Tag Archives: Gen Con

In Which Craig Looks At The Gen Con 2022 Event List

Posted on by Craig

Being a listing of the things which I found by specifically looking for them by company or system, or just by scrolling through the list and spotting a name which made me say “What’s that about?”

I have no idea how many of these I’m going to end up playing;
Some are on the list because it’s a system/setting I’ve enjoyed
Some are here because it’s a game I’ve wanted to play for a while, but never found the opportunity
Some are here because it’s a brand-new game that I want to try out
And some just because they look interesting

Ghost Wrasslers: Dead and Breakfast
It’s a charming B&B with one small problem. Guests Flee in the middle of the night. Time for the Ghost Wrasslers to step in!
TV land is full of ghost hunting shows, but none are like Ghost Wrasslers. These brawny paranormal investigators’ job is to put the smackdown on ghosts. Not your great-granny still making her rocking chair rock ghosts, no. We’re talking ghosts with a mean streak a mile wide. Your job is to send those spooks back to the Great Beyond where they belong. Mallards is a charming B&B with one small problem. Every guest leaves in the middle of the night. Time for the Ghost Wrasslers to step in!
QAGS, 2nd Edition

The Great Soul Train Robbery: Hell-Raising Heist
On the road to Hell there was a railway line. An express train to the infernal city of Dis, crewed by furies and carrying treasure and souls to damnation. You’re going to rob it.
You’re a motley crew with mixed motives. Sharpshooters, snake-handlers, homesteader widows… Desperados all. You all have two stats, Lover and Sinner. Use Lover to make human connections, to act with honor, to hold onto hope, to resist opportunities for vice, and for selfless acts. Use Sinner to do dirty deeds, to act with brutality, to lie through your teeth, to resist pleas for mercy, and for selfish acts. Will you claim your prize from the train, or be overcome, damned, or broken by the heist?
The Great Soul Train Robbery

Bar Wars!
Work with others to make sure that the place where everyone knows your name and the beer is cold is saved from villains, pirates and other unsavory types.
A tried and true classic. The game where the universal laws are made up of all the bits that they didn’t want in the real universe. Work with others to make sure that the place where everyone knows your name and the beer is cold is saved from villains, pirates and other unsavory types.
Tales Of The Floating Vagabond

Yazeba’s Summer Adventure
Visit a magical bed & breakfast in this slice-of-life tabletop RPG about a heartless witch, a peaceful house, and all the folks who have made their home inside.
Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is a very special game. It uses pre-set characters, quick-play chapters, and an adaptable ruleset unlike anything else out there. It takes less than a half hour to learn how to play and get started, but with new chapters and secrets to unlock folks can stick with the game for years and years. A guide will be available to help you along the way.
Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, prerelease Edition

Dopplegangland
People who look exactly like the heroes and share their powers are destroying Halcyon! The city turns against them and brands them as villains. Can the heroes save the city and their reputations?
Masks: A New Generation

The Spiderweb
As the Spider gains control of Halcyon City, the threat to your neighborhood rises. A criminal war brews, and you and your loved ones live at ground zero. Can you keep them safe? And at what cost?
Masks: A New Generation

This is a Teenage Superheroes game, though it’s focused far more on the ‘Teenage’ part.
As a teenager, adults are constantly telling you what to do & who to be, and as a member of the latest generation of superheroes, the previous generations are constantly telling who you are & how to do things

Disaster at Gen Con
Gen Con only comes around once a year! You’re not going to let anything get in your way. But, things turn dark as horror takes over the con. Fight to survive and you might make it out alive.
You’ve been having the time of your life at the greatest four days in gaming. It only comes around once a year and you’ve been determined to make the most of the experience. But things turn sinister one afternoon and when you regain your senses, find yourself in an empty game room with a group of strangers. Do you have what it takes to escape the con alive? Or will you meet a less than enjoyable end? A cooperative, tragic horror game. You’ll work together to tell a story built around hope. But even as your characters fight to survive, you must guide them even as you’re saddled with the knowledge that their death is assured.
Ten Candles

Wayfaring Strange: Lost Highway
You have found yourselves in a roadside diner, with no memory of how you got there, and no ability to leave. Will you unravel the mystery and find a way to escape, or will you become one of the Lost?
Wayfaring Strange is an original diceless tabletop roleplaying game by Drowning Moon Studios that explores the concepts of hidden highways, urban legends, folk magic and survival in liminal America. Players portray Wayfarers, people on the fringes of civilized society doing their best to survive, or even thrive in a shadowy, dangerous world ripe with unknowable power. Pre-generated characters are provided, and the system is streamlined, easy to learn and prioritizes cooperative play. The Wayfaring Strange ashcan will be available for download on the Drowning Moon Studios website prior to the convention.
Strangeness & Charm

Delacorte Academy
Step into a world of magic as you join the Academy. But what was supposed to be just another boring school year learning to weave spells turns into something.
Step into a world of magic as you join the Academy. But what was supposed to be just another boring school year learning to weave spells turns into something you would have never expected.
Kids on Brooms

This is a spinoff from Kids On Bikes, with presumably some tips of the hat to a certain series of novels about a school for Wizards?

Big Rich Clarke and the Little Boat Pirates
During a race to prove a new “Radiant Engine”, our adventurers find a wrecked boat and a missing crew. High tempers and high adventure on the Kennet and Avon Canal in an Age of Fantasy and High Steam!
Castle Falkenstein

Familiar Companions, Peculiar Heroes
The Orc King has attacked the Kingdom of Shaam, but its heroes are missing! It’s up to an unlikely group to save the day – the heroes’ brave (and remarkably competent) familiars and animal companions.
Fate Accelerated Edition

Bad Moon Rising
Within the Dustbowl of America, a dark carnival wanders trying to save people from the darkness spreading. Will they be able to save the starving town where evil is spawning?
Crossroads Carnival

The Apartment
Experience the classic introductory adventure, as a group of misfits living in the same building fight to protect their home from the Corporate interests who want to knock it down.
Cyberpunk, RED Edition

Are Those Bite Marks?
Today, what appears to be an animal attack has left a resident badly injured. A bunch of townsfolk insist it must have been a stray dog. But you know it’s never that simple in Nowhereville.
Nowhereville

Master Thieves from the Future Save Reality!
You’re not just master thieves – you’re master thieves from the future! And your ability to bend reality will come in handy as you face unexpected twists and turns in a heist to save reality itself.
The perfect heist. Getting in, getting out. Smooth talk and careful bluffs. Stealth, hacking, and quick action. You and your crew pull it off every time. Because you’re not just master thieves—you’re master thieves from the future, who bend the very rules of reality when you need to. And you’re going to need to, as your perfect heist encounters astonishing twists and turns in this unique zero-prep new game where players and GM collaborate to create the scenario and the plan at the same time.
Stealing Stories for the Devil

Lights, Camera, Die
You are in a horror-comedy movie. Almost everyone will die, it’s just a matter of how funny you make it. Once a character is gone, you become a producer and continue to influence the story.
Die Laughing is a GM-less role-playing game where players take on the role of characters in a horror-comedy. Almost everyone will die, it’s just a matter of how funny they make it. Once a character is gone, you become a producer and influence the story and mess with other characters until the end. The game is fast paced, and every session is different.
Die Laughing

Grab the Honey and Run
Criminal bears are on a mission to steal more honey than they know what to do with.
Honey Heist remains one of the most popular single-page roleplaying games ever written, & at Gen Con 2022 you’ll have the opportunity to play it with its creator at the helm. Grant Howitt will steer a gang of criminal bears on the heist of their lives in an effort to grab as much honey as they can. Chaos! Mauling! Disguises! Haunted beehives! Hats! Yes!
Honey Heist

The Case of the Knocked Over Trash
One of your doggos is blamed for this disaster but what really caused it? Another dog? Reckless teens? A gang of racoons? A gremlin? Can they clear their friend’s name? Are they still a good dog?!
Your pack runs the alleys at night, protecting your peoples from incursion by the parliament of cats, the black masks (a gang of raccoons), local teens, and other things that go bump in the night. One night as the pack stopped to get Lou, former junkyard dog pup turned loving backyard protector, they find him chained. Someone has been knocking over trash cans on his street and his peoples regretfully locked him up because the next-door peoples got into barking loudly with his peoples. Your pack needs to clear Lou’s name and find out who the real culprit is in… Heckin’ Good Doggos and the Case of The Knocked Over Trash A mystery for 6 doggos (players) using the +One System from Wet Ink Games This event will include character creation and rules explanation for the system.
Heckin’ Good Doggos

There are a few more Heckin’ Good Doggos game sessions, including “Heckin’ Squirrel Domination!” & “Super Good Doggos Save The World”, which uses the Superpowered Dogs expansion to the game, because apparently that’s a thing.

Hundred Year War Era: Fire Nation II
A theater troupe managed to enrage the Fire Lord by performing an unflattering – and wildly popular – rendition of his deeds. Will you be able to get them out before they are discovered?
Avatar Legends

This is an RPG set in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe, and which has the capacity to set games in the various eras of that show’s history; Aang, Korra, Hundred Year War, Roku, Kyoshi, … you get the idea.

Gen Con (Online) 2021

Posted on by Craig

For obvious reasons, I’m not going to be attending Gen Con in person this year; I’ll be doing the online variant instead.

Last year they did an online version because there could be no in-person convention, this year they’re doing both, though the in-person one is reduced in number of people, number of events, and indeed hours of the day. ( they’re closing at midnight to allow for proper cleaning time; normally that sort of happens around the events? )
For last year, I just stayed in my flat/apartment, because there really wasn’t any other option, but this year the travel restrictions are fewer, so I’m heading up to Edinburgh, to stay a few nights in a surprisingly affordable apartment hotel I know there, and to, as it were, get my nerd on.
And also be somewhere other than this place.

Here’s what the schedule looks like when you’re not in the EDT zone; There are some late nights in there, but the hotel has a TV visible from the bed, so as long as it also has an accessible HDMI port, I can merrily fall asleep to the seminar of my choice.
It’s what happened last time.

Most of these are seminar events.
I decided not to try to play in any RPGs; Those are hard enough to play online at the best of times, at least for me, so when you add in ‘a group of random strangers’ and ‘significant time zone difference’, it just makes it a non-starter for me.
On the plus side, I don’t have to feel guilty about falling asleep if that’s what happens, or simply wandering away if the event isn’t holding my attention, and the convention part is costing me nothing but my time. Unlike the hotel and the train up and back, which is costing actual money.

My selection criteria for this are pretty much “does that sound interesting?” and “what the hell is that?”.

  • “The Aliens are Invading, and my Dad’s Going to Miss the School Talent Show!” attracted my attention with the title, and locked it in with the phrase “Squid on the Mantelpiece”
  • “Playing with Deaf and Hard of Hearing Board Gamers” is of personal interest anyway, but the fact that it’s an event presented in sign & interpreted in voice sealed the deal, because I’ve never done a thing like that
  • “Integrating Consent Culture into RPG’s and LARPing” is there because, to be blunt, that shit’s important and I don’t know enough about it
    ( I’ve seen the X-Card used once in a game, and that was in a ‘can we please not?’ way because the particular piece of imagery had come up in three games in a row for that player and they were just plain getting creeped out by it )
for anyone bored enough to read down this far, here are the event descriptions. also, seek help.

A Non-Gaming Gen Con Thing

Posted on by Craig

I’ve not gone back to reread all of the Gen Con posts, but I am wondering whether they come across as more of a colossal tale of woe and despair than I’m really wanting them to.

Yes, stuff went wrong; Transport getting there was chaotic & disrupted, and the ending of the holiday was not what I’d planned.

But there are many good things which I think need calling out, if only to remind myself that they exist.

Did the Orc Stomp 5k.
I did this a few years ago with Frank & Moni, and decided to do it again.
Granted, I did it in walking mode, but it was surprisingly fun.
( though the idea that I’d immediately rush off to a game afterwards was flat-out wrong, as it turns out )

I’m even visible in the background of one of the pictures of the event.

Did a bunch of catching up with friends, most of which went unphotographed, it seems, though a few made it through.

Don’t really have a collection of images to cover “Played a bunch of very enjoyable games”, so here’s a picture I do have;

Trying To Sum Up Gen Con / Holiday 2019

Posted on by Craig

It’s difficult to know where to start.
A lot has happened, both at the con and after it, much of it kind of horrible.

Focusing On The Good – The Games

Didn’t have a bad game this time around.
There was one ( “The Strange” ) which didn’t start well because multiple players had also run the game and felt that everyone needed to know that, and needed to benefit from their wisdom, which meant that the group took a while to gel & work together.
Once we did, things went well, and the scenario ( basically ‘Jumanji’ with a Halloween theme ) was a bunch of fun.

Played a very fun Timewatch game, where we ended up in Medicine Lodge, Kansas in 1900 battling giant mutant cockroaches from an alternate timeline to ensure that the temperance movement continued so that JFK would be at the helm during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And I got to do weird time shenanigans where future-me assisted present-me by dropping an anvil from a roof onto my opponent.

Kids On Bikes was a new one on me, and I was impressed enough that I ended up buying it as my Gen Con Impulse Purchase.
Hilariously unsupervised kids rounding up escaped Hammer Horror monsters to return them to a spooky house that wasn’t there. Also, we may have inadvertently stolen a car.

A Groundhog Day styled Masks game went well, including the bit where we realized that we absolutely had to let the loop happen one more time, owing to the enormous amounts of horrifying mutagens which got dumped in the water supply. Ended up having a nice “OK, now I trust you” narrative arc with one of the other characters, which I suspect is difficult to make happen in a four-hour con game.
( Masks looks at types of characters, not powers, when building characters. Mine was The Janus, which is about someone with a mundane life and a superhero life that they’re trying to keep secret, so a big thing is the question of “Who knows your real identity?” and “When do you reveal that identity?” )

Zombie World was another new one; I’d heard about it last year ( while buying Masks ) and was interested enough to back the Kickstart, which came in two days before I left for Gen Con, so I left it in the box.
It’s one of those games which winds the characters up and points them at each other, with various secrets revealed along the way, so it does a nice job of doing the “The Zombies Aren’t The Biggest Problem” thing from many movies in the genre; You’d want to be comfortable with potentially being actively working against some of the other players for this one. Fortunately, everyone at the table was good with that, and nobody took it personally.

Part Time Gods was another new one. The group got on well, and I got to play a Tech Tycoon / God Of Cold who was, to be honest, kind of an asshole when things didn’t go the way he wanted.
The game ran long by about an hour, but I don’t think anyone minded; It was fun, and we eventually defeated the divinely-powered Ancient Egyptian Death Robot.

Final game was Bulldogs!, a Pulp SF game about bottom-of-the-barrel freight hauling, run by one of the creators, Brennan Taylor.
It was awesome, and I got to play the Undead Medic; A fungal lifeform inhabiting a corpse.