Summer StabCon: Friday 4th - Sunday 6th July 2025

Saturday 5th July

Morning

Got up. Worked out how to use the electric hotel shower. Hotel Breakfast. 

Hotel Breakfasts are one of the reasons I love travelling to conventions. Cheap and cheerful hotel so it wasn’t perfect but it was quite good. I didn’t ask if they did porridge so I had a cereal course and orange juice. The fruit offering was a bit limp so I skipped the fruit course. The cooked breakfast was fine. Bacon was cooked but not well done so I skipped that. Sausages mostly well done and surprisingly nice. Black pudding was okay but could have been done more. Something has been added to flavour the mushrooms which I couldn’t place but which wasn’t unpleasant. Scrambled eggs surprisingly close to way I like them - loose but without too much milk added. Hash Browns were very good. Large, loose, lumps of potato and well cooked. I skipped the queue for toast in favour of extra hash brown. Two cups of coffee due to the small hotel cup size. Very satisfying. 

I filled my backpack with just what I needed for the day - including the two preprepared folders for my games - and made the 15min walk up to the convention. Dropped into the Co-op on the way and bought two good value packs of chocolate coveredbiscuits. The first game - in the Small Lodge again - was Risus. Run by an extremely experienced Referee. One of the hosts of one of the longest running Actual Play Roleplaying series online. He regularly runs GURPs and Runequest games for his home group and uses StabCon to Referee something a bit different. I hadn’t played Risus before but - basically - lots of narrative description on the character sheets. Narratively justify the aspectsyou are using. Roll the dice assigned to that aspect - 2, 3 or 4 six-sided dice. Total them to resolve skill checks. Highest dice in the pool in opposed or combat checks. Easy enough. 

The scenario was called “Something BadCooking”. In a continent devoted to Hedonism, the King’s beloved daughter had just married the best chef in the realm - Jeremiah Grace “The God of Stews”. As a wedding present the King had fed Jeremiah The Best Stew. This had forced a crisis of faith on the chef who sneaked out of wedding bed to go and find the secret ingredients the King had told him about. Our player characters were woken from our post-wedding-party beds to pursue him and bring him back. 

I played a female swashbuckling Satyr, who played a Dwarfish stringed instrument and got along well with animals. My fellow party members were a Dwarf, A Rogue, a talking cat and a magician made of clay (a sort of Golem). We had to travel to a land of black mud (I put on trousers) and giant spiders to rescue the errant chef from an evil hag from another planet. All good. Probably the kind of game you’d get at a convention but not at home.

Afternoon

I checked the sign-up sheet for my afternoon game, my fantasy one about a giant dragon crashing into a remote village pursued by a cannon wielding flying ship. “Claws and Cannons”. The last game I’d written before the convention. It only had two people signed up! I panicked. This was going to be my first game Refereeing in over 5 years - since before the Covid Pandemic. I don’t like refereeing for only two players. So I posted a panicked plea on Facebook and went to ask the front desk for help. The young lady on the front desk advised me to just walk up to people who seemed not to be doing anything and tell them about the game or just shout it out in the room. This was actually very good advice and typical for StabCon. But it didn’t suit my shy personality. So I girded my loins prepared to run the hell out of a game for just two people and went to order lunch. On my way I passed two young men who’d just arrived for their first StabCon looking at the RPG noticeboard. I pointed to the sign upsheet and told them there were a couple of slots available in an excellent game. 

As I said earlier the range of food does not include anything cheap and cheerful or sandwiches so I ordered Samosas for lunch. These were excellent. 

I got to The Small Lodge and set up for my game. My two players arrived, a couple who I’d apparentlyRefereed games for in the past. If you know me, you’ll know that I don’t usually provide pre-generated charactersfor players in my convention games. I prefer players to make their own. The lady in the couple chose to make a Fairy character. A very intimidating and martial Fairy. Her partner chose to roll randomly and got a disgracedTroll noble with a small pet hamster. 

Then the two young men I’d accosted turned up! I had the four players I craved. They both chose to roll randomly. We got a disgraced, warped Dwarf noble with scales down half of his body and - I kid you not - a Squirrel Wizard. An adventuring party who basically travelled in a Troll’s pockets. 

My game is not designed specifically to be played gonzo, but can trend that way if that’s what the players want.

 

The start was the party hiding out in remote village, rich after a successful adventure. However, one which required them to keep their heads down. After the usual bar room hassles, they settled down for the night. In the morning they awoke, to the sounds of a Dragon crashing into the outskirts of town pursued by a flying ship - carrying anarcane cannon - winged warriors and a “Purifier” Warrior. In the ensuing tussle, the enemy Wizard escaped, her winged warriors were defeated and the characters somehow managed to crash the flying ship right onto the injured dragon - killing the noble beast outright. 

At about this time I dropped the packet of chocolate biscuits on the table for everyone to share.

Somehow - with all the wild magic being thrown around -the Troll’s hamster grew to giant size and developed the ability to teleport. (As I say - gonzo.) With the noble dragon dead, there was no way to find and rescue her brood of eggs. So the only option was to question the captured purifier warriors. 

They revealed that an arcane ritual was being undertaken to rid the world of dragonkind. Cue a giant hamster teleport to that location. 

Four giant sky ships holding a lens aloft focusing sunlight onto an altar which forced dragonkind upon it through a portal into a void beyond. And with today’s eclipse, that light would cause all dragonkind on the world to be banished. On the altar were a clutch of dragon eggs. The characters bravely took control of one sky ships and used it crash into another to disrupt the ceremony. During the battle,the Squirrel Wizard caused the Dragon Eggs to hatch. Ritual disrupted, dragons saved. 

However, I had a final twist. 

The portal stayed open and one by one the previously dispatched Dragons began to return - driven mad by their ordeal. These were unimaginably unbeatable by the characters’ standards. I had no idea how the players were going to resolve this but trusted they would find a way. It turned out that all they had to do was to complete the evil ritual. Mercilessly slaughter the innocent, newly born, dragon babies and throw their dead corpses through the portal to seal it and trap all the banished dragon-kind there forever. Epic. Tragic. Great players. A bit gonzo but lots of laughter. I felt I’d recovered my Refereeing mojo and may well play this scenario again at future conventions.

Evening

I checked the sign-up sheet for my evening game. Three players. Fine. I could live with that. 

For an evening meal I chose a curry with rice and naan. Again excellent. I ordered a different lager (£5.80). The lager most people seemed to be ordering was even more expensive than that. And there were named artisan ciders on blackboards. It seems Masonic lodges have a wide range of specialist beverages on offer. 

The three players for my evening Science Fiction game were the couple from earlier on - who’d played the vicious fairy and the Troll with the teleporting hamster - and an old convention friend of many years occasional acquaintance. She’s an extremely experienced convention Referee specialising in “hard” military SciFi games. And luckily a fourthplayer turned up. Another old friend (see below). 

This was the scenario where the characters wake up in a ruined ship with no memory and have to work out what’s going on and how they got there. This game went well. The players were extremely competent and unravelled all the mysteries. A bit too competent. They nursed their battered, unarmed, old ship and cunningly escaped, rather than taking over another ship which did have weapons and fighting their way through their problems - as I’d hoped. A success of brain over brawn which felt a bit unexciting and anti-climactic to me. Also - note to self - prepare in advance how to role-play each species and non-player character. 

With me dropping my packet of chocolate biscuits halfway through.

The fourth player, it turned out, was the guy who used to run games of “Trumpton - the Role-playing game” on Sunday afternoons in the old days. In the intervening years he’d tracked down the original author and gained permission to type up the rules and distribute them - on a private basis. He offered to email me a set. I asked if he was running a game Sunday afternoon as I was looking for a game to play in. His answer was that he hadn’t planned to but he would now. He put me down to play. 

I’d manifested what I wanted for Sunday afternoon. That plus getting back on the Refereeing horse moderately successfully (7/10 room forimprovement) meant I slept well after walking back to my hotel. (All this walking was good for me.)