Viewscream: Black Widow, Brown Recluse

ViewScream

Most role playing games and LARPs are written to be played face-to-face. But every once in a while you'll find one that has been created explicitly to be played online. ViewScream is such a game. I backed it when it was a Kickstarter many years ago, but will shamefacedly say I haven't read it or tried to bring it to the "table" (virtual table, in this case).

The premise of the game is that you are various crew members. I though that all the included scenarios would be based on being on a space ship, but there are settings where you are cyberpunk crew hacking into a corporation, and other such settings. In all of these, you are physically separated, and communicate through video and audio channels remotely (and hence how it is played explicitly online with video conference tools such as Google Hangouts and Roll20).

Hmmm... the cover of the game is mildly disturbing.

Black Widow, Brown Recluse

Recently, Daniel threw it up on the Gauntlet online play calendar, and I signed up, along with fellow players David and Keith. We chose the scenario "Black Widow, Brown Recluse". Our situation involves being on a space ship with a rogue AI that was killing the crew.

Everyone gets a different character sheet which has some secrets that belong to them, as well as various "fixes" they have problems, and some secret background they get to establish. This is one of the things I think the game does exceptionally well, is allow you to customize the character towards some fiction you generate or want to explore, so even if you played the same scenario, there would be varying storylines and motivations.

The facilitator (in this case Daniel) still plays a character, and in our scenario that character is the Bridge. They're responsible more for establishing communication between the players and keeping the narrative rolling, but once the other players get going, that load might be alleviated. They also have win conditions, but ones that are different from the other player characters. The rest of us (Sensors, Engineering, Helm) had various problems we were facing, and various fixes we could try to perform to help others, but the mechanics here are very light. Basically the game is giving you some story prompt type fiction to help you role play out various scenes. The roles also have some personality guidelines and other secrets which flavor all the interactions.

Also worth mentioning, if you don't fix all your issues within a time constraint, your character will die, so there is some motivation to get things moving. I thought this might come across as a little stale or mechanical, but that wasn't the case at all, especially if you have folks interested in exploring the role playing aspects. I was additionally surprised at some of the fun interpersonal conflicts, touches of hilarity, and a touching moment or two that passed between some of the characters.

All said, a fun game, a really cool experience, and one that I'd like to provide to others at a future time (maybe even let Daniel get to play in the players seat, since he's apparently only run this as a facilitator!)

Sensors, reporting for duty. (Yes, I always have to do a little bit of low-fi LARP dress-up.)

Gauntlet Hangouts: Misspent Youth of The Janus Minds

I've been slowly freeing up a bit of time to run more Gauntlet Hangouts online games, and so after recruiting friends Jessica and Gina into the community, but neither of them having played yet, I set a thing up. I put up a one-shot game of Misspent Youth: "teenage rebellion in a fucked-up future", by Robert Bohl. I'd played it recently at Gamex 2018, and ran it at our Indie RPG Night meetup.

For the full details you'd have to watch the video (down below, and thanks Patrick for helping me record it!). But from what I remember, it went something like this...

We see a utopia, beautiful, the future in clean streets and strange architectures... and then zoom onwards, past the wall and gate to the next tier, where things are still looking pretty decent; maybe not quite as clean and generous. Middle class, maybe? And then another wall and gate. And more zones. And finally we end up on the edge of our massive city. The largest area by far. And the poorest and dirtiest and crowdiest.

A boarding school in the lowest caste; forced conformity; ugly jumpsuits ; manufacturing; and social experiments. Forced belief and value systems, patronizing, broad spectrum stereotyping about Millenials destroying everything and blaming youth culture. Strict ethical codes. But... they need "creatives". Not just anyone though... only the "OK" kinds of creativity. The ones that benefit society without all the disadvantages. You know, like depression, or any revolutionary thinking and counterculture. All this, and the kids are of course being recorded as part of some reality show, to try and win votes to ensure the people's support for re-election and re-implementation. The show title? "Janus Minds".

The Authority had VICE: Absolutism / VICTIM: Humanity / VISAGE: Systemic / NEED: Re-election and support for Proposition RE-ED0912. What systems of control does the Board of Re-education have? Emotional monitoring through a Fitbit-type device. Cameras everywhere. Confessionals. And they are very Scripted; with very specific punishments if you venture off script without permissions. 

We had Beana/Beatrice (she) - Born of mixed-class background, Kiyana (she) - a trusted and unassuming "A" student, model pupil, but sympathizes with the cause, Judas (he)- a brooding musician, and Lucky (they) - a scrounger. 

Authority figures included The Voice of God - In charge of confessionals; Jonathan Glen - Producer and supercreep on chicks; Officer "Fruity" Frutanis- Harassing students, sadistic; Mark "the narc" - Detentionee but works for the man. 

The Youthful Offenders had an exploit though... a way to super-charge the fitbit using strong emotions which could disable the monitoring in the vicinity.

Due to some delays with tech issues and such and a long (but oh so satisfying) world-building, we didn't have enough time to play through all 7 scenes. Instead we made do with a good 3. We had some hallway drama with the narc, and the officer making an appearance. We had some emotion disabling electronic exploits being used at the Voice of God rooms, where they find a way to hack the televised signals. Now to get a message out. We had a third and final scene, which I played similar to what would normally be scene 6 of the game: a decision to see who would win: the Authority or the Youthful Offenders.

Overall, playing online works, but was a little slower than in person. You definitely want to find ways to expedite the world-building parts of the game. Perhaps using a pre-made scenario? Although the world-building is always so fun. Another option I more recently experiences is using something like the Add and Bans from Microscope to quickly go around the table and establish some world guidelines.

Oh, you want to know the outcome? I guess you'd have to watch...

Gamex 2018: Sunday+Monday

Sunday 8:30am: Game Design Lean Coffee

Once again we were blessed with Stephanie running us some Lean Coffee on Game Design. Various of us got together, put down some topics to discuss, voted on said topics, and then discussed the shit out of them. Great, great stuff, and I will be doing this at Gateway, even though Stephanie likely won't be there (sadness).

What is it? You can read more about it in my writeup at Orccon 2018, earlier this year.

Sunday kiddo time

The next hours involved me picking up the kiddo, getting together with other families and kiddos, checking out the dealer hall, and so on.

Sunday 2pm: Games on Demand Kids Edition

So good! About a dozen kids showed, and more than a few GMs... I didn't even run a thing. We had the following games:

• Chris Grey running Tiny Dungeons
• Rob Herbert running Teenage Witch Academy
• Zoe and father Bill running Spiders & Dragons (a Deep Forest hack); I did also play in this one a bit!

Additionally, Mike Olson was running some D&D AL and it overflowed into our GoD area, and this had a double-benefit: 1. He had a kid join us in gaming, and 2. the majority of his D&D table were teens, so it actually made it look like we had a bigger GoD Kids than we actually did. I'll take it!

Teenage Witch Academy

Chris running Tiny Dungeons, just the right amount of crunch for little crunchers.

Zoe running Spiders and Dragons!

Sunday afternoon: Artemis and board games

The rest of the afternoon brought on some various wanderings and board games. We got a table going of King of Tokyo in the convention's "Family area", which has been in pretty constant high demand over the last few cons, especially as people know it exists now.

King of Tokyo!

Strategicon used to run Artemis quite regularly, as one of the con-goers would bring his gear and have games set up. The premise is you are playing crew members on the bridge of a Star Trek-like vessel, and each player plays a different station: Engineering, Communications, Science, Weapons, Navigation. And of course: the Captain, who doesn't get a computer, but just coordinates everyone else. Problem is, the guy who used to run it got burned out, and so we haven't seen this at the con for over a year.

Good news! Strategicon just purchased the equipment, including touch screens, to run this themselves, and so this was the first con to re-introduce Artemis to the con-going masses. A few volunteers help you learn how to play and setup the scenario for you, so even if you have zero experience, you can still have a great time.

I knew about this re-introduction of the game, and so went and signed up for a slot for the kids, and they went to check it out, and of course: loved it. We actually ended up playing a couple of times, since there were some later slot drop-outs. Video down below!

Artemis training

Our captain, captaining.

Sunday late: Werewolf and Shadowcon

The afternoon also involved finding some other games, and one was Cash N' Guns, a little shoot-em-up LARP type thing.

Cash N Guns

As per usual, Sunday late-night involved lots of Werewolf, however in this case they had a game that started late, and went even later. I opted out, and instead played some board games with Ann-Marie while husband Jim played Werewolf with the kids. 

At a certain point while the kids are playing, I'll take little jaunts up to visit Gina and the lovely folks up at Shadowcon, to have RPG gaming discussions (or watch them run an off-book game, occasionally). It's a little slice of non-Werewolf heaven that I always take advantage of, and thoroughly enjoy.

Monday was just waking up late, having breakfast up in the lounge with as many people as we could fit, and then wandering about and playing the "scavenger LARP", for which we barely found anything this time (I think one 20-sided die, maybe?)

And thus ends another Strategicon...

Gamex 2018: Saturday

Saturday 9am: Games on Demand / Misspent Youth

First Games on Demand (GoD) session of the morning my friend Andy was willing to run a Dungeon World scenario called Curse of Terror Island, like with dinosaurs and Wushu, and that immediately grabbed a chunk of the players. Friend Chris pitched Misspent Youth, though, and that grabbed me immediately, as I've had a chance to chat with Rob Bohl many times in the prior year, and hey: Dystopian Sci-fi Punks... hell yeah.

It was just Chris running, with John and I as players. Chris freely admitted that he hadn't run it before and just read through the book the once, so it'd be a bit of test-run, but hell was it a great game. Chris played played The Authority (GM) and brought just the right level of adversarialness... hard-hitting and r, elevant and evil. You wanted to punch all those bad guys they were soooo good. To that end, it was also a very collaboratively driven game, for two reasons: 1. we players played a large part in creating the dystopia and the authority's drives and motivations, and 2. all three of us played super cinematically. 

We went for a generation starship which is way past its reserves, being driven mercilessly to find the perfect homeworld by the ship's psychologist Jaji ("98.5% habitable is not good enough, damnit"). She's also the only one capable of using cryosleep without it affecting her sanity (or is she?), and hence the only one which has survived the 100's of years we've been flying. We had our clique, the Chromites, little orphans and punks living in the ships innards, using mechanical hacking to subvert supplies and cause trouble. Some of crew included brothers Ahjo and Buzz, a 12-year old prodigy Tree, and Gloria (supposedly related distantly to Jaji herself). A former Chromite, Siren, was now part of the evil hivemind that are the security network ("the wolves"), and they were on to us. 

Our Authority involved traits such as Absolutism, and subverting our Humanity. Systems of control included the ships robots (we decided no true Artificial Intelligence in this setting), and chips in believer's heads (the hivemind; limited number of people and limited telepathy due to technology and resource limitations). Our exploits were that we know the robotic patterns due to our prodigy Tree, and Ahjo using that information to hack the system.

Our end goal was eventually to find a way to put Jaji back to bed, as she decided that she was done with cryostatis, and was the root of all our ills. Lots of great scenes, and great drama, but in the end the Authority won, and we were caught. 

I was super impressed with the structure of the games, including the scene types, systems of control, the collaborative nature of world and character and adversary building. Additionally, the conflict resolution mechanics uses a system that's a little bit like Craps, where you roll-and-claim numbers between 2-12. Similarly, the Authority claims numbers as well, however without rolling (as based by the rules). When you hit a number already marked by the Youthful Offenders, you win the conflict. Similarly if you roll a number that the Authority has claimed, you lose. The escalating tension this causes is well placed, and the back-and-forth narration is fun, especially if you're into story games and possibly "writer's room"-style games. 

I was immediately inspired to run this game (and in fact did so twice in the following months at our story game meetup and online; links to write-ups to be provided soon).

Robert Bohl has written a pretty amazing game, and even though it feels like there is a high bar to run it if you haven't played very improv-necessary games (such as GM-less games or games like Ten Candles which explicitly tell you as the GM not to prepare), the rules are very supportive and it makes the game very much a conversation. Highly recommended.

Myself, Chris, John; you can see the craps-like mechanic in the bottom center.

Saturday 2pm: Games on Demand / Ten Candles

Normally I'd just be running another GoD game, however Jim and Lori were supposed to be in last night's game, and due to snafu, had to miss it. Jim could provide a private room, and so without further ado I got the two of them, and friends Unique and Keith, to join me for some last minute Ten Candles. Also props to Jim Pinto who was around to take on many other Games on Demand folks for some of his gaming (Praxis, if I'm not mistaken), but it was the one time I almost didn't have GMs to deal with the number of gamers present.

We looked at a few scenarios, and ended up going with Bunker by Brady Tatro (available in the Ten Candles PDF), which reads, "The world is crumbling, but people in power have planned for this possibility. People like you. A massive bunker has been constructed, a bunker capable of saving many from the arrival of Them. It only requires minor modifications to account for constant light production. Of course, it also needs to be determined who will be staying there. How many is too many? Who gets to live? Who must die?"

This was perfect, given we were playing in a literal hotel board room. Unique passed me the card which read "I have seen Them... change size", and so my mite-like creatures that can change size from microscopic to gargantuan were eventually born, to ill effect. Especially when you see someone itching their arm constantly, or see bodies with pieces that have exploded from the inside out, or are driving in a vehicle and crash into a boulder that comes out of nowhere. But of course they didn't know all this until much later.

The one thing that was in great contrast from my prior nights run, is that I remembered to do the Establishing Truths phase, and it was just such a different game because of it. Lesson learned.

The players were great at inter-person conflict, and combined with my hard moves whenever the drama got slow, it worked out for a great story. There was a drive up a mountain road to the bunker door, an accident, a dark tunnel, and finally entry into the safe haven, which was of course already overrun from the inside. A tragic ending, and I was particularly proud of how the game played out. (You can hear Jim talk about it more in the Happy Jacks broadcast linked below, if you want to see my ego grow about 5 times.)

They look shockingly like real candles... I love my LEDs. They've served me many times (this is the fourth game with them?)

Our board members!

Saturday eve: Happy Jacks RPG Podcast live

After Ten Candles, it was time for a little R&R. Gathered with some friends at the bar (folks from the Happy Jacks RPG contingent as well as fans and friends), ate a bite, drank a beer or two, shooted some shit. Then the traditional 8pm live recording of the podcast, which Kimi was running (Stu was out due to Ren-faire stuff).

Good stuff, getting to hear about various games around the convention that I hadn't seen, and the usual banter and friendliness. It was a little less chaotic than usual (I think alcohol consumption wasn't quite as rampant as it usually is, although I had my fair share of drinks before and during). 

You can listen to the live recording of the podcast at Gamex 2018 here.

Saturday 10pm: Best Friends

The final game I played was off-book. Friends Stephanie and Toby came down from Las Vegas, and in addition to running some usual games of theirs, Stephanie wanted to try out Best Friends, a diceless role-playing game by Gregor Hutton about girlfriends, and their drama. We organized the game to help Stephanie do this playtest, and it came about through the Strategicon Games on Demand Slack that I created earlier in the year, so yay for that! (And of course if you are interested in joining, you are welcome to; direct message me through a social media platform of your choice).

I will freely admit I was running on fumes at this point, but I've got strategies for how to do this with minimal game interruptions. For example: Play an absent minded character, or someone who doesn't quite have it together, or is a weirdo. All these come off well when you are already at a lowered brain capacity.

The beginning of the game is really interesting, in that character stats are determined by people basically voting for who they think is smartest, prettiest, coolest, and so on. You tally the votes, and the person who got the most votes for a thing, is the "best" at that thing. But even the prettiest person thinks someone else is prettier than them. It's all very interesting and delicious.

We had Dolories, Eunice, Patty, Beatrice, and Nora, and it was all very small-town USA in the 50's. The game itself was excellent fun, and we had some hilarious scenes. There was red scare drama, and pie contests, and much more, but the best was just our various personalities interacting with each other in all sorts of subversive ways. I'm always impressed when a system so very simple can create such good drama through basic mechanics. Of course it helps that the table consisted of great players.

I think Stephanie was looking to use the system for a game she has in development, and if it goes through, I can't wait to play it.

Gamex 2018: Friday

Stress-free

I can't remember the last time I felt this little stress going into a game convention. Partly it's because we run 3 times / year, every year, so it's super familiar to me. But even so, I used to get there early to ensure signups in slots I hadn't gotten in games, and normally I run a game in the 2pm Friday slot to kick-off the con.

Not this time. The one game I'd signed up for was 2pm Friday, and I was running later that night. And all Saturday was Games on Demand, and Sunday was kiddo-time. I just strolled right in without a care in the world. It was lovely.

Friday 2pm: Demigods (PbtA)

The first game of the day was Demigods, a playtest by Jason Mills for his PbtA game where you play as one of the half-mortal children of the gods. He's been playtesting for a while now, and specifically has a series of actual plays on the Happy Jacks RPG media empire.

This one-shot was called Ragna-ROCK, described as: This band of Demigods is exactly that, a real band! CharGen will include what kind of band you're in, and how you'll save the music industry. Rock on!

I remember a couple of things about this game:

• The story involved all of us in a band, and eventually having a battle for our supremacy on holing on to the number one spot on the Santa Monica Pier.
• I played the Warrior, a worshiper of a forgotten Babylonian god of dance and war. I was the bands dancer, as well as percusionist, and these two were tied together in performance.
• There were 6 players. Personally, I think that's too much for a PbtA game in general, and this one specifically, due to the many approaches that various players had in the game.
• Jason did a great job running the show and keeping us herded into something that resembled a coherent story, despite various gonzo turns.
• There was some player-based conflict that wasn't particularly fun to deal with.
• The system itself ran pretty smooth, and you could tell it has seen some action in playtest land.
• The system is probably what is now considered a traditional PbtA game, as far mechanics (Roll+Stat, flavorful playbook archtypes, character bonds reminiscent of Apocalypse World or Dungeon World).
• Overall, it was a fun session, but I'd recommend going with a smaller table size in the future, as spotlighting is very difficult on a table this big. Maybe 4 players max?

Demi-god of dance. And war. And percussions.

Friday 8pm: Ten Candles

I've run Ten Candles before at this game convention, and it was a pretty fantastic time. I also hadn't been able to run it for my friend Howie yet, so couldn't wait to see how he'd like it. I had a bunch of great players, including Howie, Ron and Will. 

We discussed options around which Module to play (the book comes with many starting scenarios). We went for one of the bonus modules: The Burning Man. Basically, they're members of a commune that's been anticipating and looking forward to the end days, but now that those days are here and They are hunting everyone, the situation isn't as palatable as they'd thought.

The players were great, and the story was still interesting, and the card handed to me was "I have seen Them... masquerade as others", so we had some doppelganger action towards the end of the story.

The problem with the game? Funnily enough, darkness. Ten Candles is to be played in the dark with 10 candles. And I do so with my cheat sheet, since running it by the book is too difficult. However after creating the players had created their characters, I confidently decided I knew what comes next (although hadn't run this in many months). I forgot about one of the main mechanics in the game: Establishing Truths. This is the mechanic where you take turns saying what is true about the world, and also what is happening next, and is a great transition from one scene to the next, often telling us how the world is actively changing and where the characters then find themselves.

Instead, in this game I ended up taking some liberty with pushing the story along and telling them where we were next, and although it worked, it removes some of the players' narrative control that they should have in this game. I realized my mistake a few scenes in, and at that point decided it'd be too disruptive to try and retrofit it. So, that definitely detracted a bit from the game, but overall I felt like it still worked really well.

Live and learn, right?

Lady Blackbird: Flight of The Owl

The Gauntlet's online community is amazingly good. I've played many one shots of various RPGs there, and have never been disappointed with the players at the table or the game being played. That said, the Gauntlet thrives on running games in short story arcs that last 3-4 sessions, normally played during an individual month. I hadn't played in any on-going set of games, mostly due to timing issues and the difficulty in committing game time to weekday evenings and weekends.

Within The Gauntlet, the subculture there that I've grown closest to is the Asia Pacific (ASPAC) crew. They're an exemplary group of folks, and include members from countries such as Australia, Singapore, Japan, and even various USians (including myself). And so it was only fitting that my first "campaign" would be with this crew.

In April, friend Sid decided to run Lady Blackbird. It's a game by John Harper that I've been wanting to try forever, being a prime example of collaborative story gaming magic. 

If I look back in the last year of gaming and decide on my favorite experience, it is these four sessions. This is high praise given some of the games I've played in the last 12 months, but so well deserved. The other four players (Elle, Stephen, Lu, Ary) and our lovely game master, Sid, were such a treat to play with.

The game itself is some cool story game shit. It starts with some hard framing with the crew of The Owl (an air ship) in a prison, captured. The five available characters are all unique, and with their various backgrounds which give them a lovely starting point and some interpersonal tension and connections, but with a lot of room for customization and growth.

Sid ran an extremely collaborative table with an artist's light touch, and he'd probably tell you that he was just making us do the work for him, but that's a bit of bullshit. He knew when to push us and when to get us to bring our magic. He experimented with all sort of interesting and beautiful techniques, such as doing session recaps through TV-show style intros, and all sorts of fun things with smash cuts.

Oh man, and what players. I can't do them justice in my descriptions, but I'll just say that the depth of Naomi (Stephen) and lovely chemistry with Lady Blackbird (Lu) was killer. Starting the game off with some good ol' mutiny threw some nice wrenches in to the works, which of course was patched up by yarn from the most amazing Snargle (Elle). Kale (Ary) was supremely authentic and sympathetic. I just tear up thinking back to this game. 

I can't really do the game justice in describing it, but will just leave it out there for those crazy enough to watch things like this. Enjoy!

SGG: Star Crossed and Winterhorn and autumn of the ancients

David and I have been running Story Games Glendale for almost 1.5 years now. It's only fitting we finally get some new blood and some consistent friendlies coming, damnit! And it's only fitting I give it some love here. Because I've been "lazy" at updating. (Note: There is no such thing as Laziness. Thanks, Shane!)

March 20: Star Crossed

On this eve we were joined by Asher (almost a regular, now!) and their friend Aaron, and Todd. I didn't realize it until later, but I had gamed with Todd before when he ran Cat (the RPG where you play... wait for it... a cat) back at a Strategicon a few years back!

We ended up going for Star Crossed, Alex Roberts' two player game of forbidden love (which I got to originally play at Bid Bad Con 2017). Asher and Aaron ended up playing a game of forbidden love between a Drow and a High Elf (cute concept!) and unfortunately I was playing at the same time as facilitating, so probably did them a disservice in that regard. I know I showed an example of play, and David was sort of floating between our tables to watch us, and tried helping them out a few times, but as a note: if you have folks relatively new to story games, maybe a stronger hand holding would do.

On my end of the table I played across from Todd, and we ended up with a scenario where a scientist and a janitor were falling in love as death and nanites and the end of the world were eminent. There were some awkward scenes in the lab, late at night. And a moment outside where we... almost... confessed something. And then it ends in some sadness.

April 3: Winterhorn

David has been wanting to run this at the meetup for a while now. "Chomping at the bit", you could say. He got to play in an online version of the game run by Gerrit for The Gauntlet, so had played once before, and had all the cards and such printed out and ready to go. This particular meetup had the perfect number of 7 players, including some new faces.

Winterhorn is by Jason Morningstar, and is pitched as about how governments degrade and destroy activist groups. By playing law enforcement and intelligence operatives working diligently to demoralize and derail, you’ll learn about the techniques used in the real world in pursuit of these goals.

And that's what we did. It's a "table LARP", which is to say you play completely in character at times, just like a LARP, however around a table in a manner and environment similar to many RPGs. Much like a LARP there are various LARP-style safety tools, debrief sessions, and methods for getting in and out of character, like leaving the table during breaks.

After setup and discussion, you play the game in 3 30-minute scenes where you are in character, a bureaucrat around a table making decisions to dismantle a "dissident" group (that may or may not be what it appears). Everyone has there little secret prejudices, and the way you can uncaringly make decisions that could destroy peoples lives is a bit unnerving (and reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode "Button, Button" in that manner).

Something I truly enjoyed about the game is how certain facilitating roles, such as debrief, time tracking, and managing some of the drawing and other components, are all assigned around the table. The management load is spread out by design. Additionally, breaks are done away from the table, so the table space is reserved for being in character only. The intent is to take these rules of play seriously, to provide a more LARP-like experience, and I can only say: Try to do what it says.

April 17: The Final Girl / Autumn of the Ancients

We had a decent turnout this night, with enough folks to split into two tables. David took some folks and run The Final Girl, a perennial favorite.

I got 3 players and played Autumn of the Ancients, a game based off of Fall of Magic, but in space. (Orccon 2018 writeup here.) You are travelling with the Liminal to find the source of ancient technology, which is dying. My version of this game is printed on index cards, since playing on a large star map on a table at a game convention can be exceedingly difficult to do. 

My index card version of the game was used to great effect, inspired by some ideas discussed in the past, and a suggestion by one of the players, Gene. We started with the initial location (Alpha Station), and then had a few rounds of intermediate locations, chosen at random, which itself was great. When we felt that we were getting ready to wrap up the game, we immediately went to the final location: The Black Hole (which I had placed to the side). This enabled us to play in the melancholy, slow paced way that the game usually plays out, but still tell a comprehensive, satisfying story.

And I got to play a Dralasite! (Bonus) We had some silliness occasionally, but the game was far from gonzo, and played well. There was one time that I did "X-card" another player for tone (he appeared to be getting tired and a little silly and added something that definitely was of the gonzo derailing sort). Otherwise, good session.

HGMO: Sherlock

Hot Guys Making Out (HGMO) is a roleplaying game by Ben Lehman, and is set in a remote village in the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War (1930s). You play one of two main male protagonists (or ancillary other folks), and it's a game of passion. I haven't played it.

A hack of this game called HGMO: Sherlock was written by my friend Lauren McManamon (a fellow Gauntleteer) and is instead about those Baker Street detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and Watson, and the steamy relationship that simmers right under the covers of daily mysteries.

River was running this game, and I got to play it along with Agatha, Asher, and Larry. And I got to be Sherlock Holmes, himself. As is usual during Gauntlet games, the character keepers stored in Google documents was excellent, and really lent to immediately getting to get into the gaming, and having an easy-to-use reference:

The rules splayed out in a Google doc, true to form for The Gauntlet

Fortunately River led all us newbies through the process of the game, and bless her heart because she was sick at the time, but suffered through it to give us this joy. 

This is one of those interesting games where you take turns framing scenelets (I use that made up word, because they are less scenes, and more little vignettes). It helped when River said that we should imagine framing little pieces of story in a comic book, in the order of a few frames. In the actual play you'll hear us start to get into that flow a little bit into the game.

The story starts with choosing a framework for the story, but everything is very, very loose, and you end up doing lots of improvisation. The mechanics are all based around a set of cards you hold in your hand, with some giving you special narrative rights, and others just allowing you to describe setting details, and allow for some uncomfortable silences and looks. All in all, it seems to support the mood its going for pretty well.

Interested in hearing our actual play? Here's an MP3 of the thing, after I edited the hell out of it. The original game was in the order of about 3 hours, but here it is chopped down to about an hour. I left in a little of the setup, some initial mechanics (but quickly throw most of that away as we continue with the game), and took out all the white space. Enjoy!

You can find HGMO: Sherlock in The Gauntlet's Codex - Lies zine (Jan 2018), and it can be purchased off of DriveThruRPG. Interested in an ongoing Codex subscription? Check out the Gauntlet Patreon.

The actual play video of this game is also available on Youtube here:

Dialect online and in person

Dialect with The Gauntlet: The Heart of the River

My friend Gerrit posted to run Dialect for The Gauntlet online gaming community, probably back in January or February (they normally schedule 1-2 months out), and I jumped on that. Fortunately I was still able to play by the time the game rolled around in mid March.

Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost. In this game, you’ll tell the story of the Isolation by building their language. New words will come from the fundamental aspects of the community: who they are, what they believe in, and how they respond to a changing world.

I had backed the Kickstarter based on the premise, but also having heard some great stories about the two authors' (Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu) prior game, Sign. Otherwise, I hadn't looked into it at all, and went into the game knowing little about the rules. Fortunately The Gauntlet uses a very "open table" style of play, which allows anyone into a table, and has no expectations on you knowing the rules ahead of time (and plays games that lean into those needs).

I already expected a great caliber of players (thank you Gauntlet), but I was impressed with the game itself.  The setup is simple, but meaty and fostered some good collaboration. You start by choosing a Backdrop, one of four settings that the game comes with: A mars colony cut off from communication with Earth. Or a bunch of scoundrels hiding in plain sight.

We chose The Compound: We’re 200 strong, not interested in where the world is going, and have built a compound, and are now completely independent from the world. 20 years have gone by. We started back in the '80s. The US started to wage its drug war. We are in Columbia, locals, mostly indigenous, but disconnected from the land (possibly for generations), we now live in the city, and are fed up with those in power that deal in drugs and violence. We've fled to the jungle, and colonized a small island floating in the middle of a large, flowing river.

The game play revolves around Aspects, of which you will have three. A set of two leading questions provides us with the means to define two of the Aspects, but one Aspect is completely free choice. All of these are answered collaboratively by the group. We ended with these three Aspects:

1. What about who we are made the Compound a necessity?  We freed ourselves from the terror of the drug war.
2. What special property about the Compound keeps us secure?  The river runs around us.
3. Free aspect?  The return to our ancestral homelands.

Character generation is a choice from archetype character cards. What's fascinating is that your character card also is tied to the Aspects in some manner, for example I chose the Artist:

A Dialect character card

I shunned #1 (the past), and identified with the river, but especially with my "muse", returning to our homelands. I was Jaji, a singer, and somewhat charismatic, providing home when needed, and giving us a narrative as a people. But I also was a bit of a layabout, not really helping when it comes to the real day-to-day needs, and had gained a strong reputation for this over the years.

We had Aziza (she/her, Gerrit) our gardener and spice and color maker, Primitivo (he/him, Paul) our scrounger of resources, with an antagonistic relationship with the river that takes away much of what we need, and Ani'bal (he/him, Brian) our healer of bodies and minds, with occasionally outbursts and a tendency to drink, and who occasionally misses the world.

The game then goes into Age 1. In our game, we just had a huge pile of cards, and chose what we wanted out of it. I'd learn later that if you play rules as written (RAW), then in fact you should draw a hand of three cards each, and select one from your hand. But our method worked perfectly fine here.

The cards are words to be created. For example, creating an expletive, or a word that means "worry". Although we take turns choosing the word to create, the creation is a collaborative process as well, which was excellent. Sometimes you have a good thought on the sound, or a concept, but your teammates are there to help flesh out the other details, or help guide the process. In the end, if it's your turn, you have final authority, but collaboration is the name of the game.

After talking about and formalizing the word (which takes about 5 minutes or more), then you create a scene, where the characters get to use that word. A little scene prompt at the bottom of the card helps if you need an idea of where to start. My favorite part of this process is seeing the evolution over a number of scenes, as there is a cascade effect, where you start to use earlier words more and more in later scenes, just as a side effect of the building of this language.

If this sounds a little intimidating, I'd say building language sounds bigger than you are responsible for here. You are building words, but most of your language is entirely the same as normal, so there is no need to feel pressure, but with all the advantages of getting to see the wonder and creativity.

We got to play far enough so as to finish the first Age, so that everyone created a word. However we had to tie up the session there. My compatriots continued a later session, but I had to miss that, unfortunately.

(I'm going to start stealing from my friend Sid and occasionally using "Stars and Wishes"; things that were highlights, and things I would like to change.)

Stars: 

• Gerrit's setup using Google documents with image of the cards was really well done and made the game run with ease online.
• The chemistry between our characters was really fun to see unfold.
• We took some care to make a real-life situation not feel silly or trope-filled.
• Paul's word choice was for Death, and it was my favorite segment of the game, as we worked together to create Tzon, and the scene was magical and intense. I sometimes still get teary eyed thinking about it.

Wishes: 

• I wish I could've play the second session.
• I would want the game to run as a one-shot. (As I found out later, it can fit in a 4-hour slot, but that's in person. I wouldn't try to speed it up for online play, as the slow intentionality is important. My recommendation: If you run online, break it up into two sessions, but try to do so with as short a break as possible in between).

The game was recorded, so here's a recording of the first session:

Sacramento

Before moving on to another session of Dialect, in which I ran the thing, first, a little of Sacramento. Visiting the family, taking the daughter to an afternoon of retro video game action (two arcade cabinets in one restaurant that each had about 60+ retro games on them!!), and finding an old puzzle for $2 at a thrift store.

Hitting the arcade! She played lots of Donkey Kong Junior and Donkey Kong. I showed her 1942, 1943, and a spattering of others...

Busy puzzling with the brothers and nephews

Only 3 missing pieces, not bad! None of those were even vital.

Dialect in person: The Iron Reign's Lastride

So then, I'm up in Sacramento visiting the family (who'll play board games, but RPGs not so much). That means I also gotta get out and gaming, and so got in touch with a few of my Sacramento peeps. Matthew and I met when I tried running a "story games" type meetup up there the prior year, and was down to play. We ended up meeting at his place, and he invited his friend Yuri (who'd played some RPGs, but story games not much).

Now, normally I lean more towards fantasy and sci-fi, even when playing serious games, because I feel like there's less restriction on being able to create or play in the setting. However, in talking with Matthew and Yuri, we went more historical fiction. In the past I was a bit averse to this (and still have an internal reaction as such!) but I've had so many good RPG experiences that are set as historical fiction recently, that I didn't say anything to the contrary. And I'm glad we played in the setting we did.

We chose the Thieves' Cant Background: The most important tools for the dozen members of our crew are not our weapons but our language. We speak in code, disguised as pleasantries and idle chatter as we move among our targets.

In creating our setting, we settled on Germany, early 1800's, the early budding of the industrial era. Germany is still a bunch of kingdoms, with some consolidation going on. We decided on the made-up city of Salzberg, on the Baltic sea, north Germany. It has a strong ship-building industry.

We are The Iron Reign, a few places away from a royal seat in a kingdom which has been engulfed by another kingdom. We are horse "thieves", trading in only the purest of German pure-bred horse breeds, whereas our rivals, the "Open Hand", believe a horse is a horse. Heathens.

Our Aspects:

1. Our job: Procure horses, by any means
2. Eyes on us (what provides us cover): The fairgrounds, a mix of cultures and trade, dominated at times by the Roma.
3. Free aspect: Preserve the line; we are from a noble line, and need to regain our seat of power.

We had "Lady Iron Reign" (a royal title, or a stage name?) Isolda, the closest in line to a royal seat that is no more, an adrenaline junkie. Richard von Eisenhuf "Ritterhard", a true knight, and protector of the line and honor. And Adolar, known as "Books", who is a bastard of the royal line, a mix of the royal house and Roma blood, who is self-educated and smart, and also swims in the sea of knowledge that is the fairgrounds.

I played this game closer to RAW (rules as written), and we drew a hand of cards for character choices, and then later each a hand of cards for words (3 from the first age). After you play a first age card, you draw a new card from the second age. This means in the next round of play, you'll have 2 first age cards, and 1 second age card to chose from and play. It was very interesting to see how second and third age cards differ. In the first age it's mostly about making words. In the later ages it's also about more complex word concepts, or situations around words, such as the government mandating their use, or deprecation.

One example word we defined was Prox, which we decided originally came from a longer chemical word, which was part of our mix that subdues horses. Now it's comes to mean "an important resource" or an "important part of the plan"; and eventually we found ourselves using it as "cool" or "good".

Another great one was Lastride. Our knight had gotten old, and was on his death bed, and decided to bring back an older tradition that was no longer being kept. He was held up on his horse (he couldn't ride on his own anymore), and placed in a fake field of battle with friends. And they stabbed him, so that he could die honorably in battle, in his "lastride".

We played almost a 4 hour session. I'm finding that it seems to fall into 3 equal sized chunks: game setup, the first age, and the rest of the game. The second and third age sort of snowball a little bit, and that may be due to getting familiar with the game by that point, or maybe we just rushed some of those scenes more than expected.

Stars:

• Although it's important to stand up for what you want to see in a game as a GM, just as a player, I'm very happy I let Matthew and Yuri guide the basic premise for the setting, because I again enjoyed a historical fiction game!
• The scene after Ritterhard was killed in his Lastride, had the Lady Iron Reign lead a charge in a war that was brewing, and all the soldiers stood up and chanted "to the lastride!" despite the fact that they had no horses and were just foot soldiers. I loved how the word really felt like it came to it's own, and no longer needed to be true to its original meaning. It felt like what the game is meant to do!
• About 2/3 through the game, and I did some checkins to make sure everyone was still in for the long haul (~ 4 hours), and I was feeling a little worn down, but thanks to Matthew and Yuri for carrying it to the end! I felt really satisfied with the game when it ended.
• I was really happy to get the game to conclusion, both because it felt complete, but also because I now know that it belongs in a 4 hour con slot (don't try a 3 hour slot unless you set expectations that it's only to show how it works, or rush some aspects, which I wouldn't recommend).

Wishes:

• I don't think I've read all the rules, but I definitely recommend being a little lose with some of the scene framing (such as not necessarily having only our characters be a main protagonist in the scene, if it feels forces). We had one scene were it made more sense to see children on the street say the word as our older main character watched. We had scenes after one of the characters, Ritterhard, had already died.
• Although games are probably quite variable in timeframe, it'd be interesting to know what the expected times for the different phases of the game are (and it'd be cool if the rules mention this).

The table with concentric circles heading towards the center.

Our story, with Matthew, Yuri and myself

CONlorado 2018: Sunday (Deep Forest, Scum and Villainy, Underwater People)

The Deep Forest, with Lego (morning)

I woke up as late as I could, took a Lyft to the YWCA, and met up with Paul, Madjay, and Michael, for a game of The Deep Forest. Michael had played before, Madjay had played The Quiet Year, and Paul hadn't played any of that jazz. The Deep Forest is a hack of the original map-making game about a post-apocalyptic community, and is instead about a bunch of monsters trying to rebuild after the humans have trashed their lands.

Our scenario was an island, where human super-wizards had come and started to colonize with their magics and sorcery, got part-way done, and then left. We had a little abandoned magic metropolis. We had a magic portal that leads to another world. We had a few outposts they had scattered around.

We created some monsters: A giant sea kraken that was hanging out near the city port. A group of wraiths who lived in the Well of Souls. A group of gnomes under the big mountain (with one of them "corrupted" by the outside, and therefore our emissary). Judy, a gelatinous cube clear-cutting a patch of forest.

Part of the game involves creating Taboos (things the humans left behind that we avoid), but also Adopted things that we've taken on for use. We Adopted the human food: a pen in the city center that magically generates flora and fauna of various types. We try to avoid the Eyes of Loving Safety (which float around all over the island, watching), Common Language (we don't know how to read their stuff), and Wands of Arcane Energy (like dangerous landmines! there's still an eternally burning chunk of forest from the last one we tried to use; the remains of a prior monster included).

From there, we started drawing cards and playing. Before long we had a tribe of bugbears invading through the magic portal. We established a small tribe of goblins, who were helping them build a road into the metropolis. That is, until they started eating some of the goblins. The gnomes and goblins didn't get along (as we found through various "discussions") but then suddenly an alliance was made, as the bugbears became more territorial. A giant scorpion thing came out of the ground at one point. Another failed attempt to use a wand resulting in a skyscraper burning. A discovery that the Kraken was eating 90% of our food. The gnomes working on an aqueduct of sorts. The Kraken sabotaging that project by making a dam. A wall around the gnomes as they all "corrupt" themselves with the outside, in an attempt to stave the bugbear invasion. And then the ominous bone golems appearing from the old ruins... as it turns out: our doom as the humans were remotely watching and then taking back control of our world (with the bugbears as their helpers).

Normally the game is played with a map, but we played with my Lego Creationary set (an idea I've written about before, and executed a number of times). It doesn't come out too great in pictures, but man is it nice in person... colorful, 3-D map, and so tactile.

Now, we played "the fleeting year", which is to say we removed some cards to ensure we had a faster game... but I still never find we finish in the established timeframe. Maybe I'm not keeping the pace fast enough, but  still. One thing that Michael suggested during gameplay, as we reached towards the end of session, was a tweak I'm going to incorporate from now on: Instead of ending abruptly somewhere in the middle of the game (if we run out of time), doing a fast forward and taking some cards from Autumn and Winter, to give a more satisfying ending. In our case we chose one card from Autumn and one from Winter, and then ended the game with the King of Spades.

I think it would be nice to explore the change in mood a little more significantly. Thing is, it's also important to really establish the setting with the first season as well. Maybe some spread of a nearly full Spring, 1-2 rounds of Summer, and then 1 round of Autumn and Winter for each player. This might provide a more rounded out experience, that you can fit into a 3 hour session more easily.

A scene from our game

I really dug Michael's tweak of rushing those final seasons!

Players of a monster island.

Lunch at The Post

From there we were joined by Kit (another one I didn't get to game with, but at least we shared some chatty lovin'), and some of us headed to The Post Brewing Co, and the food was delicious; I ordered a very big breakfast for lunch (which worked, as I only had a weak bowl of cereal earlier). Additionally, at this point I was smart enough to order a flight of beers, which I shared with Paul, so we were able to try a bunch of different flavors. And there was some DJ spinning great funky beats while we were there, so bonus!

Scum and Villainy (afternoon)

Ok. Seriously running on fumes here. But... need... more... gaming. I didn't get to play with John yet, and he was running this beauty, also a game I have never played but have heard good things about. Scum and Villainy is a game about a crew of a spaceship trying to keep flying and make ends meet while bending the iron fisted rule of the Galactic Hegemony. 

Again, we're talking another game that is "Forged in the Dark", so the complexities of the game system (which aren't that huge, but definitely the next level up from PbtA games), had me at a disadvantage. I took the easy route... I wouldn't try to really grok the system too hard. And fortunately the table and the GM made that easy for me.

But what happened next took me by surprise: I got to play a fucken Dralasite! Turns out you can play a "Xeno", an alien. So I made a Dralasite mechanic. I can't convey how happy this made me. I barely ever got to play Star Frontiers as a kid, as I was mostly running it for others. I loved the game so much that I've made a whole scenario about it in recent years, just so I could relive that magic, but even then, that's me as a GM. But now I got to play a Dralasite. Seriously. So happy.

We had Lito Thorn, "Zenith", our Speaker (played by Paul), Ratan Levanchy, "Vandal", our Scoundrel (played by Morgan), Orrin Bartok, "Karma", our Stitch / Medic (played by Jeff?), and Aria Gyle, "Elbows", our Muscle (played by Michael).

We started by creating a shared ship, which was the glue that held this team together, but then immediately found ourselves in a scenario (in media res) where we were in a prison! The first step: breaking the hell out. I got to use my slow shapeshifting powers, which obviously gave me some serious joy. We quickly acquired some decent Stress among the crew throughout our escapades, and then perform some downtime scenes. I would almost say that I was starting to get the mechanics of the game, but that would mostly be a lie. I was brain-friend by this point in the weekend. 

Also, if you know Paul Beakley on the G+, he has a thread about the con, and there's little bits about these last two games in there (among many other writeups). Go check it out!

Dinner at West Flanders Brewing

Headed out to get grub, and we (Cate, John, and many others) ended up at West Flanders Brewing Company. I was trying to be good to my body at this point, and ordered a beet-arugula salad. But that wouldn't exactly be accurate, as we were all sharing so many fried and delicious appetizers, that I really had quite a large and heavy meal. Fortunately I didn't force myself to also eat an entree, as I'd been overeating most of the weekend.

LARPs! (evening)

The last sessions were fortunately ones which required me to move around. I don't think I would've lasted sitting down at a table at this point. I didn't get much sleep the night before I left for the con, so by now it was 4 days in a row with minuscule sleep.

Underwater People

The first game I played was a playtest brought over by Alex for Bully Pulpit, called Underwater People. Basically we were all related to the water (in some way, mer-people, or weird sea creaturs, or even an ocean, itself), and we were going to a support group for sea-things. I was the secretary of the group, a sea slug that used to date Elon Musk, but was dumped after he stole my magic moon pelt, and launched it in a car that's circling the earth. That's OK, I've moved on and was dating someone new.

Our president was Sean, playing a human that was pretending to be a sea creature (without any of us knowing it). We had some strange characters, such as the Pacific Ocean (Jerry), and a siren (Krin). Venn and Cate were also in it, and everyone was so... baffling? We didn't really know who each other were, until you started talking. Just like at a real support group. We had hidden cards which described what people needed or wanted (to be listened to, to be pitied, etc.) and if it wanted to emulate some of the possibly strange and tentatively emotional interactions of a support group, well it certainly succeeded!

You play until someone leaves, and just over an hour in, that's what happened as our (human) president and the siren went off to, well, hang out, as it were. I don't play many LARP-type things, but have been doing more since last year, and it's definitely a nice mix at a con. I'm currently happy with about 1-2 of these for each large set of RPGs I play.

There was one other fantastic piece, which if you are good, I may tell you about one day. Yes, I tease you!

All night boat ride to Valhalla

Back to the Big House, and the slow process of saying goodbyes to so many beautiful people. And then packing. And then realizing that I had to leave to the airport at about 4am, and sleeping before then was a loosing battle. So I just stayed up all night, and we hung out on the love couch, or around the kitchen table. I got to spend the most time I had thus far with Stras, with I didn't even get to game with the entire weekend! (what!?)

Towards the end Andy (who was also my roommate through this process) went off, and came back with a bunch of Shaktilove books, which will be the titles for the games we'll be pitching and playing the next time: The Polarity Process, The Cosmic Serpent, Fierce Medicine, Champions for Peace, The Higher Taste, and of course Psycho-Cybernetics 2000. Stay turned for these marvelous games in coming years.

To all the lovely people I got to hang out with this weekend, much much love, and thanks for making such a welcoming and pleasant and superior-fun experience. Peace!

Jumping ship...

Until next time...

CONlorado 2018: Saturday (Urban Shadows, The Final Wife, Girl By Moonlight)

But... there was a "game" post up on the whiteboard by Krin, for Thrift Store shopping! I really wanted to go with them, but... but... Urban Shadows. And Madjay. My RPG side won this battle, this day. There is still part of me that is sad about missing thrift store shopping with another lover of the genre.

Urban Shadows (morning slot)

I've heard good things about this particular game, Urban Shadows being: an urban fantasy roleplaying game where you’ll play characters struggling to survive in a dark urban environment drowning in supernatural politics. I'd never played. And I've heard good things about Madjay as a GM, so had to jump into this opportunity. Also, this was the elevator pitch on the sign up sheet: "Buffy meets the Wire set in New Orleans". I mean, come on.

Players included Dylan, Michael, and Morgan. We created an interesting set of characters, all humans. The game revolves around factions, groups that represent communities of mortal and supernatural creatures: Mortality, Power, Night and Wild.  Our group? Two of us were Power (an Oracle and a Wizard), two of us Mortality (the Hunter - or was it the Veteran? - and the Aware).

I played the Oracle, her name Kami, a half-Japanese half-Filipino street rat punk, been around for a few years, smoking lots of weed to deal with the visions and bad dreams. My powers: foretelling, psychometry (reading objects), reading surface thoughts of people, and so on. My first step was to upgrade my gear from "crappy car" to an "awesome bicycle".

We had Cole our Aware (played by Michael), who didn't know the powerful lineage he was from. We had Vivian our Wizard (played by Dylan) casting spells with magic scrawlings burning on cigarettes. And we had Bianca our badass Hunter (played by Morgan), also somewhat Filipino (and we got to exchange quips and throw some very elementary Tagalog around during the session).

Madjay started by introducing a character by the name of The Owl, someone we may be associated with who runs trade in magics and the like. We all created some bonds with each other and with The Owl. We rock up to home base of the mortals trying to take back this town from the supernaturals (a home base and an organization that many of us have worked for, to some extent or another), and find the front door busted open. Dead bodies. A possessed operative. Some violence.

We had some interludes and "downtime" type scenes, some attempts to investigate the goings on, and then the session ended with a good confrontation at the base of The Owl, an old cathedral of sorts.

Madjay kept this session tight and moving. We had 3 hours, and I've heard - since this time - that running Urban Shadows in a one shot is difficult to pull off. But it felt seamless. 

Thanks for photo, Madjay!

Ramen

Stras was around to take us to yet another local joint. This time we headed to a ramen place called Sushi Zanmai (normally a sushi joint, but only serves ramen at certain days and hours). Good eats and good times. I love that almost every meal I got to meet some new folks, or hang out with the old homies I don't get to see often enough.

Werebear: The Final Wife (afternoon)

So, a bunch of us found ourselves gameless in the afternoon. There were the seven of us: myself and Alex and Nadja and Andi and Andy and Andrew and Morgan. We pitched a few things, but 7 doesn't lend itself to just any game. I mentioned The Final Girl, and it turned out no one had played before. There was some trepidation, and I mentioned that the game could go gonzo, but I'd love to see it played in a thoughtful or more serious way, if people were up for it.

We went for it. We grabbed a room, and ended up: The wives in a polygamous family are heading up to a resort in the Canadian Rockies to meet up with their husband, who they don't know has been killed by a Were-bear (like, a person who could turn into a large grizzly monster). My favorite part of this process however was not the result, but how we got there. There were discussions about what tropes would be disrespectful, or just silly, and we tended towards avoiding some of that. The most important part though was that everyone was listened to, and therefore was bought into the story.

We had everyone create 2 characters a piece, and ended up with:

The wives:

• Nicole, the first wife and a true believer
• Constance, the innocent wife
• Tyreen, the wife who solves everything with food
• Bernice, the eldest wife
• See-yung (aka Sally), the wife with quiet intensity, new to North America

The folks working at the resort and lodge:

• Roger, the friendly resort manager
• Marsha McClean, the butch groundskeeper
• Kathy, mother of two, owns the general store
• Piper, the sanguine resort maintenance person
• Sarah, the housekeeper with dark circles under her eyes
• Jack [she/her], the resigned cook
• Jean-Paul, the old hermit of the woods
• Hank, the bro-y ski instructor

During the three introduction scenes I already felt we had something really good brewing. Nicole (the first wife) was already set up as a matriarch that everyone else seemed averse to. See-yung started as quirky, maybe, but with a little bit of attitude. And the first scene between the resort staff - taking and dealing with a phone call about the missing husband - set a good mix of incompetence and apathy, and with Jean-Paul quitting and storming off into the woods. 

We decided each scene would have 3-4 players in it, which left the rest of us few folks to be the audience in the cheap seats in the theater. Even this added some good punch occasionally.

First blood was at the grocery store, Constance and Tyreen (both wives) going down, as did Kathy and Sarah. Kathy grabbed her shotgun, and to be fair, Sarah did a bad-ass move of snapping a broom in half against a shelf to face the werebear, but all for naught. What really drove the scene was the Jaws and Alien effect... we would only get little teasing views of the beast: the reflection in the refrigerator glass door; a quick shot of a claw; a split-second view of large silhouette. And of course a pineapple can rolling on the floor.

The scenes progressed one-by-one as we took turns playing the killer. We lost various people, with survivors occasionally running into the dark woods. Morgan played the werebear in such an amazing way as it crawled, sniffing, around the wives' cabin. We had a great scene with Hank pissing off the second story balcony of the lodge, as the trees went down one by one, and then a vicious and sad encounter as Marsha falls, saving her love Jack from death. See-yung runs through the woods and finds a cabin, banging on the door, to find Bernice and a shirtless Jean-Paul; after which we had an amazing moment of guns and armaments and a chase with a pickup truck and subsequent crash. And Bernice sacrificing herself to allow See-yung an escape.

A the final moments we see a return of the resort manager Roger, clueless, on his little gold cart, as he runs into both Jack and See-yung. At one point the werebear, chasing Jack and Roger, has See-yung in its large maw. There is a river and a rope bridge that the two try to run across, but it becomes their doom as the werebear gets up on both feet, and rips the bridge out from under them. And that's when See-yung gets up from the ground, swaying, silhouette showing in the moonlight. And little pin falls to the ground as she throws a grenade rolling towards the creature. Like a pineapple can. A huge explosion blasting in See-yung's face. And darkness.

Honestly, it was the best game of The Final Girl I've ever played. There was something about how everyone was tentative at first, but became trusting based on our conversations, and just brought it. We had a few ideas that were nixed based on X-card style "nays", even someone nixing their own idea. And the intentionality was just excellent. When people felt low or winded, we didn't force them to play in the scene or play as a the director/killer, we just found the next person in line who wanted to be in the scene. It just really felt like we were all taking care of each other in many ways, and the result was fabulous. In retrospect, it was probably the highlight of my weekend.

The writers room for Werebear: The Final Wife

Side note: Post-game, due to prior discussions, Andi had brought some crafts... in this case a coloring book and crayons! I really needed to unwind a bit and go into a quite mode for a few, and so flipped open the book to the first page. Starting back at me: a vicious bear. And hence, below...

The Final Wife - unofficial movie poster

Girl by Moonlight (evening)

After a relatively large meal, the blood rushing away from my head, with too little sleep over many nights, it was on to the next game. I mention this, because we were about to dive into some very cerebral territory, for two reasons: 1. This game is "Forged in the Dark"; which is to say, based on the relatively crunchy Blades in the Dark system. 2. Led by Nadja, we needed to process the overly hippie-weirdness that is plastered all over our AirBnB, and we ended up with a theme that required some amount of brain work. Both of these together ended up leading to an amazingly good session (especially after we struggled past our tiredness and into giddiness).

Girl by Moonlight is written by Andrew Gillis (who was also our GM), and is about magic girls (a la Sailor Moon). We ran with a specific playtest Series Playbook called In Darkest Night, which had a somewhat dark theme. We lived on a world where the rotting body of an ancient god was slowly covering the surface. It's agenda? Madness. How has our city-society survived? Partly by encapsulating Shaktilove (lowercase) by focusing only on the positive and "yes", and disallowing the expression of negative emotion. We ended up being the avatars of these perceived "profane" actions, like expressing fury, envy, despair and self-doubt. Oh yah, and our "daytime" personas worked in an internment camp for those affected by negative feelings, which we were there to suppress. Yep, somewhat dark.

We had Vantablack (codename Opal), avatar of despair, played by Nadja. There was Sunrise Starbeam (codename Fury), avatar of anger, played by April. Veridian (codename Seafoam... or maybe vice versa?), avatar of envy, played by Eric. And Nora (codename Sanguine), avatar of self-doubt, played by me. The playbooks also had some interesting dynamics. For example I was also a time traveler, and had come from the distant past, when our society and world were in a much better place. And it turns out I had known Opal's distant ancestor, who was my sister's lover.

The scenes we played were strange, and intense, and there was so much conflict between our characters... it was really enticing. But I think all of our brains were working at a slower pace than normal, and we ended up not get to do what would normally be a full session. I think Andrew was a little down by that, but honestly, the session was still soooo good. I have no regrets. And we got to work through some shaktihate.

A happy bunch. Like shaktilove happy. (Note: per prior game, you can see the start of the werebear poster on the table)

From there it was back to The Big House, more coloring and hanging out. More love boat. And me eeking out as much sleep as I could, but still getting to the YWCA in time for Sunday's morning game.

CONlorado 2018: Friday (Inheritance, Love Each Other)

Inheritance (morning)

Paul Beakley wanted to run some Inheritance. We barely squeaked in the right number of players. (It's a LARP that plays with 9. Only 9. No more. No less.) The premise: 

Ten years ago, Daxo murdered his beloved older brother, Baldr. Exiled by his father for his crime, he’s spent a long decade wandering. But now he’s heard that his dear grandfather has died, and he’s returned home to claim his inheritance.

We played the hodge podge of people involved in the funeral and drama. We grabbed the YWCA's bigger board room, and went to it. The game is LARP which has us act out all sorts of scenes, occasionally with most of characters there, but often between 2 or 3 people alone. In theory this could happen in tandem, without all of us seeing each others scenes, but the facilitator (in this case Paul), could get everyone to stop and pay attention if something important was going on. 

As it turned out, there was lots of important things going on all the time, and I'm super happy that our focus was often on each other. It was like watching a play, most of the time. Well, when you weren't in the play itself. There were scenes both hilarious, and scheming, and heart-wrenching.

I played Gefjon, the seer. Honestly, I was a little lost at times, not knowing much about Viking things, but the game mostly leads you into knowing what you need to know, but there was a lot to digest in a short time (and keeping in mind that the morning was a 3 hour slot, so we had to play tight).

After the game was over, you get to know a bunch of spoilers around many of the characters and their goals and backgrounds. It made me think that the game might not have replay-ability, but in fact the majority of the players had played at least once, if not a number of times, so I may be totally wrong there.

Once again Sean did a AP report, so I don't have to write much! Freedom!

Everyone preparing by reading their little playbooks

Final scenes... a priest and a mother, dead. A brother, poisoned. A father negotiating with a prospective daughter-in-law (or more?)

Lunch

Lunch was at the Lazy Dog Sports Bar & Grill with Alex, Andy and others. It was a chilled out affair, as were many of the outings. Lots of gluten free options for some of our members, and pretty decent grub. Because of the crazy elevation at Boulder, we were recommended not to drink alcohol to quickly. Kind of sucks when they serve full sized pints. We'd learn... eventually I'd split beer flights, or beer pints, or glasses of wine with my various compatriots.

Love Each Other (afternoon)

The next game was a playtest written by Venn Sage Wylde, including players Sean, Nadja, and April:

Queer apocalyptic story game about love and community formation in a world that reflects the vulnerable, broken, and breaking worlds of the characters we create. Will they love each other, overcome their fears, and connect? Will the community survive while the whole world falls apart? How will these characters be remembered?

Once again we have a Sean AP report! He concentrates mostly on the games mechanics and does some roses and thorns. I agree on some counts, such as the mechanics being much to mentally grasp as the tech trees started to open up. A simplified cheat sheet may assist, or something which pared down some of the rules perhaps. A way to get into the meat of the story without as much restrictions in movement?

But either way, instead I'll mention a little of the beautiful narrative that came out of this beautiful game. All characters use a they/them pronoun by default, and we created a few genders at the beginning. We had pooka and goblin, anemone, and noodle, among others. These would become a deck that would be shuffled and drawn, each time a recurring character would appear in the story (and thereby define their gender). Each had a simple definition, such as "navigating through and around other genders, watching", or "create and leave gifts for other, not looking for thanks or recognition".

We had a world of rising waters, and a grey goo that was threatening to overwhelm us all. Big Pink, which was the last dry space before the floods. Hodge Podge, the island of junk and debris floating in the ocean, where safety is now in short supply. Bly's Hall, and Chevron Skeleton where Ram's Raiders - our unfriendly neighbors - hail from, and where they're all out of food. There was Nono and Jaji, two refugees from the Floaters of Hodge Podge; Penny our little scientist with the weary face and shaky hands; Zin with the wiry frame and darting eyes.

The game had both world building, map making, and character generation all spread through in little bite sized pieces as we went round and round, and then scenes of various types of desperation. But as we wrapped up, we ended on a happy note. Penny and Jaji ended up bonded by skills, working together to prevent the grey goo from spreading. Nono found inspiration from Jaji, and reclaimed their name, once a series of words said to make them go away, to words used to prevent others from bashfully refusing help.

But my absolute favorite scenes were those with Zin (played by Nadja) pestering Penny (played by April) out on the Hodge Podge. I was in tears of joy.

Our little water world...

Yes, we loved each other.

Indian dinner at Tiffins

Stras, Andy, Nadja and I headed to an Indian joint that was around the corner from Stras' place, Tiffins, and it was lovely. Got to check out Stras' place afterwards, and got to meet some cats and bunnies.

Delicioso... we ordered way too much, which worked out really well for breakfast the next day.

The man next to the seminal poster. 

Scotch party

Then it was off to be dropped back at the Big House, for a little scotch tasting party. We also at some point moved the couches together and created a sort of love boat.

That's possibly when the overwhelming feelings of dread started to sink in, in the house of Shaktilove (lowercase). You can see an innocent looking chalkboard in the background, which proclaims Love and Trust, and never say No, and other words that start to nefariously sink into your soul.

But other than that, all good fun!

My stalwart companion on a maiden love boat journey... one of many.

Gracious scotch hosts, John and Cate!

CONlorado 2018: Thursday (Star Crossed, The Queen's Receipts)

House con

I was invited to CONlo (abbreviation approved), run by some friends in Boulder. Stras and John have been running this show for a few years with extremely small numbers, but this year Andi was invited to take some reigns, and it got just a wee bit bigger. (And that includes me, yay!)

Plane Tension

I took a direct flight out of Burbank. Fortunately my friend Sean also thought he was taking a direct flight (incorrectly), and grabbed me on the way. Props for getting all those dirty looks saving me an exit aisle seat during boarding. Well worth it, as we got to chit-chat, but more importantly, eventually got to the work at hand: a game of Star Crossed (Alex Robert's 2-player game of forbidden love, and Jenga).

Because of Andi's excellent organizational work, we were able to converse about the idea of playing this game on the plane. It started as a bit of a joke, and also some talk about how smart it would be to play a scenario with a sky marshal and a terrorist on a plane. (Answer: not smart.) But because of this planning, I specifically brought a miniature "block tower" that I'd found for $0.79 at a thrift store.

Here is Sean's actual play report, which does a good job in giving you the low down. So good, I'm gonna do a straight-up rip, and quote him directly (just in case the link breaks at a later point):

We played Jaime, the idealistic son of a dictator of a small island, and Marco, the house butler that served in the war with the now-dictator and took a bullet for him. Knowing that we were about to wage yet another war, in the middle of the night Jaime convinced Marco to steal his father’s greatest weapon (works left unsaid we because we were flying, but the implication was that it was a WMD) and fly away in the night.

Marco had been the man to see Jaime’s education and his upbringing. While most of the people on the island, including and especially the dictator were expressive and rash, Marco was patient (that’s one of the things that made him so attractive) and reserved. His attention to detail, especially his perfectly trimmed beard were all signs of his control and thoughtfulness. In fact, many years ago Jaime learned to shave from Marco and tried to model the perfect precision that he used when drawing the razor across his skin. Marco was Jaime’s godfather. He was also totally hot for him.

Jaime, in his mid thirties, was erudite, privileged, and idealistic. Though he often argued with his father, he had know idea the extent to which the despot oppressed both the people of his island and threatened his neighbors. Brash like his father, when he learned of the dictators plans, he found the only man he could trust not to betray him (and that could fly the small plane they escaped in) and set off with him to deliver the dangerous cargo to his father’s enemies. He needed to prove this was a mission about political ideas. He needed to prove he wasn’t just flying away to be with Marco!

Pilot and Co-Pilot sat side by side (as Tomes and I did on the plane) and flew from the dictator’s island. They wanted each other but their beliefs and the need to safely pilot the plane trough a deadly course held them apart!

That summarizes it pretty well. He forgot to mention things like how the word "crash" and "WMD" would come up, and how we'd have to quickly tweak all that to ensure we made the rest of our journey unscathed. We joked about passing X-cards around to our neighbors. Honestly, having to be that cognizant of what words we were using added a second level of intensity and tension to the game.

Airport shuttles to Italy-food

We met at the Super Shuttle desk as Andy did us the solid of organizing one shuttle for the 6 of us that landed roughly the same time. We headed on to the YWCA, after passing the evil incarnate which is Blucifer, on the way in.

From there is was on to Pearl St, which is 2 blocks away from the YWCA, and houses the majority of food that was consumed on this journey. We hit Sforno, an Italian joint which was completely devoid of people at that early afternoon hour, and had a delicious family style feast.

Edit: I forgot that Nadja was debuting her show (she is the Talent Manager!) called "Stream On", a reality show that's pretty much the Twitch version of Survivor. So we got to actively see parts of it during our din-din.

The YWCA

Our gaming home for the next days would be the YWCA in Boulder. It's amazing what a great location this turned out to be: custom keycode so we could get in anytime, a couple of conference rooms, miniature kitchenette, proximity to tons of food options, and supporting a great organization. Everything was so seamless that it just makes me want to run a house con like this around my home.

The Whiteboard Schedule

Being such a small convention, of about 25 people, I got to see yet another way that games on demand and scheduling can happen. We'd just fill these out little game signup sheets, and tape them to the game time slots they'd created on the white board (three slots a day: 3 hour morning slot, 4 hour afternoon slot, 4 hour evening slot). The only oversight was leaving a spot for players to sign up, but that was quickly rectified.

An example of a signup sheet.

The Big House

Andi and crew planned accommodations for the majority of us foreigners around two AirBnBs, colloquially called The Big House, and The Little House. I was in the former with about a dozen or more of us. It worked out surprisingly well. It wasn't too close to the YWCA, but was a quick $6+ Lyft ride, or a 20+ minute walk (which I did at least 4 times).

Atrocities: The Queen's Receipts

Back to the Y for gaming. First thing I signed up for was Alex Robert's pitch for "Unnamed Game Playtest". The description: "You are a Queen's retinue on a perilous journey. Answer a deck of question cards to find out who you are and how you really feel about the Queen." I'm in. Players included Sean, Eric, Nadja, Andy, myself, and Alex.

The premise was that the Queen chose us because she knows we love her. Who are we? Why are we doing this? What's our relationship to the queen and each other? This is a game where your character gets formed in the journey, much like Fall of Magic or Protocol, however there you at least start with a name and a title or something... here you start with an empty canvas.

A deck of cards. That's it. They get drawn, one by one, one person taking a turn at a time, and you just answer the question. That's all. But holy shit was that game intensely good.

Again, Sean does one of his Actual Play reports. (Which just makes me wonder if I should always play with Sean not just because he's amazingly good fun to play with and a generous co-player, but because then I no longer have to blog about my games, he just does it for me!)

I was the bodyguard. The Queen had cut out my tongue, or more accurately: she'd had her last bodyguard do it, before that bodyguard slit her own throat. I took on the role. I was from a foreign land, brought over as an emissary, but also a spy. The Queen was onto me. And she had my sister in the jail beneath the castle. (There's a word for that, right, Andy?) And she'd let my sister live, as long as I served. If I betrayed her? Well, I had no choice.

One of the fantastic mechanics was the ability to "pass", if you didn't want to answer a question. Or if you wanted to possibly see the next character do so. Of course they could pass too. Everyone could. And if the question got around the table? You just discard and move on. Worked really well for various reasons (safety, narrative flow, and more).

Seriously though, you can just play this game for an hour, or more, depending on how many cards you want to play. Standing in line? Play an RPG. Driving for an hour in traffic with a few friends? Play an RPG. I want this.

Some of the various Queen's Receipts

Late night ramblings: Part one of many

And then it became the first of many, many nights, of late night hanging out and talking, and staying up way too late. The first of 4 days of too little sleep, and too much adrenaline. Can't complain, so much love.

Orccon 2018: Sunday+Monday - Lean Coffee with RPG designers, Games on Demand Kids Edition, Werewolf, and out

Games on Demand - Half Baked Breakfast and Lean Coffee (8:30am-10am)

So. Prior to this con I set up a Slack channel for Strategicon RPG Games on Demand. The purpose was to facilitate some pre-con communication around this part of the convention, maybe get some more visibility into what people wanted to run or play. Fortunately, it's sort of worked out, and there's been some decent (if very budding and slight) traffic on it. And from those conversations...

Stephanie Bryant suggested maybe a design-focused part of Games on Demand, where maybe some designers can get together and discuss, troubleshoot, etc. Maybe even get some game playtesting going. And hence was born Half-Baked Breakfast. I've learned to avoid Sunday morning as Bob and I found that we were the only ones showing up, however, here we're talking about some more serious motivation.

Stephanie and a few showed up at 8:30am, and some of us a little bit later. I rolled down there about 8:45am. She'd already started a cool little thing by the name of lean coffee. Apparently this is "a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated." Everyone generates questions, votes on one or more that they are interested in discussing, and a very simple but effective time-tracking system is in place to try and target as many topics as possible.

It was pretty fascinating to see, looked very simple to produce and run, and appeared to create some solid results. This will become a staple of GoD's to come, and perhaps even scheduled in the con book!

A meeting of the minds...

Lean Coffee in action!

I'm Afraid of You playtest (9-10am)

After the lean coffee was over, most people took off, but Chris had a copy of a short-form narrative 2-player game he'd put together, and Bob and I took it for a test-run with Chris' help facilitating. It's called I'm Afraid of You, and is about two characters in opposition: "One a monster that must be appeased. The other a victim who has what the monster wants." The mechanics are super simple card draws from a poker deck, and the success and failures are interpreted and the narrative just plows forward for as long as the players desire.

I suggested a scenario that had to do with human colonists who've landed on a planet, and been mostly wiped out by the indigenous population. The monster was one of these local creatures, and the victim was a young boy who is the sole survivor and has been in the forest for about a month. Bob played the monster, and imagined them as sort of like Predator, but without the tech... a hunter type creature. The kid had what the monster wants: a homing beacon which would likely bring a rescue mission. From there we had taboo lands, little creature pets, and a dramatic showdown.

The part which I loved about this game was that the scenes felt like they developed fluidly, and the feels just sort of crept up on you. It reminded me a little bit of playing Alex Roberts' Tension (which I wrote about somewhere here).

Curious what it looks like? I ended up playing it with friend David LaFreniere in the Gauntlet a week later in an ad hoc game. Here's the recording, which plays out in about 40 minutes:

Picking up the daughter

Next on the agenda? Get the daughter. We played a bit of catch with a tennis ball and velcro catching mitts (no pool this time), and then met up with some friends from cons past, and friends new to the con (welcome Thong and Lucia!)

We did a little bit of miniature painting at the paint-and-take, and then hit the dealer room (another big draw). They're favorite spot is Michael Mirth's booth, which is set up as a sort of kiddie wonderland.

Shopping!

After a little wandering around, I wanted to grab a bite from the room, and we had some time, so we took everyone up to the room (which is also next to the pool) for the kids to get out some of their vast amounts of energy.

The jumping-all-over-the-beds game. Not in the convention book.

Games on Demand - Kids Edition (2-4pm)

Next it was time for Games on Demand for kids. There was a bit of a kerfuffle with the rooms, however I'll readily take some blame for dropping the ball on being organized, combined with some convention mixup. Also the fact that this is the largest of their conventions ever (they broke 2,500 people), and our space was being infringed upon by other areas. We did find a good room to play in, though, so all's well...

There were about 11 kids. I had one or two GM's in the wings, but the games that sold were Goobles and Goblins which Ryan ran for 4 kids, and me running The Deep Forest for a group of 7.

Ryan running Goobles and Goblins. These kids were excited by the game, every time I looked over!

I was really looking forward to running The Deep Forest. It's a variant of The Quiet Year, which is one of my favorites of the GM-less variety: a map-making game that's very collaboratively driven, and great for newbies and experienced players alike. In the Deep Forest, you play a group of monsters who have reclaimed their territory from the invading humans. They have some time to rebuild, however the game ends when the humans come back (perhaps with dire consequences).

The creativity of the kids was always great to behold. We had penguin warriors, and gaseous clouds with illusion power, an elf queen riding a griffon, a thingamabob, a strange caterpillar monster, and a little bunny so cute it could mesmerize humans into doing what it wanted.

The game plays in seasons, each contains in a suit of cards. Because there were 7 players, I did one round of cards as one season, which was the perfect amount of time prior to taking a break. Normally each player gets a choice to answer 1 of 2 questions, but I simplified this to just asking them one of the questions.

I made a few other modifications to the game:

• I let the kids own their monster (Even though each player creates a monster, the monsters normally aren't owned by any individual. However, I figured there may be some tension in this scenario. It worked out well.)

• I stretched my kid-management skills, using moments to close our eyes to imagine things, or close our eyes to vote on how many weeks projects would take (to reduce peer pressure).

• The kids wanted to have the monsters win in the end of the game (after I told them it normally has a sad ending), and so I told them that if they played collaboratively by listening to each other and using each others ideas to build upon, then they could win.

• I made sure that there were fairly strict limits on their drawing area. This really helped ensure a level of fairness around the table. I think some of them appreciated that structure both as far as being able to set expectations for themselves, as well as ensure that others didn't get to draw more than them.

Discovering new things was popular. Projects weren't very popular, but came up mostly through questions. In the second season some of the kids started getting interested in starting projects. At one point we had 3 going on the map at once.

Discussions weren't popular at all. In retrospect I should've used this action more like the basic game where it's more free form (The Deep Forest has a modified version). Also, in the future I'd make discussion occur as an extra action, instead of one used by the players. For example after each season, or after a very serious event (such as in our case when someone found a hidden village of humans, *gasp*!)

All in all, I felt it went very well, and importantly, I'd run it again in a heartbeat. But after 2.5 hours of gaming, I was exhausted.

One of my favorite parts of the game... 7 kids drawing monsters, in silence.

The kid’s awesome penguin warrior, Tala.

The Deep Forest crew with their map of caves and underground lakes, sunken ships, mysterious footprints, caches of weapons, berry bushes, and glowing rock formations.

Afternoon hanging out (Sunday eve)

The next hours included some general hanging out. We spotted PST Improv doing their thing. The kid and I have checked them out before, and took many of the kids and families from Games on Demand to go have a view. The improv crew sources words and inspirations from the crowd, and our kids were happy to oblige them (especially with the word "cow", over and over again).

PST Improv (Photo credit: Jesse Watrous Photography & Media)

We also hit the game library (where you can rent one of hundreds of games) and the Open Gaming area down in the lower lobby. I showed some of the kids how to play Lotus (which I picked up in the virtual flea market), and Ann-Marie played Catan Junior with a few of them.

Playing some board and card games with the kids (Photo credit: Jesse Watrous Photography & Media)

Werewolf (Sunday 9pm-3am)

This is one of the big draws for the kids. We ended up being in the room full of teens. Apparently some werewolf aficionados aren't as into these games, as there is a reputation for using weird roles in the games (and the teens mostly act like teens, and when there is a lot of 'em... hoo boy).

But, that said, the roles are interesting and we always learn new facets of the game. And once the game gets going, the teens get seriously into it, and seriously fun. The first game went from around 9am to maybe midnight. Lucia was new to the game, and was one of the last 3 players! (And unfortunately the she and the villagers lost due to a silly decision on the part of the other player.)

Of course some of the kids wanted to have another go, and so round 2 commenced, ending before 3am (so a fairly "quick" game). I could only take so much though, and left the kids with Jim and mostly hung out and chatted with various RPG friends.

Oh, the lovely couple attempting to murder each other!

Monday morning

Had access to the upstairs breakfast lounge, something the kid enjoys a lot, so we did breakfast before they shut down (barely).

The rest of the con involved wandering around a bit, playing the "scavenger hunt game" during which we found a few dice around the convention floors, and the kids running around playing tag and such. At one point I showed Ann-Marie and family and daughter how to play Lotus.

Lotus... such a pretty game.

And with that, the con comes to a close... this time with possibly more regulars for next time!

Orccon 2018: Saturday with Autumn of the Ancients, Monster of the Week, Happy Jacks RPG Podcast, and The Final Girl

Games on Demand

Ah, Saturday. Time to kick off Games on Demand! This is the part of the con that I'm currently responsible for, and where we get together and pitch games, and it's all very ad hoc.

First off, one success of this con was sourcing players at Games on Demand who were interested in various scheduled games that were short players. We donated 6 players to 3 different games (from memory: Traveler, Jinkies, and Wild Talents; maybe Demigods?)... I say "donated" but really we just pitched those games along with the rest and players chose them. So: bringing players where they were needed... huzzah!

For the morning 9am session, we had a dozen people, including some recurring friends of GoD, as well as some newbies. Four went over to JiB who was running his Bad Streets (gritty cop drama of the '70s PbtA game), and a few went over to Golden Sky Stories as run by Ira. But me, I got a few people to play...

Autumn of the Ancients (Saturday 9am-noon)

My friend Kevin Marshall brought Dan, and together with my compatriot Bob Q. we played Autumn of the Ancients. The game is basically a Fall of Magic hack, but in space. The little intro story should be familiar if you've played the original:

Ancient Technology is dying, and the Liminal along with it. We travel together to The Foundry, the Liminal's homeworld, where Ancient Tech was born.

Of course, just like the original Fall of Magic with the "Magus", the Liminal is undefined. My experience with this game has taught me that a middle ground between 'completely undefined' and 'a discussed and agreed upon known entity' is useful, so we're all on roughly the same page starting out, or at least close. We decided to go with my method of "rumors". Each of us talked about one rumor we'd heard about the Liminal. This gives us a starting framework that is still completely loose and open to interpretation and changes.

So, the current version of the game comes with an amazing space map that is lovely. I will readily admit that using the map provided, on an iPad or some tablet, zooming into each location, would be very evocative and thematic. That said, I couldn't print it out large enough to be visible (and don't have a reasonable tablet), so instead took it upon myself to print each location on 3x5 index cards that I could easily pack and bring and play with. And they worked exceedingly well.

The current version of the Autumn of the Ancients map, as of this writing.

Characters included Dwi the Indigene of Libery's Landing (me), Nebo the Specimen of Eco-Station 1, Wolf the Exile of the Capital (Dan), and Alex the Professor of the Aureate Federation (Kevin). 

I'll say this: If you like what Fall of Magic does, you will not be disappointed here. You can easily get a similar sweeping and emotion-filled narrative. We had great flashback moments of conflict and genocide, silly scenes of wonder and also over-the-top professor diatribes, bitterness-filled meetings with an old assistant whose studies were spurned, and emotional scenes with our lovely uplifted specimen both filled with wonder, and innocence lost.

We played a good 3+ hour session, and decided to call it there. I'd happily play this over multiple sessions (and as of this writing I've placed it up on the Gauntlet calendar to run in April).

Feedback: I think the game is pretty solid as written. Playing on a map is difficult unless you are well prepared, but on a tablet with zoom-in and out capability would be great and thematic for the space theme. That said, I printed it on index cards and that worked very well; so well and portable I am considering doing this for Fall of Magic itself. One negative criticism was that many of the flavor text / story cues for locations were repetitive with "The hospitality of the ____." Although of course you can interpret "hospitality" to mean many things, positive and negative, I would prefer to see some variety in these.

Playing Autumn of the Ancients on cards

A few of the games running in the morning, including Bad Streets and Golden Sky Stories

We finished a little early, which allowed me to complete some of my Strategicon math trade game trades, and also quickly check out the dealer room. I'm glad to see that the indie RPG dude is back and selling all sorts of great games, and I even hung around the booth for a few moments talking up some of these to random buyers.

Lunch with mates

Headed to the room with a few friends from below, ate some bring-it-yourself food, and took one of those nice, short social breaks.

Games on Demand - Monster of the Week (Saturday 2-6pm)

Our second session of GoD had a few folks go up to scheduled games, and a table of Dirty Secrets run by Ira (which uses a really interesting mechanic of one player and everyone else being GMs). I, however, got to play in Monster of the Week, as run by Bob Q! He's run sessions before for Games on Demand, and some of the players of these prior sessions, such as Unique and Even, were playing in this one. This was my first time playing this game, and I've heard Bob run good sessions of it, so I was looking forward to this (and wasn't disappointed):

Most people don’t believe in monsters, but you know the truth. They’re real, and it’s your task to bring them down. This revised edition of Monster of the Week brings that adventure to life.

We had a pretty eclectic group of monster hunters, but interestingly enough, all four of us chose strong magic-wielders. The magic-type stat for this game is called Weird, and all of us had a +2 or +3 in that stat. This definitely flavored the session strongly, and in a way that I think we all enjoyed.

I created Aboud, a half-Ethiopian half-Spanish Jew, but from a strange orthodox sect called Solomon's Key that follows the "real" form of the Kabbalah and wields magic. The sect is strict in laws, and is weary against outsiders and especially "abominations", such as Unique's character, a Succubus. This invited some good tension, and some interesting ways in which the story played out.

The overall adventure was one in the Pacific Northwest (thanks Unique!), and so we ended up with some first nations skinchanger type creature, someone filled with hate so deep that harm to many innocent bystanders was just par for the course.

There was a lot of us going in all sorts of different tangents and directions at the start, not waiting for one another and diving into different hijinx, but as the story went on we started to pull together and some good inter-character drama unfolded, and bonds seemed to tighten. Would've been fun to see where this team would've gone as a campaign.

Super-props to Even who ran character Jae-Chill, a youtube streamer and social media nut with a large following (many of which are part of an arcane user streaming network). He evoked this character sooo well, it was extremely entertaining. Best part of the scenario was that we all worked really well together, and it felt like a good synergy and combination of drama and heroics.

After the game there were some others who were diving into yet another ad hoc game, but I knew I was hitting some energy limits. I am proud that I was able to pull myself away, go up to the room and nap, and then eat some grub before coming back down to find them ending their session.

The Happy Jacks RPG Podcast - Live at Orccon 2018 (Saturday 8-10pm)

From there, I went to check out the live recording of the Happy Jacks RPG Podcast. They do this almost every Strategicon (sometimes missing Gamex due to the Renaissance Faire, although sometimes making that date as well).

The next 2 hours included the usual chit-chatting about games, including up on the mic. I got some props for Ten Candles, and gave some props to games such as Bedlam Hall and A Game of Throne Acquisition. The event gets blurry a bit later on due to alcohol imbibing habits. And then around 10pm, it was time to head down to the last event of the eve.

Some pre-show hanging out and drinking of definitely non-alcoholic beverages

The panel!

Want to suffer through the chaos? Here you go!

The Final Girl and Games on Demand Late Night Edition (10pm-1am)

Post-podcast it's time for our late night jam. In the past I've run Dread, and Bob's run Monster of the Week, and lean towards other good creepy stuff. In this meetup my friend Sasha from the Story Games Glendale meetup showed up with their own game-in-testing! They ran a table of three, including friend Chris Shorb; can't wait to try it.

My friend Howie showed up after over a year of missing the con (dang children!), and because the rest of the audience didn't volunteer to run something, and because getting a closed room for another run of Ten Candles was an impossibility on a Saturday night, I went with a good standby for a large group of 7 players: The Final Girl.

The Final Girl emulates a slasher flick, and we did some random card draws to see what the fates would try to suggest as a scenario, but they were all weak-sauce. So instead I pitched a scenario which combines two pre-canned ones from the game: "It is opening night of a romance movie about vampires. The characters are all vampires coming to see the premiere, but who are being hunted by a human vampire hunter!"

We made a bunch of characters, and did a few intro scenes. As always one thing I love about the game is having different players play the same characters over different scenes, and seeing how disparate the characterizations are. I was the culprit of one of these, running one of the ancient vampires in a weird slapstick way. Everyone later called that character the Mr. Bean of vampires, which was kind of hilarious, especially as I was just being silly because I didn't know what else to do in that scene.

Oddly enough, our Final Girl was not a vampire, but in fact our human universal blood donor (who gets bitten just before the end, with sunlight streaming into the theater and killing off some of our final characters). He wakes up a few days later, and the story continues.

Off to some late-night sleep, in preparation for getting the daughter the next day (and some early morning GoD loving I didn't expect).

Orccon 2018: Friday - getting there, game of Thrown dice, bedlam hall, ten candles

Getting there

Getting to the West side involved following a pleasant dotted line across the city which included: A few hours working at Tomo Coffee; Hanging out with Howie and Lisa and 1-year old Bei and grandma Kathy, with lots of slam dunks and delicious fish soup; Missing beers with con friends because apparently 10 miles = 1 hour traffic; Loroco Pupusas with Sonia at a newly discovered joint; Late night hot beverages at a churros place with Jeremy and Sonia; Some 3-player Citadels with Howie and Lisa again before the sleepover; Breakfast at Metro Cafe; Early arrival at a con hotel under some crazy construction.

Howie and family... the kid is old enough where Howie was actually able to make it out for some late night gaming Saturday!

From there it was chit chatting with all the various lovely folks that I've come to see at each of these events. Kurt Potts came with a game to playtest, a game that Chris and I like to call...

Game of Thrown Dice (Friday noon)

So, apparently last Strategicon (6 months ago) Dave Kizzia put out a challenge to have people write a game and bring it, and Kurt took this to heart, and wrote a dice game which he currently calls House Rule: A Game of Throne Acquisition.

The game itself was surprisingly easy and fast, but exuded so much flavor of a type similar to a popular fantasy and HBO series, that we were all duly impressed. We had a full contingent of seven kingdoms, including the rulers Kurt, Kurt Jr, Jason, Kurt Hanna, Dave, Chris, and myself.

The various kingdoms you could play included special powers of types that felt flavored by fantasy kingdom intrigue, and there was a sense of balance in that it felt like there were many ways you could win. There were turns were everyone got to act, and then a moment where a new ruler would be voted on (via dice and support) and victory points distributed for the winner, and any supporting rulers. There was an end game component where walkers (of whatever color) would invade, and if we didn't altogether prepare in some manner, we would all perish and lose. But preparing involves making yourself weaker, so who has time for that noise, right?

All in all, fabulous, and if you told me it was ready to be published, I wouldn't blink and I would purchase a copy. Seriously. The whole game took about an hour, and could be played as a simple board/card game, but could easily be role played in silly or fabulous ways. Kudos to Kurt!

Bedlam Hall (Friday 2-6pm)

I've run a game in the first con slot for the last 4 years or so. This was my first time playing in it in a long time, and it was David Kizzia's Bedlam Hall, run by Christopher Grey. Although I'd backed the Kickstarter and recently received the book, I didn't really know what to expect as I haven't read through it yet.

I showed up to the table, which had a clothing prop at each seat (chef hat, chauffeur hat, so on), and I promptly sat at the maid apron (which I got to wear for the next 4 hours). Four players showed, so we had Chamomile the Maid (me), Agnes the Housekeeper, Hobson the Valet, and Gorely the Chauffeur. The cook and butler weren't chosen (and unfortunately friend Stephanie couldn't make it in time join us), so they became NPCs. This worked out well because the missing cook became a big part of our complication, and the drunk butler became a great foil, as played by the GM.

The game centers around us, as staff, needing to ignore as much weirdness as possible and maintain etiquette and composure around the house, all while Lord and Lady Blackwood and their family act bizarre and horror-ful. Other than the parents, there is 18 year old Matilda who hates Meredith the visiting Hollywood actress cousin, Rubric (14 y.o.) who kept digging for dead uncle Agamemnon so he could join us for dinner, and little Violet (6 y.o.) with her stuffed animals. As in, literally stuffed dead animals, which she would dress up (or have us dress up) and play with. There was grandma Dolores, cursed during a trip to the Nile - so she naturally came back from the dead at some point, and Columbine the sister of the Lady (and mom to Meredith).

We started and just dived into the crazy. The family continually asks for bizarre strangeness, and we just helped the best we could. I can't say we played with all the rules as written, and Chris admitted as much, but it was better than that since we got to feel the real flavor of the game. Chris' characterizations and constant stream of weirdness just fed us with a constant stream of tension and silliness. 

I remember a moment when grandma comes back from the dead, chanting in old Egyptian and wielding a ceremonial dagger, stabbing the Valet. The chauffeur walks into the room demanding, "Why are you stabbing grandma?" At which point the Valet, flustered: "Well, she stabbed me first!"

There was also the matter of the missing cook, and us having to prepare dinner without them, and a dead body or two, which of course led to cannibalism cooking, all led by the Chauffeur with his blowtorch. There was Lord Blackwood shooting canons on the grounds, and the car ending up a bit of a useless mess, and green goop from the stove used as a face mask for Lady Blackwood, and then later served as the soup course. All the while a combination of weird and sometimes arcane happenings occurring.

Our session ended a little early, and there were various game mechanics that we didn't do much with, but that's the sort of introduction session that I prefer. I have since started reading the Bedlam Hall book, and it just makes so much sense after this session. Mechanics can be learned easily enough.

Chris came in Lordly attire

If for no other reason then getting to wear a maid apron for a few hours

Ten Candles (Friday 8pm-1am)

I've run Ten Candles before, and was hoping to do so some more during the winter, but the plague struck and prevented that. This was the second time I got to run this game. I had five players which included Chris (who ran Bedlam Hall and has run 10 Candles once before), Kurt P, Emily, Aaron V, and Grace (who's played in my Golden Sky Stories long ago; glad she can see the other end of the emotional spectrum here).

We discussed a few of the book scenarios to see if any of them sounded interesting, and went with the moon base. For those not familiar, the premise of the game is simple: 10 days ago the world went dark; no sun, no stars, and in this case, from the moon, no Earth. 5 days ago, They came. The only thing we know is that they fear the light. And They are coming for us. You play with 10 candles, and as characters "fail" conflict rolls, scenes end, one by one, extinguishing these candles and plunging us into darkness. This game is tragic horror, as we all will die.

We had a crew consisting of a security officer, a lab researcher, a pilot, a union engineer, and a billionaire tourist. I won't go into the minutia, but just to say that this system is genius. The GM is not allowed to prep coming into it, and doesn't really need to. The players have almost all the narrative authority early on, and so narrate as they will. But as time goes on, the GM gets more and more narrative authority, and things go from bad to worse. We had a generator in need of repair, missing people on the comm links as they were breaking down, an airless room, Jared Dunbar - another survivor - who locked them out, more "friends" (Shannon and Mattais) found on the way to the rocket, a moon surface jaunt, and a successful moon takeoff. All before madness subsumes, and they turn on one another.

Even among the horrors there was a scene where the engineer exasperatingly explained the blood and bodies to the pilot, after a painful episode, which had us all losing our shit, laughing.

The session ended up going just over 5 hours, but it certainly didn't feel like it. Tense as all, and great little ending. I just love what this system does. It may have to become a staple in the convention repertoire.

Gauntlet: The Rebel Few

Rich Rogers is one of the Gauntlet's staple GMs, running a ton of different games, storylines, and systems, and with a gusto that makes me want to be a better advocate for "the hobby". One recent recurring set of games he's running is Star Wars Saturdays, where he has an open table playing different systems and stories that are Star Wars adjacent.

I got to play in 2 sessions over 2 Saturdays of The Rebel Few:

Hop in a starfighter, join a squadron of fellow pilots, and fly as members of the Rebel Alliance against impossible odds and the tyranny of the Galactic Empire... 

The game system Rich was using was The Few RPG, a game about World War 2 fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain. Except in this case we'd be playing X-wing pilots.

First session

The first session started with a bit of character generation. For most of these games I come in with nothing in mind, and like to be inspired by the table and other players. This game was no different. We ended up with a group of 5 pilots, with only one being the token human. This included a Bothan (lion-looking dudes), a Sullustan (like the guy who flies with Lando in the Millennium Falcon), a Nautolan (you see him as one of the many jedi who gets cut down in the early episodes), and me: Sorguc Le. Sorguc is a Mon Calamari (like General Akbar), and in fact is one of his many 100's of children (in my made-up head cannon). She's the only kid to not grow out of being blood-thirsty, and so has become a Rebel pilot. Also, Akbar isn't a general yet, since we're playing around the time of Rogue One.

Our cast of characters

We start after being briefed with our mission. Being an RPG with a very specific focus (fighter piloting), the route is fairly narrow. We're gonna be given a mission and we're gonna shoot down some Tie Fighters, or die trying. But, before we do so, we did a little bit of scene framing around the base, to establish some of our characters. We have a career pilot, a swoop biker gang leader, a Jedi smuggler, and youngster from a family of performers, and got to see some little vignettes and role playing scenes prior to getting into the "action".

The game itself is fairly simple. Trying to shoot down another pilot is relatively hard (roll 3d6 + your piloting stat, which is probably 2 or 3, and roll a 16+). That said, there is some tactics you can use, like building Advantage (to get a bonus to your roll), or flying on the wing of another pilot (to provide them better defense). The first battle was really about us learning how these different rules work and interacted. Much like the Star Wars Miniature game, it was a lot more fun that I would initially think. I'm not much into war games, but the action and moves are quick enough for you to get a feel for fast-pace battle. Before long we'd obliterated our target with some photon torpedoes (I think that's right... I'm not really a Star Wars expert), and fly back to base without any casualties.

Personally, I love having good background audio playing during games, and was happy to easily find free Star Wars battle music out there that did the trick. Many of us agreed that having that play during the combat really enhanced the experience (just the first track makes you dive head first into the scene!)

We didn't have enough time to do the downtime phase of the game, where we get to do some roleplaying back at the base, which is unfortunate since that's super fun (especially after doing over an hour of combat simulator), but we'd end up saving this for the beginning of the next session (and I was to play in that one as well)...

Second session

I don't often get to play in more than one session in a Gauntlet series, so this was a real pleasure. We went straight into the downtime / base scenes, where each of us pitched and ran a little role playing, in between combats.

For my choice, I decided we needed a Y-cert Vibrokey (some made up Star Wars sounding shit) from someone in the vicinity. Blaise joined me with character Borsk Ov'Ar, and Rich ran with it, and suddenly we were visiting a mafia-style Hutt to negotiate. Of course it turns out this Hutt has one of my compatriots, a Mon Calamari engineer, as a slave / prisoner. Well, this is Star Wars, right? So I pretend to trade our speeder bike for the engineer, but it's just a feint, and we get in a blaster fight, steal the key, and head home. Unfortunately I failed my Soldiering roll, so the way I spun it was so it felt like we saved the day and freed a prisoner... but when we get back to the base it turns out we damaged that Vibrokey during the fight. Now we lost the advantage we needed for some other part of our mission.

After our scenes, we floated straight into the next mission. During this one we were distracting some Empire vessels from our ground operations, which were on the planet surface. We were pretty quickly feeling desperately outgunned. I wasn't rolling too well, and Rich was, so suddenly my shields are down, and I'm pushing some risky mechanics - which resulted in my torpedoes going out of commission. We survive the onslaught of tie fighters, but then make a desperate run for the Empire's big ship. I go in, even though I don't have torpedoes, just to provide more targets for them, hoping it'll help us distribute the damage. Sorguc Le is killed in action... I like to think I might've saved one of my compatriots. The last scene I frame is the Mon Calamari engineer, working on some Rebel vessel, looking up at that moment, feeling the Force, and Sorguc's life departing from it. Star Wars, right?

Battle #2!

Roses and Thorns

Thorns: The game is fairly simple, and most of us thought that the limited number of moves was a bit of a hindrance by the second session. We wanted at least another 1 or 2 (or 3) options, beyond "Support", "Tail them", and so on. Hopefully this would also provide more fictional directions to go during combat.

To that end: For story gamers it always helps to tie something of the mechanics into a way to further allow for narrative. As an example, in this game you can use the Force to re-roll any dice, normally once / battle sequence. When you do so, instead of making it just a mechanical thing, it would be great to have the player describe a flashback, or parallel scene, or something related. Don't get me wrong, most of us do this anyways, cause I mean: story gamers, but still, would be nice to make space and time for that in the middle of combat.

This is something that Stras has built into Atlas Reckoning, and I think done in a fabulous way. Resolving "traits" and marking "burnouts", all mechanical benefits during the engagement / combat phase, all have some narrative associations that you immediately take advantage of to frame miniature scenes and vignettes. It feels very cinematic. I think this game could use some of that.

Roses: The game sings well in regards to evoking quick and fluid combat. Combined with the background music (for those of us playing it) we felt like we were in that cockpit, and there was a sense of desperation as you'd expect, being a Rebel with the Empire breathing down your neck.

Rich pulled this off very well, and gave us some of the story elements we were looking for, combined with simple X-wing combat that felt cinematic, and evoked the desperation you find in the movies.

Gauntlet: Red Carnations on a Black Grave

Red Carnations on a Black Grave

Red Carnations on a Black Grave is a mechanics-lite story game that's in development by Catherine Ramen. She's described it as similar to "Montsegur: 1244" and "Witch: the Road to Lindisfarne". I've only played the latter.

She put the game on the Gauntlet calendar and I was able to get in on it. Here's the description:

For just over two months in 1871, the Paris Commune tried to make an egalitarian, socialist state a reality despite disagreement within their walls and attacks from outside it. This is the story of 12 Communards, their messy personal lives and their attempts to create a utopia in the face of impending death. How far would you go for what you believe in? Would you stand firm even if it meant your death?

The game explores a very specific set of historic events set in France around 1871. I get nervous with historical games, because I'm not very versed in much of real history and don't like the pressure of being accurate in that context, especially as this is a game around political ideals that I'm not very familiar with. Fortunately Catherine pretty quickly assured us that bringing in any political knowledge won't be necessary, and the politics just sort of come into play with the context, but to feel free to concentrate on whatever character drama and minutia you find interesting. I wasn't the only one so concerned, and that bit of reassurance was very useful for us.

Characters

Much like Witch: the Road to Lindisfarne, the game revolves around pre-built characters that each have a light framework around who they are. Interestingly, many of them have real historical context, although apparently only one (Louise Michel, a sort of "main" protagonist) has any significant documentation around her. There is total freedom in making these characters your own.

The game is card-based, insofar as choosing characters, and random events that transpire, based on real historic events. Catherine had some help from fellow Gauntleteers in using the ability to draw from a custom deck, using Shane Liebling's RollForYourParty online dice roller / RPG tool. 

We started by each choosing two characters from the available dozen in the game. We had 5 players, but from Catherine it sounds like the game is meant for 6, optimally. She's played with 4 and has a hack for that, but we were going into unexplored playtest territory here, and it worked fine. A very useful part of the game is the simple relationship map that quickly illustrates character interplay:

This was a great reference during play and when creating scenes, as you can assess who could be involved for maximum drama and effect. Additionally, fellow Gauntleteer Gerrit helped make a Google drawing of it which we used to fill in additional information during character creation and were able to color to quickly show which player controlled which characters. Super handy!

In comparison, you can see how very useful this version of the map is. Kudos to Jason and others for formatting and simplifying this key piece of info.

The game itself played very similarly to many simple scene-framing games (Fiasco, Fall of Magic, the other games mentioned above), in that a specific player controlled a specific scene in framing and controlling "Action" and "Cut". In general the scene they set should include one of their characters. The game is played mostly over 3 different parts: Part 1 during early days of the Commune’s existence; Part 2 after the attacks by the national army against the Commune, when hopes dims. Part 3 during the “Bloody Week” with the army assaulted and the massacring of many Communards.

The character cards are excellent in their conciseness, and usefulness during play. They each succinctly explain the character and motivations, and are as easy to read as Dungeon World monster entries.

The session

What can I say? There were some few light and touching moments, but we played toward dark. Innocent people got dealt bad hands, and Part 3 is especially rough as you choose one of your two characters to die. 

I loved that during each Part of play, there is a set of event cards (placards) that come out that you can optionally choose from. These really help provide a consistent flavor to the game, and are even put together in a way that emulates placards used during that time:

An example of a Placard used in the game

The above example is probably from Part 1, when things are good. They get increasingly dark as times go bad. Even if you don't have a feel for the time period or politics or France or whatever, these gives you just about as much as you need to stay on tone and inspire scenes and events.

There were two of our players who were new to Gauntlet games, and RPGs in general, but I wouldn't have known it if they didn't say anything, as they played beautifully. The table environment was great.

We had drama, romance, and lots of darkness. Most characters came to pretty sad endings (at least half the characters will die during the game), but we did have one shining light: Camille, the young boy, was able to live a decent life. Perhaps that's the story of France moving on after the events.

Probably one of the toughest parts in playing this online was the amount of moving pieces. You can see on my screen that I was trying to take advantage of every piece of real estate: Hangouts window for players, my character cards, the rollforyourparty window in the top right for the game cards, and the relationship map in bottom right. It's a lot, and if it hadn't been organized well, it would've been hard to digest. I know one player had a tough time playing on an iPad, which required lots of switching apps back and forth.

Lots of windows!

It all ended up working well enough for me, however, and it probably would've been somewhat trivial in a face-to-face game where you have all the cards ready to go, and in play on the table.

Some elements of the game reminded me of another GM-less game I've thoroughly enjoyed called Heaven's Collapse (which I wrote about here). I thought both games were elegantly simple, and could allow anyone to dive into the setting and play without needing any sort of background knowledge.

Definitely keeping my eye out for this one. Catherine has done a wonderful job in creating this game.

EDIT: Looks like the video is posted, and with "production value"!

Gaming in the warm winter of Los Angeles

Hiatus from blogging

So, apparently it's been a while. Well, I haven't been to any game conventions, so that's a possible reason. But conventions are coming, with the next one looming being Strategicon Orccon 2018.

But before I go writing about that, in a few weeks, I just catch myself up here, as there's been more than a bit of gaming. And all the below is just RPGs. My partner has been running board game days about once a month, so to supplement the usual stuff, I've also been playing much more board games, and we went to our friend Unique's birthday, which was basically: game night! So, recent favorites being: Citadels, Secret Hitler, Above and Below, and Shadow Hunters.

But on to RPGs...

Winter 2017 Recap

Oct 24, 2017: Played The Final Girl at Story Games Glendale, as Halloween approached. Only in this case it ended up being The Final Internet Billionaire Tim on a haunted oil rig.

Story Games Glendale and The Final Girl

Oct 31, 2017: Among other days, played lots of World of Dungeons run by Tom, with various Gauntleteers mostly from Asia-Pac. In this one we traveled the dunes, and finally got to see to Medved the King Bear.

Nov 4, 2017: Played in a playtest of The Veil: Cascade, run by Kyle of The Gauntlet, with fellow players Lauren and Alex, my Asia-Pac homies. I got to play a little runt Jeet, with Asha the Futurist and Autumn the Mnemologist, visiting Autum's Speakeasy, looking for memories. Mostly it fostered a big desire to play The Veil, which is great for emotional play.

Nov 17, 2017: Got to finally play Monster Hearts in Jason Cordova's Monsterhearts 2: Mercy Falls '83 session. I got to be a Ghoul which is a sort of re-animated Frankenstein composed of four different, previously murdered, geeks.

Nov 17, 2017: Ran The Final Girl with a combo of some of my old RPG crew, and newbie Lien. 

The Final Girl

Nov 28, 2017: I ran a game of Dungeon World at Story Games Glendale, with newbie Craig as the wizard Avon and David as the bard Florian. They journeyed through a swamp to see a fortune teller, fighting off tree beasts and with a final epic battle against a demon trying to take a little girl.

Dec 9, 2017: Ran Legend of the Elements (aka Avatar the Last Airbender the RPG) for my daughter and Stu Venable's kids. We played a roughly 3+ hour session involving the White Lotus Scouts dealing with forest weirdness, and trying to get badges, trying to tame strange animals, and talking to stranger spirits.

Dec 10, 2017: Went over to new friend Kevin's place to run some Dungeon World with Martha and Candace, who'd I'd gamed with at prior Strategicons this year. I ran them through a similar adventure starter as the one from Story Games a few weeks back. But the players made some cool PCs, including a weird gem-based golem from the wastelands, a druid of the savannas who's adopted it, and an immolator (the first I've ever played with). 

Dungeon World crew

Dec 12, 2017: We played The Quiet Year at Story Games Glendale, set on top of mountains in a world with long and inconsistent lighting and flooding (like enough flooding where the mountains turn into an archipelago). And very big goats. And Babayaga. And glowing people.

The Quiet Year on Dave's cool white board cards.

Got sick on two separate occasions, so had to flake out on two proposed sessions to run Ten Candles with two different groups... still sad about it.

Jan 9, 2018: First time officially running a game for The Gauntlet, an afternoon session of Forget-Me-Not:

Jan 9, 2018: After running Forget-Me-Not, headed straight to Game Haus for Story Games Glendale. Many people said they'd show, but due to many flakes, we got one show. We ran a session of Microscope.

Jan 23, 2018: Ran an afternoon session of Murder Hobo for The Gauntlet:

Jan 23, 2018: After running Murder Hobo, went to Story Games Glendale at Game Haus, where we had a good 6+ players showing! David ran the bulk of these guys, while I ran a 2-player game of Dungeon World with Jon, a regular, and Asher, a newbie to the meetup. I had ideas about running something, but after they made their characters I just went with their cool concepts and made some stuff up, crazy cool Eco warriors! 

Jan 25, 2018: I got my question (labelled under "Inferiority Complex") answered by Adam Koebel on his Office Hours:

Whew... I think that sums up the bulk of this time period.

Pinecon 2017: Camp de Benneville Pines, The Warren, Ten Candles, and archery

Pinecon and Big Bear

Pinecon. Basically 3 guys got together and started a weekend gaming camp. It's up in the San Bernardino Mountains, not far from Big Bear, at Camp de Benneville Pines. (In other words, Los Angeles adjacent national parks.) I met one of these guys, Chris Shorb, through The Gauntlet online community, and at Strategicon, when he came to play and run some stuff at Games on Demand.

The only thing possibly keeping me from there: an already packed schedule, and figuring out how to manage that with the daughter. And hence I reached out about how kid-appropriate or kid-accommodating the convention would be. And the answers were mostly positive, with more than a few people saying they'd bring a few young ones and teens. And Adam, one of the other founders, would attempt to bring his daughter of the same age as mine.

The Lodge and Camp de Benneville Pines

I picked up the daughter from school and headed straight to the location... a solid 3 hour drive with good ol' LA traffic slowing our progress. We just about ran out of gas as we pulled into the camp's grounds due to some fuel mismanagement on my part... but made it!

The main feature of the camp, past the parking lot, is the large lodge. We were greeted by Chris, who was managing the check-in process; pretty low-fi, but just the pronoun stickers made me confident I was in the right place.

Although to be fair, Chewie appears to identify as "he" in the movies.

The lodge became the focal point for the convention and gathering, as all the meals are included (and served here). This large room can accommodate over 100 people, and also served as the open gaming area. A long table in the corner became the game library (a lot of folks brought things they'd be open to sharing). 

There was also a fireplace area with pretty regularly maintained flame (in the evening), a constantly available tea and coffee bar, some small refrigerators for beers and smaller food items, and many, many friendly folk.

The Lodge, with game library table at the far back (from this view).

The Lodge after dark.

Meals

Normally meals are served at 6pm for dinner and 8am and 1pm for breakfast and lunch. This works perfectly for scheduled game slots that are 9am-1pm, 2-6pm, and 8-midnight. But for the first night, they served dinner at 7pm to give everyone time to get there (taking into account Friday work and traffic).

The meals here were pretty solid. Very much camp-style meals, with hot meat and veggie options, and vegan and gluten-free options mixed in there. There were always steamed veggies of some type, and a salad bar as well. I was pretty impressed with the food: not super high end, but much better than fast food.

Werewolf and One Night Ultimate (Friday 8pm +)

At any given slot there were about 4-5 RPGs running in various cabins around the campground, and always many folks playing or open to running board games of various types at the lodge.

I volunteered to run a few games, coordinating these decisions with my travel partner. One game she loves playing at Strategicons is Werewolf, late at night. And so we did that as our intro game for the convention. I ended up attracting a small crew, both with and without Werewolf experience. The game is all about deduction and social intrigue, and we played about 2-3 rounds of the old-school standard game, and then switched over to play the shorter One Night Ultimate Werewolf version, which was also fun in a slightly different way.

All this was a way to get to meet some of the various kids who we'd see later in the weekend. Unfortunately Adam and family didn't get there until late, so their daughter Cassie (roughly the kid’s age) wouldn't be around to play until the next day.

Our Werewolf crew debating and voting to off each other

In the spirit of open gaming, we had gamed with Seven (at Werewolf) and met his mom Tina, who convinced Dorian and the kid to join them for a game of Spaceteam. This was a fun, collaborative, timed, and hectic card game involving a space crew trying to repair their spaceship. The parts and tools are all weirdly named, and it is one of those games that, when played, will cause you to get stressed out and loud.

Playing Spaceteam.

The cabin

There are a number of cabin's peppered throughout the camp. Each cabin building may consist of a number of rooms, and each room may have a few bunk beds. The cabin shares normally 2 full bathrooms with showers. There are also more private style cabins which you can pay a little extra for (we didn't). Overall, the rooms were comfortable, if tight, and you must bring your own things, like sleeping bags or blankets, and towels. I was lucky that I threw the sleeping bags in the car last minute, because I otherwise didn't prepare well. I didn't bring towels at all, so we just used my old T-shirts.

A room with 2 bunks; could fit 4 comfortably. Because they don't completely fill up the campground, the daughter and I shared this room on our own.

The Warren (Saturday 9am-1pm)

During breakfast the next morning, the kid got to meet Cassie, which she would later play with throughout the convention.

The kid had asked me to run The Warren as a role playing game slot. There was four players, and I decided to play the Abigail Meadows setting from the book. I didn't come with anything prepared at all, so just went with what the players brought to the table and the way they answered questions. We had:

• Lightning, a quick rabbit (played by the kid)

• Clover, a seer (played by Dorian)

• Thorn, a tough tooth and claw rabbit (played by Sophie)

• Max, a dominant rabbit (played by Ben)

• Moss, a nuturing rabbit (played by Emma)

They mentioned gathering herbs for an old rabbit, so I made the quest about being asked to gather such medicine. I kicked off the game in media res with the final question being: How did the hunters get between you and the warren? We immediately launched into panicking mode, with dogs and hungers running around, ran into Lump, the large toad hiding in the bushes, and rabbits trying to make sense of it all and survive. By the end of the first half, all the rabbits were captured in a steel cage (some purposefully so, so as to rescue the others). 

At this point the daughter said she was done playing and wanted to go hang out with Cassie, and so they went back to the lodge to game. This worked out, as halfway through the game a young lad named Alex came in and was very interested in joining us, after listening in the background. It worked out perfectly, with the story dramatically shifting.

• Leaf, and engineer rabbit that was marked by the black rabbit (played by Alex)

Leaf ended up Innovating a move that helped the other rabbits get free. He was also a bit of a wandering rabbit, with no permanent home. The second half of the game became one of political intrigue and a struggle against the current hierarchy of the warren. At the end a sly fox tried to cause trouble, but the rabbits used him to chase off the matriarch who was standing in their way. We did some epilogues and it felt like a solid landing for the game. (Unfortunately forgot to get a picture of my players!)

I returned to the lodge to find the kid and Sophie playing (and teaching) Sushi Go, and running their own table!

The kids running a table.

Archery (Saturday 2-3pm)

After a hearty lunch, we had nothing planned. This worked out well, because at 2pm the camp was providing access to their archery range. They provide a basic set of bows and arrows, and about 6 people can shoot at a time.

Cassie's dad Adam had brought his own traditional bow and arrows, as apparently it's something he's into. There were a few people who had, in fact. The range was great, and the women who ran it (who works at the camp) was great. We had a good hour+ shooting arrows, and all this without any cost above what we expecting to pay at the camp. Bonus!

Archery with an adult bow the first day.

The rest of the afternoon we spent playing a game or two, but mostly just wandering around the grounds, playing in the play structure and with the other kids, and chilling out.

Ten Candles (Saturday 8pm-midnight)

The second RPG I wanted to run this weekend was Ten Candles. A tragic horror game written by Stephen Dewey, Ten Candles is about and apocalyptic scenario where the world goes dark. Completely dark. And They want to get you. And the only thing They are afraid of is light, which is in shorter and shorter supply. You actually play with ten candles, in the dark. This game was perfect for the camp. 

The game has been written about more thoroughly in other places, such as in Bluestocking's blog and the 3W6 podcast interviewing the designer (in English despite the fact that this is German podcast), so I won't go into the minutia of how the game works. But I will write about some impressions and things I really liked about it.

The daughter was supposed to play, but it turns out was dead tired. Instead she sort of crashed out, an just slept in the room while I ran the game.

Ten Candles explicitly prevents the GM from prepping anything around the story. I did prep the props, as real candles in a forest (and game convention hotels) are generally forbidden. I got some recommendations somewhere about running it without actual candles and so I purchased LED tea candles, and some water-dissolving "spy paper" (for when you need to "burn" the player stats cards).

I will also credit myself in putting together a pretty solid cheat sheet (which is found, and will be updated, at http://tinyurl.com/tencandles-cs). I didn't want to break immersion in the game by having to refer to the book, so this is something I spent some time preparing prior to the game.

I used the Light in the Dark scenario, which has the players be a crew that has some weapons and a Humvee with a massive flood light, and are tasked with getting survivors from a small town, and heading to a chopper to be rescued. I liked the idea of them feeling powerful at the outset. We had:

• Gregory (M), authentic, and an ex-telemarketer (played by Joe)

• Jane Thomas (F), a short and sturdy and harried nurse, looking for her mother (played by Chris).

• Sam (F), a meek and withdrawn 29 year old masters / PHD candidate, scared (played by Galen).

• Travis (M), a grizzled, retired marine, promising to get back to get back to his mate, Troy (played by Tom)

Actually playing the game is fascinating. My favorite aspect has to do with narrative control. There is an interesting dynamic where the players have almost complete narrative control in the beginning of the game, so can be as successful as they want to be (although some players get into the part of causing their own pain, and Galen did that brilliantly). But as the game progresses, the GM has more and more control of the narrative, and They start to appear and cause problems. And who or what They are at this point can easily be colored by what the players or characters themselves have revealed about what they fear. Feels in some ways similar to a GM-less game in some respects.

The characters explored a few car wreckages, found spare batteries, went through a safehouse which didn't provide much in the way of "safe", recovered some scared children from a hardware store (and discovered the many strange human remains left behind), found survivors (including Jane's mother) at the hospital, ran into a rogue group and crashed the Humvee, continued with a crippled car as gas was running low, saw the helicopter in the distance, hit a deer, almost made it to Drop Point Delta (but heard the helicopter leaving), crashed over the side of the road, losing Jane's mother, lost the children, found another crappy vehicle, and then were waylaid by Them on the road. Almost everyone died, except for Sam, discovering that humans had probably let them loose through Lovecraftian means. At this point she screamed at Them to kill her already, but the wouldn't, they just surrounded at her and stared and stared.

The pace of the game is very interesting, with a slow start, but with that building speed of a downhill rolling snowball. And then the ending is fantastic. (But no spoilers here.) We all had a blast playing, and despite my nervousness coming into it as a no-prep game, it really supports the GM very well in that regard. This may be my con-game go-to for 2018.

Just about getting ready to turn out the lights

Thank Galen for the picture!

More Archery and gaming (Sunday morning)

The next morning we had breakfast, and I checked our stuff out as the daughter played with her new friend. It was a relatively chill day.

We got out to the archery range again, and this time there were kid bows, which worked a lot better for the girls. At one point, the kid was able to hit the far targets. There were few people out, and so we got a full hour of shooting, and it was quite enjoyable.

Archery, round two.

At one point she got to watch, and then we later got to join in and play, a game called Captain Sonar. It's basically a 4 vs 4 player game of Battleship, with everyone getting a specific role on their sub, and the goal being to sink your opponent. 

The game has some really clever elements, including one crew member listening to the other sides instructions to try and get a reading on where they are (without knowing where they've started). Definitely a fun party-type game for board gamers.

After some heart felt goodbyes and exchanges of some contact info, we went off to face the long drive home. Oh ya, that was made possible by the friendly staff who helped me fill my gas tank. They get big props for being so lovely (and fortunately there is a tip jar there to put money behind those sentiments).

All in all, an amazingly great experience. This was the second Pinecon, and they plan on doing it again next year, and still capping it at 100 people (for which they sold out this year). It's not trivial in cost, but considering it comes with food included, it's actually very reasonable, assuming you can make it there. It is definitely on my to do list for conventions next year.

Captain Sonar!