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.
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