My story for KublaCon begins the night before, as I’m calmly printing out the character sheets for my Saturday AM game. (Unhallowed Metropolis – Steampunk Survival Horror.) As I printed the last character sheet, around 2 AM (because I’m a night owl), my brain reminded me:

“YOU FORGETFUL JERK!! YOU HAVE A SECOND GAME THIS CON!! YOU’VE DONE NO PREP WORK FOR IT!!”

Which was true. I knew I had no chance I would finish it that night, so I didn’t even try. Instead, I made sure to pack the books I’d need.

Unfortunately, I was up until 6 AM. Not doing anything important, just not sleeping.

Cil woke me up at 7 to drive her to BART, and when I got home, once again, I couldn’t sleep. I tried. I really did. Finally, around 1:30 PM, I got up, began to pack up the car and take care of business, and then ran to the grocery store and OfficeMax. Purchased a printer, some other stuff, food, drink, and then drove to the hotel. I got in around 4:45 PM, got my room, checked in on the Good Omens games I knew were running, went out to dinner, and then did some last minute work for my Saturday AM game.

And had crappy sleep for about 8 hours.

Got up, and prepared to run Unhallowed Metropolis. It was fun – my playtest was really bad (in my opinion), but the actual game went a lot better. Part of it was that I re-tooled my plot, and made sure that the clues led somewhere. The players seemed to have fun.

After the game, went out for food, and then went up to my room and prepped my game for Sunday morning.

This isn’t a problem for me. I’ve improvised entire games before when covering for cancelling GMs. (In 2002, at an early KublaCon, I was approached by the RPG coordinator and asked to fill in because a GM no-showed. I warned the players that I’d use a different system, but they were cool with that. It’s good to know I can do that.)

(Maybe that was 2001?)

So putting together a game in 6 hours? Not a problem. I had internet, I had a computer, I had a printer, and I had my source material. I had to purchase a few PDFs, but that’s okay. Using the original comic book (Jesus Hates Zombies) and printing out a few pages for player background, it was easy.

The next morning, I got to the room and found something like 4 or 5 players wanting to crash the game, and only one no-show. I tried to whittle the crowd down by warning them:
1) One of them would have to play Jesus Christ.
2) One of them would have to play Jesus’ pet zombie, Lazarus.
3) I was a liberal nutjob Christian.
4) It wasn’t your standard All Flesh Must be Eaten game, as I’ve adapted lots of cinematic unisystem stuff into it.

There was another warning, but none of it worked.

Eventually, we chose the player to take the open seat – I forgot how, it was either because he looked like Jesus or because he was the first one there.

I think the game went well – it could have gone better (I have high standards for myself, never forget that), and it could have been about an hour longer (though we did get kind of a late start on the actual game), but overall they put the clues together without being hit with a clue-stick, and only waited around for verification of their suspicions. (Basic story – a demon in a church had created “fake” zombies during the middle of the zombie apocalypse, and was using them to terrorize a town. His goal was to get all the people into the church, because it was ‘safe,’ and then bargain for their souls until he had netted all of them.)

Oh – the cast of PCs:
Jesus H. Christ (from Jesus Hates Zombies) (complete with “Big-Ass Anime Sword” that Buddha gave to him.)
Laz (from Jesus Hates Zombies ) (Jesus’ Zombie buddy)
Jesse Custer (from Preacher)
Joan Girardi (from Joan of Arcadia)
Sarah Bailey (from the Craft – Robin Tunney’s character)
Bethany Sloane (from Dogma – the last scion)

In the end, they saved the day, banished the demon, and hopefully realized they had a good base of operations now for the rest of their “save people” campaign.

So after that game, Cil and I went out for lunch, then fell asleep while eating lunch, so we went to the hotel room for a “nap” that took about four hours. (I put nap in quotes only because four hours is not a nap. Four hours is sleeping.)

Hung out with Sean N. for a few minutes, went down to Greg M’s. Mutant & Masterminds game, hung out with Jen M (his fiancee), and with Jessie, Sean’s wife, and then went up to our room. Cil went to sleep, I played a bit, and then we woke up, packed up, and came home.

I didn’t get to play anything this Con, but that didn’t bother me. The games I ran were fairly fun, and that made up for it. My games purchased were “Reign” and “Aeternal Legends.” (Expect reviews soon.)

Next Con is “GO-Con” (in July – the official “Good Omens” RPG convention, at Endgame in Oakland) where I’m running a World of Darkness: Innocents game, and then ConQuest, where I’ll run a street level “Mage: the Awakening” game. And then I need to figure out if I’m running at the October Endgame mini-con.

I’m probably going to avoid running two games at a Con anymore, unless one is a game that doesn’t require much updating. Having to fully prep two new games was really draining.

Rich