Concrete Cow 23.5

It's always good to be back at Concrete Cow. I put out my sign up sheet, chatted with friends, bought a copy of Masks: A New Generation from Leisure Games and generally prepared for a good day.

Game 1: Monster of the Week

You can't write a scenario called Concrete Cows and not run it at Concrete Cow. This was a repeat of my Men In Black inspired game from North Star but thanks to having four players this time and a different selection of playbooks, it had a different feel.

It was also a good reminder that while character creation and establishing relationships does take some time, it's also an enjoyable part of the game. This time we had the experienced agent, the rookie, the alien and the conspiracy theorist, and the conspiracy theorist deciding that the alien was actually her father gave their relationship a whole different dynamic.

The dice also stepped up to provide the comedy side of this comedy-horror-scifi adventure, with the alien's wildly misfiring teleportation powers making the simple act of leaving a lake into the funniest part of the game.

While I've played a lot of Monster of the Week (see Wicker Valley) I'm still pretty new to running it, but I felt pretty comfortable with it this time and I'm looking forward to more.

Game 2: The Cthulhu Hack

The Raspy Raven discord often has games running in seasons, and Heist Season was a particularly unusual one. We all started off with the same blurb about a group of people in a room who'd just completed a heist, and wrote adventures for a variety of systems. This game was one of them, originally written for Those Dark Places but redone using The Cthulhu Hack.

This scifi horror take on the premise had us all waking up in a room on a spaceship with a body and a bad case of amnesia, and only got weirder from there. Unlike my previous game of The Cthulhu Hack we were at least vaguely competent at some rolls, although of course this did us no good in the end. The system is easy to pick up and having picked up a bunch of adventures with the kickstarter, I might try running this myself.

Around this point we discovered that the venue had double booked us in the evening slot, and some kind of Hindu religious festival was taking place in the main hall. Fortunately we still had the meeting rooms, so we all piled into the largest one for the raffle. There I picked up Mythos World, a PBTA take on Call of Cthulhu, which should make interesting reading.

Game 3: Darkness of the Demimonde

I wanted something flexible on numbers for the evening slot so decided to continue playtesting my scenario, Lights Out In Limehouse. I got five players in the end, and once again we learned that while difficult, angel summoning is not completely outside the remit of a starting magician with sufficient assistance. A fun game where I got to introduce more people to this charming system.

Post-Con

With a few people having stayed overnight, we decided to meet up for lunch on the Sunday. The Harvester provided a very average meal, but the meetup itself was fun and an opportunity to talk more to people I hadn't seen much at the convention itself. Something worth repeating, although at a different restaurant.

Reflections

Numbers were low, and I wonder if we'll ever get back to the pre-covid peak, but it didn't seem to matter. There was a great selection of games, to the point where I struggled to decide what to use my golden ticket on, and plenty of room to spread out (at least until the evening). Regardless of size, it's still one of my favourite conventions.