In hindsight, going straight back to work the day after I got into the UK was what might be described as “A Mistake”.
Kind of wiped me out on the blogging/summarising front, though it did lead to a hilarious situation when I edited the Big Red Couch episode we recorded that weekend, and had no memory of much of the conversation.
If, for some strange reason, you want to hear that episode, click the image below, and it should take you there)
Anyway, I played some games at Gen Con, because that’s the point.
Here are some summaries, or maybe just some thoughts, on them.
Thursday
Masks ~ Rabbit Holes
Halcyon City is overwhelmed by strange refugees when portals to different dimensions open throughout the city. Is this strange phenomenon a distraction designed to distract from some nefarious scheme?
Masks is a game about being Teenage Superheroes, but is way less about the ‘punching bad guys in the face’ and way more about the ‘everyone is trying to tell you who and what to be’ of being a teenager.
You’re a teenager; Adults have views.
You’re a superhero; Three generations of superheroes before you have views.
I like this game.
Played it once last year, and didn’t 100% get it, but it was interesting enough for me to want to learn.
I did try to get the books last year, but they’d sold out by the time I tried Masks. Rectified that this year, by which time they had the book in hardback. And a couple of additional books. Also in hardback.
Did I mention my poor sales resistance?
The game uses Playbooks (a character archetype, less about the powers and more about the role in the fiction), and I ended up with The Transformed, so went with the victim of a freak fertiliser explosion, who’d been transformed into Swamp Thing with the serial numbers filed off, or maybe a high-school version of Groot with a much better vocabulary. And Clothing.
It was a fun session, and a fun group, with a Ref/GM who kept the play going.
And I got to do the “Oh, Fuck It” full monster option to make a heavily-armed hero run away and stop trying to shoot the super-villain who was, on this occasion, trying to fix the problem.
(It was a scenario with a lot of conflicted motivations)
In a longer game, that would totally come back to bite Wat (I named, or superhero-named, the character ‘Wat’, based on the reaction of “What The Fuck!” from most of the people he met) right in the ass, because that’s pretty much what Masks is about.
Oh, and our group didn’t have a name, so when asked what it was by … someone … I chimed in with “Team Awesome Tree Force”.
It stuck, even though nobody, including me, wanted it to, because it was such an awful name.
Part Time Gods
Sadly, I didn’t get to play this one.
Pre-Con-Crud (OK, how do you hyphenate that? Con-Crud is a thing, Pre-<THING> is a valid form, … ) left me in a bad state before the Con even started, and I only made it through Tuesday & Wednesday with rampant Red Bull abuse.
The game was supposed to run from 2000-0000, but I had the feeling that, if I stayed up until midnight, I’d be dead for much of Friday, so I reluctantly refunded my ticket & got an early night.
I did catch up with T & K before falling over and dying, though maybe not very much before, as there were a few “You don’t look so good” comments, with concerned looks as a garnish, so … I’m thinking the early night was a good move.
Friday
Torg Eternity ~ Day 1: Nile Empire
9 innocent strangers are transformed into heroes as an invading reality crashes down around them. They must work together to survive the strange & terrifying world now surrounds them.
This is a relaunch/remake of a much-beloved (at least that’s my impression from the folks who’ve mentioned it over the years, and indeed from the folks at the table) game about invading realities, and the folks able to move between them.
Took place out on the field at the football stadium, which is fun.
Unlike the game.
The game was supposed to be for complete novices, no nollidge required, rules will be taught.
I actually told the alleged GM, when he asked, “No, never played”.
He proceeded to ignore this, assume that everybody knew everything (I had to ask one of the other players how the dice-rolling system worked) , and run the scenario on fast-forward, so that a three hour game was finished in 1¾ hours.
To be honest, I was glad it was over – Got to escape & go do lunch with D & M, which was vastly more entertaining that that fucking Egyptian Themed Trainwreck.
There’s a good game there, I think.
It has a lot of bits to it, and there are cards which do something to the situation in game, and other cards which the players have, and queue up, but I’m not sure how they get played or why.
And the setting is interesting, and the idea of starting a game on the very day that things change is similarly interesting.
Unlike this session.
Outbreak: Deep Space ~ The Goliath Awaits
Experience terror in deep space and try to survive! The year is 2257.You are a member of a UIC science vessel that has been sent on a top-secret mission to investigate what may be an alien megastructure far outside regulated space. After a long journey you finally reach your destination and confirm the discovery that will change the course of human history. Several questions remain. What is the purpose of the megastructure? Who built it and where are they now? The mission takes a turn for the worse when something most unexpected is discovered.
Friday, it seems, was game for “Man, What?”.
This is an out and out horror game, in the style of Alien/Aliens, Pandorum, maybe Event Horizon if you’re so inclined, but it’s an RPG; One of the players for some reason expected it to be a tabletop wargame sort of thing where we’d be hunting aliens, or maybe Space Zombies.
Then he stayed around anyway, and was trying, but his heart wasn’t really in it.
The guy next to him was playing a security sort of character, but once it became apparent that the scenario involved strange time anomalies, some level of nerd-based physics wonk emerged, and I got a lot of snide references to <insert stuff to do with relativistic physics> directed my way, because I was playing the only scientist.
Eventually a “Yeah, whatever dude”, coupled with a vague dismissive wave and a physical part-turn towards the GM made him cut it out.
The game?
That was fun. We were 100% screwed from the start, but we all knew that going in, and it was a really interesting time-loop scenario involving Tabby’s Star.
Saturday
Heavy Metal Thunder Mouse ~ Welcome to Thunder City!
A world where pint size biker clubs embark on epic adventures in Thunder City, USA.
I’d been asked to find a game F & I (OK, that looks odd) … A game that I was playing which F would also enjoy, and found this one.
I now own a copy of the book, which should give you a solid idea of how much I liked it.
It was one of those very rare circumstances where players & GM were already bonding just by chatting at the table, so it already didn’t feel like a bunch of strangers as we decided on our ‘Club’ name ( The Cheese Wheels ), headquarters ( A heavily-modified wooden circular cheese crate, on it’s edge ), and general style ( Hopelessly disorganised ).
The we decided that the shipment which had been stolen from us was a supply of rennet for cheesemaking, at which point we realised that we were, in fact, playing tiny furry drug manufacturers.
And were OK with that.
Masks ~ Jailbirds
After their last fight tore the Memorial Building in half, the team finds itself on the run from AEGIS. Can they capture the villain truly responsible for the mayhem & destruction?
What, this again?
Yes, this again.
This time I got to try out the Nova – Huge Cosmic (Gravity Manipulation) Powers, very little control.
What could possibly go wrong?
Something I forgot to mention.
The GM/Ref made the game feel very comic book by asking people which comic their character first appeared in; Was it their own line, a side character somewhere else, one of those characters who is constantly being rebooted for the next generation, …
Given the Gravity Powers, I went with the name ‘Deadweight’ (he’ll be regretting that name later) , who first appeared as someone who’d just got powers and couldn’t control them in the B plot of an ensemble comic.
The character playing The Delinquent went with the name ‘Slack’, which then gave us the spin-off comics “Deadweight & Slack”, about the comedic adventures of a pair of superheroes being typical teenagers
There was a slight technical hiccup when the GM wasn’t there, and it turned out he had the wrong time on his schedule.
These things happen, particularly by the end of day 3.
Another good game, in which we were framed for massive property destruction, promptly escaped, because of Gravity Powers, accidentally collapsed a part of the facility we were held in due to the consequences of taking out load bearing walls with the aforementioned Gravity Powers, …
Here’s a page from my notebook related to the game;
One of the characters was rich (and the child of a Super-Family) , so rather than having a fortress of justice, we were using a mothballed base as our HQ, which we dubbed The Poolhouse Of Justice.
There was already the Super Group “The Exceptionals”, so we became “The Exceptions”, and then after being framed there was the suggestion that we could just swap sides and go into crime, which is when I started working up a “Dark Exceptions” logo.
See, it all makes sense.
Sunday
Our Last Best Hope ~ Destiny, Meet World
Everything and everyone is about to die. It may be fate, or God’s will, or just the shitty truth. You are the only thing that stands in the way of the end of the world. Can you save it?
I’d heard a lot about this, and wanted to try it.
It’s a game about the folks who are the last hope for an otherwise-doomed humanity.
Not all of them are going to make it out of the scenario alive; In fact, a lot of the mechanics of the game are about failure management, and setting up your character’s death for the opportune moment.
Putting together the threat was fun (we’d decided on ‘Space’ over ‘Zombies’ or ‘Snow’, I suggested Tabby’s Star after the Outbreak: Deep Space game, and we ended up with Extradimensional Psychic Angler Fish Using A Star To Attract Intelligent Life So That It Can Eat Them), character generation was quick ( I went with the fringe scientist, who’d brought with him a collection of amulets and crystals, and left behind the wreckage of an academic career ) , but the actual system did not grab me.
In fact, my review afterwards was that I really enjoyed the game, I thought the GM did the best job they possibly could for their first-time running that game, but I really did hate the system quite a lot.
It felt like every time there was some actual interaction going on, the system reared up and threw dice at you, and that you were trying to guide the narrative to fit the game mechanics.
The again, that’s why I try games at conventions; To see what they’re like, and whether I like them.
And there you have it; My games of Gen Con.
I’d been thinking about trying an 0200 – 0700 game of Starfinder, the SF incarnation of Pathfinder, but the pre-con-crud made that a dumb idea; I could have powered through a day with minimal sleep under normal conditions, but not after a couple of days of lurgh had already happened.
( I should mention that there were non-2am session of Starfinder, but they filled up fast. Plus, it’d be interesting to try playing a game in the deep dark of Gen Con )