Last Saturday my beloved wife got the day off work so that she could watch the kids while I went to play all day at EndGame’s Mini-Con. And they say angels only are only in heaven!

Unlike other conventions this one was short enough that I can actually go through each game in a normal review (rather than a synopsis of the highlights). Happy reading.

My first session was in Bob Kuzmeski’s “Night of the Reich” Mutants & Masterminds game. It was four color heroes done very well. I had the happy time of playing a “leave it to beaver” Kid Freedom who spent the entire game drooling over the women folk and constantly being shocked when the bad guys did sneaky things. Bob’s game was really well prepared and gave the players plenty of options, all of which advanced the story in one way or another. My personal favorite moment was realizing that the “Trashman” was a woman (although an alien woman who looked like an acrogenous trash monster) and had been hoping that Kid Freedom would ask her out. Calling her “Trash-ma’am” at the end was probably my best line all day. Bob is really good at throwing enough clues to keep people going but not enough to allow the players to skip over the plot. We were all the cities most cherished super heroes and an enemy we defeated five years prior had messed with the cities water supplies and sent out mind altering radio waves that convinced the whole city that we were in fact villains who had been conning the city out of funding for years. Oh… did I mention they were Nazis? What better bad guy for heroes to fight!

After Bob’s game and a rather tardy dinner (never trust a hostess that says she can feed your party of 12 in fewer than 45 minutes unless the restaurant you visiting just got bought out by Taco Bell). I got into Brian Isikoff’s “Jisou-Seisen (The Children Crusade)” Steampunk Musha game. The core game was Iron Gauntlets (which I’m not familiar with) but apparently all of the PIG (Politically Incorrect Games) use a constant set of statistics with a variable rules set. Meaning you can make a character and play them with several different game mechanics without having to change anything on the character sheet. The idea that this was even possible is new to me and I’m really keen on the notion of telling stories through different mediums such as a very cinematic fast action system for fights and a much more abstracted system for political intrigue. As is we only used one mechanic (it probably would have torqued our noodles to have switched mid game) which was a dice-less one. Personally my experience with dice-less systems have so far (and continue to be) that anything is doable until the GM decides something needs to be really hard and then it’s impossible. Characters rarely ever fail and this game was no exception. Though the game had very little combat, the other conflicts could have potentially been dangerous and the system has a “fatigue” mechanic to represent characters exerting themselves (in any area physical, social, magical, mental, etc.) but I never saw a character be worse than “dazed” (a fatigue state that incurs no penalty) and the one time a character was injured (due to a explosion no less) the injury was very minor (it also was insufficient to levy any penalty). As Brian put it, the PIG dice-less system is really more about resource management (you have several expendables: experience, luck, and discipline) but in a single con game it was hard to determine if those resources would realistically ever run out.

Brian’s game however, was quite fun. The characters were diverse but still had a decent reason to all stick together (which is no small feat considering he used template character with no back story). The way he glued us together in the beginning is a method which I have already stolen and used not two days later in my Mage: The Awakening campaign game. After we had finished up the details on our characters (which was basically giving them a name and assigning a handful of experience) Brian went around the table and asked each player questions from their character’s perspectives. The questions were things like: Who is the leader of the group? Who isn’t pulling their weight? Who do you trust the most? Who is going to betray you? What does the character that belongs to the player sitting across from you do in their free time? Who is the go-to guy in the group? After doing this he asked if we had any other additions we wanted to make and a few of the players added some additional creative content. I can’t tell you how many small bonds were formed in that fifteen minutes of questions. Not only did we create a feel of what the group was like, we helped flesh out each others characters. Warning: this would be a very bad practice for a group that starts off with a very rigid background or description for their character or that had members who didn’t like having their characters affected by the whim of other players. For me, however, I loved the exchanges and plan to have some form of this in all of my future games. Thanks for that Brian.

Another great thing Brian did was let us set the stage for how the adventure started. Instead of wandering aimlessly or being assigned something right off the bat, Brian told us we were walking down a dirty street and wanted to know why we were there. I said (as my character was voted one of the two leaders of the group and was trying to assert his authority) we were going to see the Jun-Sow Kabuki theatre to talk to them about getting protection from the vicious Wakatari gang that has started to put pressure on them. Brian did a great job of not only validating my narrative but continuing to use the “menacing Wakatari gang” throughout the adventure (despite the fact that it really had nothing to do with gang fighting). The storyline was interesting but I think some of the players (me included) were a little unsure of the setting. It was clearly supposed to be Wild West Victorian era but there was Japanese and Chinese influence we weren’t really sure of the social norms. All together I had a blast and would try another round of Steampunk Musha, though I think I would opt to use another of the PIG mechanics if for no other reason than to see how well the game and the characters interact with one of the other options.

One last pleasure I had was meeting Paul Tevis of Have Games, Will Travel. I was hoping that I would have been in a game with him but I’ll have to try another time. I did talk to Paul, Carl Rigney and the EndGame Chrises after Carl’s “Zombies in the Vineyard” and all four of the guys sounded like they had a great time facing ineffable horror.