Gaming at Dice Fest 2025

 Dice Fest 2025 wrapped up yesterday.  Over the weekend, I ran 9 sessions of a custom Shadows of Brimstone mission on a fancy 3D Board. I also played two games of 1,000 Blank White Cards while I was there, and one game of the The Score (a micro-RPG that takes about 20 minutes to play). 

And I also I helped create, organize, host and judge a miniatures event called the "Bitz Box Brawl" where 20 people received a box of random miniature parts and one hour to design and glue together their own chimeric monster. 

I taught all those games above to new players while I was at it.  I really enjoy sharing my favorite games with people I'm just getting to know, and conventions are great for that. It was all immense fun, but I am truly exhausted today.

Three Cons, Old Friends, and a Boom

I have been busy as heck lately, and playing a lot of games.

Work sent me out to GenCon, were I ran demos of Shadows of Brimstone, Forbidden Fortress, Last Night On Earth, Fortune & Glory, and A Touch Of Evil. It was super fun and I love sharing and teaching many of my favorite games to total strangers... but it was also very exhausting because GenCon is a huge show with a million faces and a hundred thousand games.

In my off hours at the con, I played a couple of new games I hadn't tried before.

Incan Gold is a fun press-your-luck game that I reliably came in... well, certainly not winning, but not in last place, either, so I feel like I did okay for a newbie. The best part was that I got to play the game with my old friend Brendan Riley, who lives far away and I hadn't seen in several years, and my buddy Bill French. I never would have expected them to meet, given that they live in different states, but GenCon is a place of miracles.

Brendan's company Rattlebox Games is playtesting a game called Udder Chaos, the only competitive cow-milking game I've ever seen. It's fast and goofy and full of rhymes. It was light-hearted fun, and you'd be helping support a old friend of mine, so check it out if you get a chance.

One night at GenCon I played a party game called Buy The Rights, in which you get a random hand of high concepts and genres and have to make your best pitch about why producers should invest money with you. I hammed it up, basically role-playing as a different screenwriter or producer in each round, and it turns out that nonsense is a very successful strategy in this game.

The other fun new experience of this GenCon for me was Hellapagos, a party game that starts out fully cooperative and then suddenly very quickly descends into murder and sometimes cannibalism. It was a social game that really felt like the first season of Lost. Everyone was working together to build a raft and catch fish, except for a couple slackers who just raided the wreckage for personal treasures. Much fun was had by all, including those who died when suddenly everyone started scrambling for the limited space on the raft. I, as one of those horrible slackers who spent a lot of turns searching the wreck, found a decent supply of bullets, which I traded 1 at a time to the only person who had found a gun, in exchange for her using them on people other than myself. In the end, 3 of the 8 players, including myself, made it back to civilization to tell the story of how we were the sole survivors of the wreck. Just don't ask about the barbecue.


Shortly after getting back from GenCon, I packed my suitcase a second time and headed to my favorite little (~1,000 attendees) local gaming convention, Dragonflight. I had originally planned to just go for fun, but at the last minute agreed to volunteer to run the Story Games Lounge when the usual volunteer dropped out. As it turns out, volunteering to run the Story Games room is itself a lot of fun.


First day of Dragonflight Game Convention:

GM'd an awesome double-length Psi*Run for 7 players.

Explored an alien planet in The Quiet Year

Lost a game of Snake Oil to the dreaded Fraud card

Played "2 Rooms and a Boom" till my brains hurt. It's a great social-deduction game, kind of like "Are You A Werewolf?" except everyone gets to play the entire game and know one has to die until the last couple seconds.

Won a game of Jetpack Unicorn. Honestly, I'm not crazy about this game. I think Superfight does the same thing, but better.

Played some more 2 Rooms and a Boom. (Across 6 games I've now been on both teams a couple times, been the bomber and been an Ambassador.)

On Day 2 of Dragonflight:

 GM'd Og the caveman RPG for 5 players. No use big words play Og. The cavemen met The Doctor, and caused a regeneration.

GM'd another successful Psi*Run, for 4 new players. Hallucinatory madness derailed everything in a delightful way.

Hosted a giant marathon Microscope timeline for 6 players. It was epic! One of the best-developed, most fleshed-out microscope games I've ever seen. These new players really picked it up quickly and dove deep into the game.

That night, I got the band back together! Playing in Laura Mortensen's annual midnight Urchin game, as my recurring character, Rory Wanker of the formerly famous Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickers. We're making a comeback, if only in my mind.

Other games played in the Story Game Lounge included more Quiet Year, some Zombie Cinema, and a few escapades of esteemed Baron Munchausen.

Day 3 of Dragonflight:

Played in a delightful Lego and d20s game run by Tim Beach. Two of the 5 players were kids, and they kept the game light-hearted and unpredictable. Tim did an amazing job of making the game work on the kids level and not lose the adults to boredom. Nearly all of my GMing experience in the last 20 years is with adults, but I can only imagine GMing for kids takes extra creativity, patience, and panache. Well done, sir.

Later that night:
I went to a birthday party at Zulu's game cafe. While there, we played a game of Dark Gothic. We all lost when the Shadows filled up in a sudden hurry. Quite the shame, as I was super close to winning, and probably could have done so in one to two more turns.


The next weekend:

Battlestar Galactica board game with old friends I hadn't seen in forever: Andy Collins, Gwen Kestrel, and Greg Collins (and their friend Ben). I was a frakking toaster the whole time, and I successfully destroyed the pathetic human fleet by breaking their morale. It was a solid game, and the humans came very close to winning. Possibly the closest game I've ever played of BSG. 

After that, we played Between Two Cities, which is a very clever cooperative drafting and tile-placement game where you're building a city together with the player on your right and simultaneously building another city together with the player on your left. I didn't do so good at this, coming in 4th out of 5th place. I love the entire-cooperative nature of the mechanics, and how that's counter-weighted by the scoring. It's a game that exists in a very unique head space. I want the players adjacent to me to do well, and any other players to do poorly, but I don't really have a way cause that second part. There's probably some deeper strategy I'm not seeing yet, but I can at least admire the novelty of this truly unique game.

We followed that up with Royal Turf. It's a Knizia game about horse racing and betting on horse racing. In the abstract the topic doesn't sound interesting to me at all, like if you said "want to play a game about racetrack betting?" I'd reply with "not unless it's Royal Turf". Every time I play it I feel like a) I'm really not very good at it,  and b) the game is surprisingly fun and enjoyable despite all that.

Then the wonderful Bobbie Hyde showed up to pick me up and we talked her into playing a round of Decrypto. It's a team code-guessing game, and we both really enjoyed it. If I didn't already own Codenames Duet, I would immediately rush out and by Decrypto. I feel Decrypto is a much better game than normal Codenames, but that makes it about equal with Codenames Duet (which is closer to codenames, but also generally a vastly improved version of Codenames itself).

So, it's been a summer cavalcade of new games and old friends. Pretty damn cool way to spend the days. And it ain't over yet. This weekend is PAX West! I will once again be running demos of Flying Frog adventure games. Sleep is for the weak.

Dragonflight game highlights

Last weekend I went to a local gaming convention, Dragonflight. It was a ton of fun. Because of my work and sporadic volunteering, this was the first game convention I'd attended in something like 5 years where I was actually off-the-clock and free to sign up for a full event schedule. Man, it was nice. I played the following games, including quite a few that were new to me:

• Night's Black Agents - The first of 2 different NBA sessions I played in, each set in a non-typical era for this RPG. Usually, it's a game of burned superspies hunting vampires in the modern day. Instead, this scenario was set in 1870 in the Ottoman Empire, with everyone playing real-life historical figures instead of modern superspies. I played George Stoker, surgeon, officer, and younger brother of the author of Dracula. 
• The Captain is Dead - a brightly colored cooperative board game about everything going wrong on a space ship all at once. The game was really solid. I have some minor concerns about replayability because there are card decks where every card in the deck gets played every session of the game... but I'm still probably going to buy The Captain is Dead in a paycheck or two.
• Prime 20 - Tim Beach's ultra-streamlined version of the d20 system, GM'd by Tim Beach himself. He did something fun for character creation: we built Lego minifigs from a big bag of Lego parts, and then quickly stat-ed those minifigs in Prime 20 mechanics. The adventure was a rescue mission that evolved into diplomacy when we learned the "abducted" villager had actually eloped.
• Thanos Rising - The first of many pick-up games of this Marvel-themed cooperative dicefest that I played this week. OMG, I played so much Thanos Rising. Every hole in my event schedule was filled with a round of Thanos.
• Night's Black Agents - My second NBA session of the weekend. This one was set within 24 hours of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We had a pretty cool chase/combat scene in a Berlin subway station.
• Cthulhu 7th - The new rules features in Cthulhu 7th Edition were enjoyable and meshed well with my gaming style and tastes. It seems like a more forgiving version of the game. That said, the GM had the Phobia Deck handy for when I found myself face-to-face with mind-bending horror. I drew the outburst of Violence card, and it colored the rest of the session. Pretty cool.
• Urchin - A recurring staple of my Dragonflight experience is the Saturday Midnight Urchin game. All those years when I was a volunteer or board member for Dragonflight, the midnight Urchin was the one game I'd make sure I always got to play. As is my tradition, I re-curred my favorite Urchin character, an outrageous over-the-top musician name Rory Wanker, who is forever chasing his (imaginary?) former glory in the music industry. I'm getting the band back together!
• Thanos Rising - So much Thanos Rising. Seriously, this game has no right being this good. It's a movie-tie-in by USAopoly that came out right after the movie did. That could have easily been a design disaster. How on earth did it end up being such a solid game? Shut up and hand me the dice.
• Dr Who: Time of the Daleks - This is a semi-cooperative dice game with some card and board game elements. It really nails the theme. If I had played it for the first time maybe half a year ago, I probably would have fallen in love with it. Unfortunately for the good Doctor, it's mechanics kind of scratch the same itch that Thanos does, but you can finish three games of Thanos in the duration of one Time of the Daleks, and Thanos is easier to teach to new players. Given all that, I just don't see myself buying Time of the Daleks.
• Gaslands - This game is everything I ever wanted Car Wars to be, but more elegant and much faster-paced. Our introductory death-race ended in a three-car-pile-up and massive explosion, in under and hour. I foresee myself buying and modding a bunch of Hot Wheels and Matchbox Cars in the near future.
• Thanos Rising - And we closed out the Con with another nail-biting Thanos struggle.

That was a fun weekend.

Focusing the Microscope

The last weekend of August was PAX, a huge convention here in Seattle. I ended up quadruple booked that weekend. I ran three RPG sessions in the Games On Demand area, spent a day with a friend from Chicago who was in town briefly for an unrelated business meeting, and then helped out a little at the Flying Frog Productions booth between other commitments. Triple-booked like that was intentional.

What I wasn't expecting was for Jury Duty to run long and eat two whole weeks just before the convention. People had to cover for me at my job while I was deliberating and convicting, and then I had to cover for them over the weekend to make up for shifts I missed. So I was going in to work at 6am each morning, throwing freight for 8 hours, and then rushing down to the convention center to do my hastily rescheduled volunteer work at the con. It was a very exhausting weekend, and came at the end of an entire month without a real day off (between three conventions, jury duty, and work, I had 8+ hours of commitments planned every day from August 4th to September 2nd with no exceptions). So wonderfully tiring.

3 days of painful deliberation.

Despite all that craziness, I had a lot of fun at PAX. The three RPG sessions I facilitated ( two games of Microscope and one of PSI*RUN) were all highly enjoyable laugh riots. Natalie and Morgan from Games On Demand were able to provide me with an extra one-day PAX badge so my friend Brendan from Chicago could actually attend the convention with me on Sunday. That was pretty damn cool of them.

Me and Brendan just outside the convention.

The Games:
The first Microscope game I ran was an exploration of a post-apocalyptic setting, with Mahmood, Quintin and Brian. We chose that both of our end points (the start and the finish of our tale) would be nuclear explosions. In between those mushroom cloud bookeneds, we'd be spending time with a mining community that took shelter underground to survive the end of the world. Most games of microscope cover a stretch of made-up history running hundreds or thousands of years. This one, however, was measured in decades, and saw a lot of recurring characters as a result.

All three of these players were amazing. They were hilarious when it was appropriate to be so, and really dove into the world-building during the less flippant scenes. Voice acting and characterization were really rich, so you got a sense of this fictional community and its problems. We built a great palette, including the wonderfully fresh "RULE #7" which forced us to avoid stealing characters or plotlines directly from pop culture. Tropes were still okay, but everything needed it's own fresh spin. The rule was placed mostly to prevent Quintin from just lifting characters whole-cloth, but to his credit he stepped up and did a marvelous job bringing in new fresh ideas and being very respectful and conscientious of the rule.

Subplots involved rigged local elections, a justice system devolving into gladiatorial games, a war with the next town over (Greenspring) for very petty reasons, nordic naming conventions, deserters from a nearby military base usurping power within the town, sensitive data stored on milspec e-readers, three months of nearly-daily drone attacks from an unknown enemy, and goat-based bestiality.

Microscope palette for Mining Town #37b

The goat fucking was my fault. (Not a phrase I utter lightly.) We were having an in-character argument in a tense scene and my opponent said that he had a confession to make. Since the confession was almost certainly going to be the revelation that he'd helped my Mayor character rig the elections in a previous event (years in the past), I felt the "need" to head him off at the pass and discredit his testimony. "There's no need to confess. We all know about the goats, Scott. There's just so few of humans left after the nuclear war, so we've all agreed to look past your repeated visits to the barn." And everybody just rolled with it, from then on and for the rest of the game in every scene involving any of those characters, it was just taken as fact that Town Clerk Scott Johansen was officially a notorious goat-humper.

Another great moment in the game involved unexpected revelations about a mysterious sniper. Early on we'd alluded in-character to there being stranded units of some sort of Chinese army on American soil during the run-up to the first nuclear exchange. So when a few characters went off on a quest in one later scene, I chose to introduce the "Unknown Sniper" character mostly as a plot device to be overcome on the way, and again I heavily implied (by way of equipment and vehicle choice) that the sniper was from the remnants of one of those Chinese units but never established it as definitive fact. In a later scene, Mahmood played the same sniper that I had, and when he did so he revealed she was actually sent by the Mayor (a prime mover in several previous scenes) to ensure the quest (which would have undermined the Mayor's authority and power) failed. That was a brilliant turn of events that I did not foresee. Well played, sir.

Note as well that one of the restrictions on the palette was that there are fewer than 1,000 bullets available in the entirety of our timeline. Brian tracked that religiously. He noted every gunshot on-camera, and assigned bullet costs for off-camera conflicts. In the end, 809 bullets were fired. Brian also played a recurring gunsmith/gunrunner character, who had a penchant for boobytraps, as well as selling blank cartridges to those he didn't trust. So many good moments in that game.

Emergent Complexity:
 I've said this before, but I'll reiterate it. "No" statements are of great importance and value when starting Microscope. Some folks just put "Yes" statements on the Palette, but I find that "No" statements impose interesting limitations and force people to get creative. Too many "Yeses" can make your game messy, and you can often get away with just laying down the things you're dead-set against.  Here's the entirety of the palette from the second game of Microscope I ran at PAX:

A streamlined minimalist Microscope palette.

 This second game started with an odd and unique premise. It was all about bugs and insects. Our start and end points were "Pre-Sentience" and "Ordinary Again (Our Reality)". In between, we'd tell the multi-generational tale of intelligent arthropods rising to the top of their food chain, building multiple civilizations and figuring out dimensional physics so they could interact briefly with our world before somehow losing the ability to reach between worlds. None of that showed up in the palette, it was just in our basic premise. All we felt the need to say in the palette was what we didn't want to see, and this keep it tight and focused. Astute readers will notice that "Rule #7" was reprised --- I'd told this group (two of them strangers, and the third a person I'd gamed with before at GwenCon several years back) about the previous night's pop-culture ban and they fell in love with the idea behind it.

All of these factors together forced us to really think outside the box and try new things. There were elements of Alternate History, Cosmic Horror, a scene about the devil's successful efforts to eliminate hominid (and more generally mammalian) life on the bug-world, communication barriers and societal differences between different bug types, a ton of 6-legged characters, fire-ants with pyrokinesis, bug-on-bug violence, a clan of stickbug/spider hybrid ninjas, pscientist and inventor (and eventual speed-based superhero) Phineus Polonius Pillbug, and a never-ending series of puns. Oh, dear God, the puns. I will not repeat them. Brian (the guy I'd gamed with at GwenCon years ago, _not_ the same Brian as played Microscope with me the night before) loved to make bad jokes and worse puns... but he also came up with the amazing idea of exploring the politics and religion of dimension-hopping sentient insects, so I've got nothing to complain about overall. Another great game.

Tragedy + Time = Comedy

In addition to the usual cards for periods, events and scenes that always show up in microscope (for example the cards surrounding the devouring of the queeen, above), we made other use of spare notecards figuring out ways to make the game more insectoid. We spent a lot of time, energy, and flash cards on trying to emulate all the non-verbal ways that intelligent bugs might communicate with each other. "If anyone would like to smell my pheromone trail, you may read these notecards and learn what they reveal..." was announced to the room in several scenes. Which was dangerous, because within the setting, "the devil" was a contagious and willful scent that could drive entire hives wild. (And again, nothing like that was expressly listed in the palette, it just grew up organically during play.) It was pretty cool.

Rediscovering something about myself.

 I wrote the following in the days between GenCon and Dragonflight, but didn't have time to edit/polish/post it then. This rambling digression really isn't about gaming, it's more crazy talk about my life. If you're just here for house-rules and game reviews, you can skip this post (and the previous one) and go click on the links down the side of the page instead.

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Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for both of the organizations mentioned below (Dragonflight and Flying Frog Productions), not an employee. While I do sometimes speak from a position of some authority in my work for Dragonflight, I do not speak in any official capacity for Flying Frog (I'm just a volunteer who helps when need with playtesting and teaching demos). Any opinions expressed in this post are mine, and mine alone, and should not be taken to represent any official positions of either of those two organizations. This isn't really a post about those groups, it's a post about my life, parts of which just happen to occur in the vicinity of those groups at the moment.

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Something I rediscovered about myself this week at Gen Con. I really enjoy hard work that culminates in other people being entertained. There’s this great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes from a long day of effort, especially when that work puts smiles on other people’s faces. That’s why I loved running the 50-player LARP and all those big Magic: The Gathering tournaments back in the day. It’s why I loved even the moments of set-up and tear-down before and after GenCon this week, and it explains what I find so fulfilling lately about my physically demanding job at the grocery store (at the store I don’t bring people entertainment or fun, but I do feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of most days).

About 5 years ago or so, a crushing malaise crept quietly into my life, slowly sapping my confidence and eventually dooming my marriage. As the pain and unease overwhelmed me, I responded by withdrawing further from the world. I kept thinking I just needed more time to myself, and I trimmed my social calendar down to a nub. It is so clear now that this was a self-defeating response. For three years I pulled back “for introspection and healing” and it just got worse. The health issues that I thought were the cause of my hardships just grew more dire the more I retreated, because it turns out they were merely symptoms of my lack of self-esteem. The more I worried about them, the more I tried to hide my Spasmodic Dysphonia, the worse all my problems became.

But this is not a story that ends in despair. Just in the past two years, I’ve started getting better instead of worse. I identified the change in trajectories and have been getting excited about it, but until this week I had misidentified the turning point. I thought (incorrectly) that my healing started when I hauled a bleeding friend (Sarah Bergstrom) safely off a mountain. Truth be told, while that day ended in victory, it was emotionally traumatizing for me at the same time and probably resulted in minimal net change in my long term mental state. As epic as that tale is, I realize now that what’s been actually fixing me these past two years has been a little more mundane, and it started a week before she fell off the cliff in the first place.

Since getting drafted by Mark Walters to help with Dragonflight two years ago, I’ve been feeling much better about myself every time I work a long day to help others have a fun. When the website at Dragonflight crashed last year, I stepped up and busted my ass to make sure the convention went on (with paper sign-up sheets). It was exhausting and prevented me from getting to play games most of the con, but it felt so good. The show went on because of me. That was a major victory, and a huge bolus of actual healing from my long-denied psychic wounds took place that weekend. The next weekend was the struggle on the mountain, and they came so closely together I failed to identify which victory started the healing process.

While I was on the floor at Gen Con this week teaching people a new game, fielding questions from strangers, and wrangling up players for demos, I felt like I was King of the World. All my shyness and social insecurity fled away. Then in the evenings, when I’d get to relax with smaller groups of friends and friends-of-friends, the shy retiring Rolfe would return with a vengeance. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it. Why was I confident and strong in a room full of thousands of strangers, but so darned quiet when it was half a dozen of us Frog people, several of whom I’ve been gaming with for months? On the last day when we where rushing to break down and pack up the booth in time to catch our flight, why did I feel so happy and strong? Why did I find it so easy to joke around with  the other volunteers when we were “fighting” over who got to use the packing tape, but so hard to find the courage to talk to those same people when we were sitting right next too each other in the airport? Apparently I’m brave when I’m working, but a bit timid when at rest.

In the last few days and nights leading up to me flying to Gen Con, I was putting in full work days at the grocery, rushing home to do online administrative stuff for Dragonflight for a few hours, then carpooling up to the Flying Frog studio to pack boxes full of miniatures onto a big truck, and then coming home for a tiny bit more Dragonflight email trouble-shooting before squeaking in an hour or two of sleep. It was insane, and I loved it, and I feel like it was really good for me.

Holy crap! Am I in danger of becoming a workaholic? That kind of schedule is not sustainable. Does it matter, if it’s healing me? There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m healthier and happier right now than I was 2 years ago, despite the fact that large portions of my life fell apart less than 2 months ago and I find myself crying over random memories. It is all so weird. Is there a way I can reconnect with the braver version of myself without burning myself out? I hadn't seen that part of me in years. Is the solution to volunteer for every imaginable event until the boxes around the days on the calendar start to burst from the pressure? I have some serious soul-searching ahead of me, and _so_ much healing to do, but somehow hope is easier for me to envision now than it has been in years. That's gotta count for something.

Catching Up With The Summer Of Extremes

It has been a while since I blogged. Life has been far more complicated than usual, and gaming has been in "feast or famine" mode this summer.  2015 has been terribly extreme. The good parts have been really truly wonderful, but laced between them has been some absolutely crushing bad news for my personal life, from which I haven't completely recovered.

Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for both of the organizations mentioned below (Dragonflight and Flying Frog Productions), not an employee. While I do sometimes speak from a position of some authority in my work for Dragonflight, I do not speak in any official capacity for Flying Frog (I'm just a volunteer who helps when need with playtesting and teaching demos). Any opinions expressed in this post are mine, and mine alone, and should not be taken to represent any official positions of either of those two organizations. This isn't really a post about those groups, it's a post about my life, parts of which just happen to occur in the vicinity of those groups at the moment. 

Let's just start with the elephant in my (entirely new) room. After over 14 years together, Sarah and I are getting a divorce. (That's why you'll no longer see anything about me being a "kept man" in my bio on this site.) It came on suddenly, without really any warning for me. There was some weird tension for a couple of weeks, but it started while my mom was visiting for 2 months, so I misinterpreted all the tension as being just a function of the extended house-guest. Then, boom!, "I think maybe I don't love you anymore", out of nowhere, followed by a demand for divorce just one marital counseling session later. No fights. Not much effort spent trying to fix things, either. Just done and gone in a hurry. One minute I was a house-husband, the next I'm a grocery-store clerk living alone. (Apparently, she'd been unhappy for some time, and I just didn't see the warning signs at all.) I'm still working through it. That much is essentially public record and I don't feel I'm betraying any confidence in sharing the story, such as it is, of our sudden dissolution.

Both of my RPG campaigns (an Everway campaign, as well a Dark Heresy campaign using a hybrid of Warhammer 3rd and Edge of the Empire rules) collapsed in the process of the rapid separation. She's been a player in every multi-session game I've run in all those years, and was my co-GM in the Everway campaign. So my most recent big creative outlets vanished. To be honest, I kinda crumpled there for a while. She started her life over pretty fast (from my perspective anyway),  but I've found it hard to get going again, at least on a personal level.  For the past few years I've been the quiet one, and she's always been our social scheduler. Charisma and organization are among her strengths. So, before I knew it, she was the one with invites to events, including regular RPGs on the evenings most of our friends have free, and I'm only this week finally trying to cobble together a group and a game. Now to be fair, I've still been attending the weekly rotating-GM one-shot group that I've been associated with over the past 6 years, but that group doesn't always meet regularly, and I've had no time (my hours filled with Dragonflight prep, see below) to GM anything myself. GMing has always been my first and favorite hobby. But more than that, the creative process of GMing is the way I recover from stressful days. GM prep work is my preferred way to fill dead hours and keep my brain busy enough that I don't obsess over the little things in life. So, the extended break from it has further slowed my own healing over the gaping wound in my life, at the same time that I suddenly have a lot more hours to fill and lot more little things feeling wrong.

I'm sure there's a large helping of green-eyed sour grapes of envy poisoning my perspective there, as well. There were a couple of weeks early in the separation where every time I got up the nerve to call friends to see "what are you doing tonight?" the answer was invariably "going somewhere with Sarah, so sorry but you're not invited" and that hurt. I know she wasn't maliciously out-scheduling me, it's just in her nature to plan something cool for every box on the calendar, just as it's in my nature to focus on the now and go with the flow. Problem was, my flow had gotten a little damned up. There were big things on the horizon, and I couldn't figure out how my social life was going to trickle around them. Which, convenient to the metaphor but unpleasant for me, meant I worried a great deal about washing up on the rocks.

Convention season was, at that time, just ahead of us. I'd swung an invite to attend GenCon as a volunteer helping the Flying Frog Productions team, and of course I was running the main ballroom as Board and Card Game Coordinator for Dragonflight the week after. Both of those were solid, upbeat accomplishments that I own, and can be proud of. That said, the invite I'd landed was for both of us to volunteer, and the tickets to Indianapolis were already purchased before we contemplated divorce, and she was signed up to be the Registrar for Dragonflight, too. So there was a lot of motivation to part with a functional friendship or at least a working relationship, rather than just kick and scream and break each others' toys. We seem to have pulled that off for the short term anyway, and with any luck we may actually be one of those rare few ex-couples that stay friendly over the years. I still have some sore feelings over the sense of rejection that comes from losing love, but things could certainly have gone a lot worse and been even more painful had either of us decided not to be so smart and adult about it. Life is a cooperative game, and it doesn't do anyone any good to mess with the other players at your table. I'll take my victories where I can get them, even snatching them from the jaws of divorce.

On that note of victory, I should add that both conventions went really damn well, and I've been invited back to help next time(s).  So that's really good. Hard work, but rewarding, and they gave me something to throw myself into instead of just sitting in a room by myself feeling pitiful. I think overall they did me a lot of good, even though it meant I was too busy every night leading up to the Cons to consider putting together the game that might have helped me de-stress. It's a trade-off. GMing sooner might have been more helpful, but these Cons required me to interact with people and not just lock myself up in my new little apartment. If I didn't have the Conventions to keep me busy, there's no guarantee that would have turned into "more time to GM" and not just "more time to wallow in my loneliness". Especially early on.

Apparently, I felt very strongly about that card.

First was the unending stream of games that was GenCon. I lost count of how many dozens of people I taught how to play Colonial Horror / Dark Gothic at the Frog booth. It was quite a few, many of whom went on to buy the game. In the evenings I hung with new friends on the Frog team, playing card games over drinks and slowly processing all the crazy new emotions just barely contained inside my head. Jason and Scott Hill (the brothers at the core of Flying Frog Productions) are two of the most generous people I have ever met, and they made us all feel like family. Hotel, airfare, food, con tickets -- all paid for, and all I had to do in return was spend my days teaching people how to play a game I really enjoy. I got my quota of much-needed fun that week, that's for sure. And for several weeks before that too, as the fine folks at Flying Frog have been inviting me up once-a-week for the past few months to help playtest upcoming Shadows of Brimstone expansions (many of which debuted at GenCon). That's been a series of very cool experiences. It's rather amazing just how well they treat their volunteers.

One night at GenCon they took us to True Dungeon as a group, which was staggeringly enjoyable, and very unique. Live-action puzzle-solving in a 3D life-sized dungeon, with a shuffleboard to-hit system and memorization minigames for the spellcasters. It was a lot of fun, and I definitely carried my weight by solving one of the puzzle rooms singlehandedly, and by scoring some high-damage spells during our fight scenes. Go me!

The weekend after that was Dragonflight. GenCon had over 60,000 gamers in attendance, and Dragonflight had under 800. That gives two very different experiences. One is roiling chaos, the other feels more like a community. (Though, as I said, the Flying Frog crew was my community while in the GenCon chaos, so I've been surrounded by friends this whole time.)  This was my third Dragonflight, so there were a lot of familiar faces, and I'd gotten a good sense for how the convention rolls along.

Dragonflight ballroom, on a slow morning hour.

It was my first year as Area Coordinator for the main room at Dragonflight, so I had a lot of responsibilities... and yet, it felt like less work than the previous year. Last year, we'd had a big computer problem, and I'd been "Johnny on the spot" retro-converting us back to a paper sign-up system when the website went down. That was grueling work, but worth it to keep the convention running in spite of tech failure. This year, I pushed to just use electronic/online for pre-registration leading up to the convention, and have paper sign-up sheets prepared in advance for the events. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, and it all went really smoothly.  Smoothly enough I was free to actually play a couple games during the convention. (Meanwhile, Sarah had similar impressive success at the Registration booth. Go, Sarah!) Multiple people have told me that this was the smoothest running Dragonflight in over a decade, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. Attendance was up 25%, but numerous people actually said it felt like it was down a little from last year because the lines were so short and it was so easy to get into a game or find a table. I went to a lot of trouble engineering the flow of the ballroom to make it feel that way, and I'm thrilled it paid off so well. Go me again!

That said, there were a number of other changes and improvements I was unable to implement this year at Dragonflight. I didn't get to everything on my list, partly because I was away at GenCon the week before, partly because it was my first year in this role and I underestimated how much work it would be, but partly because all the stress and craziness in my life eroded my focus and efficiency a bit this summer. Regardless, the convention still went well enough that people were impressed, and partly as a result I've been elected to the Dragonflight Board of Directors. So I'll get to implement my ideas next year.  And to be honest, the hours I put in in the last two months before Dragonflight were a little unreasonable anyway. I had around 400 games to coordinate -- I had to solicit GMs and game hosts, assign them rooms and tables, create a schedule and a map, approve listings on our web software, edit descriptions for the program, and answer a lot of questions over many months to make this all run so flawlessly on the weekend in question. The only person who had more work than me was Amy, our Convention Director (though I'm sure Ted, our Web Developer, would disagree with my assessment). Next year I hope to "hire" (it's an all-volunteer organization) an assistant to handle some percentage of the work. I've got a lot to be proud of, and have laid a solid foundation for even better events next year.

Not bad for a single week.

In the first 7 days of June 2015, I played the following games:

• Dark Gothic (semi-cooperative deck-building card game) x4 game sessions
• Shadows of Brimstone (cooperative miniatures board game)
• Pandemic: The Cure (cooperative dice game) x2 game sessions
• War of the Worlds (home-brewed RPG scenario)
• Ultimate Werewolf (8+ player bluffing/deduction party game) x7 game sessions
• Shadowrun Crossfire (cooperative deck-building card game) x6 game sessions
• Forbidden Desert (cooperative board game) x3 game sessions
• Dead of Winter (cooperative survival-horror board game) x2 game sessions
• Lego Avengers 1895 (home-brewed RPG scenario)

That's 27 plays total of 9 different games, with over 20 different people (ranging from as few as 2-3 in some of the games all the way up to 8-12 players per round of Ultimate Werewolf). Both RPGs were run by GMs I hadn't gamed with in four years or longer. Some of the games were pretty fast little things (Pandemic: The Cure can be pretty zippy), but there were several multi-hour games on that list (Brimstone, Dead of Winter, both RPGs). It's been a pretty great week in regards to restocking the fun after a recent gaming deficit. I actually had the opportunity to spend a little more time gaming than I did this week: I ended up cancelling an RPG session I was going to run on Wednesday because a player had a rough day at work and needed to call the night early. On top of all that, I spent 4 hours at an art museum this week, and took multiple long walks that added up to at least 10 miles.

I needed it, though. The past few weeks have been really stressful and exhausting (more about that some other time, perhaps). I really appreciated the chance to kick back and game my brains out for a few days.

Flying Frog Productions

On International TableTop Day last weekend, I ran a bunch of demos for Flying Frog Productions at Uncle's Games at the Crossroads Mall. I taught 14 people how to play A Touch of Evil: Dark Gothic that day, and Uncle's sold out of copies of the game I was running. It felt kinda good, resonating back to my time running a game store years back before we moved out to Seattle. I clicked well with the Flying Frog staff and volunteer team, and it sounds likely that Scott Hill from FFPwill call upon my services as a volunteer for future demos and events. So that's a pretty exciting development for me.

Yesterday at home, Sarah and I played another fun game session of Shadows of Brimstone (also by Flying Frog Productions). For those who are unfamiliar, Shadows of Brimstone is a big, RPG-like cowboys-vs-cthulhu dungeon-crawl dice-fest miniatures-based board game with really great character- and world- building, and lots of variety and replayability.  If that sounds like fun, you should go buy it now, because it really is the best of the dungeon-crawl genre. (Believe it or not, this is my really trimmed back, dialed-down-the-fanboy version of this post. The rough draft was painfully exuberant and about 5 times a long. Seriously, it's one of my all time favorite games.)

As I looked over my tally sheet where I record missions we'd won and lost, I realized that my wife and I have played about 30 sessions of Brimstone so far (maybe more as I realize today that there's at least two sessions we didn't write down on that log). Since most of our games have been with 4 players and lasted around 3 hours, it amounts to well over 350 "man-hours" of entertainment split between us and the various groups of friends we play it with. When we put up the money for a "Minecart" level pledge on the SoB kickstarter, it felt risky. My wife and I are not rich. We'd never spent that much on a single game before, let alone a game we hadn't even played yet. It was a big leap of faith, but luckily the game turned out to be great. I have _so_ gotten my money's worth already.

Shadows of Brimstone is already fun and engaging, and it's just gonna keep getting deeper and better as the expansions roll out later this year. I've talked to Jason and Scott at multiple conventions (I've pretty much been stalking them at their booths at PAX and ECCC ever since Brimstone was announced), and I'm very excited about everything they've told me is coming up. New characters, decks, monsters, missions, and whole other worlds. So many good treats in store for us! Here's a BGG thread I started about some of the cool stuff that they told me about at ECCC. I meant to cross-post it here at the time, and just got too busy to do so.

Highlights from Emerald City Comic Con

I went to the Emerald City Comic Con last weekend.  My wife joined me on Friday, but due to illness she had to skip out on the other two days of the con (and three days of work after that). Cons are better when you've got a friend to gawk with, but I still had a lot of fun despite being on my own for the weekend.

I ran two sessions of Psi*Run for the Games On Demand / Story Game Seattle booth. The first was a little disjointed and didn't really come together until the third hour of play. That happens sometimes with the game, due to its highly improvisational nature. The second session found its footing immediately, and just took off. One of the players posted "playing my new favorite RPG, Psi*Run" to her Facebook page. So that's definitely a success. Both games were over-the-top crazy, but I suspect the first group might have enjoyed it a little more if I'd reigned in the zaniness a bit early on and given them a more coherent faction of Chasers.

While at the con, I made frequent visits to the Flying Frog Productions booth. The Frog continues to impress me with their customer service, friendliness, and with the immense fun their games provide. They told me a lot of what's coming up in future Brimstone expansions, which deserves a post of its own here sometime soon. Now that I'm not nursing my wife back to health, I should be able to find time to type that up.


Other purchases I made last weekend included:

• 4 expansion decks for Shadows of Brimstone, including much-needed new artifact cards for Targa and Jargono and some more blanks just in case we burn through those in a hurry too.
• 2 expansion decks for Fortune and Glory.
• A die-rolling tray to reduce dice-related clutter when playing big board games. I've had one for years, and decided it would be useful to get a second one.
• Two expansion decks for Super Fight that add Locations and Scenarios to provide some context for the ridiculous battles in the game.
• A handful of custom Lego minifigs and accessory pieces. I have plans to use these in an RPG I'm running called BrickerWorld.
• An album by local nerd-rock group Kirby Krackle. Got it signed by the song-writer.
• The goofy godzillesque board game Terror In Meeple City.
• Crazy game and science themed nail art (for my wife) from Espionage Cosmetics. She can decorate her fingers in nebulas and dice.
• A gift for an out-of-town friend that I probably can't talk about until it shows up in his mailbox.

Beyond that, I played a few demos, geeked out a lot, and just generally had fun. It was a really good con.




EDIT: Oops, forgot to mention the expansion deck "Curse of the Werewolf" for Dark Gothic. It's a very small expansion, but solid. I had to build an entry for it on Board Game Geek it was so new.

Summer Disruptions - and OMG the summer is over, isn't it?!?

Back in Albuquerque, the summers were so hot that they had no impact on gaming. Sitting inside with a cold drink and few friends under the "swamp cooler" is a great way to spend a weekend when you live in a desert where there's next to nothing to do.  We gamed all summer long, and rarely missed a session.

It's just not like that here in Seattle. There's a million things happening in town every weekend, and you desperately want to get outside for the couple months where it's not necessarily raining. Even if you do feel like being indoors and geeky, there's usually some sort of major geek-friendly event going on in town, many of them based out of air-conditioned hotels and convention centers. Which meant that all my RPG campaigns went on hold for a couple months as everybody had scheduling conflicts. During that time, I served on the staff of two gaming conventions and then headed up the coast to a hippy-gypsy-circus near the border. Crazy times.

But now it's mid-September, and... Holy Crap! I need to be ready to GM Warhammer 3rd again on Sunday! Two months without building a dice pool, micromanaging A/C/E, or pouring over my copious notes about the plot...  I fear it's gonna be a painful session trying to get back into the swing of the rather crunchy system. We're deep into Book 3 of The Enemy Within, and I have to be ready to run the climactic final battle should my players push in that direction this weekend. Eek!  If you need me, I'll be buried under the cards and tokens having a last-minute panic attack. Which one of these NPCs was The Black Cowl, again?

PAX 2014 Highs and Lows

Wow. Pax was mostly pretty wonderful, though I did have one ugly Enforcer incident, and one very failed demo, both of which I'll whine about below.

Dragonflight is more my speed (the crowds of tens of thousands at PAX were at times overwhelming) but I certainly had a great deal of fun.

High Points:

• Flying Frog Productions blew me away with their sheer power of their awesome friendliness. My wife and I really connected with Scott Hill and Mary Beth Magallanes, and we gabbed with them quite a bit. They gave us lots of free stuff, a great deal on something too big to just give away, and then they go their whole staff to sign everything, and then gave us more free stuff so they'd have an excuse to sign some more things. It felt like we were reconnecting with old friends, not having our first real conversation with total strangers. It's cool to learn that the designers of some of my favorite games (I love A Touch Of Evil, and the demo I played of Shadows Of Brimstone was great) are such friendly, excellent people.  If you have money burning holes in your pockets, might I suggest you spend it on a Flying Frog game?

• Games On Demand was great. For those unfamiliar, Games On Demand is like going to the library during the con, except you're not checking out a book you're checking out an RPG to play, and the GM to run it.  My wife and I were volunteers. I ran three tables of Psi*Run for total strangers, including two amazing incredible games, and one just merely solid and enjoyable. My wife ran three tables of Microscope, which were, to quote one of her players, "Fucking _Metal_ As Hell!"  Good times.

• So many awesome things to spend money on! Dice, T-Shirts, RPGs, board games, video games, you name it. Expect a series of posts about all the cool stuff we bought, at least until the check for our internet bounces. Then expect smoke signals.

Low Points:

• Overall there weren't enough chairs or tables, and the lines were too long. With 70,000 people out there, it's hard to find a place you can just catch your breath for a moment. Random chairs in the various nooks and crannies and back passages would be wonderful. I don't quite get why they stuff 50 bean bag chairs into two places, rather than spreading them out across 10 or 20 different spots across the various floors, which I think would be a huge improvement.

• Absolutely pathetic demo of the Netrunner card game from FFG. The guy from FFG forgot to tell me two really important rules that resulted in me actually losing during my first turn, and then couldn't shut up about how he'd never seen anyone lose that quickly or make such a big mistake.

• One of the Enforcers (a bearded guy in the Indie Megabooth area sometime between 2 and 3 on Friday afternoon) was a total asshole too me, screaming in my ear from well inside my personal bubble because the heel of my right foot was across a line of pink tape I hadn't even known existed. When I tried to apologize, he flailed his arms and yelled more like he thought I was starting shit. His aggression actually drove me out of the convention center for more than an hour till I could calm down and cheer up, and I stayed out of that part of that exhibit hall for the next two days in case it was his assigned area. If someone on my staff behaved the way he did, I'd fire them immediately. The Enforcers don't have badge numbers or name tags, so there was nothing I could do to report him. I suspect his blue uniform labeled "Enforcer" had gone to his head. Seems like that word is just asking for trouble. At the very least that term has some risk of attract raging jerks to the position, and I suspect it was provoking a bit of Stanford Prison Experiment mentality too. I would strongly encourage the PAX organizers to change the labeling of their staff, but they'd probably just tell me I should just be happy the shirts read "Enforcer" not "Dickwolf". 

No Use Matrix Tables, Play Og!

I just signed up to run a session of Og: Unearthed Edition at the Dragonflight convention next month. I'll also be GMing it this weekend for a group of friends from my wife's workplace.

I just keep coming up with crazy ideas to spring at the poor cavemen.  Ran down to Top Ten Toys and Archie McPhee to get some megafauna and other props. Being a gamer is fun.

I'm also currently toying with the idea that a sheet of black construction paper and an old Icehouse set makes a good simulation of the table with the matrix of control crystals from the inside of a pylon in Land Of The Lost. The idea is to present the players with the sort of intellectual challenge that makes D&D gamers groan and start asking to short-circuit it with an Intelligence check... knowing full well that as cavemen, they'll just smash the device with rocks and clubs. It's your classic unsolvable puzzle situation, but this time no one has any delusions about needing (or being able) to actually solve it. I mean, I did work out a puzzle for it, but I'm not expecting the players to actually solve it, and the plot won't bog down regardless of whether or not they do. No use smart thing, play Og!

A good GM can save a bad system.

A good GM can save a bad system. I played several new (for me) RPGS this weekend at the Emerald City Game Fest, and I had a ton of fun. In spite of the mechanics. These games had ridiculous off-kilter mechanics, but the GMs kept the games rolling and provided more than enough color to overcome the flaws in the systems.

The first game was octaNe. The scenario was a riff on Big Trouble In Little China, and I gather that's not the usual setting for the game, but it was a lot of fun. Towards the end, the silliness meter cranked up higher than it goes in Big Trouble In Little China (and that's saying something, isn't it?). Ranma and Sailor Moon both showed up in the final scene, a couple PCs got replaced by their evil twins, things just got... odd.

All of which certainly justifies using some light-weight system (instead of, say, Feng Shui, or d20). Yet, I can't say I cared for octaNe. The mechanics were very unbalanced. The pregen I was playing had a Daring rating of 2, and (since the other pregens didn't) that meant I almost always acted first, almost always succeeded at every task, and ended every conflict with more plot points than I started with.

I can't imagine building any sort of dramatic tension in this system, given that on any die roll the PCs have at least a 71% chance of winning... the whole conflict. Because I was going first every round, I was constantly having to reign myself in, force myself to leave something for the other PCs to fight (or do). It was not easy.

I feel particularly bad for one of the players in our group whose best stat was Magic. Magic goes last each round, _and_ you have to pay plot points to activate it. In theory this is somehow compensated for by being broadly applicable and open-ended, but given the level of narrative freedom that any of the other stats already has, I can't imagine how that could possibly compensate for such drawbacks.

To add insult to injury, his second best stat was Charm... which sits in the middle of the initiative order. Ever try to make a social roll in the middle of the round, _after_ you comrades have already killed half the enemies? Oh, sure, on a success the rules let you narrate a sudden peaceful resolution, but it will rarely pass the disbelief test. "After you ambush and behead most of them, I convince the survivors that there are non-violent solutions to our disagreement." Sure.

Painfully bad system. I think the exact same scenario would have been far, far better with Wu Shu, Risus, PDQ, 3:16, F#, or any of a dozen other "fast and fun" systems. I can't think of any reason why I would want to use octaNe's system. Admittedly, I've never read the rulebook, so maybe there's something I'm missing here... but I doubt it.

Honestly, I'd rather just have everyone roll a single die at the start of a conflict and highest roll narrates how the entire conflict wraps up. It'd honestly be better balanced. As it was, I'd always go first, and nearly always had the freedom to end the entire encounter on that one roll, so spreading that around to the other PCs would have had to be an improvement. I have never, ever in my decades of gaming experience, had to fight so hard to keep myself from abusing a system. The flaws in octaNe are so obvious and horrid, it's amazing it ever made it into print (and even more amazing that there are supplements and expansions out there).

And yet we had fun. The GM did a few really interesting things outside of combat that really saved the game from its own conflict resolution system. His previous plays of the system had indicated that there'd be a plethora of plot points sitting unused, so he came up with a way to make them meaningful. He got these really fancy chinese envelopes and stuffed them with "fortunes". Clues, plot hints, solutions to puzzles, revelations of background info, and some real game-changers like "your character is actually a ghost". So, between scenes, we cashed in excess points for clues, and they really helped coax us along several possible plotlines. He also prepped color photos of all the locations alluded to in the clues (and many of the villains), so there was plenty of instant flavor and atmosphere, and a sense that we were "on the right path" even though it was free-form. Without these clever structural cues being available, I imagine our narrative freedom would have imploded the plot before the end of the second conflict scene. Well done, Mr. GM! I may just have to steal your red envelopes for my own future campaigns.

The Last GwenCon

Gwen Con X, the last Gwen Con ever, was this past weekend. After some troubles with a bus Friday night, Sarah and I were able to make it over there for 4 RPG scenarios and a couple short games of "Are You The Werewolf?" Overall, it was a great weekend, and I'd have been happy if any of these games had run twice as long as they did. All the games had some meaty in-character inter-party-conflict, with PCs arguing with one another in a way that echoed the bittersweet dissolution of our favorite Con. Happy to be there, saddened to go, there was a real sense of "let's go out with a bang" which manifested in some delightfully dysfunctional scenarios. Here's some highlights:

• We played in both of Tim Beach's lego games this year. Tim does these bizarre RPG mash-ups, with light rules so you can ham it up in-character. One of the games was a blend of several sci-fi franchises, with bits of Star Trek, BSG, Firefly, Terminator, Dr Who, and Galaxy Quest. The other was a "best of" game featuring characters and lego sets from the past 10 years of Tim's games at Gwen Con. Pretty crazy stuff, revolving around the love affair between Ash (from Evil Dead) and Catwoman (from DC Comics), while Dragons attacked Fort Legoredo and Zorro's horse played charades. In a lot of ways, Tim's games sum up the heart of Gwen Con for me, being scenarios you'll just never find anywhere else.
• For a more conventional RPG experience, I played Vampire: The Requiem for the first time. I've done lots of Masquerade in the past, but this was my first actual test of the "new" system. The rules are really a streamlined improvement over the older system, and it looks to be relatively easy to house-rule back in the setting elements of the previous edition that you might feel are missing. I took to it far better than I thought I would. Session was too short, but with solid character acting all around, and the most "personal horror" I'd seen in 10 years or so. My character nearly shot himself in the head, and three out of the 4 PCs really struggled with the beast within. The fourth quickly embraced that beast and became a real monster, which served as a great roleplaying foil for the other three.
• The academy award in the disfunctional party category was taken in a Cthulhu-meets-Cloverfield game that Michael Lee ran on Saturday night. It certainly wasn't a subtle scenario, and he really could have used a back-up character for the PC that died early, but it was a great game none the less. Two PCs were treasure-hunting archaeologists in it for the fame and glory, two were the Miskatonic University biologists who'd screwed them over, and two were the FBI agents investigating the other four. The scenario itself was short and sweet, and mainly just a pretense for the 6 players to bicker and threaten one another while a monster rampages in the background. You'd hate to have that conflict for a long-term game, but as a one-off it was a pretty clever device.
• The two games of "Are You A Werewolf?" were likewise short and faux-argument-laden, but extremely enjoyable as a result. One of them was the most ridiculous game of Werewolf ever, with literally zero normal townsfolk, and special identities for everyone.

A great send-off to the Con series that first caused my wife and I to move to Seattle. Saying "good bye" to dozens of "once a year friends" was hard, but in several cases it at least motivated us to finally exchange contact info and make some efforts towards seeing certain people more frequently.

We'll miss Gwen Con dearly, but at least it rode off into the sunset gracefully instead of burning out or imploding.

I missed the Emerald City Game Fest

Emerald City Game Fest is an annual free one-day gaming convention, put on by the same group that hosts the weekly Game Feast I regularly attend. Last year's ECGF was tons of fun. This year's con was last weekend, and I'd been looking forward to it all year.

But on the morning of, our car refused to start. We intended to go catch the second half later, but the car still wouldn't start, and the ECGF was way up in Kenmore... Okay not "way" up, if the car had been running, it would have been less than a half an hour drive. Instead, as it turns out, in order for us to arrive in time for the 2:00 game, we would have had to get on a bus at 12:08. We didn't realize it would take that long, and didn't even go look up the schedule till a few minutes after that.

In general, the bus-service here in Seattle is really good, but in this case, when taking a bus to far northern suburbs, it kinda sucked. I guess I've just been spoiled by my direct and easy route downtown.

Not technically Space 1889

Since the theme of the Emerald City Game Fest was Steampunk, both games I played in were set in 1889.

The second of those games was actually in the setting of "Space 1889", the seminal Steampunk RPG. It did not, however, use Space 1889's mechanics, which, I'm told are a little clunky for a one-shot. Instead, he used a system called "Science vs Savagery". At first, I thought it was homebrewed, but half way through I realized it was derived from some of Ed Texiera's "2 Hour Wargames". In other words, it was a rules-light skirmish miniatures system, shoehorned into being an RPG. That said, it was a brilliant move by the GM (whose name escapes me, sorry), as it made for fast combat and simple character sheets.

Brief complaints: PCs were a little fragile, and we got knocked out fairly often. The "taking fire" reaction chart favored the target a bit too much. We kept getting charged by the winged monkees we tried to shoot - I would have been happier with them (and us) ducking for cover more often.

On the other hand, since his plot hinged on us barely escaping alive, and having to sneak and fight our way back, it worked out okay. He threw overwhelming force at us in the first fight, and faded to black once we'd all been KO'd. We woke up "left for dead" in the desert, with our airship moored to the badguys castle. Survive the desert, find the back entrance to the mesa, disrupt the villains plans to unite feuding factions of barbarians to overthrow Brittain, steal our airship back, sabotage or steal Blavatsky's invisible airship, and escape. All in a days work.

He also did a great job with his NPCs. Specifically, Professor Blavatsky! (which needs the exclamation mark to catch the character) will be with me for a while. I'm chuckling as I write that. Superb, very memorable.

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I must say, I really took to the Space 1889 setting. Thomas Edison built a steam-powered airship and flew to mars, and the various colonial powers followed. Mars has some antigravity trees ("liftwood"), and there's apparently atmosphere in space, so you can literally sail from planet to planet. Liftwood airships are fun, adding the 3rd dimension to old-school naval battles is neat.

Like 7th Sea, it does a good job of blending familiar history with the mystery of supernatural/unexpected. The three martian cultures seem flavorful. As presented in the one-shot, the Canal Martians were roughly analogous to colonial India, the Hill Martians had Zulu and Native American influences, and the High Martians were Flying Monkees. Now, I suppose that could be interpreted as racism, but I'm confident it's not intended as such. I think the point is really to give you a hook on which to hang your concept of the various Martian types, so instead of being random anonymous aliens, they have a cultural niche. You get a starting point, but no smart-alec history buff (or armchair anthropologist) will be able to tell the GM how to run his game. That's my take on it, anyway. (It may also be that the Martians were grossly oversimplified for the sake of a 4-hour time block, I don't know.)

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I ended up playing a largely forgettable character, which I now regret. I'd played a flamboyant noble dandy earlier in the day, and so wanted to try something else. I knew I was going to be a Native American warrior in the game I thought I'd be playing this week (going to a free movie instead, it turns out), so I passed on the opportunity to play a Hill Martian scout. I ended up as an airship crewman with a dodgy past, and I never really found the character. I had lots of fun, but I don't feel I contributed much to other peoples fun (unlike the InSpectres game, where I was on fire), which is regretable. I tend to over analyze and self-depricate, so I probably wasn't as dissapointing as I imagined. Still, I could do better, and did so earlier in the day.

InSpectres 1889

Each year Emerald City Game Festhas a theme. You get extra raffle tickets for running a game that fitthat theme, and I think there might be other incentives that I'm justnot remembering. This year it was "Steampunk". About a third to a halfof the games in the program were in-theme, as were both of the games I played in.

The first one I played in was Saint George's Arms. It was an InSpectres game, run by Sophie Lagace.I'd played InSpectres recently, with mixed results. That game had fallen flat, but that was largely the players fault, and seemed like the sort of thing we'd not have trouble with on our second outing, so I was tentatively excited to give it another go. We'd gamed with Sophie before, 3 or 4 times before she moved to California. It was pretty cool that she and Edmund drove back up here for the free con they'd helped create, and we were glad to see them.

Standard InSpectres is basically Ghostbusters. This was Ghostbusters in 1889, so we could do some steampunk. We ended up with minimal steampunkishness, but had a blast anyway. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was found dead in his home, with possible occult causes, and so the Queen's own ghostbusters were called in to investigate. Sophie did a good job of creating an opening situation that was easy to grok (some sort of pixies or faeries had killed him) and riff off of. We lampooned the era, the spoiled gentry, the notion that England was the pinnacle of civilization and everyone else "savages". Lots of good tongue-in-cheekiness, and some zulu pixies.

InSpectres GMs get to sit back a lot, providing minimal structure and letting the players chew the scenery. Sophie did a good job of this, nudging us to new scenes when the plot slowed, calling for die rolls when needed, etc. Her administrative skills were showcased well. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it sincerely. If the InSpectres GM assumes all the work will be done for them, the game can bog down in a morass of meaningless meandering subscenes or zip to premature conclusion due to a string of good rolls that should never have advanced the plot. For a game that is so player-driven, it actually takes a good GM to keep it rolling, and Sophie was definitely up to the task.

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I played a flamboyant bit of puffery named Reginald Carter Fizzlebottom, Esquire, 58th in line to the throne. He was a talented athlete, a royal scholar, a foppish dandy, and a womanizing rake. Very fun. I'm a little worried that I've given Sophie a poor impression of me, though, as my two most recent characters in games she was present for included this windbag womanizer and a vampire with a host of undead brides. Oh, well...

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As is the case with InSpectres, things can get a bit whacky. Our pixies ended up being zulu-pygmy-pixies. They had glowing teeth that left glowing bite marks. They had tiny blowguns with poison darts, but you had to get hit by several of the tiny darts to get an effective dose. Taking photos of them stole their souls. Killing them by traditional means would actually make them regenerate into bigger, nastier bodies. The sounds that we thought were zulu drums instead turned out to be dozens of pixies beating eachother to death to inspire their own metamorphosis into combat-form-super-pixies.

I'm now sold on InSpectres. I ordered a copy from my friendly local game story (Gary's Games), which should show up in a week or two. I'm even more excited for the third session of the game, since we have yet to really make use of the Reality TV narrative structure the game assumes, or the campaign rules, and I think both will boost the game to a higher level. As with Wushu, InSpectres is a game that needs a good group to make it fly, but if you've got good players it's an awesome little pick-up game. Check it out.

Emerald City Game Fest rocks!

Last Saturday, I went to the Emerald City Game Fest. It's a free, one-day gaming convention. It was lots of fun. I wish it were longer, however. I'm pretty sure they only had the space (the Northgate Community Center) for 9 hours, including 8 of gaming and an hour of set up / break down, so things were a bit rushed. Still, for a free event, it was pretty awesome.

ECGF had board games, miniatures games, RPGs - the whole gamut. The only aspects of gaming they noticably lacked were computer games and hardcore CCGs. There were a couple of vendor tables, but due to the tight timing, I didn't get to visit them. If they'd scheduled an hour-long lunch break between events, I think the gamers and vendors would be serviced better. I'll mention it next time I see the group (I know 5 of the organizers of the event, and game with 3 of them nearly every week), since it may help make their sponsors happy.

Those minor complaints about time aside, I got far more than my money's worth out of the free con. I played in two RPGs, about which I'll post more in a couple minutes. I also won two prizes in the free raffle drawings. One drawing was for a pick from the table of swag - which included a Cyberpunk 2020 book we didn't already own (Corp Book 3). The other drawing was for two tickets to a sneak preview of The Transporter 3, which we'll be seeing tonight.

Other minor swag included neat grenade stickers for some upcoming Punisher sequel (too bad they're bigger than blank white cards) and flyers for gamestores and cons I'd never heard of. This town has more cons and gaming opportunities than any other city I've ever lived in.

The big table of swag had a copy of the book I wrote part of, so I signed it for them. I felt famous again, but just for 15 seconds this time. :)