The Owlbear and Wizard's Staff 2026

While in previous years I've commuted in to The Owlbear and Wizard's Staff, thanks to Leamington Spa only being an hour away, in 2025 I decided to treat myself to a hotel room and join in for the Friday night as well. And I had a great time, so decided to do the same in 2026, particularly since this time I was bringing my husband, a.k.a. Mr Sue.

This time there were extra gaming slots on offer, starting on Friday afternoon. With a limited number of tables available, I initially didn't have a game - but then a GM had to drop out, and since I'd volunteered as a reserve GM...

Game 1: CY_BORG

The cancelled game was Ronin, so when deciding what to run in its place, I thought I'd better pick a Borg system, and I happened to have a few one-page CY_BORG adventures I hadn't run yet meaning that my husband could play too. I went with Johnny Bubonic, and fired up Punkmaker to print out a bunch of pre-gens.

The room was crowded and loud, and this was a more challenging game running environment than I'm used to. Fortunately CY_BORG is not a complicated system and JKW's one page heists are pretty simple to run. The team made it into Club Mint, picked up on the hints I was dropping, and successfully abducted the lead singer without anyone getting killed - although if I hadn't given some of the pre-gens a small hit point bonus, that might not have been the case.

It was also nice to run CY_BORG for, for want of a better word, normal people. I've previously only run it for my home group, who as I've mentioned before, can be a bit wacky. And for this specific game, this meant actually having to deploy our group's equivalent of the X-card: a firm no. But my Owlbear group were a lovely bunch, and despite the noise, I had a great time.

With a limited amount of time between games for those of us gaming in both Friday slots, food looked likely to be a challenge, but Matthew solved that by deploying an additional round of this convention's secret weapon: samosas.

Game 2: Lovecraftesque

I backed the Kickstarter for Lovecraftesque, but haven't managed to actually get it to the table yet. So I was excited to get the chance to try it out. We picked out a scenario about an old house being turned into a hotel, and soon Emma was setting out to investigate the strange goings on.

I enjoyed the structure of the rotating protagonist and GM roles. It's a bit of a challenge to get your head round at first, but we all picked it up after a couple of scenes. The only thing that didn't quite work for me is the 'jumping to conclusions' part resulting in us to some extent trying to push the story in different directions, so that's something I'll probably de-emphasise when I finally get it to the table.

With Matthew not at the venue in the evening, I was assigned to be co-responsible person, charged with turning off the lights and letting the staff know we were going. But we finished quite a bit early, so I passed my responsibilities onto another group (who then passed it on to yet another group when they finished) and went back to the hotel.

Game 3: Call of Cthulhu

I've seen the scenario Deadfellas recommended a few times, so signed up immediately. This scenario takes place mostly in a car, so the GM took advantage of the venue's somewhat flexible layout and used two chairs and the bench seating to construct our car. Off we drove to dispose of the body of a dead drug supplier, which did not go at all as planned.

This scenario is just as good as I'd been told, super atmospheric and full of drama as our various secrets started to emerge. The GM did plan to supply us with some toy guns, but with the venue not keen on the idea, that didn't happen. I did offer my collection of phasers instead, but I don't think it would have given quite the right tone.

We finished fairly early, this not being a very long scenario, so it was time for more samosas. Lovely.

Game 4: Call of Cthulhu 

I was back GMing for the afternoon with another outing for Kane's Tone. My group very efficiently got to grips with what had happened, figured out who they were, and set out to save the world.

Since I was in a large room with multiple other games rather than the small room I had at ChaosiumCon, I decided not to do the sound effects this time, and instead bought a nightlight with multiple colour settings and a remote control. Of course the players were so focussed that the first time I activated the light it took them a while to notice, but overall I think it went well. And I was amused to later read the author's blog post about writing it which included a mention of having recently acquired a similar light.

And that was it for Saturday's games, so off we went to the pub for a meal.

Game 5: Star Wars

I love FFG Star Wars, and was very happy that my husband got into this one too. We were playing a starter adventure, so slightly simplified rules and characters, which is definitely the right choice for a game when some players have never encountered the Star Wars funky dice before. I picked up Oskara, a Twi'lek bounty hunter who I'd actually played once before in a one-shot with the home group. Off we went to steal a ship before the Hutt caught up with us. Technically we did not actually steal the ship in the end, although by the end we did inherit it after the owner was dismembered by Wookies.

Still my favourite Star Wars game system, so long as nobody tries to make me play a Jedi.

Game 6: Darkness of the Demimonde

And now it was time for the final 'taster' slot with games running up to two hours. After a particularly efficient outing at North Star, I felt confident I could bring my own scenario, Crisis at Crystal Palace, in within the required time. Then I ran it for my regular DotD group, who managed to take two sessions...

I offered the usual set of pre-gens and the group selected Mirike Visser the Dutch werewolf, Hank Webb the American explorer, Archibald Baird the Scottish detective, and Ezekiel, who is just Ezekiel. Off they went to investigate a missing dog and a case of food poisoning, which unsurprisingly turned out to have related causes. And I did bring it in at just under 2 hours, largely by omitting the extensive conversation with Arthur Conan Doyle that the regular group had.

And that was it. Time to put the tables away and put the Owlbear to bed for another year. A lovely convention that I always look forward to. 

The Owlbear and Wizard's Staff 2022

After switching to online play for last year's Owlbear over ongoing covid concerns, I decided this year I was going to go for it and show up in person.  There was a new venue this year - St Patrick's Irish Club in Leamington Spa - and it looked like an easy drive.

Things kicked off on the Friday night with curry and the pub, but feeling a bit socialised out after larping the previous weekend I decided to skip that part, save myself the extra drive, and show up on Saturday morning.  With the venue only an hour's drive away, staying over didn't seem necessary.

I might have slightly reconsidered my stance on that when waking up unnecessarily early on Saturday morning.

Game 1: Things from the Flood

I've played Tales from the Loop a few times now, but this was my first time playing Things from the Flood.  The game world is the same, but several years later and after the explosion of the Loop.  This worked perfectly for me.  While I don't remember the 80s all that well, I was a teenager in the 90s, so playing a group of 16-18 year olds in 1996 is spot on for me.  The kid archetypes of the original game have been updated to ones more suited to 90s teens, with things like Motorhead, Party Animal and Snob.

The premise for the game, however, was that we were a band trying to make it big by winning the Battle of the Bands, so we began by deciding what instruments we played, and suggesting names for the band, eventually agreeing on Supergods.

Everything I like about Tales from the Loop is there in Things from the Flood, except in the 90s.  So basically I'm going to have to buy this one.

Game 2: Kult

Having done the work of getting Called to Account ready to run in person at Concrete Cow 22, I wanted to give it a few more outings.  This game never ceases to surprise me, starting from the beginning when the characters were all immensely suspicious of each other in a way they've never been before, to the end when one of them actually walked away relatively unscathed.

One thing that made me happy was the amount of laughter this game caused.  There's nothing like a horror game for a good giggle.

There was an evening visit to the pub, but I decided to head home while it was still light and get a good night's sleep.  Given how absolutely exhausted I was in the evening, this was the right choice.

Game 3: Liminal

Fortunately I checked Warhorn before going to bed, so knew that Sunday's morning games started at 9.30am instead of 10am.  Unfortunately that meant getting up half an hour earlier than what I already considered an unreasonable time on Saturday.  Maybe next time I'll stay over.

Sunday morning's game was one last outing for The Reid Legacy before my first few scenarios get temporarily retired in favour of playtesting the new material.  The P-Division MTAC squad, much envied for having a team name that actually sounds cool, went hunting for a stolen book and dug up some of London's dark history in the process.

This time in addition to the character sheets I'd also printed out my 'how to play Liminal' rules summary that I normally include on the character sheet document when playing online.  I think this was useful, as it meant it was there for new players to refer to throughout the game rather than having to remember what I said at the beginning.  I'll definitely use these in future games, and might write something similar for other games I run.

Reflections

The Owlbear and Wizard's Staff is to some extent the reason I joined Twitter back in 2019, having heard that the organiser was looking for female GMs, and it was wonderful to finally get there in person.  I got to meet a lot of people I'd previously only seen as faces on a computer screen, or as names on a Twitter post.  Which certainly made figuring out who I was talking to more difficult.  Name badges, preferably including Twitter handles and icons, would be the one improvement I would suggest for this event.  Roll on next year...

The Owlbear and Wizard's Staff 3

I missed the 2019 Owlbear and Wizard's Staff convention due to only finding out about it the day before the event - particularly annoying as it was in Leamington Spa, an entirely commutable distance from my house.  Not wanting to miss out on the following event, and knowing the organiser was keen to have more female GMs next time, I got myself on Twitter to ensure I'd be all set for 2020.  Which actually worked out OK in the end.

The event began with the Mitchester Arms getting temporarily taken over for the Owlbar.  I'm thoroughly in favour of out-of-game socialising at online RPGs, so would have enthusiastically taken part - had I not been playing the final session of a Call of Cthulhu one-shot.  Ahh well.  Next time.

Game 1

Things kicked off on Saturday at the thoroughly unreasonable hour of 10am for The Late Shift, a fantasy police procedural set in the city of Sigil using the Dungeon World rules.  While it's a bit of an odd time to be playing police (and the GM did note that he wrote the adventure before everything kicked off in America) this felt a lot more Discworld City Watch in tone.  RPGs let us play out all our wildest fantasies, and right now my wildest fantasies include going to the pub with friends and having police who actually care about the law.

Planescape: Torment was one of my first introductions to CRPGs and this was the first time I've actually played a tabletop game set in Sigil.  It's remarkable how much I remember from a game I played in 2003.  The bizarre setting was perfect for the game, with the potential for all kinds of strange things going on for our guardspeople to deal with.  Crimes ranged from an exceptionally unpleasant kidnapping to transporting dangeous magical items without a permit.

The Dungeon World system worked really well in Sigil.  We had normal D&D style archetypes like an elf ranger, but also more out there things like a salamander immolater, and having played Planescape: Torment, a wizard based heavily around setting things on fire made a lot of sense to me.  I played the elf ranger, with my pet lynx, Constable Floof, and I really liked how the rules meant he was useful without slowing down combat by being an extra piece on the board.  For a one-shot game I thought it was an excellent choice for playing high fantasy without the crunch of D&D or Pathfinder.

Game 2

In the afternoon I played The Cthulhu Hack, with Paul Baldowski as the GM.  The scenario, Forgotten Duty, was enormously fun, with my only complaint being that we couldn't fit it all into the session and had to rush things at the end.  (This was including overrunning by an hour, after which we absolutely had to stop because a lot of us had other games to get to.)  An intriguing investigation, and one I'm thinking of picking up to run myself - I think it would work as well as a Delta Green scenario as it did for The Cthulhu Hack.

One change to the normal Cthulhu Hack rules was that instead of the various talents my character had last time I played, there were a list of specials at the top of the sheet that we could pick from twice per game.  This change was because of players in Paul's previous games entirely failing to use their talents.  Mechanically this worked well, but for me I found I lost some of the feel of what my character could do.  System-wise I felt like I was somewhere between The Cthulhu Hack and Cthulhu Dark, and losing the strong points of both of them.

It was a clear demonstration of the difference a GM can make to a game.  Despite using the same system, this game felt very different to the game I played at Virtually Expo.  That game felt 'Call of Cthulhu, but streamlined' while this one felt 'OSR, but Cthulhu'.  Both of which are fine, but as someone who's a lot more into Call of Cthulhu than OSR games, I preferred the former.

I enjoyed it enough that I'm feeling motivated to finish reading The Cthulhu Hack and try running it myself.

Game 3

Another outing for my Liminal game, Mother Said I Never Should.  My decision not to name the paranormal investigation business the PCs work for continues to pay off.  This time it was Spooktacular Solutions who set off in search of a missing teenager.

Rather than talk about this game yet again, I'll just share my top tip for running online convention games: you should always have a plan, and a backup plan, for your AV platform, neither of which should be Roll20.  This time I planned to run the whole thing on Discord as usual, but one player's audio wasn't working well (weird robotic sounds) so I switched over to Google Meet.

I'm looking into Jitsi as my replacement backup for once Google Meet gets the one hour limit on free accounts.  The only issue I've had with gaming in Jitsi is that I often stretch out the window to be really wide or tall so I can have everyone's video visible while still getting a decent view of a VTT.  Zoom, Meet and Discord all change the tiled display to a row or stack when I do that, but Jitsi keeps trying to make a rectangular tile, which is less than helpful when it turns everyone tiny.

I'd love to see a VTT where the AV actually works, but nobody seems to have got there yet.

Post-game

Sunday morning brought us a panel discussion with people from Pelgrane Press and  Modiphius.  Once again I really appreciate a panel that isn't all white men.  It's so easy to feel like an outsider in a hobby where so few of the participants look like me, and representation like this really matters to me.  There was a lively discussion over Zoom, plus the audience chat was hilarious.

Reflections

I did wonder if GMing in the evening slot after playing two games was a bad idea, as I was likely to be tired by then.  As it turns out, running that game energised me.  Worth remembering that for future conventions.

What a brilliant event.  I only hope we can do it in person next year.