Saturday morning had been an empty spot for a while, but I eventually found something to play; A cozy GM-less game called Good Soup, about woodland animals making soup for travelers.
Sadly, the game session was cancelled just before Gen Con, so I went with one of the other options, a Grimdark SF Horror game called Vast Grimm. Based (to my understanding) on Mork Borg, the universe is doomed, as parasitic würms infect people and chase down the survivors, like zombies with spaceships, and you’re trying to survive, and maybe see whether those rumours of a way out have something to them.
I enjoyed the game session. I didn’t think much of the system, but in fairness I’d had the various Borg systems represented to me as being quick character gen, because you’ll go through a lot of them. That … Wasn’t quick. Random tables for stuff, yes, but lots of looking things up in the book. I entirely skipped a section on Background because I’d just stopped caring.
On the plus side we did get Vast Grimm pencils in the game colours of black & pink; They’re also part of the game, where you roll it and read the text on the side, though I think that’s only a würm infestation thing?
Anyway, we all survived despite shitty dice rolling, the ship we escaped from the würm infested station on also having a würm problem, and a possibly insane ships robot.
I don’t think I’d buy this, but I wouldn’t mind playing it again, though I’m not convinced that the system is my sort of thing?
And on that topic!
Next game was Rifts, from Palladium Games. I didn’t expect this to be good, but it’s a game I’ve heard about since the early 90’s & never got to play. People would occasionally plan to run a game, and then it’d never actually happen.
Well, now I’ve played it, and am comfortable with saying “what a load of old-school grognard bullshit”.
The setting is an amazing ridiculous wonderful kitchen sink of a thing. The system has numbers everywhere, and even the guy running the game, who made the characters, had to look stuff up on my sheet because he couldn’t find it. The entire scenario was a bit of setup, and then one 15 second combat round; This took up 2½ hours. Two of the four players were on their phones except when they actually had to do something, and I really couldn’t see what they were getting out of it.
Enjoyed finally getting to play that game, but wow, I do not think much of that system. Or ever want to think of it again.
Last game was Curseborn, which seems like it’s maybe not out yet? I was a little unclear about that, but it started at 10pm, so I might have misunderstood.
The idea here is that you’re people with various courses, conforming roughly to classic monsters; We had a Teenage Werewolf, I was a PR Vampire, and another person was a Slacker Ghost/Zombie, maybe?
We were looking for our entirely non-cursed friend who we’d all meet & have coffee with, and who had vanished. Turns out he’d got taken by members of a limnal-space soul eating creature cult in the crypt under a church turned nightclub. We couldn’t save him, he was long dead & being used as some kind of ritual focus, but we could surely as hell avenge him and break some stuff.
Had a bit of a White Wolf/World Of Darkness vibe to it as a game, or maybe Urban Shadows? In any case, it was a fun game & a good group.
My friend David turned out to be staying in the same hotel as the game, and tracked me down towards midnight; He’s there as support/backstage/merch/whatever for Mikey, one of the entertainers. Folks were still somewhat awake at midnight, so I got to say “Hi” to people & chat for a while.
Not entirely sure how many people were crammed into that hotel room/suite, but given that Gen Con will only comp ¼ of the room cost for a GM, it’s a fair bet that someone was sleeping on the sofa. We had a very fun bit where I was enjoying hearing about the hotel shenanigans required to get all the entertainer stuff moved around, and they wanted to hear about my travels over the past year. Then it was decided that I must actually be an International Assassin, based on all the travel and the strange destinations and the accent which nobody can place, which we all just ran with, though I’ll cheerfully admit that a bunch of entertainers & improv folks & drama types are much better at bouncing off each other than ‘some guy who did a podcast’. I mean, I did my best, and mentioned the dual passports at the appropriate moment for comedy timing.
Eventually wandered back to the ICC (the hotel for the game wasn’t on the gerbil tube network, and while I could get pretty close by going parking garage to hotel to art garden over an intersection to another hotel to stairway by an apartment store, much of that was closed by 1am, so I just walked purposefully down the sidewalk. Not that it’s super risky when you look like me & there aren’t many people around because it’s 1am.
Caught up with Tom & Jay & Kevin somehow; Probably by posting an “anyone still awake?” on social media somewhere.
I’m not certain that these next photos were taken that night, but they’re representative of the clusters of Social Deduction gamers who gather at the far end of the longest ICC corridor. I think when this first started out it was a lot more ad-hoc, but now they have an HQ in one of the lobby/outside access areas, ticketed event times, and I think the green vest folks are organisers or maybe facilitators? Not directly playing the game, but setting the wheels in motion?
