This was my “8 hours of RPGs in a row” day. I don’t like to have two events back to back, especially not in different hotels, but sometimes it just works out that way.
We (Tom, Naomi, Jay, & I) were trying to arrange for a game we could all play in, but I misjudged the popularity of the one we were going for and we didn’t get enough tickets; Next time, we’ll do the Friends & Family approach, where everybody tries to get tickets for the whole group.
We did get enough tickets to Nowhereville after some searching.
Game number one was The Wildsea, where the forests have taken over the Earth, and post-humans travel this sea of trees in chainsaw prowed ships.
I was playing a cactus person, and we also had a somewhat regular human, a moth person, and a hive mind of spiders in an environment suit. Something about the game lends itself to community building, or did for us at least, so a “can you check out the rumours of weird stuff so that people calm down” from a newly established village in the skull of a leviathan eventually became “we found this ancient construct which wants to run a forge, which is really bad in this forest, and rather than try to destroy it, we’ve persuaded it to let us move it; want to be the only village in the world with smelting?”.
The Wildsea game was in the JW, and my next game was a block down the street, in the Marriott Downtown. I’d briefly considered trying to be very clever and take advantage of both games being on the ground floor of their respective hotels by going outside and simply walking down the sidewalk; Then I took a look at the traffic and the construction, and decided to do the sensible thing of going up a level, using the skywalk to get to a parking building, cutting through said parking building to get to another skywalk, crossing to the next hotel, and dropping back down.
I ended up playing The Youngster again (played that character type when I played this game a few years back, & had another player comment that I clearly had a 12 year old somewhere in my life; didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was just playing me, but more enthusiastic), and over the course of the game we decided that he must be living in the town library, because there was no other explanation for why he was so good at breaking into it, so good at turning off the security system, but had no idea how the lights worked.
The GM didn’t do a great job of explaining how some of the bits of the system worked, specifically the skill and spirit tracks, but it was a fun game and we all enjoyed ourselves. The phrase “on a scale of one to spider, how scary is it?” came up a lot, especially because the monsters turned out to be fear eating & people eating spiders. The town librarians had been trying to keep some juveniles asleep in the basement of the library, but that didn’t really work out so well when an adult one turned up. I don’t think very much of the library got burned down.
I bought a copy of this as, I think, my only RPG purchase of the convention.
The VIG Swag arrived, but I held off on collecting mine until other folks were there, so that I could immediately hand on the almost everything I wasn’t going to keep.
The plan for game three of the day (hours 9 & 10 of gaming, for anyone who’s counting) was to do a demo of Fallen London with Frank. Unfortunately, Magpie Games had a nightmare of a time with GMs this year, seemingly worse than their usual “we could really use some more GMs” situation from previous years, and they just didn’t have someone to run the game.
This seems to be a thing for Magpie every year, but especially this year, and I have no idea why. I’ve read speculation that they’re offering the least value for time spent, leading to fewer people being interested, or that they decide on how many sessions they’re running before they start looking for folks to run them.
We could have just refunded the tickets, but Frank had been talking to one of their other GMs, who offered to do a demo of Rapscallion instead, so we played that instead. (Along with three other guys who’d also been caught out by this)
It was a fun demo, where we were attempting to get away with the ship we’d just stolen. Was difficult to get the three other guys to do … Anything. One pretty clearly had CP or something similar, based on speech & movement, but there were a number of times when Frank & Rich the GM & I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he, or the other two, were even going to respond. They did eventually get involved, or warm up, or get in the zone, or whatever, and did some fun stuff, but for a chunk of time it was Frank & I trying desperately not to take over the game because there was nothing coming from that end of the table.
Also, my character was a were-kraken, which was very amusing when a negotiation with the more legitimate owner of the ship broke down; Their representative changed from a little monkey in a suit into an actual 800 pound Gorilla, I changed from regular looking guy into a tentacle monster, and we had a brawl on the deck of the ship.
Another late night, to nobody’s surprise, wandering through the ICC and looking at all of the stuff still happening, or the remains of stuff that had happened. Even very late at night, or early in the morning, there are still small clusters of people gaming in the board game halls; Out in the corridor there are people playing endless social deduction games until the wee small hours.