While I'm part of the organising team for Concrete Cow, my job ends a day or two beforehand when I make the final updates to the schedule and close down the game submission form. On the day, all I had to do was show up and join in. Which I began with a trip to Leisure Games, since I'd been meaning to buy a copy of Outgunned, and there it was in the box. Perfect. I handed over my sign-up sheets and caught up with some old friends until it was time for the games to begin. We'd remembered from last time about the room divider, so there was a bit of table shifting and the sliding wall sections were pulled into place.
Game 1: Monster of the Week
K-Pop Demon Hunters seems to have done things to me (although to be fair my husband's enthusiasm for K-dramas has also been a factor) and with the movie having a certain amount of Buffy energy, I was pretty sure I could run it with Monster of the Week. Rather than Huntr/x themselves, I pitched a game where you play a junior band, relatively new to both the music and demon hunting business, based in Busan. Korea is around the same size as England, and to get from Seoul to Busan takes about six hours on the train (or more if there's a zombie outbreak.) So the juniors handle demon outbreaks that Huntr/x just can't get to in time.
The newest expansion for MOTW includes some new playbooks, some of which seemed like a great fit for this game. So in addition to the Chosen, Initiate and Divine from the original book, I offered the Celebrity, Changeling and Forged from the new book. All three new options, plus the Chosen, ended up in play.
They decided to be a girl band, so I offered a set of photos of one of my favourite K-pop bands, Dreamcatcher, to choose from. With a bit of help from Fantasy Name Generators, everyone picked a name, and the Ji-Socks were ready to perform. Rather than use the history section from the playbook, given that in most cases the history would be 'you went to an audition', I instead created some new moves based on roles within a band. And so the band comprised of the inspiring Leader, the gorgeous Visual, the intimidating Main Rapper and the golden voiced Main Vocalist. They also each decided on an insecurity, something that could cause problems on a failed roll.
And so the Ji-Socks set off to make a series of public appearances, with various levels of success, in between dealing with a demonic outbreak threatening Busan, saving countless lives and also scraping through with their reputation just about intact.
Normally I run an online playtest before taking a new scenario to a playtest, but couldn't fit it in this time. All the same, I was confident I knew MOTW well enough to make it happen. The band roles and the insecurities all worked out just as I was hoping and the players did a wonderful job creating their band members. I'm offering this again at future conventions and I'm really looking forward to running it again. Just one change: bring bulldog clips so people can attach their photo to their name card.
During this game we heard from the people running the community fridge in the same venue that they had way too much food and we were welcome to take some to save it from being thrown out. So we take a short break to see what was on offer. I came back with ciabatta rolls, ham, and custard doughnuts, which made an excellent lunch, and some mince pies. I certainly wasn't the only convention attendee somewhat baffled to see mince pies about to go out of date at the beginning of October.
Game 2: Girl By Moonlight
I wasn't the only person running a K-Pop Demon Hunters inspired game at this con (and in fact the GM for this game had been in my morning game.) This time we were playing with Girl By Moonlight, a Forged in the Dark game about magical girls. Not being much of a fan of magical girl anime, I'd not looked at this one before, but it did seem like a logical fit for the movie.
This time we were playing Huntr/x, but an alternative version of the band in which there were four members instead of three. Like me, the GM had brought photos of real K-pop stars, this time four members of Twice. I picked Momo, the ballad singer, who certainly had some stuff going on.
We kicked off with a mission to rescue our manager Bobby who was being abducted by demons, interrupted somewhat by the sudden appearance of an incredibly attractive demon boy band. Inevitably things immediately started going wrong, with Bobby rescued but traumatised, and Sana suffering from demonic corruption from contact with the Saja Boys.
Like more FITD games, this one has a pretty rigid structure, and the next item on the list was Obligations. This turned out to be really fun, as Jihyo had to endure an epic signing and photography session, Sana was followed around by the camera team from The Only Way Is Seoul, and Momo had a truly disastrous time when the band had to take on the Saja Boys at the Korean equivalent of Ninja Warrior.
Then it was time for downtime, and an attempt to reduce some of the absolutely massive amount of stress we'd picked up during the mission and the obligations by connecting with each other. I say an attempt. Despite Jihyo and Momo spending some quality time in the dance studio together working on the new routine, and Momo taking Nayeon out to a bar for soju and kareoke, the band was still on the edge of falling apart when we were due to appear at the Idol Awards, with Sana set to perform with the Saja Boys instead of Huntr/x. It took a demonstration of just how band the rest of us were at rapping compared with her to snap her out of it and get her back on side.
Then it was time to take to the stage and throw everything we had into this performance. Incredibly, Sana's trick worked perfectly, deceiving the Saja Boys into a performance that strengthened the honmoon instead of breaking it, but now it all came down to one last song to seal the honmoon. Which almost went perfectly. Almost. And so the sequel to this alternative version of the movie will be The Search for Jihyo as the rest of the band have to venture into the demon realm to rescue her from the wrong side of the honmoon.
Comparing the two games was interesting. MOTW puts more focus on the monster hunting aspects. GBM has more about the connections between characters, encouraging emotional conversations. Overall I prefer MOTW, partly because I find standard PBTA as a system is not quite as prone to that situation where someone has come up with a brilliant idea, is doing the thing they're theoretically best at and has stacked up all available bonuses and the dice still say no. It's also less prone to the constant escalation of FITD, where every partial success leads to complications, injuries and stress. Partial success results are laid out in each move, with the partial result on moves like Investigate A Mystery being that you get fewer questions to ask rather than an immediate escalation, which from the GM side of the table I find puts a lot less pressure on me to constantly come up with ideas for complications.
I really did like the Obligations part of GBM though, and while I wouldn't want to use the same mission/obligation/downtime structure in my own games, incorporating some aspects of it in a more freeform way could be a good addition to my MOTW games. There's always room for new ideas in PBTA.
I'd planned on a trip to a local takeaway for dinner, but I still had a bag full of ham, ciabatta and doughnuts. It was certainly one of my cheaper trips to Concrete Cow.
Game 3: Age of Vikings
I'd planned to run Wraithound in the evening slot, but with a record number of evening games on offer, it didn't get sign-ups, so me and the other GM with no players jumped into other games. I'd been hoping to try out Age of Vikings for a while, and the game on offer was The Cursed Farm, a shorter demo game which should see us finished in plenty of time to get home at a reasonable time.
The system was BRP, so not far off Call of Cthulhu, although it seems it takes more inspiration from Runequest overall. One nice feature was the ability to pray to your favoured deities where appropriate and get a bonus to your next roll. Alas, despite Thor hearing my call, I still managed to shoot an arrow in entirely the wrong direction.
I played Hrund, nicknamed the Uninspired, and with plans to team up with Njall the Beardless to have serious words with whoever was handing out nicknames in our settlement. We headed off to the titular cursed farm to find out what had happened to Bjorg's redcurrants. There was overall less concern about what had happened to the kale. We did actually set the kale patch on fire at the end, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Overall this was a fun time. I'm not sold on the giant skill lists (Rivers of London remains my favourite version of BRP) and I'm not sure I make a particularly convincing Viking, but it's definitely one I'd be happy to play again.
With the game finishing early, I decided to stick around for a bit and chat with the convention's co-organisers. Despite all being at the MK-RPG club every week, we're all GMing different games so don't actually get much of a chance to talk, so it was really nice to catch up.
And so that was it for Concrete Cow 25.5. I've already seen a couple of other blog posts about the event - Groundhoggoth wrote about the Pico game he ran about wrestling bugs and Simon Burley wrote about his first trip back to Concrete Cow since before Covid.
Concrete Cow 26 is booked for 7th March 2026, and based on what I've found in the MK-RPG wiki archives it's our 20th anniversary! I'm looking forward to it already.