6/8 – Wayfaring Strange, the Exhibit Hall, & Avatar: Legends

Posted on by Craig

Wayfaring Strange is another of the Weird Americana games I found in the event catalog, run, in this case, by the game designer.
It’s about hidden paths & folklore & limnal spaces. We were a bunch of Wanderers who all found ourselves in the same roadside dinner with no idea how we got there, where we were, where the diner staff were, and who the guy making enigmatic statements & eating pie is.
Over the course of investigation I accidentally made friends with a creepy bipedal deer with blood & viscera adorning its antlers. (I’d seen something in the woods behind the diner, thought maybe it was avoiding the creepy guy inside, and brought it a sandwich. I was dead wrong, but … Worth a shot)
The resolution turned out to be that the creepy guy was a crossroads entity who’d given the diner owner 50 years of ownership of this wandering diner, had just collected, and the diner had brought us there to finish out the shift. Took us a while to figure it out, and it was mostly a shot in the dark, not helped by creepy guy trying to profit off the situation.

This was my Vendor Hall & “Wander Around Looking At Stuff” day.
Didn’t attempt to see everything or anything like that. I visited the booth where Wandering Strange was sold, but they’d sold out, so grabbed the online ashcan edition instead. It’s an interesting game; diceless but not GM less.

No idea what they were doing or why, but it was a fun group to see. Also, one of them had a pink mohawk which worked really well with the outfit & suited her.
Talked to these folks after they did the slightly desperate “do you play 5e” booth outreach thing. SF setting/rules for 5e. They had never heard of the TV show prior to that day.

I saw a booth with a plushy tentacle on the table, which turned out to be for a game called Tentacle Town. Couldn’t get the timing right for a demo, but looked it up; not my kind of game, I think.

Caught up with David the Teacher, who I met at a game run by Mikey Mason in 2016 & kept in touch. ( Was going to meet him at the show he was setting up for, but then he saw me in the hallway )
We chatted a bunch while he set up for ticket & merch sales for Mikey’s show.

David had been working at the Q Workshops booth, selling dice, and I ended up finding that booth by accident. Bought some cat polyhedral ( they’d run out of some amazing purple & gold ones, but they had black+white. The purple+gold are absolutely for a game with magical cats in it; it’s the first thing that came to my mind when I saw them )

Avatar Legends was the second game of the day, playing teenage rebels in the Fire Empire during the 100 years war. Decided that my characters assumed name was “Wang Fire”, as a nod to the show, a recognition that he’s a bit of an idiot, and because the the idea that in the show Sokka was unknowingly using the name of a folk hero.
We had to rescue a theatre troop before they were arrested for their farce about the Firelord. Had a good plan, worked well together, and the one fight ( when guards wanted to search the barrels we were transporting ) was over quickly thanks to them already being completely surrounded before the fight started. We planned well.

We had an extra player join at the last minute; they were there to play the Root RPG, but the GM had been in a car crash, so they joined our game instead.

Caught up with Tom & Kevin, & returned the huge bag of medications; Can’t take them with me.
We tried to find somewhere open for a snack, and got in at a place on the Westin with 8 minutes before the kitchen closed. ( Pub next door sent us that way after they told us their own kitchen was already closed )