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.

Furnace XX

Off to Furnace again, along with my husband who remembered to register this time. This was set to be the biggest Furnace yet, and excitingly for me, a few friends were coming for the first time, including one guy I'd never seen in person before, allowing me to confirm that he does in fact have legs.

Last year's outing to the Italian restaurant was seven people. This year, probably due to the increased numbers as well as greater awareness, there were seventeen of us. Which meant it was a bit of a long meal as they had so many people to serve (it's a small restaurant and we took up about half of it) but did make for good conversation. If we get numbers like this again next time though, it might be worth splitting the Friday meal across more than one venue.

Saturday kicked off earlier than usual, as breakfast was ending earlier so they could kick everyone out of the breakfast room and reset it as an additional gaming space. This room provided an additional eight tables, allowing for the biggest Furnace yet. It also meant a bigger area for All Rolled Up and Patriot Games to set up their stalls, and for the Bring and Buy table, all of which were very welcome.

The traditional opening speech was followed up by collecting the bag I'd pre-ordered, and also a commemorative dice tray. I decided not to use the bag during the weekend (foreseeing chaos with everyone having the same bag) but did use the extremely nice dice tray which is now a permanent resident in my gaming bag.

Game 1: Pendragon

The luck of the draw meant I hadn't got into any of my game picks in the morning session. Fortunately there was a space left in a Pendragon game, and since people had previously told me that they thought I'd like Pendragon, I decided to give it a go.

Well I do like Pendragon. The skill lists were a reasonable length, with a clear split between combat and everything else, much like Dragonbane. The traits meant I had a solid idea of how Dame Tamura was going to behave, and gave the option of making rolls to see if she was going to make poor choices as a result. Whether I'd actually want to play an entire Great Pendragon Campaign, I don't know, as I'm not sure how much doing knight things would appear long term, but I'd be willing to give it a try.

By the end of the session, Tamura had got lost in London, had mild religious disagreements, watched fellow knights vie for a lady's favour, and performed an emergency knighthood. Good times all round.

Game 2: Pinebox Middle School

So long term blog readers have probably noticed that I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Pinebox Middle School is a slightly younger age range than Buffy but still firmly in that general area, so this was obviously a must-play.

I picked out the Athlete character, noticed a degree of resemblance to the Williams sisters, and accordingly named her Juno. Juno and friends set out on a camping trip with the local not-actually-scouts group, where things naturally went very wrong. Juno's athletic skills served her well in most situations, but things did get a little hairy towards the end when she was forced to play the flute, an upsetting experience for everyone involved.

Overall this had pretty similar vibes to Tales from the Loop, with the additional benefit of being Savage Worlds, where the dice just aren't as dickish as they tend to be in Year Zero Engine. Overall I have a slight preferences for the older teens in East Texas University (also based in Pinebox) but this is a great game nonetheless.

Game 3: Dragonbane

Time to take up the GM mantle and run a game. Having claimed one of the Jailhouse tables rather than a cell, I felt I should offer something where I could manage five players, and decided to try writing a Dragonbane adventure. Knowing I'd need miniatures, and somewhat inspired by an all duck game I played at a previous con, I decided on an all cat person game.

Prepping for this game, I discovered that while writing monsters for Dragonbane is pretty fun, I don't like making characters at all - at least, not the assigning skills part. And I'd signed up to provide five of them. But eventually I got them done, and Coco, Felix, Smoky, Marmalade and Stripes were ready to discover what catastrophe had befallen their home village of Meowington.

Running Dragonbane, particularly stuff I wrote myself, is still a weird experience for me because it's quite a long way away from the kind of thing I normally do. It's hard for me to judge how things actually went. Still, nobody looked bored or acted disengaged, so it clearly wasn't terrible. The biggest hiccup was when I couldn't remember the villain's motivation, which was really rather important to the story. Fortunately I remembered in time, but I should probably write that one down a little more clearly in future.

Nerves and insecurity aside, it was a lot of fun getting to bring out some of my collection of cat adventurer miniatures and make use of the Tom Cartos battle map books.

Game 4: SLA Industries

SLA is usually good for a laugh at a convention, and this was no exception. Offered the usual set of pregens, I decided to try something new and picked out the Neophron, a bird person with good social skills, making me the de facto party leader, although leader is a strong word for a party of SLA characters especially when there's a Stormer and a Frother in the group.

Our mission was simple: get a kebab. For which we needed money. For which we needed a job. For which we needed to replace the paper in the job printer so that it would print properly and we could read what the job was. And so began a sequence of bizarre events as we set out to clear a paper jam and ultimately get something to eat.

The GM was playing a little fast and loose with the system, which I appreciated as it gave me a chance to get more to grips with the basics of how it works, without having to worry about oddities like the reverse declaration initiative system. Also a welcome opportunity to pull out my bag of d10s. He also had the feats printed out on cards, which was a more convenient way to read them than all being printed on one sheet.

This was probably the highlight of the convention for me. Funny, gory, well GMed and with an enthusiastic group of players.

Before the final slot we had the raffle. Thanks to Chaosium sponsoring basically every convention I've been to this year, most of the prizes were Chaosium books and I walked away with a brand new copy of BRP.

Game 5: Monster of the Week

A second outing for my K-Pop Demon Hunters inspired game. With only three players this time, it was the Celebrity, Changeling and Forged who set out to protect Busan from demons. Based on what happened last time, I provided bulldog clips to attach the photos to the name cards, although I'm wondering if separate standees for the cards might also be a good idea. It may come down to how much lamination I can face doing.

With only one player being familiar with the movie, I had to work a little harder to bring the setting details, not helped by my tendency to forget that we were in Busan, not Seoul, and I don't think overall that it was as good as the game at Concrete Cow. But it still works as an adventure and it's going in my regular convention rotation for a while. As I learn more about Korean mythology, it may even get a sequel.

And that was that. Furnace remains an absolute delight. I got to catch up with old friends and meet some lovely new people across all the games. I really hope our first timers will join the rest of us again next year.

Revelation 2025

I set off at a reasonable time on Friday afternoon. It should take about two hours to drive to Sheffield, but I know from past experience to allow at least three. So I got to the Garrison at 6pm, within minutes of my room sharer, and then headed to the bar, ready for another weekend of Revelation.

Some of the Garricon regulars have started going for meals out on the Friday nights. With dietary requirements significantly cutting down the options this time, we headed out to Church - Temple of Fun, an all vegan bar and restaurant run by the front man of the band Bring Me The Horizon. This was a little surreal. We were, after all, a group of nerds going into an extremely hip venue. But on the plus side, one of our party was someone the rest of us were meeting for the first time, and I hope it made it a lot easier for him to identify the group of nerds while we were surrounded by really cool people.

The whole place was like this

I managed to obtain a drink free of alcohol, kombucha or CBD (a bigger challenge than it sounds), admired the black cutlery, ordered a seitan and facon burger and fries followed by cheeseless cheesecake, and enjoyed the absolutely bizarre decor. It was certainly the right atmosphere for preparing to run Kult.

black cutlery

Vegan chicken and bacon burger and fries

Vegan black forest cheesecake with chocolate ice cream

Game 1: Monster of the Week

I kicked things off with Valentine's Day, a scenario I originally wrote for a campaign, updated to work as a one-shot. I kept the campaign's group concept of the characters all being retirees and acting as the neighbourhood watch group in their suburb of Milton Keynes. I stuck with the standard set of playbooks, and the players picked the Spellslinger, Expert, Initiate and Monstrous. After establishing histories, they set out to find out why Lizzie the part time barista was getting so many unwanted valentine's gifts. By the end, an appropriate amount of love was in the air, nobody died and nothing was on fire that shouldn't be. So a great success!

I modified this slightly from the original scenario, adding in some extra monsters to add theming, excitement and things for me to do on a failed roll, and I'm pretty happy with the result. I expect I'll give this a few more outings over the year.

I put all my game materials for each game into separate themed bags this time. My new Matrons of Mystery bag seemed appropriate for retirees investigating mysteries, even if it wasn't quite the same game.

Matrons tote bag

Game 2: Monster of the Week

Proving just how versatile MOTW can be, my second game saw me playing an agent of a United Nations agency devoted to tracking down dangerous uses of fringe science. I picked the Professional, and along with an ex-military Wronged, an ex-police Gumshoe and an ex-alive person Monstrous, we investigated strange goings on in a gated community in Oxfordshire.

I love how this game rewards creativity. Lily the ghost proved to be an extremely valuable team member due to her ability to get inside places without having to open doors (and then telekinetically open them when necessary). It was also tonally very different to the game I ran. Rather than my cosy group of retirees, this was action and body horror.

Game 3: Kult: Divinity Lost

I'd done one practice run of Not For A Million Dollars, confirming it would fit into a four hour slot, and resulting in a few tweaks to the characters. While there's still room for improvement, the tweaks were good choices, giving every character an opportunity to use at least one of their advantages. But I think in future this one needs a longer slot. I put it in the Saturday night slot to get the maximum amount of time, but I think six hours would be a more comfortable timeframe. Definitely one to run at a longer con like Contingency.

Based on the test run, I picked up a few props and prepared some handouts. Based on this run, I could do with a few more props and handouts, which I will have ready for the next time I run this.

Of course it's the players who make a game like this, and I had an absolutely lovely group, all embracing the messed up reality show contestant PCs, bringing both pathos and humour. The grumpy scientist, determined investigator, dramatic influencer and himbo model were all a delight, and I don't think I'm going to forget the phrase 'Luigi board' for a while.

Game 4: Escape from Dino Island

While PBTA is thought of as low prep, both my previous games involved quite a lot of prep. But all I had to do for Dino Island was print out playbooks. We ran through the standard questionnaire, skipping the first question about why they were on the island, because in the process of writing a blurb, I'd already done that: guests at a destination wedding on a dinosaur themed resort. They were expecting animatronics. What they got was the terrifying, electrically active, genetically branded, Tesladactyl.

In addition to the box of tiny dinosaurs, my kit now includes a set of dinosaur dice for when I need to roll on the random tables.

This is one game I'd love to see more people running. While I consider myself a generally competent PBTA GM, I know there are plenty of people who do this kind of low prep, high improv GMing better than I do. Plus, I really want to play it some time.

Dinosaurs!

Game 5: Threadbare

There were two more MOTW games I could have signed up for - but instead I went for Boogie Shoes, in which a group of toys had to overcome a series of obstacles in order to participate in a dance contest in a post-apocalyptic world populated entirely by toys. I played Millicent Mouse, a well constructed cuddly toy mouse manufactured by Steiff, meaning she was able to get served in high class hat shops, unlike her friend Rollup, a cuddly six-limbed alien who had been a carnival prize.

Millicent and Rollup were joined by Coco the gorilla and her barrel of monkeys, and Martha the Christmas sock. We arranged for dance lessons for Coco (to get her monkeys working in sync) and Rollup (to help him figure out which of his limbs were arms and which were legs). We got a sparkly hat and cane for Millicent, and some Christmas lights and music for Martha. And we put on a musical spectacular, the like of which had never been seen before.

This was a very different setting to the last toy based game I played. It's got great potential for creativity as the players come up with toy ideas. We didn't get to see much of the part of the game where bits of you get damaged and can be replaced with other items, largely thanks to the dice who had decided to be cooperative for once, so we didn't get much of the stitchpunk aspect. But it was Sunday afternoon, and this was an ideal time for a cute and cuddly game in which all conflicts were resolved via dance-offs.

Millicent Mouse's character sheet

Reflections

Well that was great. Exhausting - I probably shouldn't have offered three games (although I had a great time running them all) so next time I'll try to remember to not be quite as enthusiastic. Or at least, try to make sure I'm GMing something energising in slot 5 as that's the one where I start to flag. Oh, and try to make better choices at breakfast so I don't have a horrendous mid-morning sugar crash.

It's impressive how much variety there is in a convention where all the games are PBTA and adjacent systems. Even across just Monster of the Week there was a lot of variety. And it's great to see older games like MOTW and Apocalypse World itself still getting plenty of love alongside much newer arrivals.

Revelation was my first in-person Garricon, back in 2022, and it might just still be my favourite.

Furnace XIX

Once again it was touch and go whether I would make it to Furnace. Two weeks earlier I'd picked up a very nasty cold, and then on the Monday before I had covid and flu vaccines which knocked me out for a couple of days. But by Friday morning I was feeling well enough to make the drive.

In theory it takes a little over two hours to drive to the Garrison. In practice it seems to be getting longer and longer. This time I allowed three hours to get me there by 6pm as planned and still ended up arriving half an hour late. Fortunately dinner was booked for quite a bit later than that. A group of seven of us went out to a nearby Italian restaurant for a bit of pre-convention socialising. By the time we got back it was 11pm and we pretty much all went straight to bed.

Saturday began with breakfast at the Garrison, and then a trip to the car to retrieve the bring and buy bag which I'd been too tired to bring in the night before. Games are heavy. I had a quick browse of other people's books and then headed to the cells for my first game.

Game 1: Star Trek Adventures

Lower Decks is amongst my favourite Star Trek, so seeing a STA game in that setting, I had to sign up. I quickly found the character based on D'Vana Tendi and claimed her as my own. Along with Marcus (engineering), Jack (medical) and Seleya (command) we began our mission: to make sure the group of diplomats visiting the ship were not alerted to any of the usual nonsense that goes on in Lower Decks.

I began by making some adjustments to the alarm system, so that in the event that an alarm went off, instead of the klaxon there would be a sudden burst of Orien space shanties. Which didn't quite happen, as I'd got the wrong data chip and when something strange happened with the transporters, we got a sudden burst of Klingon acid punk. Seleya demonstrated great diplomatic ability by convincing the diplomats that it was in fact a welcoming fanfare.

Then of course we had to find the surprise tagalongs from the transporter, involving the traditional crawl through the Jeffries tubes, an attempt to communicate with a Tamarian, and creative use of the transporter beam. I could picture every scene. Wonderful stuff.

Game 2: Liminal

After a number of attempts to get to play the scenario The Edge of Reality, I finally got lucky here (or rather used my GM pick to get in.) I picked up a rather dubious antiques dealer/werewolf and we got to work looking into a mysterious death accompanied by some suspiciously helpful horoscopes. The scenario involved a little more sci-fi than the average game of Liminal, and was a thoroughly good time.

Then it was down to the bar for dinner. The hotel had utterly confused us by actually changing the menu for the first time in years. I went for the confit chicken breast with chorizo, potatoes, wilted spinach and saffron mayonnaise, and was rather impressed. Having eaten everything to my taste on the previous menu a number of times before, it was great to have something new.

Game 3: Liminal

I was in the GM seat for the evening game, running my newest Liminal scenario, Blood, Sweat and Tears. This one started out as part of a campaign I ran, and didn't go too well as I wrote it for a crew with a necromancer and then the necromancer's player was ill and couldn't make it. I've now substantially reworked it (to the point where events happen in almost reverse order) and it now runs a lot smoother and is no longer necromancer dependent. I'd run the new version twice before, and now had it polished into a version that's close to being publishable.

One fun part of running this one is that it's set in a very small area and incorporates significant amounts of local history. To the point where I could tell the players to feel free to google any named locations - anything they found was most likely true.

I also came up with a new set of pre-gens for this one - a touring band who alternate playing gigs and solving mysteries. The players did a great job embracing the unusual crew, and by 11pm the mystery was solved and they were ready to get to the next gig.

Game 4: Cthulhu Dark

Sunday morning I was GMing again, this time with my newest Jamesian horror scenario, The Temple of Artemis. Originally written for a game season on the Raspy Raven discord, this one had also had two previous runs and is coming close to its final form. Which meant I was scribbling notes on my notes as we went, and the whole thing needs a thorough rewrite to match the game I actually run.

Once again the players did a great job embodying the characters as Miss Williams took them to visit the creepy old mansion she'd just inherited and unsurprisingly discovered supernatural goings on in between some very substantial Edwardian meals. All survived with their minds intact, although it was a close thing, particularly for Miss Renfrew, and they all had to play a lot of golf to recover their nerves.

I didn't have a game booked for slot 5, having been unlucky in the raffle, and while I did offer to run a game for gameless people, not enough were interested to make it viable. And in any case, I was still pretty tired. So I stuck around for the raffle, just in case I won anything (I didn't) and then headed home.

Another lovely weekend at the Garrison. Here's hoping none of us caught covid this time!

Longcon 2024

Longcon is a revival of an older Garrison convention, where the premise is that rather than playing different games in five gaming slots across the weekend, you spend the full weekend playing one long game. An initial attempt to revive it in 2023 didn't work out, but with much more notice for potential players to get it onto the schedule, 2024 went ahead.

This was a very small convention, smaller than any other Garrison convention I've been to. Nevertheless I managed to meet up with a few regulars in the bar on Friday night. We talked about the games, and I explained that I knew almost nothing about the game I was about to play, except that it was based on a TV show I hadn't seen (Justified), but I was pretty sure that we were going to do crime.

Day 1

The game I'd signed up for was Copperhead County, a FITD game that the author calls "a Southern noir game about organized crime and political corruption in a fictional slice of present-day Tennessee". We kicked off with character creation. I picked the Cleaner, supposedly the brains of the operation, although once we'd done stats I was pretty much the designated face. Loretta the Cleaner was joined by Johnny Bob the Brick and Axle the Mover.

The story began with the three of us coming back into town, five years after the raid that destroyed our operation, to attend the funeral of our former boss who died in prison. Like most FITD games we'd all created a few NPCs during character creation, so Loretta's first meeting was with her old friend Milton the bartender, who'd given her a job when she first came to town, still wearing her wedding dress after ditching her fiancé at the altar. It soon became apparent that Copperhead County had become a much worse place since we'd fled the raid, and by the end of the funeral we'd decided that the three of us were going to have to do something about it.

Cut to a few weeks later. We'd managed to make ourselves unpopular with basically everyone except a local biker gang. We'd carved out a bit of space to sell weed, but what Johnny Bob really wanted was a meth lab. Which also meant we needed a meth cook, as you don't want to go messing with meth if you don't know what you're doing.

Johnny Bob had found a meth lab out in the woods run by the Mountain Mafia, and while it was pretty well guarded, we reckoned we could take it. We went in at night, but before we could start, we actually found the meth cook. He was trying to escape, but also wanted to help his sister, who was still imprisoned in the lab, and also revenge on all of them. We were happy to help in exchange for him coming to work for us instead, and in we went.

Loretta set up her sniper rifle, aiming to pick off a few guards while drawing them away from the lab while the others crept round the other side. That didn't exactly happen. Instead there was gunfire from the other side of the site, and Loretta had to go running, pursued by guards. Some of them got taken out by the explosives trap she'd set up in advance, but then it turned out whoever had shot at her had also set up a bunch of land mines.

Several explosions later, the pursuing guards were all dead but Loretta was unconscious with serious burns. Things weren't going well at the other end either, with Johnny taking serious injuries in the gunfight. Axle ended up being the one to save the day, setting two guards on fire and getting out completely unharmed.

Our next mission was a society party, where Loretta entirely failed to roll well on her social skills, Johnny ended up having a rather disturbing encounter in the bathroom, and Axle once again ended up saving the day. Quote of the weekend: "Why does she have so many sex knives?"

Trouble came looking for us after that, with Loretta's ex fiancé showing up trying to blackmail her into going back to him, plus the ongoing developments as we learned someone in the background was very determined to screw over the three of us and take over our operation. We ended with us teaming up with our biker friends for an assault on the Mountain Mafia, who were annoyed about us stealing their meth lab, aided by a rocket launcher Axle had bought off the dark web. Turns out, when all you have is a rocket launcher, every problem looks like a target.

Overall I think Copperhead County is a well put together game, doing a great job of  reworking the Blades in the Dark concept into a modern day real world setting. My character's special abilities felt fun and thematic, the actions were easy to understand and use, and the XP triggers were fun to discuss at the end of each of the three sessions. It's well worth checking out, even if, like me, you never watch this kind of TV show, as the playbook will guide you in how to make the genre work.

To me, its only issue is FITD itself. Particularly when you're a new character, your chances of rolling 6s are low, meaning the chances of things constantly getting worse are high. It's the kind of downward spiral more commonly associated with horror games like Call of Cthulhu, which can make it really difficult to think of yourself as a badass criminal when everything you do ends up blowing up in your face.

So overall I'm thoroughly impressed with Copperhead County, but do expect starting characters to struggle as much here as they do in any other FITD game.

Day 2

While the intentions was to play the same game across five slots, the GM normally only does one day of Garrison conventions and knew there was a chance he wouldn't be able to run on day 2. We'd agreed in advance that if he had to drop out, I'd take over, so on Sunday morning I pulled out the contingency plan: Starforged.

I picked Starforged partly because it requires no preparation beyond some printing, and partly because as a game with a GMless mode, I'd still get to play. So Johnny Bob became Cowboy the hotshot pilot, Axle became Cleric the battlefield medic, and Loretta became Pyro the psionicist. Based on my previous experiences with Starforged I also gave everyone +1 to one stat, and had us all pick a starship module in addition to the one extra asset you get at character creation. In a short game like this it's common for the ship modules to see very little use, which can be disappointing if that's the asset you picked. This way everyone had a path or companion, but we still had some fun stuff for the brief time we did spend on the ship.

Cowboy had picked Courier as his path so it made sense to do a courier mission. He told us we were transporting a case of DNA samples, and we randomly generated the Jovian planet Zephyr, with a toxic atmosphere and constant megastorm. The journey there was pretty quiet, but our descent into atmo rapidly became exciting when we encountered a space pufferfish with mental control powers, which initially took over the ship's AI causing it to do nothing but sing Taylor Swift songs. Its influence rapidly spread across the crew itself, and ultimately we ended up losing control and crashing onto the planet.

From then we had a journey through some caves, meeting a giant spider along the way, before making it to the settlement which rapidly turned out to be some kind of cult to Taylor Swift. We had to take the samples to a professor, but he was out on the research farm, so we asked to borrow a vehicle. They agreed, on the condition that we get it out of the shed ourselves, which first meant clearing out the infestation of acid blooded cave worms.

The journey out to the farm was pretty smooth, and we even got some help from the local wildlife, which by this point we assumed everything was about to go horribly wrong. And it was, as we arrived to realise what they were farming here was people, the case we were carrying was a ruse, and the real DNA samples we were delivering was ourselves.

We fled, fighting off the guards that pursued us, back to the settlement, with Taylor Swift playing from all the enemy vehicles. We took a few injuries, but managed to Shake It Off. We knew there'd be Bad Blood for not finishing the delivery so we threw the case out of the vehicle as we went, and then dived back into the cave systems. We got our ship repaired and took off, smashing straight through the injured space pufferfish which went off like a burst balloon, taking out all the enemy ships as we left atmo and swore never to visit that planet again. Cowboy decided to quit the courier business. But at least we got a nice hover skiff out of it.

Starforged is absolutely the game I would recommend for a situation like this when you don't know how long you're playing for, if at all, or how many players you're going to have. I did no prep and it all just worked. I'm lucky enough to have both the asset deck and the reference guide, which make things a bit smoother at the table. For each player I printed a character sheet, and a double sided page with adventure moves on one side and combat moves on the other, as those are the ones people are regularly referring to. Based on this game, I would also add a single copy of the exploration moves, as we used those quite a lot. For the rest, we passed the reference guide around.

Reflections

This was a great opportunity to play things like FITD games with downtime phases that you normally never get to do in a one-shot, to create a character and then get to stay with them for hours, to play without the pressure to wrap things up in a single session.

There are some minor downsides. With everyone being in one group all weekend you don't get to see much of the other players outside your group, not even at meal times since the games don't have set slots. I did miss some of the social aspect of conventions, and other than the people in my group and those I saw in the bar, I'm not really sure who else was there.

While for that reason I wouldn't want this as my only con, it's a fantastic addition to the usual convention offerings. I'd definitely like to add this to my annual convention schedule and I'm already starting to think about what I could potentially run next year.

Revelation 2024

Normally I drive up to Garricons on a Friday afternoon and then have dinner when I get there. This time the traffic was so bad that I decided I didn't want to wait, and stopped off at a services to have dinner while I waited for the traffic to clear a bit. By some chance I'd managed to find a Burger King where there'd been some kind of catastrophic drinks failure, meaning the only drinks they had available were black coffee and Capri-Sun. One of those journeys.

I did still make it to the Garrison at a reasonable time, and was able to have a bit of a rest before heading to the bar when other people started arriving, but then it was time for bed at a sensible time ready for the games ahead.

Game 1: Matrons of Mystery

Another exciting opportunity to play my own game! I decide to take a break from Rosemary and Pierre this time and come up with a new matron. Brenda Kerr is an outdoorsy type who enjoys birdwatching. Her husband Derrick was a dentist, who left her for a younger woman. She's very proud of their two children though, Molly the footballer and Peter the doctor.

Brenda and her friends had a lovely meal in a stately home (Brenda wore her dress fleece) and a good night's sleep, but were awoken in the morning by the shocking news that the solicitor who was about to read the will in the morning had been murdered, and the famous painting, Stable Boy With Huge Stallion had been stolen! And so began a comedy of errors as the four of us annoyed everyone in sight, tampered with evidence and got covered in tea. For a while it seemed like we were never going to solve this murder! But finally we managed to uncover a few clues, with the help of Dr Peter doing a bit of extra medical examination, and finally the culprit was revealed.

But the killer had escaped! And so began an epic chase scene involving a bicycle, a moped, a horse, a Reliant Robin, and after matron Peggy had called her TV producer child, a news helicopter which we used to finally take down the killer.

An absolute delight.

Game 2: City of Mist

Despite my best efforts I've played very little City of Mist, but for once luck was on my side and I got into a game. A selection of pre-gens were on offer, including Detective Enkidu who I played the other time I played City of Mist. This time though I picked up Post-Mortem, a lab-created member of the walking dead and skilled assassin. And the three of us began looking into some strange disappearances at a hotel in the tourist district, resulting in some very creative use of a super soaker.

City of Mist is a bit of a weird system, combining regular PBTA moves with Fate tags, but it works pretty smoothly. Some of the move names I find a little unhelpful, as my interpretation of them doesn't entirely match up with what they actually do, so I have to keep reading the descriptions to remind myself. That's something that will come with practice though. So I just need to get more practice. Noir superheroes is a genre I enjoy, and I'd really like to play more of this.

Game 3: Kult

I went for my improvised Kult game, The Heist, for the evening slot, and off we went to steal an occult book from a billionaire's yacht, in what was probably the most gonzo outing this particular scenario has ever had. Although given who was playing, I'm not entirely surprised.

This one can be hard work to run, with the constant referring to the tarot cards, but it's pretty damn rewarding when it does all come together. I'm considering publishing this one. While most of my Kult scenarios involved enough work that I don't want to give them away for free (the only option as for IP reasons there's no Kult community content license), this one is a single page plus character sheets, and I think that might be worth sharing.

Game 4: Monster of the Week

Two years after my first Monster of the Week game at Revelation 2022, I brought along my own scenario, Who Ate All The Pies? and had two of the same players in the game. The team soon learned that trouble was afoot in Piesville, Louisiana, and they were going to have to sort it out fast if they were going to be able to enjoy the town fair and its annual pie eating contest to its full extent.

Thanks to transport delays we were a bit late getting started, and with character creation taking longer than usual, I was a bit worried about timing for this one. But it worked out in the end - we spent a little less time on inter-character banter and investigating the full motivations at play, but the key plot points were all played out.

Once again I've realised that the scenario I've written down isn't exactly the scenario I run, so while I'd like to publish this one (possibly along with a few other MOTW scenarios) I need to first update it to match the actually scenario.

Game 5: Trophy Dark

My second game of Trophy Dark. We set off into the forest in search of a book, in the hope that retrieving it would get our souls back from a demon. That didn't happen. What did happen was a surprise conga line of murder, one character turned into a tree, and much to my surprise, my own character actually getting out alive. I'm still not sure how that happened, although I doubt life got any better for her after that.

A good game to end the convention on. Relatively short, not too much thinking with the randomly generated characters, and no expectation of survival resulting in proper drive-it-like-you-stole-it playing. 

Reflections

As I noted during a break in the final session, the one down side with increased gender diversity at conventions is having to share the toilets. It really is nice to find myself at a table where not only am I not the only woman, but women actually outnumber men. As a hobby, we're getting there.

Revelation remains a gem of a convention. Even with all the games being PBTA or FITD (or at least adjacent) you never know what you're going to get. I had five radically different games and I enjoyed them all.

North Star 2023

This North Star was an unusual convention for me, as I managed to convince my husband to join me. Despite having been roleplaying for almost as long as I've been alive, and being by far the more social and outgoing of the two of us, he's always been reluctant to join me at conventions. This time was different. The prospect of a full weekend of Star Wars and Star Trek might have done the job.

Game 1: Starforged

I've been playing a solo Starforged game in the Firefly setting to help me learn how it works, and loved it, so I had to take the opportunity to play someone else's Starforged Firefly game. The premise was we were a group of bounty hunters who were chasing the Serenity crew to win a bounty placed by Niska.

We randomly rolled for character types, and got a scoundrel, a fugitive hunter, a medic and an occultist. With Firefly not being a particularly occult setting, I decided my character's ability to veil herself in shadows was something she'd learned at the same institute as River Tam.

Things went as unsmooth as things in Starforged are inclined to do, and there were some injuries when our captain got into a fight with Zoe, but we were able to take her and Wash captive and track down Malcolm Reynolds and co. Things were further complicated when we discovered that there were quite a few more members of the Reynolds gang than we were anticipated, including River, who my character remembered from her time in the institute.

Apparently previous groups have decided to join forces with Reynolds at this point. However, given how many of us River managed to stab before we could react, this didn't happen. By the time we were done, River and Wash were both dead, and the latter's corpse used to take out a minefield. We got our bounty, stayed on the right side of Niska, and the 'verse presumbly went very differently from then onwards. Perhaps it was our crew who eventually discovered the secrets of Miranda?

Starforged is my new favourite system for Firefly and this was a blast. One of those games where the only negative is that we won't get to spend any more time with those characters.

Game 2: Things From The Flood

My own scenario, Witchlight, is set in 1996 and features the somewhat reluctant members of the school film club discovering the secrets of the Vac. Being a 90s teen myself, this setting resonates for me and it was fun to take the group twenty-seven years into the past (even though a part of me is convinced it can't be more than ten years ago.) I set it in the Norfolk loop, as it's the setting that I'm most comfortable with. I've never been to Sweden or Nevada, but a significant amount of my family are Norfolk farmers.

I could still use some practice with this game, this being the second ever time I've run it, but I'm pretty happy with the adventure. One to keep in the convention rotation for a while. Things From The Flood doesn't get as much love as Tales From The Loop, but I really like what it does with the setting.

One tweak I might make for future in-person runs is to have handouts for people's iconic items - not least because one of them is a mobile phone and absolutely nobody can remember exactly what a 1996 mobile phone looks like without googling it. Some period appropriate images should help with the atmosphere as well. And for online runs, having everyone's favourite song queued up in WatchTogether should be fun.

Given how popular this was in sign-ups I'm going to bring this one to Furnace to give a few more of the Garrison crowd a shot at playing it.

Game 3: Star Trek Adventures

I'm not a big enough Star Trek nerd to be completely at ease with Star Trek Adventures character creation, but I do know it well enough to play a pre-gen character. And with the prospect of two linked games, one in TOS and one in TNG, I was keen to give it a go. My husband also got into the TNG game with me, and he's a massive Star Trek nerd, so I was confident this would be fun.

And it certainly was, with all kinds of wibbly wobbly timey wimey things happening, characters swapping tables as they got displaced in spacetime, and finally the GMs pulling out a pair of walkie talkies when we managed to establish communication between the two times. The best moment was when we insisted on the two Romulan captains in different times talking to each other and the GMs had to roleplay between themselves.

This game was supposed to happen in 2022 but got pulled when covid meant one GM had to drop out, so I'm very happy to have got in this time. Linked games have to be difficult to pull off and this one was a delight.

Game 4: Monster Of The Week

While MOTW isn't typically a sci-fi game, the preview documents for the latest kickstarter arrived not long before the convention, and included new team playbooks. One of them, Agents In Black, was clearly modelled after Men In Black. And Men In Black is all about aliens, which is definitely sci-fi so...

I'd been intending to write a scenario involving the notorious concrete cows for a long time. I thought it was going to be Liminal, but when I started thinking about what alien threats the Agents In Black could take on, the cows came to mind once more.

From the fairly large pile of playbook options, I picked five that seemed to fit the concept. With three players in the game, that gave them a variety of options without being overwhelming. Choosing names was simplified by using the naming convention from the movies where everyone has a single letter codename. So the highly experienced Agent Q, newly recruited rookie Agent X, and small but deadly alien Agent B set out to solve the mystery of the concrete cows and save Milton Keynes.

As with Witchlight, this was only my second time running not only the scenario but the game itself. Again, I think I need more practice, but overall I'm happy with how things went down. This particular scenario could use more handouts. I had a few photos ready on my tablet, and Google Maps ready to go, but a couple of printouts would have sped things along.

I'm planning to run this again at Concrete Cow, because how could I not? And given that it's a PBTA game I'll probably bring it out for Revelation as well.

Game 5: Tales From The Loop

And back to the Loop, this time in Sweden with one of the adventures from the core book. With the title 'Creatures from the Cretaceous' I was expecting dinosaurs, and we certainly got dinosaurs in this terrifying adventure. While I knew we were playing Tales From The Loop and kids can't die in this game, my character didn't know that and Elin's fear was very real.

Sunday afternoon is normally the point where I start flagging, and as usual it took quite a lot of coffee to keep me going through the early stages. Fortunately, when the dinosaurs showed up, adrenaline started to take over.

Reflections

I love having a specialist convention. The sci-fi theme really pushes me to be creative in my convention games, and provides opportunities that might not come up as often at general conventions.

This North Star felt a little calmer on the scheduling side of things with only the normal challenges of numbers, slots, etc. to deal with rather than the multiple covid related drop-outs that have been plaguing Garrison conventions for the last couple of years. The complication seems to have been at the event itself, where a combination of multiple games with only three players and a last-minute drop-out seems to have caused some headaches. I can only express my admiration for the organisers who do an amazing job dealing with all this and making sure games happen.

It was a little smaller than last year's North Star, and another ten or so people would have been nice. Perhaps Eurovision was a factor - it sounds like it made hotel bookings more difficult - and rail strikes probably didn't help either. We did seem to be missing a few 'regulars' though so perhaps this was a one-off.

My husband had a good time. We only had one game together (he couldn't play mine because I'd spent so much time bouncing ideas off him while writing them) but that just made for good conversation in the car on the way home as we told each other what we'd been doing. He enjoyed meeting the other players and it sounds like he'll be joining me again next year. I couldn't ask for a better outcome.

Seven Hills 2023

My first time at Seven Hills! The theme was Change, which seemed appropriate given how much has changed since there was last an in-person Seven Hills convention.

Game 1: The Gentle Ladies' Tea & Monstrosity Destroying & Quilting Circle Auxiliary

So obviously I signed up for this scenario, entitled 'A Fete Worse Than Death', based almost entirely on the name of the game.

We were genteel ladies in Worcestershire in 1919, trying to ensure our village fete was a successs, facing various challenges along the way. We started off with such mundane horrors as someone trying to pass off a shop bought cake as home made, and rapidly escalated until we were fending off all manner of eldritch threats armed only with parasols, brooms and teapots.

This had a bit more of a board game feel to it than most RPGs, being fairly structured with each of us taking it in turn to face a new threat. We described how we approached the threat, rolled dice to see how well we did, and continued to do so until either the threat was dealt with, we were 'fudged' by a critical failure, or lost enough gentility points from failed rolls that we fainted. In the latter two cases, another lady could step in to assist. On two occasions we all failed so much that all three of us fainted and we were subjected to the ultimate horror: being rescued by a man.

This is the kind of game that's perfect for a casual one-shot. If you like coming up with creative ways to fend off abominations while maintaining respectability, give this one a shot. The main hinderance is actually finding a copy. After much searching I've found it for sale although the preview appears to be the entire document.

Game 2: Liminal

A rare opportunity to play my favourite game. Our team was called in by P Division to investigate a bizarre death at a stamp collecting shop in Manchester. A fun set of pre-gen characters and a thoroughly weird mystery that we had a great time unravelling. The GM was someone who's previously played in my games, and it was great to be on the other side of the table.

Game 3: Kult

I've been looking forward to the first in-person outing for my new scenario, Disco Inferno. I requested one of the cells at the Garrison hotels for this one, partly because I like them as a gaming space but mostly so I would be able to deploy my soundtrack and disco lights without annoying anyone else.

When printing the character sheets I'd managed to forget to include the relations section, so decided to freeform that a bit, just letting people pick a numerical value. That worked fine, but I'll need to remember to include that section next time as it does add something. Fortunately two players picked disadvantages that lead to a strong NPC relationship, which gave me something to incorporate into the story.

I'm very happy with how this went, except for one small error at the end. I got to the end of my prepared plot in the 3 hours I anticipated, but the players were so enthusiastic and didn't want to let it go! I should have been clearer about wrapping things up there as that would have made for a tighter ending. All the same, what we actually got was still OK. And credit to the players for thoroughly embracing their characters and the spirit of disco.

Game 4: Root

A PBTA game of adorable woodland animals, based on a popular board game. I'd been looking forward to trying this out, and with two sessions on the schedule I knew I had a good chance of getting in with my GM pick.

In the end though, despite a fun setting, solid rules, an interesting scenario, good GM and enthusiastic players, this one just didn't land for me. Maybe I just don't want to be an adorable woodland animal all that much. And this is why I like convention one-shots - a chance to try something out before I buy it.

Game 5: Liminal

Given how tired I was by slot 5 at Revelation, I decided the best way to keep myself going to the end was to run the one game I can always count on invigorating me: Liminal. I ran The Haunted Hospital, one of the set of adventures I've written set in and around Northampton, and created a whole new set of pre-gen characters. I used the convention theme of Change to create a new P Division team who'd all recently had a major upheaval in their life which lead them to their current job. I also sprinkled in a few new limitations that don't appear in the core book.

I wasn't sure exactly how this would go as it was my first time running it as a one-shot (it's previously only appeared as part of my Northampton campaign) but timing and balance all worked out well. This will join my convention staples for the year.

Reflections

I was supposed to indicate when registering if I was new to Seven Hills. I wasn't sure if having attended the virtual one in 2021 counted. But now I can definitively state I am not new to Seven Hills. I really like having the convention theme to guide my thoughts when deciding what to run, and I'm looking forward to future events and seeing what inspiration strikes.

Roll on North Star!

Revelation 2023

It was a bit nerve wracking going back to the Garrison, as the last time I was there, five of us caught covid. Somehow this manifested in an unusually high level of organisation, and I managed to leave early enough on Friday to beat the rush hour and was in the bar shortly after 5pm. Unfortunately, nobody else was. It wasn't until 9.30pm that a few more people arrived and the socialising began.

Normality resumed on Saturday morning though, as even with a few illness-related drop-outs we had a good crowd in the jailhouse ready to play.

Game 1: Kult

Having made these cool handouts for my scenario, A Walk In The Park, I had to run it a few times. I had three players booked, and had modified the scenario to run with three players instead of four, but with the last minute drop-outs I figured I should be ready in case there was someone in need of a game, and printed the fourth character as well. And there was indeed someone in need of a game, so things ran with the normal four players.

This game gets a bit of a tweak each time I run it, which in this case meant I'd added back in some of the characters' disadvantages. This makes a bit more work for me, but things tend to run faster offline than online, so it's doable, and I think it adds a little more depth to the characters. I still might tweak them further, but I'm really happy with how things went.

I also did a bunch of laminating this time. Laminated character sheets worked out well for this, as marking stability and conditions with dry wipe pens made it a lot easier to erase things as they changed. I might need a slightly finer pen for writing in wounds, but otherwise this is working really well and should save me a lot of printing for scenarios I run multiple times.

Game 2: Apocalypse World

I loved the TV show Blood Drive and it's a great fit for Apocalypse World, so I was pretty damn excited about this one.

I've played with the same GM before, and played a Brainer both times, but since we were going for a different setting this time, I decided it was time to branch out a bit. Inspired a little by the character of Grace in the TV show, I picked up the Battlebabe. One of the playbook moves for the Battlebabe is having such great reflexes that you're considered to have 2 armour providing you're naked or nearly naked, so I decided she was dressed in wedding lingerie with a tiara and veil. Continuing that theme, I picked two custom weapons, a massive handgun and a bladed chain, and named them the Best Man and the Maid of Honour.

Then we had to decide if any of us were teaming up in the race and sharing a car. One player, who'd picked up the Brainer, had described his character wearing a leather tuxedo, and that just felt like fate. So Sunset and Scratch in their luxurious Rolls Royce with added spikes, were racing against Mustang the Driver and Barbarossa the Gunlugger in their armoured coupe.

The race route was unveiled, and the GM asked us what was so bad about the town we were going to have to drive through. Cannibals, one of the players said, and thus we created Hungry Bowel Town, where every building looked like a pizza hut, where trenches filled with dips and dressings bordered the roads, and a moat of burning barbecue charcoal surrounded the outside edge.

As expected, we were forced to stop off in Hungry Bowel Town when our engines stopped working. Scratch and Sunset went into a basement, as Scratch was sure the problem was coming from beneath us, while Mustang and Barbarossa went into the town centre where they found a statue of a giant chicken. And suddenly everything started making a horrible sense. This place had been built by a fast food company, and had been called Hungry Fowl Town, until the weirdness from the Scar had made everything go wrong.

Anyway, the statue was actually a mask for a giant chicken man, and once Scratch had killed him with mind powers we were able to leave. The other car had drawn ahead, and tried to stop us. There was a bit of an incident with a grenade launcher, resulting in both Barbarossa and Scratch exploding. Mustang got into the Rolls and entirely failed to convince me to drive away, so I put the Best Man to his head and told him to get out, then drove away and won the race.

Fortunately both Scratch and Barbarossa had recovered from exploding, so I was able to spend my prize money on a wedding dress so we could finally have a proper wedding.

Game 3: Kult

Unfortunately the GM for the Saturday evening game of Kult had to pull out, so I offered a second run of A Walk In The Park. Again I picked up another player from another cancelled game, which was lucky as one of the original players also had to drop, so I ended up with three players for this round.

Another entertaining run, with a different ending to the morning game. There are two general directions the end can take on this one, and it was good to get both of them in one day.

Game 4: Thirsty Sword Lesbians

This was me GMing again. Only my second time running this game (with the first being the practice run for this scenario), but I was pretty excited to see how it was going to go. It feels strange going into a session without much in the way of pre-written material, but it really works for this one.

My pitch was Robyn Hood and her Merry Maids, and I'd picked six suitable playbooks for feminised versions of the most popular characters from various versions of Robin Hood. With four players, this meant plenty of choice even for whoever picked last, plus two characters who could be NPCs for the game.

By way of plot I had six situations for the players to choose from, and they ultimately combined two. Robyn Hood and Alanna Dale had been captured and were imprisoned in Nottingham Castle, where there was also a high society wedding happening. They went in to do a rescue mission, but decided that they had to do something about the wedding as well.

By the end of the session, the Merry Maids had got away with both the brides from the wedding, two guardswomen, a lot of jewellery and a dog. Highlights included Briar Tuck managing to marry two people simultaneously, then swing on a chandelier through a stained glass window and landing on a horse outside, Jill Scarlet sliding down a curtain using a knife to slow her fall and using the remains to make a new dress for Lady Marian, Dutch the Miller's Daughter taking out half the castle by smashing a lantern to set the dungeon on fire and sending flaming rats in all directions, and Little Joan managing to so thoroughly humiliate the Sherriff of Nottingham that he was forced to let them all escape.

I could use a little more practice running this system, as I'm still getting used to the GM moves, but overall this was exactly the kind of swashbuckling romance I was hoping for. I hope to offer this one again at future conventions.

Game 5: Apocalypse World

This was supposed to be A|State, but we'd lost enough players by then that it wasn't really viable. Fortunately the GM for an Apocalypse World game based on Metro 2033 had brought enough playbooks to take on an extra player so I joined that instead.

I picked up the Gunlugger this time, as I was getting a bit tired and figured that would be reasonably uncomplicated. That turned out to be a good choice. I inadventently caused early chaos by shooting someone I really shouldn't have, but later managed to punch another character back to life after an encounter with a supernatural smoke cloud.

The playbooks we were using for this were the ones from 1st edition, which had significantly more complicated rules for determining Hx with the other PCs. After some confusion, particularly for people like me who've only ever seen the 2nd edition playbooks before, we abandoned that and used the 2nd edition version to sort out the numbers. While a lot for my tired brain to deal with at the time, it was very interesting to see how the game had evolved between versions.

Reflections

Covid has done a number on my stamina. Normally five games in two days would be no trouble at all and I'd still be full of keen by the end of game 5. This time not so much. I had enough energy left for the two hour drive home, thankfully, but after that I was completely wiped out. Fortunately I find running games to be energising, so I should do OK at Seven Hills where my games are currently scheduled for the final slot of each day, and Concrete Cow where I'm planning to GM in the evening slot. But the prospect of having to pace myself at conventions is not an encouraging one. I have to hope this is only temporary.

Furnace XVII

Things were a bit touch and go on the run up to Furnace.  Two weeks beforehand I managed to pick up a nasty case of flu.  With the week before the convention seeing attendees dropping like flies with covid, flu and other illnesses I was wondering if I was actually going to be able to go.  But by Friday my health had improved considerably, and with the NHS website saying that flu is infectious for 3-7 days after symptoms appear, I was confident that I wasn't going to inflict it on anyone else if I showed up.

Game 1: Apocalypse World

Things kicked off on Saturday morning with a game of Apocalypse World.  Given that it was the same GM as my first game of Apocalypse World, I was tempted to play Pity again, and when said GM also suggested it, my mind was made up.  I made one change, switching out the brainer ear plugs for a pain projector, as the ear plugs are a passive item and therefore a bit more boring than the more active ones, especially in a one shot.

The rest of the players consisted of two PBTA veterans and one guy playing for the very first time.  We soon established that the town of Stagnant Waters was being visited by a mobile fight club housed in a luxury yacht on wheels being towed by a big rig.  After that things got weirder.

The more I play Apocalypse World, the more I like the idea of playing in a campaign.  Preferably with at least some of the same people.

Game 2: They Came From Beyond The Grave

The prospect of playing the characters in a 1970s B-movie was too good to pass up.  The Haunting of Abbeyham Priory is a quickstart adventure for this system, with a delightful set of pre-gen characters, each with a character portrait showing them suitably dressed for the setting.  The five of us piled into the Austin Allegro, and in a cloud of cigarette smoke and patchouli, started our investigation into the haunted priory, where we encountered many strange and horrifying things, although perhaps nothing was more terrible than the 1970s instant coffee.

I'm not totally sold on the system, it being a little too much like Vampire for my liking (understandable since it's from Onyx Path).  It did have some great features though, and I particularly liked the rewrite system, where we had a pool of points we could spend for rerolls ("What? My character would never mess up such a simple task that badly!  We're rewriting that bit.") and a number of other special effects ("We're going to get to the secret lair via this tunnel that was built for the previous movie that used this set.")

All round a good laugh, and definitely something I'd play again at conventions.

Game 3: Kult

Game 3 should have been a game of Delta Green, but with the GM succumbing to illness shortly before the convention I stepped in with a replacement.  There were four players besides myself, and I had a bunch of four player Kult games prepped.  Although with one player making alternative plans, and another also falling ill, I ended up with only two players.

I went with Called to Account, as I had it prepped ready for another convention, and also I was fairly sure I could run it with only two people.  And it ended up being a very different experience to previous runs, not only because there were two characters absent, but also because of the way the players chose to portray the characters.  End result: no PVP, and an ending that wasn't exactly happy, but certainly worked out a lot better for the PCs than things normally do with this one.

Game 5: Liminal

Having survived contact with three different campaign groups, I decided it was about time Sins of the Father became a convention scenario.  Once again I'd lost a player due to illness, but found a replacement in one of the people who'd lost their GM for that slot.

Four members of the Northampton branch of P Division set out to solve a murder and prevent the river spirit from flooding the town.  I'd done one practice run online with these pre-gens and made some minor tweaks to backstories that seemed to make things a little smoother this time.  Each game is a learning experience, and this game will continue getting polished over the next few conventions.

Game 6: Liminal

It's October, so time to break out the Halloween specials.  For me, that means my adventure Mischief Night.  I used the same set of pre-gens as for the previous game, but with flu having prevented me from running an online playtest, I had no idea how it would go with these characters.  The answer turned out to be pretty damn funny, with the players finding some uniquely creative solutions to some of the problems placed in their way.

This scenario is a little less polished than the previous one, but based on this run I'm happy to keep pitching it at conventions.  And the pre-gens are working out well, with some very creative takes once they get into the hands of the players.

Reflections

My first in-person Furnace, although after Revelation and North Star there was no real question whether I was committed to the Garrison conventions.  I'm finding that I really value the Friday evening in the bar, as a time to catch up with people I might not otherwise see much during a packed schedule.  Well worth taking the time off work to allow me to get there early.

Covid and everything else permitting, I hope to get to all four Garrison conventions next year.

North Star 2022

After two years of waiting, I finally got to go to North Star!

The pandemic is very much still happening, despite the government's best efforts to pretend otherwise, so Friday began with a covid test and the hope that all the other attendees would see things the same way and test too.  Then sorting out transport.  Fortunately I was going to be driving, so didn't have to worry about the rail strikes.  Unfortunately I'd found some chips in my windscreen a few days earlier, and didn't want to risk cracking the screen further on a long drive, so borrowed my husband's car for the weekend.

All of which was minor stuff compared to the organisation of the event itself, as the organiser had to do a lot of slot wrangling to deal with the effects of covid and rail strikes on game allocations.  But by some miracle, by Friday we had a timetable.

I spent a pleasant evening in the bar trying to figure out who everyone was.  When I say that gamers tend to have a certain look, people generally know what I mean, and when that's combined with face blindness, it can be really very difficult for me to recognise people.  However, we agreed that the gamer look can be very useful when you're trying to find an event in a new venue, as often all you have to do is follow the trail of nerds.

Game 1: Alien

With face-to-face gaming still being a bit new, I decided to pitch my Alien game in the first slot.  It's the game I ran for the first time at North Star 2021, but I figured there'd be plenty of people who hadn't played it yet.  Then I had to figure out how to run Alien without the aid of Roll20.

The official fillable PDF character sheets didn't really give enough room to fill in talents, or to include changing personal agendas, and the other sheets I'd downloaded also had issues.  In the end I concluded that the only option was to create my own.  Which also meant I could add a little creativity.

These turned out well.

In addition I'd brought sets of black and yellow dice for people to use, and a box of tiny skulls in different colours for tracking health and stress.  The sheets does have boxes for marking those off, but skulls were generally agreed to be more fun.  Finally I had the Alien card deck including initiative cards, meaning that for once initiative was not a horrible struggle to sort out in Roll20.

We were down a player thanks to covid, so the Pathologist had to take a back seat on this one, and I had one of the players roll the dice on the occasions when their skills were needed.  The four remaining players embraced their characters with great enthusiasm, and off we went.

The scenario was my own CSI: Weyland Yutani, which starts out with the team being called in to investigate a murder in a mining colony.  There are of course a lot more secrets to uncover than simply who the killer is, plus some horrible monsters to deal with.  Said monsters were rather more successful than usual, meaning that we made extensive use of the critical table, but for once didn't end up in a massive panic spiral.  Not that that was much comfort to the character who took the groin attack critical.

It was a bit of a push to fit this into a three hour slot rather than the usual four that I take for this adventure, even with things working faster in person.  That meant there was a little less thorough investigation of the murder - but that's not really what the adventure is all about, and all the important parts went ahead as usual.

While it was a little extra work compared to just resetting my Roll20 table, running Alien in person was really good fun, and I'll definitely be repeating this one.

Game 2: Tales From The Loop

Having just been watching Stranger Things series 4, I was entirely ready to be a kid in the 80s going to visit a haunted house.

Free League's organised play program, the League of Free Agents, provides scenarios for its members to run at conventions and this was one of them.  For characters we used the pre-gens from the Starter Set adventure, although I think we could have made original characters and still had it work out.  I picked the Jock, not having played this archetype before, and got Fredrik, a hockey player dating the Popular Kid, whose life was nowhere near as simple and perfect as it appeared from the outside.

Having shared our characters fears, and the stories we'd heard about what happened in the haunted house, we soon learned that our plans to spend Halloween there were scuppered by the disappearance of the friends who invited us and a rapidly imposed curfew.  There was nothing for it but to get on our bikes and go and find out what had happened.

Tales From The Loop is a delightful game, and this was a lovely scenario, full of things to investigate and some fun twists along the way.  The GM was one of the players from my Alien game, and I also had the opportunity to play with two people that I've known for some time but have never had the chance to sit at a table with before, and two people who were completely new to me (one of whom was at her first ever convention).

Game 3: Scum and Villainy

I'd initially planned to only run one game, as I did at Revelation and previous North Stars, but when the call went out for more games I decided I could step up.  Prior to the pandemic one of my convention standard games was a Firefly scenario using Scum and Villainy, which certainly fitted the sci-fi theme.  While I hadn't touched it over in two years, I figured I did at least have experience of running this one in person.

While I used to offer six spaces in this game, I decided to only offer four this time, to make things a little easier for me, but when rail strikes meant we were down a GM for the evening slot, I decided to offer a fifth space in the hope that that would make game assignments easier.  The five ended up including two more of the players from the morning Alien game.

While Scum and Villainy can be completely improvised and player-led, this particular scenario is a little more structured.  While the old Serenity RPG isn't particularly great system-wise, it does have useful setting material, including a complete deck plan for a Firefly class transport.  The scenario involves a drifting ship, with various items that the players can find.  What they do with said items, however, is completely up to them.  Some crews like to investigate thoroughly and figure out exactly what happened on this ship to leave it drifting in orbit.  Others, like this lot, decide to chuck the evidence out of the airlock and be on their way, only discovering later on that one thing they spaced might have been worth hanging onto after all.

This was not the easiest game to get back into after the pandemic hiatus, and I'm not sure this is going back into my convention standard scenarios, but it was good fun to bring it out again.  It remains my favourite game for Firefly adventures, and perhaps with more practice I'll get back into it.

Game 4: Avatar Legends

While I've not watched Avatar beyond catching the odd bit while my husband was watching, this game was pitched as more Cowboy Bebop inspired, so I figured my lack of knowledge of Avatar wouldn't be an issue.

I picked up Geb Hara, a 'Guardian' character who was a water bender with a monastic background and a mission to soothe the troubled souls on our ship.  I picked Mirabelle the fire bender as the character I was particularly devoted to protecting, as she was clearly the most likely to get herself into trouble.  My character was also a xeno, and with everything else on the sheet in mind, I decided that she resembled a giant capybara.

We set off to respond to a distress call, with Geb insisting to Mirabelle that setting things on fire was not the solution to every problem.  Once we discovered the exact events that lead to said distress call, Geb was willing to concede that on this specific occasion, setting things on fire was an entirely appropriate solution.  Although perhaps by the end of the scenario, a few too many things had been on fire...

 

The system was a PBTA game, but on the crunchy end of PBTA with a whole separate combat system.  Understandable, given that martial arts battles seem to be a part of the show, but it was a bit jarring switching between the basic moves and the combat moves, not to mention trying to figure out whether or not we were in a combat situation.  Balance also forms a whole sub-system, further complicating things.  It was fun to play, but not quite what I'd expect from a PBTA game.

Game 5: Fate Bulldogs

There was a prize draw before slot 5, in which I unexpectedly won a voucher for Patriot Games who were running a stall at the event.  I took the opportunity to buy a print copy of Blades in the Dark, and then headed to the final game of the weekend.

I'd signed up for "Zaggy Spacedust's Luxurious Private Space-Taxi" largely based on the title, and as I'd hoped, found myself as part of a team of anarchist terrorists who were also working for a big corporation as delivery drivers.  With the GM having forgotten to bring quite a lot of his stuff, including the character sheets, the session started off with us creating new characters.  With an option once again to play aliens, I decided to play an octopus pilot with a love of fast ships and bright colours, meaning she immediately took a liking to another PC, a chameleon-like alien played by my room sharer - the first time we've been in the same game in two whole conventions.

As Fate characters we all had a trouble, which for each of us was the person whose identity we'd co-opted when acquiring this ship.  My octopus was 'not a lawyer' - although by the end of the session she'd done enough lawyering with enough success that she decided she was getting the hang of it and might actually become a lawyer after all.

This was a great way to finish the weekend, with a game full of comedy moments using just enough of the Fate system to keep things interesting and unpredictable.  By the end we'd struck a decisive blow against corporate hoarding of intellectual property rights, while getting the group's frustrated punk rocker his moment of fame.

Reflections

Organising this was clearly a heroic effort with the number of last minute changes involved on top of the usual challenge of assigning everyone to a slot.  It's a testament to everyone involved how smoothly things went from my point of view as an attendee.

It was great to be there at last.  North Star was about twice the size of Revelation, at around 45 people, but still felt very small and friendly.  I got to reunite with people I met at Revelation while finally getting to meet people I've met at previous online events.  I'm full of enthusiasm for Furnace now.