[TotalCon 2010] Crashing a Conference at Wewelsburg

Crashing a Conference at Wewelsburg wasn’t part of my original game plan for TotalCon. I’m not sure what I intended to do Sunday morning instead. Maybe just kick around the hotel and read a book, or spend a disproportionate amount of time scrutinizing wares in the dealer’s room, looking for the odd stuff my own local store didn’t stock. While flipping through the book Saturday evening, though, I decided to jump into Charlton’s game. I had yet to play a game GMed by Charlton, despite knowing him from the New England convention circuit for three or four years now.

What’s more, the adventure premise was brilliant: Infinity discovers a timeline in which Germany won World War II. A conference at Wewelsburg brings together all the top officials of the Third Reich, including Hitler himself. Infinity gives one of their officially non-existent ISWAT teams a three word mission: “Resolve the issue.” And much fun was had.

Charlton once remarked to me that time travel games are easy. The GM gives the players too many guns and pieces of equipment, then lets them generate the tension tripping over themselves not to get caught by downtimers. With that in mind, I came to the table expecting a loose, freewheeling game. And that’s exactly what I got.

[Carnage 2009] GURPS Infinite Worlds: Highway to Niflheim

Saturday afternoon of Carnage, I ran Highway to Niflheim, an adventure in the campaign setting Infinite Worlds, where a near-future society explores and exploits parallel worlds for knowledge, art and resources. The players took the roles of I-Cops assigned to investigate the failure of a research station on a low tech world to check in with Homeline Control on schedule.

The session got off on the wrong foot for me because I forgot to print out one of the six character sheets for the players. Usually I keep backups of character sheets, notes and such on a thumb drive just in case of such forgetfulness. However, this time, as I pulled all my gear together the day before, I thought to myself, “Oh, there won’t be a printer or a laptop available for you to use, so there’s no point in bringing digital backups.” Fortunately, the last player to get to the table gracefully volunteered to bow out, so that worked out okay, if not ideally.

There was an initial misunderstanding about the kind of game I was running versus what some players thought they were in for. A couple took tactics better suited to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 while I had envisioned something more like Stargate: SG-1 with disguises. But we all seemed to get on the same page readily enough. Some of that was me rolling with what they wanted and some was the players stretching out a bit when they realized it was meant to be a cinematic game I think.