Figures of Text

By the middle of March, the seasoned con-goer acquires the thousand-yard stare of the shellshocked veteran. Every weekend in the month brings another gaming con, another weekend of sign-up sheets, pub quizzes and cheap accommodation. I don’t do the full con circuit as much as I used to, but March was still a death march of relentless fun, capped off by flying to Edinburgh for Conpulsion.

I played my little heart out over the con. The Friday night pub quiz fell before the ’semi-pro’ team, especially as members of the team wrote about half the products referenced in the roleplaying round, and spent a lot of time chatting to the Avenger crowd and to James (Wallis) and Gregor (Hutton), both of whom I know well enough to not merely namedrop, but also mock merciless if I could think of anything to mock them about right now. (I suppose I could mock Gregor’s Dodgy Facial Hair, but I’m on thin and extremely hypocritical ground there). As for the games:

Hollow Earth Expedition: was fun in the standard convention pulp game way, which means it was intensely formulaic but still enjoyable (up until the end, when two of the players fell into killing NPCs for no good reason other than they looked slightly threatening, and the game descended into inter-party conflict). I wasn’t really sold on HEX, as it doesn’t seem to offer anything Spirit of the Century doesn’t. (Of course, a con game isn’t really the place to show off a detailed setting, so maybe HEX could score points there.)

Traveller: Yeah, I got to play Traveller. It was a light-hearted (and again, rather pulpy) game run competently by the Avenger crew. We were on an airship that got highjacked and then blown up (ahead of schedule, thanks to one of the PCs). Good fun, but it did reinforce my desire to write up a set of corrections and patches to the main rules to take into account actual play over the last year. Mongoose have ruled out a second edition of the book for at least a few years (which is a good thing), so any such notes would have to take the form of a third-party supplement or free web article. Or both.

3:16: I’ve too many books at home anyway, so I promised I wouldn’t buy anything physical in the charity auction. I did end up buying places in the two guest-run games. Gregor’s 3:16 game was a lot of fun, and came closer to Paranoia than I expected. (You could very easily use 3:16 as an Armed Forces In Spaaaace game, replacing Terra with Alpha Complex). The game’s still a little too light for my tastes, although the addition of some Objective rules would be easy.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen: was played in costume (of a sort) and with brandy (of an expensive sort) and my memories are perforce rather sketchy. All the players were excellent, but one tale about repelling the Prussian army with a pink cake was clearly the favorite of the assembled company. Afterwards, we tried the variant My Uncle The Baron, which also worked well (especially as my mental powers were rapidly diminishing).

Conpulsion’s always a good con, although there was a lack of buzz this year. The venue has a wealth of small side rooms which are great for running games, but it means there’s no real centre to the con, and it’s hard to find people. There were a few faces missing this year, too, but it’s still a fixture on my convention calendar, even in these latter days when I don’t even try to make it to half the cons I used to go to.

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