ConTingency 2024

After a rather snap decision to go to ConTingency in 2023, this time I was more organised. And was also planning on bringing eight friends. As it turned out, two of them had to drop out at the last minute, which was very sad, but certainly made it easier to fit all of us into two three-bedroom holiday homes.

I arrived on Monday with my husband, giving us a couple of days to get settled in before everything kicked off properly on Wednesday. I'd been assigned the same lodge that I was in with CJ the previous year, which meant I already knew the place's niggles. Which did not stop me from getting stuck in the toilet twice.

Wednesday

Pathfinder - Sundered Waves

I don't normally play Pathfinder at conventions as it's usually Pathfinder Society which I'm not interested in joining, but there was a one-shot with pre-gens on offer - Sundered Waves - and it was about pirates, so I decided I'd give it a go.

I picked up Kaako Ashfeather, a Tengu rogue. I'd not played a rogue before in PF2, and thought it would probably be a little easier to deal with, especially as we were going in at level 5. This was not entirely correct, as the character sheets for some reason gave you all the feat names, but none of the feat descriptions. Undaunted, I pulled out my phone, loaded up Pathbuilder, and copied Kaako into it. With her feats now easily at hand, I prepared to sneak attack.

There were a couple of people in the group who I don't think had ever played PF2. One of them picked up the human fighter, probably the safest choice for a newcomer, but the other had to figure out cleric magic, without the aid of an app. Fortunately it's quite a short adventure, so even with a bit of time spent figuring out character abilities at the start, there was plenty of time for the adventure.

Looking back on the adventure it was a really nice five room dungeon type affair, with interesting fights, puzzles to solve, and plenty of flavour. Definitely the kind of thing I'd consider running as a one-shot - although I'd sort out those character sheets in advance.

Era: The Empowered - Career Day

There's not actually a rule that everyone has to play one Era game at ConTingency, but I did want to play at least one game with my husband, and since he'd enjoyed Era: The Empowered at Condensed, I thought I'd give it a go.

We were...not exactly the best group of superheroes out there. I'm not sure if this game is supposed to be a serious superhero game, but that's certainly not what we were playing. But given that our scenario involved having to go to a high school to do a career day, it made sense that we were perhaps not the brightest and best that the Empowered agency had to offer. Highjinks ensued.

Era as a system is the kind of thing that gets out of the way. I didn't find it to actively support a specific playstyle, which makes sense since it seems to be a generic system used for multiple settings and genres, but the rules didn't get in the way of doing cool stuff. I'd definitely play it again. Ideally I'd play it again with exactly the same group of people. They were all so much fun!

Thursday

Kult: Divinity Lost - Gated

One of the benefits of a five day convention is that I feel a lot more enthusiastic about pitching a two session game, as I don't feel like I'm taking up as much of people's time. My own scenario Gated normally takes two sessions to run, so I decided to give it a go.

I had a table assigned in the lounge, but decided to move it to the lodge. Kult goes better with suitable atmosphere, which is easier to achieve without other people close by, and it was also convenient, given that two of my own group were in the game.

I'd done a proper write-up of this scenario, for someone else who played it in the past and wanted to try running it, so I printed out my nicely formatted version rather than relying on my old rather messy notes. This was particularly useful as a test to see whether I'd actually put all the bits that need to be in the document into the document. The answer is no. Fortunately I could work around that by remembering the missing bits, but I do need to give this one another once over.

The game itself was great. I had an excellent group of players, who all leaned into their characters as the mystery unfolded. The convention was a really good opportunity to schedule something that is otherwise very difficult to schedule, and run one of my favourite scenarios.

Unnamed forest folk horror thing

One of my group had a new thing to try out, so a few of us gathered to tell a GMless story of how we went into a forest and bad things happened. As a work in progress it had some details to iron out, which we were able to highlight by getting confused at various points, but overall we had a fantastic time telling a story together. By the end I was already missing my character's fictional dog, the only entity in the game which actually got a name. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes in future.

Friday

Matrons of Mystery - The Corpse in the Crypt

I got to play my own game! I thought about creating a new Matron, but ultimately decided to stick with Rosemary Braithwaite. I tend to end up changing her a little each time, as I can never remember all the details, so this time her contact was her niece who works in the art shop, but of course Pierre the giant bunny was there on his lead, wearing his little blue jacket.

We were investigating a murder on the site of an archaeological dig being filmed for a TV show. Rather than just giving us the suspect names, the GM had looked up photos of a bunch of TV stars in their younger days to portray the various characters, which I thought really helped capture the spirit of Sunday night British TV - especially the very young Tony Robinson as the presenter of the TV show.

The only negative here was that with six Matrons plus GM and a very large table, I was so far away from some of the players they could barely hear me. Fortunately when we got onto the 'Put it all together' stage of the game, we were all up on our feet, moving ourselves and the clues around as we collectively assembled our theory. In true Poirot style we gathered everyone together in the drawing room and made our accusation, which turned out to be entirely correct. Another successful case for Rosemary and Pierre!

Kult: Divinity Lost - Disco Inferno

It was Friday night, and that meant Disco Inferno, a scenario which also takes place on a Friday night. I claimed the lodge again for this, and again had two of my own group happy to not have to go far for a game.

Being in the lodge meant I could also do a better job with atmosphere. I set my Disco Inferno youtube playlist to play on my phone and set up the disco lights, and soon everyone was bopping along to Donna Summer and Sylvester.

After one unusually bad run of this scenario I'd been a bit wary of it. But it went much better when I ran it at ConDucked so I decided it was worth one more shot. And I'm really glad I did, if only for one delightful moment when three out of four characters were in the toilets, two of them having sex with other club goers and one of them playing the violin. And then having to describe what happened next, which fortunately also happened to be taking place in the toilets.

This run was everything that I wanted Disco Inferno to be, and I'll also be writing this one up properly so one of the players can run it. It's going back in the box for a while now as I'm working on new material, so I'm very happy to be leaving it on such a high note.

Saturday

Liminal - The Crown of Winter

Back in the GM seat for a game of Liminal. Rather than the newer material which I've been rather thoroughly playtesting recently, I decided to go back to one of my older scenarios, The Crown of Winter, partly because it was the middle of winter and it felt thematically appropriate, and partly because I'd be able to run it directly from the Liminal Casebook.

We were assigned one of the giant tables in the main hall, but fortunately a much smaller table was available nearby. There was still noise around us, but we were close enough that I could make myself heard.

I have a specific set of pre-gens that I wrote for this scenario, but I wrote them back in 2020 so decided to give them a bit of an overhaul. While the backgrounds remained largely the same, a few abilities got swapped around, and some new limitations were added. Minor tweaks, but enough that I was happier with the end result.

It was really nice to get back to this older scenario and see what it was like to run from the book. While the layout in the casebook isn't quite how I do things in my own notes (I like to have the NPC stat blocks at the end rather than the beginning) it was otherwise very nicely done, and having had it properly edited was a definite improvement. Props to everyone involved.

There was some joking right before the game that I should roll a d6 and use that to determine which RPG called Liminal I should use to run this game of Liminal. I of course pointed out that I couldn't do that. Because I only own copies of two of the RPGs called Liminal. (Seriously, if you're planning on publishing a new RPG, take a few minutes to google your title! This one's been done.)

Call of Cthulhu - Shared House

Sometimes you barely need a mythos threat to make a Call of Cthulhu scenario horrifying, at least when CJ Romer is the GM. We were a group of students moving into a shared house in Brichester, which we all immediately took as an excuse to embody the very worst aspects of both student life and 1987.

I played the law student, who showed up in her own Citroen 2CV, wearing a lavender power suit with massive shoulder pads and with a blonde poodle perm. Unlike some of her housemates, she actually had a pretty exciting first couple of days at university, and while by the end of the scenario she did have to find a new place to live, she and her new pet mouse were both pretty happy with how things were going.

Cyberpunk Red

I specifically requested Cyberpunk Red for Saturday night, as I knew my husband was free and we'd have another chance to play a game together. Along with two more familiar faces and one new person, we dived into a mission to poison avocadoes on a container ship. Literally dived. We used a submarine.

I've now played Selene the netrunner enough times that the GM said he might have to start giving her XP. My husband picked up the solo he'd played at ConDensed and we once again argued about the 6th street gang and whether they were true American patriots or a bunch of complete arseholes who kept trying to kill me.

The avocado poisoning went off reasonably smoothly, but we also found a weapons cache on the ship. We could have stolen them...but we could also sell the information that they were there, and then get paid to steal them. Why mess around fencing stolen goods when you could have someone else do the work and still get paid twice?

Sunday

Kult: Divinity Lost - The Murder Shack

I originally only pitched three games, but I had Sunday morning free and felt like doing something else, so pitched a game of The Murder Shack, a Call of Cthulhu scenario from the Blasphemous Tome. It's not a game that needs full CoC character sheets really, and even for Kult purposes I have it slimmed down to stats and one disadvantage, which ends up as far more of a roleplay prompt than anything mechanical most of the time anyway. I had two familiar faces (the same as the previous night's Cyberpunk) and one new person.

I ran this in the bar, but really should have arranged for a lodge. Kult needs atmosphere, more than most games, and the bar just didn't have it. All the same, The Murder Shack is such a fun scenario that it still went well, even if it did end with a remarkably low number of murders having occurred.

Casting the Runes - An Unwelcome Spectre - The Mysterious Haunting of the Bell Hotel, Thetford, Norfolk

Another game with CJ, and while I still don't care for Gumshoe, I knew CJ's somewhat Wodehousian take on Jamesian horror would be a good time, and two of my group also joined this game.

We were investigating a haunting at a hotel in Thetford, on behalf of a friend whose husband had seen a ghost there, and as a result had become religious, and thus acceptable to her family, and therefore no longer fun. We did indeed debunk the haunting, although given the vast amount of other stuff we found in the process, I'm not sure if it did any good.

Escape from Dino Island

There was no official slot on Sunday evening, but having had a chat with a friend who played my Thirsty Sword Lesbians game at ConDucked, I offered to run an extra game. He provided the lodge and one other player. I found two more, both from my Thursday Kult game, and off we went.

I had all the materials printed out, including the island map, and had brought one extra thing: a box of small plastic dinosaurs. This was great fun. If I needed a specific dinosaur to appear, there was generally something suitable in the box to put on the map. If I needed a dinosaur generally I could grab one at random.

Dinos in action

 A hunter, a survivor, a paleontologist and a kid made their way around the island looking for an escape route that didn't involved walking right through the middle of a herd of angry carnivores, meeting all kinds of dinosaurs and other strange things along the way, before finally finding themselves unexpectedly on the Yucatan peninsula right before the asteroid hit. A suitably cinematic ending, to both the game and the convention.

Reflections

I'm really glad I was able to introduce a few new people to this lovely convention. I really hope this will be an annual thing from now on. I managed to pace myself reasonably well so I wasn't exhausted by the end, and found time for going swimming and a walk along the beach. I picked up some books I really wanted in the bring and buy, while also offloading half the stuff we'd brought to sell. My group are lovely people and it was wonderful to spend time with them in addition to all the new friends I'm discovering at ConTingency. In short, I had a brilliant time