The first big Convention of 2008 is over and done. This is going to be really long, and boy am I actually surprised by that.

I may have mentioned this before, but I always dread going to Dundracon. I don’t know why. But every year, as DDC comes closer, my inner child holds his breath and stomps his feet and then shouts “I DON’T WANNA GO!!!!” and then holds his breath again.

And every year, when I finally get there, inner child has fun and doesn’t even thank me for making him go.

This year was better (much better) than last year, even if I didn’t play as many games as I did the previous year. Then again, over the past year, my standards have changed – I’d rather play a really good four hour game than play in 16 hours of crap games.

Warning: This year, rather than using people’s user names, I’m just going to use their real names.

Friday started out kind of slow. Cil stayed home from work so that we could drive to the Con together. I had packed most my stuff up the night before. The drive up was a little tense, mostly because of personal things I’d rather not go into. (Don’t worry – as far as I can tell, things are fine between Cil and I. She just gets anxious more easily than I do. My meds keep me level most of the time. Like a calm, relaxing white noise generator. mmmmmmmmmmmmm.)

Anyway, we got up to the San Ramon Marriott pretty quickly. Parked, got our hotel room, hung out there for a bit, got food, went back to the room to eat it, met up with Mike B., got stuff from the car to the room, and then Cil left with her friend Lisa to go do scrapbooking or something.

Mike worked on his game, and we kind of talked about the Con. It was around this time that I looked at the seminars and saw that there was one going on about how to run horror RPGs.

I’m a fan of horror movies and horror novels and horror short stories and horror comics, and I’ve tried to run horror games, but I’ve kind of drifted more towards modern fantasy than horror, these days. So Mike and I grabbed some things and headed off to the seminar. It was being led by Ben Monroe, Brian Isikoff, and Kenneth Hite (1).

This was probably the best seminar I’ve attended in Con history, ever. There was some interaction between the speakers and the audience, though not as much input from the audience as I would have liked. (I put forth the two tenets of Unky Rich games – first, manipulate the character, not the player; second, anything the player puts on the character sheet is fair game. I don’t think anyone really understood what I meant by the difference between “I really really don’t like that” and “actual phobia,” but that’s okay.)

Some of the suggestions are things I’ll be implementing into some of the games I run. There are places I had strong disagreements with what the panel said, but everything was good food for thought and also led to some really good ideas for other games I want to run.

After the seminar, I got some people together for a play-test of Riposte, my sometimes mentioned swashbuckling game. Since I had a bunch of 7th Sea players (and one non-7th Sea player) we chose that setting (though I need to specify to people that this isn’t a redesign of 7th Sea. It’s a generic swashbuckling game that you could use for 7th Sea. With little difficulty.)

I got to test all levels of play – freeplay, static conflicts, opposed conflicts, thug combat, and duels. I got some good feedback from the playership, some I’ll be adding immediately in the next round of typing, some of which I’m still debating. (I have two reasons to be against one of the suggestions, but there are good reasons to be in favor of it as well. It’s just going to take me some thinking on how to use it without unbalancing the system.)

Unfortunately, I missed registration for the Saturday AM games, but in the end, that wound up being okay.

Saturday morning I woke up really early – 7:30 AM – and got up and began putting the final touches on my game. I named every potential NPC I could imagine the PCs talking to, made sure to have a clear outline of how things would go if the PCs did nothing, and then felt I was done.

I went down to the dealer’s room with two gaming books in mind – one was Rites of Spring for Changeling, the other was the RPG Unhallowed Metropolis (Steampunk + Survival Horror + . . . political corruption, perhaps?) To my surprise, I found both in my first walk through of the dealer’s room, and had just enough money to afford both of them. I haven’t really read either one yet, but they both look REALLY good.

Finding those kept me out of the dealer’s room for most the rest of the Con.

I hung out with Jenn B., Ben Loy, Cil, and a continuing flux of other people until the game I was running started at 6 PM.

An odd thing for me was that all those who got into the game were men. That hasn’t happened to me since the first Good Omens games in 2001. (In fact, since DDC 2001 I’ve gotten used to running games that were 50% or more female.) The cool thing was that I also had as many people wanting to drop in as I had actual room for players, so I agreed to run the game again the next morning.

I wasn’t happy with the game – partially because I felt kind of out of it during the game. (I’m not sure why, but I couldn’t really speak well and I forgot major parts of the intro.) That made me easily annoyed. Plus, of the group of six, three were really good, one was competent, one was annoying (I had to keep him on a tight leash at the beginning, which I hate doing. However, if the GM is trying to explain the game and the setting, please don’t interrupt. And if you are a guy, pouting at me isn’t cute – it’s kind of creepy), and one – the guy who showed up 6 minutes after the game started – was just weird. (He would use his character’s powers seemingly randomly. It was useful once or twice, but most of the time, it seemed to just see what would happen.)

But the three good and one competent player I had made the game at least enjoyable to run.

I fell asleep almost immediately upon returning – which was good, because I was going to be busy the next morning, when six more gamers were going to show up to play my game again.

Before I go on, I should mention that I was running Changeling the Lost, with the game set in Disneyland (also known as “The Freehold of the Charming Mouse.”) I set up that the park was a great source of glamour for the Changelings (with all the people attending having their emotions heightened by being at the park), and that the park was ran as a kind of feudal system – each motley of Changelings had their own part of the park that they were responsible for (Tomorrowland, Critter Country, New Orleans Square, Fantasyland, etc.)

Above them were the seasonal court leaderships – one each for Spring, Summer, Winter, and Autumn. Spring and Summer divided Main Street between the two of them, with Summer on the left side (facing the park) and Spring on the right. The Autumn Court (who love secrets) hung out in Club 33, and the Winter Court had a secret office underneath Space Mountain..

The top was a group called The Magic Kingdom Motley – made up of a rat-like beast Changeling named Markey (and don’t you ever call him a mouse), and many other parodies of Disney and Disney-like characters. They mostly worked out of a Hollow located at the top of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle – a place where they could literally oversee the entire park.

To explain exactly how much detail I had set up – rather than having a linear game, I had decided who the villains were (as in who was the person doing the bad thing), their plan, and their boss. I had named each member of each Motley, and included their Seeming, their Kith, and their Court, as well as a numerical rating for their political and magical power. I had also described the types of Hobgoblins (creatures altered by exposure to Arcadia) that were present around Disneyland (Pink Elephants, Scar Lions, and Ticking Crocs). I had some encounters in mind for the Hedge (the plant-like spirit barrier between the real world and Arcadia, that changelings move through), and the last thing was the end point of the game – where the final fight scene would take place (Pirates of the Caribbean.)

So I woke up on Sunday about 40 minutes before people were supposed to be in our hotel room for the game.

I was moved out of bed by one of the players for the Sunday version of the game showing up with character sheets she got from Matt Gaston, and the comment that he couldn’t print out two of them (eek.) After she left, I showered and tried to figure out how to work around that, but fortunately Mike was able to take my CD down to the business office and get the other two sheets printed.

This game was the exact opposite of the night’s game, almost. I had five female players and one male player. (I prefer to run games for women – which is sexist, but I must admit that they are more in tune with the style of game I like running as opposed to men. Men are too ‘goal oriented.’ Women will realize that the goal has to sometimes take looking in the rosebushes and seeing what is buried there.) (2)

This group took some investigative routes that I hadn’t really planned on but that I was ready for. They caught some clues earlier, skipped a red herring, and were much more vicious in the final battle. Which was fine with me. Also, in my game, they took one of the villains (a reluctant villain) and adopted her into their Motley when they figured she was only doing the bad thing because of a Pledge she had taken.

After that, I played in Bob K’s World of Darkness game.

In September, 2006, I played in part one of this game. I referred to it as one of the best horror games I had ever played in, and that Bob was one of the few GMs I would admit was better than I am. (A lot of GMs I consider my equals, so don’t get me wrong. I’ve now played in three of Bob’s game, and between his props, his characters, and his plotlines, Bob is like the “uber-GM.” And don’t worry – I’m not jealous. I just take it as a challenge that I have to rise up to Bob’s level.)

His first game was more psychological horror, and it took a brief detour into the world of J-Horror crossed with Stephen King’s It. I’m a big fan of both.

This game was more visceral, and much closer to the King book. I think some people missed some things about my character, but that’s okay – I played for my own enjoyment. I had two characters who were brothers that I bickered with, and two characters were women that my character kind of subtly hit on while at the same time looked after and protected. (Not that they needed protection. And I also protected my perceived ‘weaker’ brother from things as best as I could.)

That game was a blast. Again.

Monday wasn’t much – we packed up, Cil went into the Dealer’s room, we made arrangements to have lunch with Jenn B., Greg E., and David, and away we went.

Overall, the Con was good. I realized some things:
There are lots of people I miss seeing or talking to regularly.
I’m still not a people person.
The Con is much less expensive for us if I know exactly what I want, get it, and don’t go back to the dealers.

I had fun, though. And I’m already inspired for Kublacon. :-)

(1) I used to (very briefly) read Ken Hite’s LJ, but gave up because he frequently seemed to me like a right-wing nutjob. Being a left-wing nutjob, we cancel each other out like anti-matter and matter. Conversely, he knows his shit when it comes to RPGs, high weirdness, and horror. As I’ve mentioned in my personal LJ, just because I disagree with someone politically or such doesn’t mean I dismiss their artistic creations.

(2) And not all women are like that, nor or all men incapable of that. Mike B., for example, does a very good job of draining encounters for all they are worth, and a few others understand that I don’t do straight line adventures. This is just a generalization. Please unbunch all panties and boxers, as appropriate.