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!)
