[TotalCon 2010] The Unexplained: Spirits Among the Ruins

This, regrettably, is where Saturday unraveled for me. Back when I preregistered, I hadn’t considered the effect of scheduling three investigation-heavy role-playing games in a row. It got rather tedious to go through the steps of investigation three games in a row. Considering the last two adventures had been rather inconclusive, I was subconsciously looking forward to something more concrete and action-oriented. I’ll know better next time I’m planning my convention playing schedule.

I thought Spirits Among the Ruins was going to be my favorite of the weekend, too. The premise centered on a mysterious, possibly pre-Columbian lithic site in New Hampshire. I’ve always had a thing for Stonehenge and other mysterious arrangements of rocks for uncertain purposes. So I loved the idea of an ancient astronomical observatory with its very own set of ghostly presences.

Are You Ready to Join the Cabal?

Before tonight, I thought one of GURPS Cabal’s biggest drawbacks, to a person like myself, who likes to run games in locales he knows personally — namely, New England and northern America — was its entirely understandable Eurocentrism. Given the Cabal allegedly grew out of pharaonic Egypt and the setting itself was devised as a roiling pot of the major monsters and horror tropes of today, which also descend from European and Near Eastern sources, that kind of focus can’t really be avoided. Emphasizing the focus, in fact, is, or was, because that’s what Kenneth Hite did, the right thing to do.

But it did leave me feeling intimidated for a long time, lacking the deep knowledge of history and occultism that Cabal exudes. A Tuesday night brainstorming session at the coffee shop, though, produced a list of potential settings in which to run for Carnage. Given this year’s horror theme, Cabal made the list, but as an afterthought. I didn’t think I’d be any more confident about running something there than before.

However, I just took a flip through the book for the first time in quite a while. The historical references are as dizzying and dismaying as ever — saying more about my own education than anything else, I think — but I did find one plot seed reassuring in its proximity to home: Martense College,¹ one of the Cabal’s “black schools,” calls upstate New York home.² A hundred miles or two to the north and east would put it right in my stomping grounds. Picture it: a small, prestigious liberal arts college about forty-five minutes south of Burlington harbors power-mad faculty, would-be wizards and the heirs to the world’s magically-derived fortunes.

I can see the game as a clash of cultures: the refined Hermetic theory of the Cabal versus rough and rural mysticism, the kind that gave rise to Lavinia Whately’s bastard son. Plus, stone chambers leading to Faerie and crashed reptoid astronauts protecting the last of their nursemaids fit right into the Cabal’s lunatic cosmology.

¹ A reference to the Martense family, I bet.

² Where “upstate” refers to any point north of New York City.

Corebooks and Supplements: The Cart Before the Horse

I have a knack for acquiring expansions and supplements to games before getting the core elements themselves. It started back in the days of voraciously devouring TSR’s Dragonlance novels without ever realizing they were tied to a game at all, let alone a roleplaying game or what that constituted. Despite the fact the local Waldenbooks — this was back in the days before Borders came to Burlington; Waldenbooks was the place to go for the widest selection of Dungeons & Dragons-related stuff, outside of Quarterstaff Games, which I wasn’t aware of at the time — had an entire tier of shelves devoted to the game books right next a tier full of fantasy novels, including the better part of the TSR fiction catalog at that time, it was some time before I made the connection.

Somehow, in the midst of my paper route-fueled mission to buy and read every Dragonlance novel I could find, I bought the AD&D Player’s Guide to Dragonlance Campaign Setting. I didn’t get the part about it being a player’s guide, nor understood why it was completely different in form and design. Reading it, I also remember a sense of puzzlement over why the information in this encyclopedic-like book was subtly different in places from what I knew to be correctly related by the novels — that the novels routinely contradicted each other was another, separate source of mystification to my eleven year old self.

Weekend Breakdown

Blimey, I had a busy weekend of gaming and gaming-related activity. In particular order — that is, chronologically sorted and neatly placed in nested lists — this weekend, I:

• Carb and protein and fat and oil-loaded at Handy’s with the Lafayette, featuring country-fried steak in sausage gravy with eggs and hash browns, before going to:.
• Playing board games at the Fletcher Free Library with a host of new faces, namely:
  • Two rounds of a mix of Dominion and Dominion: Seaside; the second being a draft sort of affair after a monstrous game in which the Thief drove everyone to scrape for points, for lack of money.
  • Chrononauts, which was delightful and unpredictable as always.
• After that, I booked it down to Rutland, where delicious Russian food — apparently the solution to making cabbage taste good is cook it in as many different kinds of meat as possible — was had before launching into a Savage World of Solomon Kane one-shot set in where else but 17th century Russia.
• Got home in Burlington around 1:45 in the AM, giving me a solid five and a bit hours of sleep before:
• Heading off to the wilds of western upstate New Hampshire — i.e., just across the Connecticut River — to discuss convention doings.
• Arrived back in Burlington around 5:00 PM for my first fondue experience, sampling The Kung Fu Mummy and thoroughly enjoying Mystery Science Theater 3000’s lambasting of Future Wars, with its hand-puppet dinosaurs of variable dimensions.

I really intend to do a write-up of the Solomon Kane game, which was drop down hysterical for most of the time, thanks to the liberal application of vodka, beer and wine to the participants, but the whole weekend’s run together so much, I don’t know if I can do justice to any single element of it.

Shambhala

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/CkUGN7oVdH0njz2PCnyvmw

The ancient kingdom of Mustang, in present day Nepal, mirrors stories about hidden kingdoms in Asia, like Shangri-La and Shambhala. National Geographic has an article about a series expeditions to Mustang in recent years. In caves carved into sheer cliff faces, investigators found wall paintings, religious texts and human remains.

Researcher Broughton Coburn is quoted saying that hidden valleys “were created at times of strife and when Buddhist practice and principals were threatened . . . The valleys contained so-called hidden treasure texts.” A remote location like the cliffs of Mustang could be just that kind of refuge for dangerous or threatened knowledge. The article notes that not only were Buddhist texts found, but also those relating to Bön, an earlier tradition that died out after the spread of Buddhism.

[TotalCon 2010] Call of Cthulhu: Curse of the Betrothed

Dice, character sheet, notebook and duckie. What more does a hardy investigator need?

Call of Cthulhu beckoned me on Saturday morning. It’s one of those games that inspires as many different interpretations as there have been of Lovecraft’s mythos in general. Pulp adventure with tommy guns and dynamite, a gore and splatter fest, psychological horror, or metaphors for a weird Rhode Islander’s views on society, race and class; I’ve seen them all proposed and explained. My own Call of Cthulhu experience is limited to a handful of GMs, however, so I wanted to take a plunge into unknown waters.

As it turned out, this particular Cthulhu GM, Bob, not only had a practice of running daylong campaigns, but also had a dedicated following of players who sign up for all his games. I’ve let myself be put off by that in the past, but I’ve also played some exceptionally awesome games after pushing through that hesitance. After all, if the GM gets repeat players like that, they’re doing something right.

Happy GM’s Day 2010

March 4th is GM’s Day — “march forth,” geddit? — a time to give recognition to the hard-working game masters who put the time and energy into creating the imaginary worlds in which our characters run amok — and, in the convention world, care enough about their game of choice, role-playing, board or otherwise, that they’ll teach it to a table of strangers.

He's Gary Gygax and he is *roll roll* . . . pleased to meet you!

The idea for a day to recognize GMs came up back in 2002 on ENWorld. Gary Gygax’s passing on the same day in 2008 cemented the date . Now it’s become not only an occasion to thank one’s GM — possibly with the purchase of role-playing books, as RPGNow would like you to do, given their massive sale; so massive, in fact, I’m having difficulty finding anything I want amidst the torrent of niche material — but a day commemorating the role-playing hobby on the whole and remembering its proud parents, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The hobby wouldn’t be what it is today, or maybe even exist at all, if not for Gary, Dave and everyone else who participated in the conception of Dungeons & Dragons.

I plan to mark the occasion with game night in the traditional sense tonight: friends getting together at someone’s house for food and tabletop fun. It’ll be board game tabletop fun, in the shape of Age of Empires III, but still. And this weekend, a Savage World of Solomon Kane one-shot in Rutland.

One of these days I will get on the ball and have something really appropriate planned to run on GM’s Day, or get the local store involved or something. TARGA’s International Traditional Gaming Week isn’t that far off. If I’m industrious and persuasive, I’d like to get some people together for an old school dungeon crawl. There’s no dearth of dungeons and retro-clones to utilize, after all.

Thanks again, Gary and Dave. You invented a truly unique hobby, which I and so many others love dearly.

Android: The New Angeles Blues

Sarah and Alex have a pretty good idea of what they're doing.

Android became a running joke in my group of game-playing friends. It had a reputation online for being complex and bit-tacular, which seemed wholly deserved from ogling the back of the box. The theme, noirish detectives competing to prove their hunches about a murder in the futuristic city New Angeles, with all the hints of Blade Runner that carries, enticed us all. But no one was willing to take the plunge and buy the game. Being frugal young people, we like to try a game out once or twice before throwing down. We are, as a rule, not early adopters when it comes to board games.

So it became the go-to name for a game for which no one was about to front. “Oh, it’s so-and-so’s turn to buy something. Go grab Android.” Then we kept promising we’d jump on the first demo available, waiting to see it crop up on a convention schedule somewhere. Alex came the closest, planning to try it out at TempleCon last month. He wound up only keeping an eye on the group playing it; they began before he got to the game room, Alex related, and were still going after his own party got through three or four plays of several games. That longing glimpse motivated him, I guess, because Alex ordered the game a week or two after Templecon. After another week of digesting the rule book and Universal Head’s player aid, we broke it out one Sunday afternoon.

[Tuesday Night Board Games] Red November Redux

I dropped by Quarterstaff after work tonight to check out what everyone was playing. Imagine my surprise to find a boisterous group of seven or eight clustered around Red November, of all things.

Apparently, last week’s half play was enough to convince Jon to get a copy of his own. And that right there is evidence of the power of a game night and why they’re beneficial to the game stores who host them.

The First Convention

Check out these photos from the first science fiction convention, Nycon, in 1939. They had no idea what they were starting, did they?

Snappy dressers, too. Imagine if broad-breasted suits were still the norm at conventions today, rather than the melange of witticism-bearing T-shirts, cat ears and jerkins. I’m a big fan of dressing for comfort — and you need comfortable clothes when you’re clustered around a table in banquet chairs of debatable comfort for four or six hours at a time — but I also recognize that outward appearances influence people’s opinions. When WCAX did a story on Bakuretsucon a couple years ago, what did they use for their bumper tease? A shot of the older gentleman wearing cat ears, natch. Hardly surprising, but still a cheap shot.