[Gaming] More fun and dice-rolling ...

Following up on this post about the drop-in RPG session at the The Ludoquist in Croydon, I did indeed end up running a game of Grant Howitt's Honey Heist for the one player who didn't fancy something Lovecraftian. His "honey badger thief wearing a crown" demonstrated some imaginative approaches for achieving his goal of stealing as much honey as possible, including something like seven changes of disguise, ramming a van into a restaurant (and later blowing up the rest of the restaurant), the complete destruction of a luxury hotel suite, and finally heading off over the dark sea in a stolen motor yacht with several large cannisters of honey skipping over the waves behind them on tow-ropes.

Since then, I've also played in two modern-day Cthulhu games - and, by some definitions, my characters were technically 'alive' at the end of the run-time of each. Possibly also technically 'sane', although at the end of the second game my brain was in a jar and controlling someone else's body ...

I also played in a 13th Age one-shot game, in which our trio of adventurers raided a gnome sorceror's abode after he died unexpectedly in the street of a heart attack, facing magical defences and another team of home-invaders adventurers with the same plan. My dark elf fighter's dice rolls alternated between ineffectual wafting with the two-handed sword to lethal bifurcation - and back again. Good fun, and the first D&D-based game I've played for over fifteen years. Some good touches in that version of the system, too, including a mechanic that gives an increasing bonus to the players' dice rolls the longer that a fight continues, to prevent things bogging down in frustrating poor rolls.

And then I finally fulfilled my promise and actually ran something. In fact, it was the first time I'd actually run a Traveller¹ adventure since buying the Traveller Starter Set in about 1984, although I had played in a couple over the years. While there is now an open-source fork, under the name The Cepheus Engine, this was a spin-off of the Mongoose version of Traveller (the first one, not the current one). As is traditional, a group of characters are hired to do something - in this case, an investigative task ... Not only did the players (claim to) enjoy it, at least one said that they would be interested in playing some more of it (which means I now need to write another one). And I've been doing some more tuning on it, to be able to offer to run it for other interested player groups, and possibly punt it up for a convention game in the future. (See next post, and please get in touch if you'd be interested in playing it sometime, potentially over Discord.)

¹ Traveller is possibly the grandparent of science-fiction gaming, having come out in the late 70s, and moved away from concepts of character classes to having a prior career history for characters (infamously, in the original editions, it was possible to have your character die during character generation). The default setting features a bunch of mismatched characters with varied life-stories flying between planets in a battered old freighter, taking on occasionally questionable tasks to keep the ship operational - this has led some to wonder whether a certain popular-but-cancelled science fiction series was simply a fictionalisation of a Traveller campaign.

[Gaming] DragonMeet 2018

Last Saturday I dragged myself out of the house at an hour before I'm usually awake, to head up to the Novotel Hammersmith to get to Dragonmeet 2018. On previous years it had clashed with other things, but this time I could make it ...

Having been warned previously that I would need to get there early in order to be able to sign up for the gaming sessions, I found myself only part-way down the queue that was doubling back around the conference reception hall. This year, the team had decided to phase the sign-up sheets, so as to enable later arrivals a faint chance of getting a slot in an afternoon game, and similarly, the evening games. It was apparently an improvement on previous years, although still something of a melee, and sometimes a little challenging to read the sheets at a distance to work out which sheet was the one for the game you wanted to play. Still, years of gig experience enabled me to sign up to a game each time.

In the morning session I ended up in a Warhammer Fantasy Role Play (4th Edition) game. It was interesting to see how the system, while returning slightly to its origins, had incorporated elements of more recent games as well. My character, an unfortunate con-artist who had been mistakenly rounded up after a brawl between a snooty high elf and a grumpy dwarf had caused one of the Lustrian settlement's pubs to burn down, spent quite a lot of the game with her head in her hands, as we attempted to contain the ongoing feud for long enough to complete our court-ordered stint in the militia, delivering medical supplies to the army outpost at Orc's Drift. And yes, we did see quite a large number of orcs by the end of the session, numbering in the tens of hundreds. I believe her war cry was also a variant on "Not the face!"

After a rather tasty but rather expensive Aberdeen Angus burger (next time I'm going to make sure that I schedule in popping down the road to the rather cheaper local food places), I fought through the melee to find a sheet for one of the games I had shortlisted - initially billed as Deathwatch, Fantasy Flight Games' Warhammer 40K role-playing game branch handling a unit of Space Marines from various chapters acting as a special ops group, it turned out to have been slightly mis-listed - the setting was the same, but the system was a custom, playing-card-based, one, selected to give a more heroic feel to the game than the GM felt was provided by the original mechanic. It worked rather well too, although there was a slight moment of double-take when we discovered one of the other players was a close-up magician, and he demonstrated his card-shuffling skills - he did promise not to do any deck-stacking during actual play, though. We fought off chaos daemons, regenerating psychic-null half-animal somethings, and eventually had to take off and get someone else to nuke the site from orbit. It was the only way to be sure.

After another melee at the sign-up boards, and a chat to people I bumped into from various gaming groups, it was back to another gaming table, to play a session of Coriolis, a game I recently acquired but hadn't yet played - a science-fiction setting with an Arabian twist. Our team of characters, hired to help out with an evacuation from a mining colony, found themselves waking on a badly-damaged ship - and then discovered that there was at least one killer (other than us) stalking the halls. The GM was wonderfully enthusiastic about the system and setting, but this did lead to a couple of side-tracks, but it was still a good taster of the system and the setting, and we did manage to (eventually) rescue our captain from being mauled by the predatory creature he ended up wearing as a hat. Combat in the system is very deadly, with a high chance of injuries that will be terminal without medical attention, but the success-resolution system does seem somewhat difficult at times (it's a d6 dice pool mechanic, but only sixes count as successes - which means that, if you're only rolling five dice ...)

And then back home again, with the last game having ended in time to get a couple of trains, rather than an interminable succession of buses. I'm somewhat tempted to offer to run a game next year if it's not clashing. Possibly even a Traveller adventure featuring the further adventures of the Type S Scout ship, the Captain Lawrence Oates.

[Gigs] Croydon Rocks 2018

About a month ago, I went to Croydon Conference Centre for the 2018 iteration of Croydon Rocks. Which turned out to be not as mis-named as some might suggest. I'm still working my way through the slew of photos that I took, but in the meantime, and partly for my reference, here's someone else's fairly succinct review of the day, featuring handy links to each of the bands that played.

Down The Front Media's review of the event.