Winter StabCon 2017 - Saturday

I woke early and went to breakfast at about 7:30. As I'd hoped, it was fine - a good, standard hotel buffet breakfast. Needless to say I filled my boots. Once a student always a student. After breakfast I nipped over the road to the nearby convenience store to use the cash machine, before going to my booked room to set up for my first game. The room was set up with two large arrangements made of smaller tables,  but I pulled a couple out separately to play on. I prefer a more intimate set up these days and don't use figures or maps.

My first game was a THE BLACK HACK run through of the classic scenario Spiderbite from an old issue of White Dwarf. Basically old school D&D on speed. It gives you the nostalgia, the feelings you used to have, without all the unnecessary crunch. All five player slots were filled with a mixture of old friends and new - young and those who remember the old days. Sarah made Ekaterina - one of those high Dex thieves that do so well a first level in TBH but who get caught up quickly as levels advance. Peter's Len Cohen and Lisa's Grimthorpe were the party's fighters. Phil made Faden, the Cleric and Karl was Conrad the Conjurer. From the moment the two fighters pursued a fleeing native through the forest and got stuck in quicksand we were off. This was DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS like we used to play. Massive fun. Faden had a bit of a torrid time, running out of cures early on. But he redeemed himself with some clever tactical play later. Grimthorpe was even unluckier and couldn't hit anything. In fact the only roll she made successfully was to stand her ground when spirits scared off the rest of the party. She then decided to proceed on her own.........

A snap decision at the end by Ekaterina nearly resulted in a TPK. (She thought showing the golden mask would cow the natives. They thought it showed the party had decapitated their King.) However, these players proved more adept at tactical retreat than combat and everyone except Grimthorpe made it out. I'll say it again, massive fun.

During the game I was visited by a fellow referee. He offers to run the "Trumpton" RPG at every StabCon. Last time out I'd commented how much fun it looked and he'd remembered. He took the time to seek me out and ask what time it was convenient to play. What a nice guy!

Lunch was Convention sandwiches (£1.50) and pork pies (2 for £1. Do you see a pattern here?)

In the afternoon I ran a scenario called "Kong Island". This was a new run out for my Anime rules. I've basically had these more or less written for 2 years but they were put on a back burner whilst I developed MANIFOLD. With that game finished and gestating in a drawer, I now wanted to revisit the anime game. I need to decide whether to go Kickstarter with it or not. As I've run the in-book scenario a few times and I know I get returning players at StabCon, I needed a new adventure. So King Kong with Mecha, basically.

Ollie was a bit late so I allowed a reserve player to join the game. When Ollie arrived, I took the decision to run the game for 6 players. So we tacked on another table. I normally prefer to play with 3-5 players but have learnt to relax these limits recently. Strangely I've found that a game you usually run for 5 players can be done successfully with 6 as long as you referee it standing up. I don't know why it works like this, but it does.

Jane made a rock musician/bard with strange abilities who'd heard rumours of the island and was wondering if it could help her with her quest to come to terms with those abilities. Consequently she underwrote a scientific expedition, led by a famous botanist - played by John. She also took along her bodyguard - Mike's character - and her Male Model boyfriend - run by Ollie. The team was rounded out by Karl's ships' engineer and Bruce's intrepid journalist. There was also a crew, of course, but how long to you think they survived?

As you may know, part of my lightweight "code" games is players writing subplots for each other. Thinking King Kong type anime Bruce thought "Mechagodzilla" and came up with a very in-trope plot. It turned out that Ollie's male model was actually a secret agent working for alien space-monkies, tasked with preparing the world for invasion.

This was weird enough, but Mike soon managed to top it. Within minutes of the start of the game - during the natives' attack on the ship (you've seen the film, right?) -Mike rolled a double on his 2d6. In my games this allows players to choose from a range of interesting options. One of these is the option to introduce a new plot element. Mike obviously had a clear idea about the scenario he wanted to play in. He then entertained us with with a vivid description of a massive meteor cum battered alien ship, barrelling down from the sky and crashing into the sea by the island, creating a huge tidal wave driving the ship onto shore. He then went on to describe the gargantuan tentacled alien creature rising out of the sea on towering cybernetic tripod legs and storming into onto shore in search of..........

This apparition was quickly dubbed "Trithulhu". Mike then went on to roll double after double. And the game got wacky.

Throw in Ollie deciding that the giant creatures on the island resembled giant "Jigglypuffs" ("Bigglypuffs") and the huge robot vs monster battles took on a distinctly cartoon edge.

Poor Karl had his engineer captured and used as a sacrifice by the natives pretty early on. Though he escaped and had plenty to do, he spent most of the game just missing the rest of the group and only caught up with the main group towards the end.

The basic rules worked fine but I was trialling a new iteration for the "top end" of the anime fights - where the characters mechs merge into a single, giant figure - and the arithmetic got a bit crunchy. I need to refine this a bit more, so I now know what I'm going to be offering for one of my games at Concrete Cow.

Overall, great inventive players who really chewed up the scenery. Could my day get any better?

For tea I ordered the Fish and Chips. Under a fiver, perfectly adequate and arriving in double quick time. The peas didn't resemble any type of pea I'd ever eaten, however, clumping together in strange clusters which defied the laws of physics. (I suspect a microwave may have been involved.) But they seemed edible.

I set up for my third game, a horror game called "Flight into Oblivion". I'd designed this scenario for Seven Hills, using my MANIFOLD system, but it had garnered no players. The same thing happened at Concrete Cow. I'd considered resigning it unrun but had converted it to THE CTHULHU HACK rules and offered it at the Continuum convention (where anything with Cthulhu in its title gets players) with massive success. I wanted to practice running TCH as I'm using it as part of my "Choose your adventure" initiative to introduce new players to horror RPGs. So I decided to give it another run out.

When I posted the details of my games on Facebook, however, players who'd played in a horror game I'd run at Winter StabCon 2016 commented. They were very complimentary about that previous game and asked if this one was being run under the same rules. ("2d6 shenanigans" was the phrase used.) So I switched back to the MANIFOLD system.

As it turned out, four out of the five players who turned up to play had been in that other adventure 12 months ago. I've never thought of myself as a horror referee but this kind of vote of confidence really gives your confidence a boost.

The adventure starts in the first class compartment of a jumbo jet on the overnight flight from New York to Birmingham as the characters awake from a truncated night of sleep and rapidly turns weird. Martin's famous cricketer and Gus's feted Basketball player shared cabin space with Bruce's lauded Doctor and Ollie's disgruntled 17 year old - bring shuttled between rich but separated parents. The group was rounded out by Matt's perfume detective. You heard me right - perfume detective, a character whose olfactory abilities were so acute he'd been co-opted to Interpol. THAT'S why I prefer players to make their own characters rather than giving them pregens. I would never come up with such an inventive idea myself. And, yes, that's the same Bruce and Ollie who'd played in the Anime game. More support for my refereeing and much appreciated. I hope they weren't too confused by the similarity and subtle differences between my "code" rules and MANIFOLD.

One of the reasons that I didn't garner casual sign ups to this game is that it's a very very weird psychological horror mystery with a really cool - I think - idea behind it. There's several moving parts for the referee to keep track of and it slowly gets weirder and weirder as the characters feel they're descending into madness. If I tell you anything about the plot I could never run it again. So I can't give anything but the vaguest details on a sign up sheet. It's sort of my "6th sense". It takes elements from films like Ninth Gate, Dogma, Constantine, Source Code and the Langoliers. I decided that I'd drink for this scenario, and worked my way through four pints as we played, getting merry enough to play the final scenes with the frenzy they deserved whilst still keeping track of all the underlying individual character subplots. I was actually really quite proud of my refereeing here.

I'm actually thinking I might write up this scenario as a system-agnostic adventure. It's the themes that are important here and it'd be easy to convert it to pretty much any horror RPG.

Frenetic and Fun as it was, even including character creation the scenario only ran for a little over three hours. I'm finding that's the length many of my convention scenarios are coming in at these days. It meant that we finished well before midnight which everyone seemed happy with. Especially Martyn, who'd shared the marathon Savage Worlds session with me the night before.