had been coworkers at a financial business of some kind. He'd been caught embezzling from the business to pay his child's healthcare bills, which caused the company to fold and she'd lost her home because she was living in a company flat. Then we needed an isolated location, for which we went for the traditional cabin in the woods, and a thing that had gone wrong, which was Violet's car breaking down.

We were already having a great time and that was just character creation. We took a short break when that finished so the GM could figure out how things were going to go from there.

Badly. They went badly. It started with spilt oatmeal and ended with us setting the entire cabin on fire. Ultimately we did manage to accumulate enough hope to escape the horror, but in the end we both went for very downbeat endings for our characters. They'd not been doing well prior to the events in the woods. Perhaps embracing the horror was the only thing that they could do?

And that was a wrap. Another great weekend where I got to try new games and spend time with some great people. Plus there were the panels! But that's a subject for a different post.