ChaosiumCon UK 2026

With ChaosiumCon UK returning for a second year, I decided to once again take advantage of my geographical proximity to the Cranfield Management Development Centre, and commute in.

Game 1: Call of Cthulhu - Kane's Tone

I don't normally run Call of Cthulhu, and I don't normally run scenarios written by other people, but this being ChaosiumCon, if you want to run a game, you have to run a Chaosium game. So I went through my collection and picked out Kane's Tone, a modern day scenario that had been recommended to me as 'my kind of thing'. It certainly is my kind of thing, a fun amnesia-based scenario with plenty of scope to inject my own personal brand of whimsy and nightmare.

My four players dived enthusiastically into trying to figure out what the hell happened, and ultimately managed to survive the horrors, although the PCs will certainly have some issues to deal with. 

I prepared quite a few handouts for this one, including cardboard standees for each PC with their character picture on one side and starting equipment on the other, which worked very nicely. Since we had a gaming room to ourselves, I was also able to break out the sound effects. I would have included some lights, but unfortunately my disco light doesn't have yellow and I wasn't organised enough to get a new light in time.

Still, I had enough fun running this that I've decided to pitch it again for The Owlbear and Wizard's Staff. I may not run other people's scenarios much, but there's so much fun stuff out there for Call of Cthulhu, I can make the occasional exception.

Evening Outing

There was a Chaosium mixer being held at the venue, with food of some kind, but I didn't much fancy it and neither did a bunch of my friends. So instead I organised a meal out. Eight of us headed out to Milton Keynes to visit the Sumac Room.

 The food was lovely, and I hope I can convince people to go back again next year.

Game 2: Horror on the Orient Express Board Game

I'd managed to resist the kickstarter for this board game, but was still pretty keen to give it a go. Thanks to commuting I'd avoided booking anything starting at 9am, but 10am for this was a lot more reasonable.

As a cooperative board game enthusiast, I loved this one.

The physical set up itself is great, with the train and carriages, the track, and the landscape tiles. The individual character boards are really nicely set up too, with cut-outs so you can lift swappable tiles out by pressing on a corner without having to get your nails underneath and risk damaging the board. Different shaped bases are used for player characters and suspects so they're easy to tell apart. The symbol language on the cards and other tokens is clear and easy to understand.

Gameplay was great too. Each character had different skills, which made for some careful tactical moves to allow each of us to make the best use of them. There was resource management, as we spent stamina on activities and made sure not to overdo the sanity loss. Push your luck mechanics, each time we talked to a passenger to try to learn more about our suspects, and logical deduction as the clues got uncovered. Plus a rather entertaining conversation with a parrot.

And we won! It was a close thing towards the end, with the vampire having eaten a worrying amount of passengers and things looking very dicey in the eldritch portal department, but we made it to Constantinople with all of us alive, adequately sane, and able to identify all the cultists.

The only reason I won't be buying this as soon as it's available is that I saw the size of the box. It's going to have to wait until we've moved house. The wallet is willing, but the shelves are full.

Game 3: Call of Cthulhu - The Death of Doc Brown

Despite my brain's ongoing insistence that this was something to do with Back to the Future, this was actually a modern day murder mystery. I picked up the forensic technician character, my theory being much like in The Necropolis when I played the archaeologists, this would avoid accidentally knowing more about stuff than my character should. Along with the great detective Hercule Porter, we attempted to discover what had happened to Doc Brown. This turned out to be quite complicated, and at one point involved some creative use of catnip on my part which proved entirely ineffective but still pretty funny.

By the end we'd not only solved the murder, but got some kids into foster care, started a new podcast, cleaned up a gym, and possibly started two romances between the PCs. Great stuff, would absolutely play with this GM again, especially since I realised she's also the author of The Eternal Grind.

Game 4: Call of Cthulhu - The Murder Shack

I carefully pitched my games in slots where all the existing games were pretty much full, for the best chances of getting a full table, and once again I had four players sitting down to experience The Murder Shack.

This scenario is from edition 4B of the Blasphemous Tome, the fanzine produced by the Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast, and is written by Scott Dorward. The group seemed largely aware of this last fact, and as such prepared for what kind of thing was to come.

While I have run this scenario before, I ran it using the Kult: Divinity Lost rules, so this was going to be a slightly different experience. While I overall like the Kult rules better for horror games, it doesn't handle PVP very well, so having the more trad Call of Cthulhu rules ready for when things started getting murdery was helpful for this scenario. While not quite as murdery as when I played it (I got very murdery) there were definite attempts, and things came pretty close at the end.

The players for this were great, really leaning into the grief support group concept, and I hope to encounter them again at future cons.

Seminar: Running Thrilling Chaosium One-Shots!

Once again I avoided the 9am start, and arrived at 10am for a seminar from familar faces Guy Milner and Gaz Bowerbank of Unconventional GMs. They ran through the spectrum of Chaosium games, giving a bunch of great tips for each of them. My favourite was the advice to run Pendragon as a fantasy game, not a historical one, which by itself has upped my interest in playing the game, as while I quite like the idea of playing a knight, a knight who's just shown up at a castle that's overrun with fairies and where I have to go and make convincing arguments to a tree to make it stop sounds far more fun that doing historical stuff.

Also some good tips for Runequest, largely about not trying to shove too much Glorantha lore in there, and not expecting people to play the stereotyped version of whatever character they pick. Because nothing puts me off trying out Runequest at a con like the possibility that I'm going to sit down with 4-5 Gloranthaphiles who've memorised the entire history of the planet while I'm like 'I think there's ducks in it'. A GM following their tips might just get me to try it out.

Game 5: Call of Cthulhu - The Last Ball of the Season

There were quite a few interesting sounding seminars on Saturday, but nothing was going to stop me playing Regency Cthulhu with CJ Romer. Our group of six ended up splitting neatly down the middle into the upper class (two aristocrats and a lawyer) and the lower class (a button maker, a housemaid and the son of the man who maintains the ballroom dance floor).

Lady Jasmine was the same character I'd played in a previous CJ game, and it was nice to have her back. Another player picked up her husband, Lord Stowmarket, and we soon found ourselves embroiled in an absurd feud between Sarah Villiers, Countess of Jersey, and the Austrian Countess Esterhazy, which involved attempting to pass off the lower class PCs as foreign nobility.

While we did have to deal with an actual terrifying threat, and Jasmine nearly died, the true horror of that situation was obviously finding ourselves the playthings of the rich and extremely powerful. Great stuff. Everything I hope for in a CJ scenario.

Game 6: Rivers of London - You Can't Make Me

For the second time I found myself investigating a murder that involved a slightly dodgy gym as we dived into a new Falcon case where someone had been strangled in a distinctly unconventional way. This was great, full of subtle clues, some of which only really fit together right at the end, making for a satisfying conclusion as we located the culprit and then had to decide what to actually do about it.

Some extra fun came from one of the players, a retired Metropolitan Police officer, who was able to assure us that Ben Aaronovitch has pretty much nailed the policing in London aspects of the book series.

Game 7: Age of Vikings - Predictions of Woe

I decided to take Sunday morning off entirely so I could have a bit of a lie in, but was back in plenty of time for my afternoon, giving me the opportunity to visit the traders, and hang out and chat with a few more people I hadn't managed to catch up with before.

That's how I learned that the scenario I was about to play was the same one my friends had described as melting their brains the previous day. Accordingly, I was prepared for us to need the whiteboard as we attempted to unravel a very complicated Viking murder mystery.

This is, of course, entirely my fault for writing Matrons of Mystery, which the GM confirmed was something of an inspiration for the scenario.

I don't think I can honestly say we did a skilled investigation, but it was a determined one, and we finally identified the killer. We should probably have paid more attention to some things the GM said early on in the game - but still, we got there with our brains only slightly melted, the GM having had the chance to improve things based on the previous session.

And that was it. Time for the closing ceremony, and while I could have stayed for an evening game, I'd decided to go home 

Reflections

CMDC is rapidly becoming one of my favourite convention venues. While it's not the cheapest option out there, having the individual gaming rooms is fantastic, as is the endless supply of coffee. 

Last year's ChaosiumCon was a somewhat chaotic affair, organisation-wise. Several issues remained this time, with the main difference being that with some experience, most GMs now knew to put the game system in the title field when submitting the game, and people already knew the answer to questions like 'why do I need to buy a badge?' Tabletop Events remains bad and should feel bad.

That said, feedback in other areas had definitely been taken into account, with the artist's alley now in a brightly lit and high traffic area so we could all see what was on offer. The hotel bar had a decent range of sandwiches for lunch, and while a walk to the Co-op would probably have been cheaper, with the massive heatwave that had dumped itself on us for the weekend, not having to go outside was a definite bonus. Next year should be even better.

North Star 2026

Another exciting journey to North Star! Unfortunately neither my husband nor my usual roommate could make it this time, but that did mean I was going to get a hotel room all to myself.

I kicked things off with the usual pre-convention outing, this time to Envers, the local Turkish restaurant. We had some first-timers joining us, who asked about the menu, and what we recommended. As it turned out, basically everything, unless you don't like aubergines, in which case everything that isn't made of aubergines. By cunningly not having a starter, I had enough room left at the end for some baklava and Turkish tea.

I'd planned on an early night, but between the disco in the pub and the people in the next room who were still talking loudly even after the music had shut down, that didn't happen. Nevertheless I was up and about in time for breakfast and made it upstairs just in time to catch the opening speech. I put out the items I'd brought for the bring and buy, and headed for my first game.

Game 1: Those Dark Places

A rules-light game that clearly takes some inspiration from the Alien movies. Given that we only had three players, the GM gave us two characters each. I had a ranged combat and piloting specialist, Blackbird, and a leader/medic, Ibis. We sat down for a session of industrial space horror as our crew of salvage operators made our way into a mysteriously silent space station. At least, that was the idea. The dice disagreed. The dice had other ideas. And those ideas were Red Dwarf.

My favourite part was the first combat with the loader with attached skeleton. By the time we got to Ibis's turn, all that had happened is that some of the others had thrown themselves at its feet, and Blackbird had shown it that her gun was unloaded. So rather than attempt to use her terrible combat skills, Ibis instead assured it that we were not in any way hostile and told it to stand down, which under the circumstances seemed pretty plausible.

Other dice ideas included an absolute determination to kill one particular characters, Tom, with the vast majority of attacks going his way. Tom was the only one who didn't make it back alive, and none of us were at all surprised.

Despite the dice's best efforts to turn things to slapstick, I overall thought this was a pretty great game. I don't like it as much as the Alien RPG, but if Alien isn't quite to your tastes I would absolutely check this one out.

Game 2: Alien

Straight back into space horror for the afternoon, and a scenario based on William Gibson's unfilmed Alien 3 script. I picked up Yelena, a roughneck working for the U.P.P. and off we went to dock with a space station, only to find something very strange had happened there. And then the xenomorphs showed up.

The secret agendas aspect of Alien was working very well here. Yelena had her own plans, and I had a lovely time acting on them. The other players were all clearly up to something, and by the end we had effectively split into factions, which could loosely be termed the ones trying to abandon the others to get killed by xenomorphs, and the ones trying to avoid that happening. We had some dramatic near death experiences, really leaning into the cinematic aspect of the game where it looked like one character was dead but then came back unexpectedly as Yelena was on the point of death, causing her to shout out some vital information just in case she didn't make it.

Most of my time playing Alien has been from the other side of the table. It was an absolute delight to get to play it myself, especially with such a great group of players.

Game 3: Darkness of the Demimonde

Victorian pulp horror might not be the obvious thing to run at a sci-fi themed convention, but when you look at the gothic and adventure novels that provide inspiration for this game, there's plenty of sci-fi to be found in the works of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Accordingly I picked out the most sciencey of the adventures I've written for this game and pitched them both.

I started with Panic at the Palace (title subject to revision), in which our supernatural detective agency set out to solve the mystery of why a previously respectable butcher was selling tainted meat, and more lucratively, what had happened to Mrs Winfield's prize Pomeranian. I handed out the usual set of pregens, and the players did a brilliant job as the detective, alienist, werewolf and psychic.

Normally I like to have a trial run of a scenario before running it at a convention, and this one should have been played by my regular online DotD group, but for various reasons we only got halfway through it. Meaning I didn't really know how the second half was going to go. It ended up being a bit quicker than I intended, but given that it was the evening game and some of us were a bit tired, that wasn't really all that bad. And if I trim it down a little more, it'll work in the 2 hour taster session at Owlbear and Wizard's Staff. So that was all useful, and gave me good pointers for the final version.

I thought the early finish would let me have an early night, but once again I was kept awake by the disco (a wedding this time) followed by loud people in the courtyard outside my room.

Game 4: The Code of the Spacelanes

This was a Star Trek game, where after a quick prologue where we played TOS characters to get used to the rules, we created our own characters: Starfleet Academy cadets.

It's times like this I realise I just don't have the comprehensive Trek knowledge of some of my fellow nerds. We were told we could play aliens from TOS, but with my original Trek being TNG and favourite Trek being Lower Decks, I didn't have much grasp of what that included. But the GM was happy for me to play an Orion, and K'Reen being a disappointment to her species due to being somewhat defective in the Orion wiles department gave me a good reason for her being the first Orion Starfleet engineer cadet rather than staying at home.

One part of Code games that I always enjoy, even though I struggle to think of something to write every time, is where we all write down a plot point on an index card, which are then shuffled and handed out. I put in 'you are being blackmailed by a Ferengi', a bit of a stretch given that I don't think Ferengis showed up until a later show, but we could just read that as a mysterious unknown alien. In return I got 'you have smuggled an alien pet on board and it's escaped', meaning I spent some of the adventure serruptitiously dropping pet treats on the floor until I got my tribble back. And a few more tribbles, of course.

The downside of these cards is that they can occasionally derail things a bit, with one player identifying our academy instructor as a secret Klingon spy and tackling him to the floor, but ultimately there was no way our mentor was going to be around much past the first scene so that was OK.

While generally I'm happy with theatre of the mind for everything except games that actually need battle grids, this was a game where we actually could have used a map, just to keep track of which spaceship was inside which other spaceship, and who was where at any given time. One of the other players ended up sketching it out on a spare index card, which did help.

While in Those Dark Places the dice were determined to make things Red Dwarf, in this one they just kept on pulling out doubles, which resulted in people's special talents activating remarkably often. Which meant in addition to regular engineering stuff, K'Reen was able to pull off a number of amazing pirate stunts.

Overall a fun game, despite getting a bit lost in the middle. I still prefer Star Trek Adventures as a system for Star Trek games, although I feel like for an academy game there might be a better option out there. I have no idea what it is though.

Game 5: Darkness of the Demimonde

A different scenario this time, Brides of Brixton, which I've run several times now, and which I was confident would come in at 3 hours. Which it did.

With two of the same players back again, I offered them the same characters, so the werewolf and alienist were back again. The detective was chosen again, along with the criminal and the magician. Given the events of the previous game, we concluded that the psychic had been sent to rehab.

And so off they went to discover why Mr Barnabas Sprout had seen the ghost of his dead wife outside his kitchen window. At least, once certain party members had stopped laughing about the name Barnabas Sprout. And how the poor man was in hot water.

It's not the first time that's happened, and I absolutely will be keeping that character's name.

My goal is to publish my DotD scenarios as a set of five (which means I have to write one more) and it's great fun seeing how a different group of characters takes on each challenge. 

A lovely conclusion to a lovely convention. 

Revelation 2026

I set out through the sleet to Revelation once again. Despite the sleet, it was a slightly quicker drive than usual, and I had time for a sit down before meeting up for the now traditional restaurant outing.

This time we were making a return visit to the local Italian restaurant, Mama Mia Pepe, whose owner is rapidly getting to know us. I was worried we might have to find somewhere a little less romantic this close to Valentine's Day, but he found us space. The other customers looked a little surprised when a party of eleven walked in.

Game 1: Monster of the Week

I decided to kick things off with more K-pop Demon Hunters, since I've had so much fun running it at previous conventions.

Sadly one of the signed up players was ill and couldn't make it, so this band ended up as a three-piece. The Misfits were a girl band, and followed the current popular trend of naming their band using English words that can't be directly written in Hangul. My pronunciation of 미스피츠 resulted in their band merch including a tie-in miso pizza as well as their own ramyeon.

The girls gave a solid performance at the finals of Busan's Got Talent but a disastrous fan meet made for a tricky time dealing with the demon incursion. Nevertheless they got it together, managed not to burn down any buildings, and with the aid of some free tickets to their park show, saved the Honmoon.

Great players, a great game that keeps on bringing out fun new expansions, and a great start to the weekend.

Game 2: Pasión de las Pasiones

My knowledge of telenovelas is limited to watching several episodes of Telenovelas Are Hell. So I wasn't sure if I really had it in me to play it. But this wasn't just any telenovela. This was The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon!

By the end of this game, I was seriously questioning Murderbot's taste in media. Actually I was questioning it by the time we'd had the dramatic reading of the theme music at the start. But I digress.

This is the in-universe show from the Murderbot Diaries books, and the TV adaptation went a step further and actually showed us clips from the show. Thus providing a cast of characters that the GM mapped onto the playbooks. I picked up Nav Bot, a pure hearted navigation unit initially in love with the Captain, which lasted until shortly after he declared his love for Terraforming Surveyor Frost, and she ended up falling for Jan-Bot, a lowly cleaning robot, until Jan-Bot's untimely destruction at the hands of a sec unit, after which she finally found love with the colony solicitor.

Nav Bot 337 Alt 66

Which in no way expresses the absolute absurdity of this game as we discovered secret brothers, secret body doubles, secret constructs and secret clones. I heard later the GM was as confused about what was going on as we were, but nevertheless guided us through every new revelation until the season finale when the captain died in Frost's arms.

This was a double slot game, which was a great choice, giving us the opportunity to properly set up the opening scenario while providing plenty of time to get into things. The GM did a phenomenal job prepping for this, with standees with the character introductions and fully customised character sheets. If this was offered at LongCon I would absolutely sign up for a full weekend.

Game 3: Kult: Divinity Lost

I don't often run Gated at conventions, because it's too long even for a four hour slot, but with plenty of space in the schedule on Sunday, I decided to pitch it as a two-parter.

This one features four people, all moving into a condo in a gated community. I generally include a question on my Kult character sheets to allow a bit of personalisation. One character in this one is asked what job they're got in their new home, and the player picked Home Owner's Association entertainment coordinator. Which was lovely, because as the gated community concept might suggest, the HOA plays quite a significant role in the scenario.

I was particularly impressed by the players, as in all the times I've run this, no other group has hit on the idea of using their cars during the first encounter. Which meant I had to improvise a bit more than usual but apparently I wrote the scenario well enough that going this far off script was not an issue.

Not for the first time, Christmas lights and lawn flamingos were deployed in the final confrontation.

Thanks to the challenges of scheduling different length games, I had one player who only played the first part, having to go and run his own game in the afternoon. So I gave him the one character in this who is often very low on stability by the end of part 1, and the character spent most of the second half either sedated or doing origami.

Kult is 100% a horror game, but exactly what type of horror game it is does somewhat depend on the players as well as the scenario. This is one that can go proper dark, but can also be a lot more investigative, and with the players I had, I wasn't surprised that it ended up being an overall more optimistic run. Of course, the 'good' ending in Kult is the one where you all get shoved neatly back into your prison, never to see reality again.

Reflections 

I gave myself some suggestions last time so let's see if I actually followed them...

• I probably shouldn't run three games? Well, technically I only ran two, but given that one of them was double length, I'm not sure that actually counts as being less enthusiastic.
• I did manage to be GMing something energising in slot 5 so I didn't start flagging too early, so points to me there.
• Better breakfast choices were made, partly due to the Garrison's new menu. With the banana pancakes responsible for past sugar crashes now gone, I went for eggs florentine, a nice vegetarian meal with actual vegetables, which set me up much better for the day.

So 2/3 overall, not too bad. I was still absolutely exhausted when I got home. Totally worth it.

ConTingency 2026

Another trip with my husband to Sunny Snowy Rainy Hunny! We had plans to once again share a lodge with the friends we shared with in 2024, but thanks to an emergency they had to cancel, so with some very much appreciated assistance from the organisers we once again joined up with the friends from 2025.

Tuesday

The convention proper doesn't begin until Wednesday, but we'd arrived on Monday, meaning there was the option to fit in an extra game on Tuesday evening. So when my friend Esther requested a game, I was happy to oblige.

Slot 0: Kult: Divinity Lost

We gathered at Matt Sanderson's Eldritch Lodge, host to the largest array of teas I've seen outside of a London tea shop, and I began another session of Not for a Million Dollars. All the players were wonderful, although I feel the need for a shout-out to Steve for coming up with the name Chase Nightsoul for his online influencer character. This also lead to my favourite wound description yet, 'attack of the YouTube plaque'.

Wednesday

Slot 1: Matrons of Mystery

After some mild admonishment from last year's Matrons GM, I thought I'd better step up and run my own game this year. My scenario Chalet Grave, featuring a murder at Pearles Holiday Park, seemed like the obvious choice.

It rapidly became obvious that none of the resulting Matrons actually got on well together, so the first mystery to solve was why were they going on holiday together? We soon got to the bottom of it as the members of the Upper Apple Slaughter parish council realised the vicar might have been up to something when telling each of them individually that they'd won a holiday.

Fortunately their arguing was interrupted by the murder of a fellow holidaymaker, and in between aquaerobics and hot yoga classes they managed to track down the murderer, allowing the local police officer to get back to his bird watching. They mended their differences over some unusual baked goods, and prepared to gang up on the vicar when they got home.

 

The Matrons put it all together over a nice cup of tea. Caution: Spoilers!

Slot 2: Outgunned Superheroes

Being pretty keen on Outgunned as a system, I was keen to see it applied to superheroes. I picked up World Hopper, a femme fatale with teleportation powers.

One thing I immediately liked was that short range teleportation could be done at will. My small supply of power points only came into use when I was teleporting beyond line of sight, or taking someone else with me. This is one of those things that bugs me particularly in superhero games, when the rules stop the characters from actually doing superhero stuff because they can't waste limited power on using their powers most of the time. No problems with that here. There were some contrived circumstances in the adventure where we temporarily lost our powers, but that's fine - that kind of thing happens in superhero media all the time. We soon got them back.

These were beta rules, and are a little convoluted in places, but I fully expect it to be tidied up a little before the final product comes out. Should I find myself with a hankering to run a superhero adventure, I'll definitely check this one out.

I decided in the interests of not burning out too quick to take a break on Wednesday evening and hang out with my husband for a bit.

Thursday

Slot 4: Monster of the Week

Another outing for my K-Pop Demon Hunters inspired game. This time the group decided to be a boy band, and so the four members of CMYK went into battle with weapons and signed photocards to solve the mystery of what happened at Busan's Got Talent while still getting to their fan meet on time.

Once again I had players signed up who hadn't seen the movie, so I'm getting pretty adept at my high speed introduction to the setting where I explain why showing up to the fan meet is just as important as fighting the monsters. And they absolutely embraced it, creatively dealing with the various obstacles with a variety of magical and occasional fungal solutions.

Slot 5: Coriolis: The Third Horizon

A bit of a surprise to see this on offer, given that there's a new version of Coriolis (The Great Dark) out now, but I still like this version better so was delighted to get into a game.

I picked up Dr Wana, an archaeologist who'd really pushed the boundaries between archaeology and grave robbing, hence why she was now the captain of a mercenary crew. We were hired to investigate the murder of the designer of a military AI. We immediately suspected the AI, but had to do a thorough investigation to fully get to grips with what had happened.

Absolutely excellent game. The adventure was great, the GM was a familiar face from Concrete Cow who I already knew would do a great job, and the rest of the players were a really fun group. A highlight of the week.

Slot 6: Liminal

One of my favourite games, but not one I actually get to play in very often, so I immediately signed up when I saw this one on offer. This was the first in a series of Liminal Lincolnshire adventures, a concept I love since I'm writing my own Liminal Northamptonshire series. The GM was also one of the players from the Liminal game I ran last year, so hopefully that means I made a good impression.

I played Jordan, a journalist determined to get to the truth, alongside her two rather more supernatural companions. We began with three dead bodies that had all washed up on the bank of the Humber on three consecutive nights, and had to figure out what they'd been up to, who was likely to be next, and what this all had to do with a 16th century priest.

Great stuff, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the adventures. Liminal is at its best written by people who know and love the area they're writing about, and are ready to dive into the history and geography.

Friday

Slot 7: Vaesen

Another trip to the Eldritch Lodge to game with Matt Sanderson while sampling more of his incredible tea selection. I picked up the Academic character, figuring a Vaesen party can always use someone with a book, and off we went to Oulu to learn more about the massacre than destroyed the previous incarnation of the Society.

We discovered quite a lot of the past events by the simple, if moderately scary method of having our occultist perform a seance to summon the ghost of one of the dead society members. Then there was a long walk in the rain to recruit a useful ally before we dealt with the issue at the well, wells proving just as troublesome in Finnish mythology as they are in Britain and Japan.

As usual though, the true horror ended up being the inability to roll even a single six on ten or more dice.

I took another break on Friday afternoon and spent an hour or so at the pool. About time I actually used some muscles.

Slot 9: Kult: Divinity Lost

I'd initially planned to run this game in the lodge, but on discovering that my lodgemate was also planning to run a game in the lodge on Friday night, I contacted the players in advance and one of them kindly offered his own lodge.

There is one character in this scenario who is a model. The players have some freedom with exactly how to interpret the characters, and this one tends to go one of two ways: goth or himbo. Tuesday's model was goth. Friday's was himbo. Both were a delight.

The strange thing about this scenario is that while it's got one of the scarier lists of content warnings, it's probably one of my less horrific scenarios. My favourite part, without giving away any spoilers, is the moment when the PCs have learned enough about what's going on in the house to realise something from right at the start of the game has way more significance than it might initially appear.

Not having access to the Sanderson tea bar for this game, I took my own, and then rather embarrasingly forgot to take it with me at the end. Thankfully our host tracked me down the next morning to give back the box.

Saturday

Slot 10: Fear Itself

I'm not much of a Gumshoe fan but I'll put up with it now and then for a game with CJ Romer. The content warnings did say that this was a very dark adult game which should not be played by anyone at all, but four of us decided to give it a shot all the same.

So four of Melissa's closest friends gathered to attempt to help her out with a mental health crisis, and in the process get rid of the psychic energy counsellor (or 'wizard' as my character described him) who Melissa's mum inexplicably thought would be helpful. Once we'd crushed him under a drinks cabinet and had him taken away by paramedics, we soon began diving into the horrifying world of creepypastas.

Overall I liked this scenario, and the pre-gen characters were a bunch of fun. While there was some genuinely dark stuff going on, it was lightened by the player interactions. Overall though, I find the constant gambling with metacurrencies aspect of this iteration of Gumshoe really pulls me out of the atmosphere. I'd consider a Quickshock version of the game but really for this style of horror I'm a lot happier with Kult.

Slot 11: Cosmic Dark

While I played one of Graham Walmsley's early test games of Cosmic Dark, this was the first time I was getting to play the completed game. The original scenario Stracsy's Adrenaline Station saw my medical officer Dr Mara Black join her old friends from the planet Revelation on a misson to a theme park where all we knew was that there had been an 'incident'.

I'm glad to say all four team members had a horrible time, although I think the guy from Legal probably had it the worst as he gradually realised just how non-compliant this park had become.

I was planning to run Cosmic Dark myself after getting home, but post-con illness got in the way. Nevertheless this game has made me even more keen to run it when I do get the chance. I also drew my own fan art of Stracsy.

Sunday

Slot 13: Matrons of Mystery

This time I was back as a player to investigate the mystery of the Six Sherlocks. Patience and her friends at the Thursday Murder Club (who meet on Wednesdays) in Walberswick had to investigate a murder at the Abbey Grange when Mr Rathbone was found dead in his room. Suspects included Mr Downey, Mr Brett and Mr Cumberbumberband, but we eventually settled on a convoluted solution involving blackmail, fraud and cover-ups, ending with a final confrontation at the not-actually-Reichenbach Falls.

This had a bunch of fun easter eggs for a Sherlock Holmes nerd like me, starting with the title itself. Brilliantly done.

And then I headed for the carvery, and after that all I was up for was a nice long sit down.

Reflections

Really the only problem with ConTingency is that it's just not possible to catch up with everyone you want to see. Maybe next year I need to try to arrange things a little better so I'm not dependent on random encounters (I had a lovely chat on Friday at the fish and chip shop). This time I didn't even make it to All Rolled Up (although I'm guaranteed to see them at plenty of other cons this year). But I did get my volunteer t-shirt in exchange for some reward tickets!