Hickman’s Killer Breakfast

This is an event where Tracy Hickman kills the entire audience in a two-hour improv exercise, where the only thing that’ll keep you alive is being entertaining or a technical problem. Or both in our case.
By chance, Frank & I had come up with a riff on people scouting for locations for pub/inn franchises, he for the Prancing Pony, and me for the Beige Chupacabra. This tied in nicely with the wholesale destruction that had happened with some previous people, and also with a Dalek fixated on renovation while the rest of the Daleks concentrated on destruction, so we could riff on cheap land just crying out for development.

We still didn’t last long.

 

Trail of Cthulhu

I’d thought at first that this was a western, based on the name, but when it came time to choose events, back in May, I looked it up and found that it’s an investigation game.

We had a good group (only four players), and were investigating the theft of the 200-year-old diary of a necromancer.
Of course someone had used it, of course there were ghouls, and of course we ran away. We just did it after grabbing the book.

The system is, as I understand it, based on Gumshoe, and I went to have a look at the book a bit later in the day.
It’s interesting, and I think I understand the basic idea, but I’d want to learn some more, and the book wasn’t $40 + sales tax worth of interesting. It’s probably ‘get the PDF’ interesting though.

 

Admin, of a sort, and the visiting Dealer Hall for only the second time

I had a ticket for a Fate Accelerated game on Sunday, but by mid-Saturday I was starting to feel like I’d been racing around the entire time. I hadn’t, but that’s what it felt like. I decided that I wanted a day without events, or at least scheduled events, so I refunded the ticket to clear the last day of Gen Con.
This turned out to be a good idea.

While on my way to the Dealer Hall (for only the second time – I’d been there for maybe an hour during VIG Early Access, minus the time taken for the long-ass line to file in, plus the time taken to let the Nerdrush in so that the doors were clear enough to get out) I passed by Norman in the hallways.
There’s no great story here, other than “Hey, I Saw Norman”.

In the hall, I spotted & visited the Pinnacle Entertainment booth, probably after visiting the … I’ve forgotten the company, but they publish Trail of Cthulhu.
Anyway, I asked one of the staffers whether the Explorers Edition had the same content as the Big Hardback Edition, and they confirmed that it did. It’s cheaper, which is no bad thing, but what I was mostly after was smaller. I decided to buy it, and the staffer checked my name, then opened & signed the book, as he was the one who wrote it.
Thus, I got to briefly chat with Shane Hensley, who also wrote the Deadlands system, which I had some fun running many years ago, and is what Savage Worlds developed out of, and thank h, im for writing it. My own little fanboy moment.

 

Paging Dr. Dinosaur

I made this comment somewhere, so I’m repeating it;

“It was by far the best event of the Con, and a perfect one to end on. Fantastic group, fantastic GM, stupid dinosaur.”

At the end of this, I have a much better idea of how to make this game work. It started with an incongruous event, we had a brainstorm about it, and all of the time-travelling Soviets from a secret Mars base, present & future Doctors Dinosaur, the Futuresaurus Rex, and massive property damage all spun out from that.

Going into more exhaustive detail, the game started with Soviet operatives in 50’s spacesuits with bubble helmets, wielding psychic powers, attacking Tesla Island.
(I arrived last, so got to play Atomic Robo, because nobody else wanted to)
After an initial fraças, they vanished, and we then used the Brainstorm mechanic of the system to work out, because we are all top-notch Action Scientists, what had happened/was happening. A heavily armed visit to Dr. Dinosaur’s lair to try to persuade him to help, if only to stop other people from using his advanced crystal technology, ended with the realisation that time-travel was possible, and that we’d just confirmed it for him, at which point Future Dr. Dinosaur appeared with the Soviet Psychics & attacked.

Defeated him & them by erasing the whiteboard with the working formula on it (they all vanished), and then set a trap to catch Future Dr. Dinosaur, who turned up as expected, but with a surprise Armoured & Be-Weaponed T-Rex, which promptly stomped me/Robo through the floor, so I spent the rest of the fight attacking said Futuresaurus from the floor below. This included standing on a desk holding it’s ankle to pivot the creature to a prone position, and jumping from desk to desk to office chair in an attempt to keep it that way, at least until the floor(s) collapsed and buried me.

This being ARRPG/Fate, being buried doesn’t actually stop you from helping, or at least spending Fate Points on other PCs and helping out in other ways (BEHOLD OUR MAMMALIAN SUPERIORITY!!), and by the time the coup de grace was set up, the player who’d gone racing off to find a freezing unit (we couldn’t kill present Dr. Dinosaur, because the presence of his future self proved that it wouldn’t work, and for some reason we decided that putting future Dr. Dinosaur on ice was a good idea. I’m not sure why) had +19 before spending a point.
He was successful.

Having played in that session, where the players all clicked as a group, riffed on and supported each other’s ‘bits’, has given me a much better idea of how to run this game, & what I did wrong before.
I should have left things more unplanned, shouldn’t have pinned down the whole backstory/plot, and let/forced the players to investigate & decide upon what is happening.
Looking forward to trying that.

 

Dinner

Atomic Robo ran 8pm-Midnight, so I wandered back to the JW & grabbed a very late dinner.
Frank texted me sometime during this, and wandered over to hang out over dinner. He’d not planned to eat anything, but then tried a cheese fry, and then wanted some of his own.

This is kind of how things go at Gen Con, for me at least, and it’s why I want to learn enough Ruby on Rails to make a way to make finding people easier. Texting folks works OK, whether it’s “Are You Still Awake, And Interested In Hanging Out?”, “I Just Finished A Game; Anyone Want To Get Lunch?”, or even “My Event Finishes At 5pm, Anyone Want To Get Dinner Sometime After That?”, but something where you could see what people were doing, and what they’ll be doing in a little while, at a glance & all at once, would be a useful thing.
Well, useful to me, at least.