Spaghetti ConJunction 4a

Normally the part before I arrive at a convention isn't worth mentioning.  However, apparently the GM has a new random encounter table specifically for multi storey car parks, and was determined to use it.  Three times I had to stop on the up ramps - once due to a car suddenly deciding to reverse past the top of the ramp, once due to a car actually driving the wrong way round the car park, and once for the slightly less unreasonable person trying to reverse into a space near the top of the ramp.

Fortunately on the fourth floor I passed my spot check and found a space.  All this meant I was seven minutes late arriving at Geek Retreat, but since they were ten minutes late opening, that was fine, and I joined the crowd of loitering nerds until we got inside.

Geek Retreat has some new tables, and we soon had the room rearranged to our liking and were ready for sign-up.  Low on numbers though.  Where was everybody?

Game 1

I was offering Liminal again in the morning - the fifth time I've run the Fang Gang, which means I may have run it more than the actual writer.  It's a really solid adventure though, with plenty of room for GM creativity in the fine details.  Each time I run this it goes a little differently, and I've learned a lot from running it.

The group did a great job bringing the characters to life.  Once again I'm using my reworked character sheets with both male and female names on as people seem to like having the choice, so on this occasion it was Samir, Alistair, Dahlia and Tony who set out to fight vampire crime.  It's amazing how a few dice rolls can make the combat scenes turn out completely different each time.

I had fun and the feedback from the players was good, so I guess my next step is write some adventures of my own for the next round of conventions.

One useful thing about the Geek Retreat is you can go and order lunch and they'll bring it to the table.  I had my usual chicken and bacon panini.  Some day I should actually try something else.

Between the game slots we had the raffle.  I don't know how they do it, but the raffle at SCJ is always spectacular.  I think pretty much everyone who entered got a prize.  I got a voucher for Modiphius, and given that they sell a bunch of my favourite games (including Liminal) I'm going to have a lot of fun with that.

Game 2

At some point since the start of the first game, several more people had shown up.  Nevertheless, the game I signed up for got only one other sign-up.  Fortunately, it could still run with only two players.

I'd never played an OSR game before, and since part of the reason I go to conventions is to try new things, I thought I'd give Dungeon Crawl Classics a try.  The adventure was Nebin Pendlebrook's Perilous Pantry, and I'm a sucker for alliteration.

What I didn't know was that this adventure is what's apparently known as a funnel.  Accordingly, the other player and me were handed twelve characters each, and played three of them at a time.

We were somewhat hindered by noise.  With the low numbers, we were only using about half of the top floor, and there were not only a couple of tables of people playing Magic, there was also a large group playing a console game (Smash Brothers, I think) at one end of the room.  Combined with the existing noise of the other games, the three of us were having trouble hearing each other, and the game dragged at times as a result.  But when we did all manage to communicate, the game was quite a laugh, with the GM using a large red stamp on each character as they met their sudden and embarrassing demise.

There were some odd moments I particularly liked, like when we were trying to reach something high up and the ten foot pole was not cutting it.  We remembered we had a rope, and used it to tie a staff to the ten foot pole for some extra reach.

Twenty-four characters entered.  Thirteen characters left.

This was a very different style of gaming to what I'm used to.  There wasn't much in the way of character development beyond a slight incredulity that one of my original three got out alive.  It lacked the social interaction between characters that I enjoy.  While it was fun, it felt more like board game fun than RPG fun.  Possibly I'd get more out of a level 1 adventure than the level 0 funnel, but it's not something I'm going to choose over something that's more my kind of game.

If that is your kind of game though, this looks very well put together.  There were some aspects I really did like, such as the critical fumble table, and the fact that the critical fumble table is also printed on the outside of the GM screen where I could read it, so I knew exactly how screwed my character was as soon as the number came up.  This table could easily be adapted for D&D or Pathfinder games and given the size of the rulebook I saw there's probably plenty of other interesting stuff in there.

I hung around for a bit after the game to talk to a few people (mostly to Simon about the Dudley Bug Ball) and went on my way.  Fortunately I made it out of the car park without any futher random encounters and passed my luck check to get home before Storm Ciara arrived.

Reflections

This event is the lowest price one day convention I've been to at only £3 entrance, and £5 for a full day's parking right behind the venue isn't bad either.  Food is reasonably priced, and while the drinks are a little more expensive, the coffee is good enough to justify it.  Plus there's the raffle - I probably won more in prizes than it cost me to attend.

Gender balance still isn't great, with I think only two of us there at the start, but a few more women showed up later on, which is encouraging.  I know I have it easy with not having to worry about childcare.

This convention is great, and needs more love.  Even with low numbers it was still an excellent day out.  I've only made it to three out of seven events and really hope to improve that ratio, so will be hoping like crazy that the autumn event doesn't clash with any larps.  I've got adventures to run.

Spaghetti ConJunction 3b

Was I in time for Spaghetti ConJunction 3b?  As I approached the Geek Retreat I saw a small crowd of obvious gamers outside.  Clearly I had not missed anything.

I paid the incredibly reasonable entry fee of £3 and dug out my sign up sheet.  Another outing for my Scum and Villainy scenario.  Would I get players this time?  I had a browse of the other sheets in case not.

I needn't have worried.  My game filled up.  Maybe it was my new and improved sign up sheet with appropriate logos and a slightly improved blurb.  Maybe there were just more Firefly enthusiasts.  Either way, with a full set of character archetypes, the crew set out to acquire a space ship and begin their journey to independence.

What I love about running this scenario is that I never know how it's going to go.  Even the very start of the game has ended up being different each time, with each group taking a different approach.

It occurs to me that it wouldn't be hard to change this adventure from its current slightly dark space western feel to full blown horror.  With more descriptive language and going into a lot more detail about certain things I could do some very different stuff with it.  But at the same time, while I maintain there's nothing wrong with including horror content in a Firefly game, if people have signed up for Firefly they're probably expecting more action adventure than horror.

But I've just acquired a copy of Coriolis, which has a similar feel to Firefly, but with a different setting where it's possible I could make it work.  Something to think about for future scenarios.

Anyway, the adventure went entertainingly as always.  I think I could have handled the end better, as it wasn't particularly exciting and cinematic and could have used a bit more tension, but otherwise I'm happy.  I'm going to take the suggestion I've seen to set silent alarms to go off at certain points during the session to help me keep the pacing and make sure things wrap up nicely at the right time.

One nice thing about playing at the Geek Retreat is that you can order your lunch at the bar and go back to your game and they'll bring it up to you.  The food is mostly burger and chips type stuff.  I had a chicken and bacon toastie with chips, which tasted great and was decent value as well.  (I would have liked some salad with it, but appreciate they probably don't have a particularly salad-friendly clientele.)  The coffee is excellent, and while my current calorie counting efforts meant I avoided the milkshake this time, they certainly looked as good as they did last time, as did the waffles and ice cream I saw other people eating.

There is the option to get food elsewhere, but given that the very low price of this event is partly due to the venue making money on food and drink sales, I'd rather spend my money there and have the convenience of table service.  And the coffee really is excellent.

In the break I decided to check out the raffle prizes.  I hadn't bought tickets on the way in, in order to help speed through the queue, but seeing there were two copies of Zweihander up for grabs I decided it was worth buying a few tickets for a shot at getting hold of one of them.

Zweihander, incidentally, is a very appropriately named game.  The book is of a size that should definitely allow it to be used as a weapon, but you will absolutely need two hands to wield it.

With a fairly huge number of raffle prizes and a limited number of people after a few of the morning crowd went home, I wasn't entirely surprised when more than one of my tickets got pulled.  I didn't get a copy of Zweihander, but I did come away with some Lovecraftian fiction from Chaosium, a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook about Arkham, and some kind of virtual Cyberpunk adventure that may never get played but I've no doubt I will enjoy reading.

Raffles can be quite tedious, but with Simon Burley in charge and determined to set a new speed record, we got through about thirty raffle prizes in just over three minutes.  Probably the most enjoyable raffle I've entered.

Afternoon sign up.  With smaller numbers but still seven games on offer, I didn't bother using the 'go first for having run a game' option, and just signed up when my number was called since I already knew it would be near the start.  I chose the Starfinder game.  Unfortunately nobody else did, so I had to scramble to find a game.  Fortunately there was one space left in The Outhere: The Storm and the Tower.

While the game blurb is my primary factor in choosing a convention game, seeing the name Christopher Dean did help push me towards this game as I'd previously encountered him running '28 Trains Later', the Thomas the Tank Engine survival horror game that I'd been wanting for some time.  This time he was running a playtest of The Outhere from Braincrack Games.

He had a set of pregen characters, but had edited them all to make them non-gender-specific, which I really appreciated.  As someone who prefers to play female characters, when there are gendered pregens I feel pushed into choosing a female one.  With no specified genders, I could pick a character that seemed interesting, in this case an antelope person with a focus on light magic.

An interesting system.  D6 dice pools, but you add the results then divide by 5 rather than counting successes, thus avoiding the irritating part of dice pool systems where you've rolled a bunch of very nearly successes, but have still completely failed.  Also reminicent of tagging aspects in Fate, as you can get extra dice by invoking your character details or making use of narrative details.  We managed to provide some useful feedback at the end of the game.

I enjoyed the setting.  A variation on the normal fantasy setting, with the non-human races being the aforementioned antelope people, fennec fox people, rhino people and golems.  An emphasis on exploring desert ruins.  It's definitely got potential and I'll be interested to see where it goes from here.

By the time we finished, the cafe was close to closing, so I gathered my bag of books and went home.

I like the spontanaeity of being able to just show up on the day for these one day conventions rather than having everything booked in advance.  I also like the sign up system with the random order, meaning that I don't have to fight my way to the table to sign up for things.  It means I sometimes don't get into my first choice of games, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to have a good game.  I didn't get my first choice yesterday (thanks to nobody else wanting to play it) but I did get into an excellent game all the same.  At the last Concrete Cow I didn't get my first choice for the same reason, but that meant I had a fantastic game of Delta Green instead.

I've never had a bad game at Concrete Cow or Spaghetti ConJunction, but I have had some games I would never have considered signing up for in advance, and still had a great time.

Gender diversity remains poor.  There was one other woman there (and we did have a nice chat while waiting for sign up to start) out of around 30-35 people.  But both of us were offering games in the morning, which isn't bad.  I hope more female GMs will help attract more female players.

Transport-wise, I really appreciate being able to park practically right behind the venue.  The last thing I want as a woman alone with a heavy bag is to be wandering the streets of a strange city after dark.  The short walk to the well lit car park is definitely a selling point for me, and at £5 for 12 hours, the price is quite reasonable.

Overall, a great day out and worth braving the M6 for.  I hope to be back at 4a in February.