With the JW Hotel Buffet non-operational & non-existant, I was forced to forage for breakfast. By which I mean that I got a breakfast sandwich from one of the ICC foodcourts, which was also an accessway to the skywalk to another hotel, and contained a few food carts or stalls. I am pleased to report that navigation by or giving directions in terms of “The Fudgie Wudgie” never stops being fun.
Game one was a demo of Shadow Scar, which I’d tried to demo last year but hadn’t timed well. Only two of us players, plus the guy running it, so we got to try a few things, and the one-hour demo lasted an extra half-hour. I’d not realised how anime inspired it was, somehow, for a game with agents of an interdimensional detective agency fighting insidious demons, but there you go.
Other player’s character was from a steampunky sort of world where The Great War had recently ended, mine from one where the Earth had been destroyed & everyone lived on space stations, and our mission was in a place (5th Street) heavily based on noir & gangster films. The agency referred to an unknown force called “the director” which seems to push events to run along the lines of noir narratives, not that it needed to do much in the case of my character, who really wanted to fire a Tommy-Gun & got her chance. Didn’t hit anything other than the door, because the other guy wisely stood out of harm’s way.
Why would anyone ship crates of assembled & ready to use firearms with full magazines? Because that’s what The Director wants to happen.
We didn’t do one of those car chases with people standing on the running boards of cars, but … We could have. And there probably would have been boxes to crash through in a narrow alley or something similar.
I decided not to buy the Official Commemorative Gen Con Dice Set this year, because I’ve got more than enough dice sets at this point, and I gave away all of the tins during The Great Unburdening when I left Esri UK & actual UK. I did ask about the commemorative D6, assuming that I could buy it or something, but it turns out they give you that in exchange for a coupon, no purchase needed.
Convenient for me, but … Felt a little moochy?
Game two was Zoetrope, a card based time travel RPG where doing stuff involves playing the cards you have in a great big timeline, and time travel shenaniganry means you can move around in & alter that timeline.
The plot involved Gen Con, more specifically the heist of some Magic cards a year or so back, and we were supposed to stop the perpetrators from being caught. We kind of misinterpreted this the first time around, possibly deliberately, and decided that they couldn’t be caught if the crime never occurred, which by entirely logical steps ended with blowing up the cards in question. This was the wrong solution, so we had to go back and try it again, because it turns out they were actually supposed to get away with the crime, not just “not get arrested”.
The group was pretty keen on mayhem & chaos, so subtle techniques kind of got cast aside early on; “Wipe the security camera footage” or “arrange things so that they do wear masks and don’t wear the t-shirts of their own game” gave way to “interrupt them halfway, try to help, spook them, and then force them at gunpoint to finish what they started”
It turned out that the reason they needed to not get caught was so that one of the cards could come up for auction in 100 years or so, and then our handler could buy it.
I missed my opportunity to give away the extra badge wallet that I had, because the person sitting next to me was at their first Gen Con and it was their first RPG ever. If there was a better candidate for “here is a free thing”, I don’t know who they are. Only thought about it after I’d left the table.
Last game of the day was Weird Heroes Of Public Access, about public access TV show hosts. It turned out that the GM was one of the players in the Psychic Trash Detectives game last year.
I had a second ticket for this, which I’d got for Frank in case he was available, but he had a clash with another thing, so the ticket went to Jay instead.
It was a fun game. We started out with a missing kid story, and ended up with a Mothman Investigator whose show had been cancelled, Aliens whose ship had crashed and were getting help from the aforementioned kid up until the point that he took it for a joy-ride, and ended with a special broadcast to try to persuade him to bring the damn thing back.
After the WHPA game, I headed over to the VIG Mixer & caught up with Tom/Kevin/Amanda/Frank over there. I think other people get a biy more out of it than I do, though the free drinks & food are nice; They had a cheeseboard! Works better for folks who are more outgoing than I am, or maybe just have better hearing than I do.
Still, it is a nice opportunity to sit & chat to folks, some of whom you only see at Gen Con, with free drinks & food, in a comfy environment.
We did end up walking around the ICC a bit afterwards, because someone there temporarily forgot that they weren’t staying downtown, ordered a Bloody Mary, and discovered that the bartender was not being stingy on those pours. Took a bit before they felt they’d be OK to drive.