This past week I went to the GameHole Con in Madison, Wisconsin. For the 12th iteration of the convention, it was me, along with 8,000 other gamers, plus three of my friends, ranging from con-experienced to con-inexperienced.
GAMES I RAN
This year I took it easy and only ran two 3-hour sessions of Miranda's Nightwick Abbey. However, I decided to not make it easy on myself by running one 9-12 PM and then 8-11 AM to the following morning. Ugh.
Similar to the ReaperCon games I ran this year, I used Nightwick's unique geomorph setup to scramble together a singular level made of elements of Levels 1 & 2. This is a unique facet of Miranda's design I've never really seen in any other dungeon. I've more thoughts on it I'll have to share in another blog post.
Then, using Shadowdark's 0-level rules, I ran a funnel where 5 pairs of villagers had to escape the Abbey after being lured there via wine, song, and a vicar who was a most terrible shepard of his flock.
Because Shadowdark uses luck tokens, I also cobbled together a quick mechanism to track different decisions made in the halls of Hell. So PCs started with 1 virtue token used for re-rolls or forcing me to re-roll. But they could gain vice tokens when bargaining for power or performing acts that were particuarly self-serving.
After seeing at ReaperCon how hard it was to remember which of the grey villagers minis were which, I decided to paint each pair a distinct color, which worked out really nicely and pushed me to get my painting station set up. But I have to admit, from an old-school perspective, black with white dry brushing is a cool effect.
How did the game play out?
The 9:00 PM game was novel out of the gate by the appearance of not one but 3 "VIG" badged persons. Which got me a little sweatty, given they shelled out the big money to play at this con so I didn't want to suck. As a group, only 1 or 2 answered "yes" to the first question of if their characters would murder for a weapon to augment what was left of their equipment. This group tried to stay together for the most part but but slightly undone when they turned north, then back west, which was toward their starting point. Eventually, they found themselves cornered by the Blind Brothers and viciously cut down.
The 8:00 AM group, despite the early morning hour, was no less willing to embrace the darkness. This group all agreed to murder someone at the party for a 1d6 weapon. Then, the group proceeded to go on the offensive against the Abbey and ganged up on the marrow-eating creatures in the room with them as well. This group's aggressiveness served them well and they were certainly willing to cut a deal with the Abbey. This included being betrothed! This group also had a very virtuous action by a member who prayed for divine intervention from the God of Law at a critical moment and rolled a nat 20! He saved his party but slain in the process; however, he ascended to heaven even in the Abbey. The rest of his party was not so much. They ended up going into the light, which is the burning, infinite gullet of the dragon of Hell.
But in the end, despite the long odds, each group seemed to really enjoy their time in these hell-haunted halls of Nightwick Abbey.
GAMES I PLAYED
Pirate Borg: I gotta say our "Harbor Master" did a very nice job introducing us to this Borg-hack. Much like its parent ship, Pirate Borg is very flavourful and does a nice job through various random tables of building great characters.
My pirate, Philip the Unlucky, and his crew explored a mysterious island, battled a giant crab, and stole a bunch of treasure! All aboard our sloop named "Dogg" led by our youngest member Capt. Waffles, who was surprisingly not murdered by the fay spirit he conjured.
Heroquest: A blast from the past as my original version was sold in a garage sale many moons ago. This game was run by Doug Hopkins who is the current line designer for Heroquest. The adventure we were playing was from the expansion that was designed by Joe Manganiello-- so a cool double twist to this experience.
At the end of the game, I won a set of specialty dice that I gave away to our youngest player, given he and his friends were big fans of the game. But I didn't walk away totally empty-handed because I got a free quest and a pad of blank sheets featuring the Heroquest board to design your own adventures.
Oh, Doug is also the current lead on one of my other favorite board games, Talisman, so it's really great to get a chance to hang with him at the con.
Shadowrun: In middle school, I made friends with a guy whose favorite setting was Shadowrun so, like Heroquest, this was mainly driven by my nostalgia. I had also forgotten how many d6's are really needed to play this game so it was laughable I showed up with a paltry mix-and-matched set of 5.
The setup with protecting a rising influencer star at a gaming convention like TwitchCon, but in the future. I played a pre-gen Smuggler class, but much to the GM's delight/dismay, kept running Edward Norton like a "Face" class. Turns out our charge was more than meets the eye- surprise! But it was a good time. We convinced a second set of runners to be our B-team, we foiled a drone attack, and had a final showdown.
Along the way me and the Street Samurai player had assembled a new concept album for our young pop-star. So coming soon from Tigre: Witness Protection- You Can't Hide My Shine (title) with tracks "Boom! Drones on Fire" and "My Technological Romance"
PEOPLE I MET
I did drop by a panel on building a YouTube RPG presence because it featured noted D&D folks Ben Milton and Justin Alexander. It was an interesting hour about some of the realities behind the screen. Notable for me was:
- The social media company's algorithm controls a lot of what is actually seen and you have to be really big for them to even bother sending you an email that something has changed
- Content in a series rarely does well beyond the first item in that series because the audience just halves after each subsequent engagement
- All the panel agreed that while some sorta live-play + DMing advice would be good that sorta content would take too long to produce and suffer from the same sequence problem; ideally, such a thing would have to be edited down from 1-3 hours to 10-30 minutes of the "good stuff" maybe making it hard to follow
- A lot of the biggest "stars" in the RPG space had already made a following from something else and brought those eyeballs to their YouTube channel; same folks often have additional editing teams and or experience to help out
Cut to me doing just that...and Doug was ready with an opinion! It actually prompted a neat conversation about music, art, and the state of RPGs and D&D. It was really interesting and was cool to chat with him. I learned three things that Doug has
- Several playlists culled from an old G+ thread of metal music which was cool
- A set of Talisman houserules he likes to play with to speed things up
- A war game called Dog Storm which a wargame consisting of bands of 5 repurposed minatures and found terrain- occasionally a storm of plastic dogs are thrown on the battlefield- if they touch your mini it dies instantly.
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