Category Archives: Convention Gaming
Shameless Self Promotion
If you’re reading this blog, then chances are you like gaming. Do you know what’s better than a reading a gaming blog? I know, there isn’t much in life that’s better than reading MY gaming blog, but playing some games at RetCon: Long Island’s Gaming Convention is… especially if they are games written and run by me. (Games written and run by my good friend Aenaiyah over at Adventurer Misadventures are likewise sure to induce sanity loss.)
Right there at the top of your screen you’ll see some links to my previous RetCon modules: “Asylum”, “The Naos of Serapis”, and “Your Safety Is Our #1 Concern”. This year I’ll be debuting three entirely brand new adventures for “Mage: The Awakening”, “Hunter: the Vigil”, and “World of Darkness: Innocents”. Stay tuned to this page for module teasers!
Registration for RetCon 2012 is currently open, and you can save a sweet 25% if you register online before the end of this month. That’s money you can be spending on dice, T-Shirts, and a vast array of cool stuff in the dealer room! You know you want cool stuff, so come join us at RetCon: Long Island’s Gaming Convention this August. Meet some people, play some games, buy some stuff, fun will be had – THIS I COMMAND!
I’ll kill your character, I mean see you (yeah, that’s it) there!
I-Con 31 FTW!
I-Con was a blast! Not only did I support the economy by spending far more money than I should have, I got to see some people I don’t get to see nearly often enough, met some new cool people, and oh yeah… there was gaming!
There was lots of gaming.
And the gaming was good. Nay… great!
In my Hunter game alone we had a folks bribing their way through the “indigenous inhabitants” of the undercity with pain pills, fun with flamethrowers, the building of a staircase down to the bottom of a sinkhole using accident wreckage and discarded construction materials, an officer of the law shooting someone in the face for trying to prevent his friend from being possessed by an Azlu, a giant demonic creature being attacked by a crazy woman with a wrench, cleansing fire, an ambulance driver who decided to “stay here to keep an eye on the accident victims… in case, you know… they might need help or something” (his Vice was Sloth), did I mention the flamethrowers?… and these weren’t even the prize winning moments!
Though charging the enormous half-human half-monstrosity with a wrench did deserve an honorable mention!
Ultimately though we all agreed that the Paramedic using her knowledge of chemistry to turn her jury-rigged “flamethrower” into a massive ball of explosive, fiery death (GM Approved!) and the Subway Worker who attempted to flamethrower the face off of someone with a nosebleed because it may (or may not) indicate an Azlu possession in the name of the Lord were simply too awesome to not walk away winners!
Although, honestly, the Paramedic deciding that it would be a great idea to try to dig an Azlu out of someone’s head with an epic sized pair of tweezers was also incredibly entertaining! (Brava Paramedic!)
And that was just one game! That doesn’t even begin to cover the Mastigos who twisted up the meanings of “Vulgar Spell” and “Covert Spell” to try to get a Seer of the Throne to unleash Paradox on himself, the Obrimos who turned gravity on and off to slam the guy into the ceiling and the floor, and then the ceiling, and then the floor… over and over again… or the fact that this time I was the Acanthus, and my Acanthus was the GM! Revenge is mine! Sayeth me baby!
Demons were slain, Canopic jars filled with fresh human entrails were hurled out of penthouse windows (sorry pedestrians!), I told my Cabal Mate in the future to leave a note in my wallet so I would have it in the past and naturally didn’t actually flip the card over to see said note until it was too late to be of use (and I still say it was all that purple-haired Acanthus’s fault we wound up three days ago and not mine but the memory bit was absolutely all Lyric’s fault!), and sweet sweet stuff was purchased. With all of the tables of gaming going on around me (had to be a few dozen tables) I can only imagine how many crazy stories unfurled last weekend. A successful con indeed!
Now I’m looking forward to doing it all again for RetCon!
Hope to see you there.
Letting My Geek Flag Fly
It’s been a busy week getting ready for I-Con 31!! I’m very excited to be GMing at this year’s event. In fact, I’m all over the schedule, running events for “Mage: The Awakening“, Generic “World of Darkness” (Humans vs Supernatural), and “Hunter: The Vigil“. So yeah, I’ve been busy. Even the adventures I’ve run previously need to be combed through so that handouts that have been previously handed out are replaced, and of course it’s always nice to refresh my memory as to how the adventure is supposed to run.
And then of course there’s the adventure debuting at I-Con 31: “Your Safety is our #1 Concern”. (See Link Above) I’ve never run “Hunter the Vigil” before so it was a bit of a challenge making sure I had everything together properly, and scaling the challenge to the characters. Of course, this being a convention and not a campaign I only have to worry so much about whether or not there is a TPK. After all, even a party wipeout can be lots of fun as long as the fight is worthy of drunken tales in the hotel bar later that evening. I believe that in that regard I have a winner! (Of course, I may be biased.)
Honestly, the bigger challenge in planning convention events for me is one of pacing. In my campaign it doesn’t matter if they don’t get as far as I figured they would in one session. In fact, sometimes that’s a blessing as it gives me a bit of a leg up on the next session. Conversely, I’m all too used to my players going off plan and I can improvise around their weirdness. I’ve grown used to their weirdness. At I-Con I’ll have all new weirdness to adapt to, which should be interesting!
Of course my bigger concern is that at a convention game there is no next session. You have to make the one session count! It has to have enough going on to fill the time slot without feeling like filler, and you have to reach the final challenge before the session ends. I tend to like planning a bit more than I think we can cover, with modular areas that can be dropped if we’re running short on time without negatively impacting the story’s flow.
One of my favorite things about planning a one-off convention game though is the researching. I’m kinda weird like that. I love wandering aimlessly through internet searches for keywords like “abandoned building”, or “subway urban legends”. I’ve found some incredibly inspiring things that way, that help me give the scenario that splash of reality that I like to bring to the World of Darkness. It may not be exactly like the world we know (especially if I’ve messed up my physics a bit since I haven’t had to calculate breaking distance in… well in quite a while let’s leave it at that!) but it should be close. A splash of realism makes the event hit that much closer to home, which is always creepier.
See you on the gaming track!
Mage Mistress 