Furnace 2026

Furnace! Always a high point in the convention year.

We began on Friday with the now traditional meal out. This time it was a trip to the Temple of Fun, an all-vegan restaurant owned by Oli Sykes from Bring Me The Horizon. The last time we went there it was almost unspeakably hip, but this time it seemed to have shifted a bit more goth/alternative and we weren't quite as conspicuous. Apart from being a group of thirteen people, anyway.

On my previous visit I'd struggled with ordering a drink, not wanting anything with alcohol, caffeine, kombucha or CBD. I'm glad to say the drinks menu has also shifted a bit, and while I think my peach iced tea lemonade technically had a bit of caffeine, I was happy with the choices available.

As we got stuck into our vegan burgers, conversation turned to the Channel Islands, and the island of Sark in particular, which turned out to be long and complex, involving WW2 and more recently the Barclay Brothers. Having been there on holiday I was able to share my own experiences. There then followed a round of competitive diabetes as the glucose monitors came out and numbers were shared.

For dessert I had sticky toffee pudding, and while I wasn't sold on the oat cream it came with, I can't fault the cake itself.

Game 1: Call of Cthulhu

Yes, it's Kane's Tone again. I spent money on that night light and I was damn well going to use it. Having managed to claim one of the jailhouse cells, I was able to also use the sound effects without making too much of a nuisance of myself. 

A great group once again, not quite as paranoid as the previous group, but certainly one of the most aggressive. Nevertheless they got to the end without causing any additional murders. This is a scenario that's good in itself but really comes alive when the players buy into it and they absolutely did.

Game 2: Thieves of the Tome

I'd never heard of Thieves of the Tome before, but when I saw the description that included using actual books to make your spells, I was intrigued enough to give it a go. And I'm glad I did.

We were asked to bring a book that was mostly text, with chapters. I looked at my bedside table, decided against House of Leaves, and brought along Asian Ghost Short Stories because it has a really nice cover. The others brought Magician by Raymond E. Feist, and Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent.

We each compiled a list of six spells based on the first six chapters of the books. This immediately revealed that I'd chosen the wrong book, as quite a few of them weren't in English, which was a bit of an issue when it came to coming up with spell effects. So I skipped them in favour of the English titles. Well, mostly.

With our spell lists complete, it was time to hand them to the GM and change books. Which meant none of us actually knew what any of our spells did! We then made characters based on our new book. Given that the first two pages of Magician are largely about rock pools, this meant that my character Raymond was cool, deep and wet, and had shown up to a heist armed with pocket sand and a sack of crabs.

Off we went into our scenario, which was of course also generated from a book: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt.

We began well with Raymond coolly picking the lock of a safe with his crab claw lock picks, which netted us enough dynamite to make our escape once Susie had summoned a giant blue horse to hold back the guards. Team mastermind Luo Hui summoned various helpful ghosts, and while blanketing our final destination in snow (the one Japanese title I left in, hoping that the recipient would know the legend of Yuki-Onna) wasn't quite the intended result, it certainly made it easy to find.

Between our random personalities and unpredictable spells, this ended up being one of the funniest games I've played. And given how much I enjoyed book binding at Conspiracy, I might just have to print a copy and bind it into my very own tome.

Game 3: Call of Cthulhu

A Cthulhu by Gaslight game, in which our team of investigators were called in to investigate someone who'd been found cutting pages out of a medieval manuscript. Utterly horrifying. Later on there were also monsters, which were almost as horrifying as the vandalised book!

We were using the pre-gens from the book, and so I decided to play Mrs Emily Fairweather, research chemist, as I'd played her before. By this time I was flagging a bit, having had a horrible nightmare about generative AI on Friday night, so went for a familiar character to give me the best chance of keeping up. And I'm glad I did, as the GM had put together a wonderful tangle of books and magic for us to unravel, and then quickly bury and pretend never happened by the end.

Game 4: Pinebox Middle School

Once again I found myself faced with a familiar set of pre-gens, and picked the one I'd played before: Juno, tennis enthusiast and keen explorer. Fortunately the rest of the group included Chase the medium and Leeza the ghost hunter, as really things would have gone very badly without them as we investigated terrifying events and appropriate Lord of the Rings references at Wilson's Quarry, finishing with an extremely salty showdown.

Takeaway message: even if you're an immortal witch, it's still not a good idea to pick a fight with seven 12-year-olds.

During the lunch break we had the raffle, this time drawn by the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, a.k.a. Furnace regular Andy. He didn't show up in full regalia as some of us were hoping, but did wear the very impressive chain of office.

Game 5: Monster of the Week

It was the final game of the weekend and I was back in the GM's seat with Red Mask, a scenario set in Korea adapted from the K-drama inspired campaign I recently ran at MK-RPG.

I gave the group three options for team playbooks: a radio station, a podcast team, or high society people with double lives. They picked the latter, and became part of the family owning an unspecified chaebol. Three of them were actual family members - the Chosen, Expert and Spooky - while two were associates - the Divine and the Exile, the latter being the Crown Prince from somewhere in the 1800s who'd time travelled to the future due to the machinations of the chief minister, this being a common occupational hazard of being a crown prince based on the K-dramas I've watched.

After overhearing a mother at a corporate party lamenting that her daughter was telling silly stories about the supernatural and that wasn't going to help her become Seoul's youngest lawyer, the family decided to investigate further, discovering an urban legend in addition to various ghosts and spirits - although perhaps the most horrifying thing was the Korean school system.

And that was that for another fantastic Furnace. The expansion into the dining area to provide extra gaming space has been a very welcome addition. I got to meet a bunch of new people in addition to the regulars, and catch up with friends from other cons too.

Now to figure out which of you bastards gave me this cold. 

Conspiracy 2026

Conspiracy was a bit out of the ordinary. A convention not for playing games, but about writing them. Carol, the organiser, was looking for people to host events, and since it was in Cranfield, I decided to go along and help out.

Friday

Friday evening saw us gather in one of the smaller rooms at Cranfield, located conveniently next to the bar, where we were treated to an enthusiastic talk from John Dodd on the difference between writing RPG scenarios and writing stories. This is how I found out that as well as being a legend of the RPG convention scene, he's also written books.

Then it was time for dinner, a meal where the biggest challenge was narrowing down my choice of dessert to just one. Treacle tart won.

There were official introductions after that, but I didn't stay long, knowing that I had to be up the next morning ready to drive back to Cranfield for 9am. Poor planning on my part there.

Saturday Morning

I walked into the venue and immediately found Chris with a large box of bookbinding supplies, making it very easy to get to my workshop location. Bookbinding is something I've thought about trying out for a while, so jumped at the opportunity to give it a go. Soon Chris had me sewing sheets of paper together.

One of the workshops planned for Saturday was about writing horror scenarios, but the presenter had unfortunately had to drop out for family reasons. Carol asked if I could fill in, and I agreed on the understanding that it would not exactly be a well prepared session.

Conveniently the start of the workshop coincided with reaching the glue stage of bookbinding, so I left my book in the clamps and went to talk horror. Despite lack of prep time, I had managed to come up with a few specific things to talk about and some hopefully useful advice. The rest of the group had plenty of great questions and we easily filled the hour.

After an excellent lunch, it was back to my book to start assembling the book case, a.k.a. the hard cover. Turns out I'm very bad at cutting greyboard with a craft knife, so my covers weren't quite as symmetrical as they should be, but with that largely hidden away under the cover paper and cloth, I wasn't too worried. Soon my book was in its cover and waiting for glue to dry once again.

Saturday Afternoon 

In the afternoon I presented another workshop, this time on being published and self publishing. Having some experience of both, I've already made most of the mistakes, so was ready to help other people learn from them. I had a little too much material prepared for this one, and we ended up running over a bit, but with the next thing on the agenda being the refreshment break, this wasn't an issue, especially since we were sitting near the coffee machine. 

Suitably caffeinated, I went to the next workshop on narrative theory, presented by an English teacher. This involved a lot of diagrams and some technical words I didn't recognise, but ultimately proved entertaining as we sat down in small groups with a large sheet of paper to assemble a narrative based on the theory we were learning. Our group created the story of a young hero out to defeat the orange wizard, facing setbacks and plot twists along the way and finally coming to an understanding about the nature of magic and society.

 

This was followed by a workshop on designing multi-table games. I was hoping to get some ideas for how to make a scenario involving a mirror dungeon across two tables work, but since I got there a bit late, discussion was already in full flow on running a multi-table epic at the next Contingency convention. While not quite what I hoped for, I stuck around as it was still interesting stuff. 

Then it was time for dinner, where I failed the challenge and had the cheesecake and the chocolate mousse.

In the evening there was a play test for a Rivers of London game that I would love to have joined. However, before Conspiracy ever got scheduled I had already agreed to run a nalbinding workshop at my craft group. So I reluctantly said my goodbyes and went home. With my new handmade book!

 

Reflections

This was a really fun and encouraging weekend, which could only be improved by my being able to attend all of it. And it seems like it was enough of a success that it's going to be repeated. There's a possibility it might clash with one of my other regular conventions next year, but if it doesn't, I will absolutely be there.

(Oh, and the nalbinding workshop went great. We made dice bags drawstring pouches!)