Choose Your Adventure - at Geek Retreat - July

Sunday 30th July. It was my turn to host Tabletop RPGs at Geek Retreat in Birmingham today.

As usual I took along my "Choose your Adventure" set up. It was very successful. I had two players interested before I'd even finished laying out my display.

One had played my introductory The Black Hack scenario before and the other was beginning to put her toe in the water with D&D 5th Ed. I do have other D&D scenarios of course but I thought running TBH might confuse her.

(Note to self: get off your backside and put D&D 5th into your setup. It's the one everyone keeps asking for. And easy to do, given the starter set you've got.)

So they chose Steampunk and we started to run my 1 hour demo adventure "Evolution of Species", using my "The Code of Steam and Steel" rules. As we played, we were joined by two other players.

The scenario was as fun as always. This time the evil Prussian vivisectionist was felled by the superior moral arguments of the British aristocracy.

Having got the basics under their belt, they all agreed they were enjoying the game and wanted to continue playing. So they all made their own characters and it was off to Mars for "The Great Martian Tripod Race." Again, great fun as always - the best scene being the characters fighting their was out of the Martian city in a stolen tripod only to run straight into the artillery of the Sky Guard upon reaching the presumed safety of British territory.

The party resolved all the issues very effectively but ultimately had to cheat to win the race.

With a couple of hours left and facing players with seemingly indefatigable stamina, I ran "Superheroes vs Dinosaurs". This is meant to be a bit wild, what with Daleks in the Cretaceous period and all. But it went completely gonzo with Cybersaurs (Dinosaurs with Cyberman tech) and an Ice Warrior spaceship showing up.

This was a group that really embraced narrative control.

Everyone asked about other events at the venue and when I was returning, so I chalk this up as another successful day at Geek Retreat.