Con on the Cob - Now With Pictures!

Con on the Cob was a couple of weeks ago, but blah blah excuse here's the damn write-up.

I really like this little con. It's grown from a loose collection of nerds in a smoky-ass hotel in Hudson, OH, to a larger collection of nerds in a hotel that really does not want you to smoke in Brecksville, OH. The gaming schedule wasn't bad this year, though if I had it to do over again, I'd have played with +Sean Patrick Fannon instead of some of the people I did play with.

As an side, there was a time in my life when I could schedule RPGs back to back from 10AM until 2AM and feel no ill effects. And the other folks over 40 in my circles, I'm sure, read this and think "well, duh," but it's actually something of a shock when your body doesn't do the things it used to do. What that means is that I have to be circumspect when I schedule games, which makes it all the more disappointing when those games get cancelled or simply suck. But more on that later.

We were running a booth for the IGDN, as we do ("we" being me, +Michelle Lyons-McFarland, +Eloy Lasanta, and +Ryan Schoon). This is only picture I have from the booth, but I think it speaks volumes:

Eloy is very excited to be here. 

Thursday, we set up the booth, and worked it for a bit. And then I had an evening game scheduled; I was playing something called Ghostories (that's pronounced "ghost stories", not "go stories" or "goss tories", so I have no idea why it's spelled that way).

Gettin' ready to tell some 'tories.

The game is a supernatural investigation kind of game, and that appeals. Basically it's not dissimilar from Chill insofar as you're normal people (perhaps with some low-grade psychic ability) who go out looking into supernatural shit because someone has to. The system didn't leave much of an impression one way or another, though I do vaguely remember feeling at the time that it was too easy to fail rolls.

The scenario set-up was decent, and the GM got out of our way as we roleplaying and figure out our approach. We wound up doing a little ghost-power time travel and, best of all, toward the end the GM didn't try to drag the resolution out into a big thing; no combat necessary, just a broken mirror and the characters could pick their way home. I like investigative games that focus more on the investigation and the creepy stuff, because horror doesn't really have combat the way action/adventure does.

So: Kinda ambivalent about the game itself, but this session was fun. My grade: B+

Oh, one other cool thing: A game of curse the darkness being run out in wild! Not by me! That makes me happy.

Damn, that's a lot of cards.

Friday, though! We arrived, opened up the booth, got to work. I had a game of Chill to run in the evening, but during the day it was all booth. My kiddos were also there for most of the day on Friday, and dressed up because they weren't able to be there for the actual costume parade on Saturday.

Batcael!

Kai as Cruella de Ville.

That evening, I ran Cold Dark Earth, which you can download for free here. I had lots of people during the day ask if I was running Chill, but both my games were full. I wound up adding a Sunday morning game, so that was encouraging. No pictures from the Chill game, though.

And then sleep. We stayed at the con that night so the kids could get some extra time in doing con things. Saturday morning, and Cael scared the bejeesus out of my by scampering off with a friend and disappearing for a while, but we resolved that, and I had a game at 10AM to play...

...except the GM was hung over and didn't show. OK, folks, if you sign up to run a game at a con, and it's at 10 in the goddamn morning, maybe exercise a little restraint the night before? Anyway. I wound up hanging out with a friend for a while (she was signed up for the same game as me), and then I had a game scheduled at 2PM that actually did happen.

The picture is blurry, sorry. The game was blurry, too.

So, the game was Everybody is John, and the idea is that you're all playing facets of "John," who wakes up naked somewhere and has multiple voices in his head, all trying to get him to do something. When creating a character, you wind up deciding what that "something" is for your "voice," and also what skills you bring to the table. I signed up for the game because I thought the premise was interesting, and I thought it might be kind of like Bluebeard's Bride or Vox. I was...wrong.

The game was played for maximum silly. The first guy to take control of John (I'll get to that) took John down to the grocery store (naked), grabbed a bunch of blue frosting, and started smearing it on the walls because his goal was to paint a room blue. Then the police got involved. Oh, and we had a friend who was an alien. So this is the level of discourse we're on.

I'm fine with that. Silly is good, especially on Saturday afternoon at a con. But there were a few problems. First, the game mechanics are...not so great. You've got five tokens, and everyone bids for control of John whenever someone makes a roll and fails, or whenever 30 minutes of game time goes by with no rolls happening. If people tie, you roll off with d6s. But when you make a roll to do something in game, you've got to roll a 3 or better on a d6 if a skill applies, or a 6 if it doesn't. That all but guarantees you'll be passing control of John off a lot, which is great, except once you're out of tokens you're...out. You can do nothing to influence the game.

Also, there is no group cohesion. You don't get to talk to the other voices (I mean, table talk happens, but there's no effect, it's just talk). It's not like Bluebeard's Bride where it's actually like a shared story. It's six people all trying to tell their own stories, while the GM...well, that's the other problem.

The GM laughed at her own jokes a lot, and her own jokes were problematic. We ended the game with a shootout between "rednecks" and "gangstas" in the "inner city" or "hood" as she called it. I think I may have facepalmed once or twice.

All in all, not impressed. My grade: D, since the initial bits of the game were at least silly enough to be funny.

Right, so, done with that, time to run Chill, which again, I didn't photograph, but I did see some other strange and beautiful things at the con.

Just act natural and switch to a garlic shampoo. 

 

 

They've upgraded Ecto-1.

OMG, it's +Andy Hopp! And a cat burrito!

Santa and a goblin chatting with dudes in suits. It's a con!

A very dapper octopus.

Dread, one of my favorites. 

And then sleep. Sunday!

I wound up running another session of Chill Sunday morning, which was fun. I ran Cold Dark Earth again, and the group wound up nearly getting Melissa killed, but saving the day last minute in a very tense graveyard standoff. And then it was back to the booth for a few hours, and then breaking it down, and then home.

All in all, Con on the Cob is a great time. It's a little later in the year next year (November sometime), so if you can make it, come play games with us.

Mall Adventures!

Back in March 2012, I wanted something to do with my kids that didn't cost much and wasn't outdoors (because it was rainy and then became cold and rainy). I started thinking that we'd go to the zoo, but again, cold and rainy. And besides which, my daughter didn't get out of school at 3:30 and the zoo was only open until five.

I like playing with my kids, so I figured we'd have a little game. I knew Kai wanted to go to Wendy's for dinner, so I had Michelle call my cell and leave a message using her awesome German accent as the evil Dr. Twistybread, claiming to have kidnapped Wendy in order to obtain the secret of delicious Frostys. Kai was appropriately horrified. Cael decided he could use his super punching power on the evil Dr. Twistybread.

We talked about where to start looking for clues, and I told Kai to think about "twisty bread." That suggested pretzels, so we headed to the mall, since that's where you can get big pretzels (Auntie Anne's, y'see). I slipped my GameStop card into the pretzel bag when Kai wasn't looking, and from there just kind of winged clues, sometimes with the help of mall store staff, until we wound up at the arcade. We needed at least 20 tickets to free Wendy from Dr. Twistybread's clutches, but we managed it, and then headed to Wendy's for a celebratory dinner.

Since then, I've made up a number of these "Mall Adventures" for the kids. They've gotten more elaborate every time, but it's always just been a matter of making up a narrative - some mission that they have to complete. The puzzles have gotten harder as they've gotten older and better able to think abstractly. I want to share the most recent one that we did.

I picked the kids up from school and handed them a note made with an online ransom note generator. It was from a character called "Patchwork." He promised a prize if Kai and Cael could solve his puzzle (which involved finding a series of objects or other things at the mall, five each). If they failed, he promised something unspeakable, but was non-specific as to what (but assured them it was scary!).

Needless to say, the kids got to work. We got their capes (from Amazing Capes!) and headed over to our local mall.

Kai needed to find "a place to buy a hot drink," which was easy enough.

One down. 

Cael, likewise, needed to find "a woman drinking coffee." As it happens, Kai's success spurred his.

Don't worry, he always smiles like that. 

From there, Kai needed to find "where he would go if he were lost." This was one I was interested to see how he'd approach - the mall has a security office, of course, but one of the other things on his list was "a security guard or police officer." He initially said that if he were lost, he'd find the security guard or police officer, but I reminded him that "where" indicates a place. He used the directory and found the security office, and somewhere in there found a cop as well (but I don't have a picture handy).

Cael needed to find a "candle that smells sweet," but wasn't sure where to look. He went into Teavana, which is (as the name suggests) a store that sells tea, but they don't sell candles. He asked the ladies who worked there, though, where he might find such a thing (explaining that he was on a mission), and they were very helpful.

Social interaction, you see.

 From there, we headed to Yankee Candle, and Cael found what he needed.

See? Smiling.

 The next thing was "a dark store for dark teens," which I thought would be harder than it turned out to be:

They showed no interest in going in. 

 And that just left a couple for Kai: "A movie about a horse" and "a place to buy a furry friend."

The movie theater had no horse movies at present, so we wandered a bit, looking for a store that sold DVDs. We found one, and Kai looked around for a moment and found War Horse.

Not my favorite Oscar nom that year, but it's about a horse, all right.

He puzzled over the "furry friend" a bit, and Cael went in search of his last challenge: "The name of an employee at Earthbound Trading Company." This challenge is twofold; he had to find the place, and then talk to someone and ask their name. He used the directory to find it (with some help), and then approached a very nice lady there and explained his mission.

His mission completed, Kai realized that one could buy a furry friend at Build-a-Bear.

Of course!

We weren't buying today, but the kids knew that going in. And with that, their mission was completed and they learned their prize - tobogganing the next day!

This is how Mall Adventures works, more or less - craft the narrative, design the puzzles, and then sit back and let the sleuths solve the problems, helping as necessary. We're going to be running a Kickstarter to publish Mall Adventures so that parents, babysitters, grandparents, godparents, aunts, uncles, and big brothers and sisters can make up awesome missions for the kids in their lives.

More details to follow!

GenCon 2013! - GM Report Card

I'm a little late getting this one, and of course it's maybe a little funny I'm writing it while I'm at FanExpo (I've got some time before my first panel), but y'know, better to do it while I have a moment. So!

Early GenCon is as it often is: largely devoid of life (I mean, by comparison), and Cardhalla is still being built.

You only get a "before" picture this year because I wasn't around when it fell. 

But that isn't to say that thronging crowds of people were far off! I'm led to understand that attendance was up considerably this year.

Ah, throngs.

I wound up spending a good deal of time in the dealer's room, mostly on Sunday. But I did manage to photograph some strange and beautiful things, such as this freaking amazing cave thingie.

Admit it, you want to make a dwarf character now. 

Did some gaming, as well. I played in two games: Deadlands Noir and Better Angels. And now we get into the "GM Report Card" bit.

Deadlands Noir is, as the name suggests, the Deadlands setting but placed into a noir context, complete with detectives and grifters and femme fatales and so on. We were in New Orleans, and my character was one of the aforementioned grifters - somewhat like the hucksters of Deadlands Reloaded, but without the ability to deal with the Devil (which I missed, and would probably import if I run this). We also had an undead detective (Harrowed), a mad scientist (Michelle, talking fast) and a couple of other folks that I don't remember offhand - one was the femme fatale.

Basic plot: The Big Sleep. Maybe Chinatown, a little. Find the millionaire's missing daughter and wife. Things come to light; the wife was cheating and generally unpleasant, so maybe it's not such a big deal if she doesn't come home. Dude has a son that supposedly died in a flood on their old estate. We wound up at said estate, and the lost son had become an alligator-monster and tried to eat us.

All in all, this is fine and in-setting. The GM got into his NPCs, used a lot of different voices, and kept the names straight (which, given the number of secondary characters, is impressive)

The problem actually came with the system. Savage Worlds is a crunchy, minis-based game. It loses a lot, IMO, if you don't use it, including maps and tokens and so forth. And we just kind of winged positioning and movement during the fights, which means that some of us (the folks with spells and other wonky powers) kind of got shafted because we can't think tactically.

But the other issue is, the last fight involving the gator-dude just dragged out, because said gator-dude has a really high Vigor and armor and a high Parry, which means we can't hit him, and when we do we can't damage him. Which would be fine - we have to work for our hits - but then the GM spent bennies to soak and unshake, and now we're back to the grind. We got out by using some clever tactics, but it felt like the GM was really married to one moment and kind of shoved us into that. My grade: B+

Noir game, so kind of a dark picture. 

Food trucks! I love them, though the lines are long. But you do get to people-watch. Or rabbit-watch.

Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a magician out of my hat!

Surrounded by severed legs. Art?

Ran afoul of a gorgon. 

Back to the dealer's room, we put some stuff up in the Cheese Weasel section. If you look carefully you'll see a copy of curse the darkness in there.

And in the dealer's room proper, you can see some of my favorite people!

Eloy's a saint. John and Kristen...aren't, but I love them both anyway. 

Friday night was the Ennies. curse the darkness was nominated for Best Electronic Product. It was really a contest for the Silver, because there was a Deadlands product in that category and I knew we wouldn't beat that, because of the way the voting is structured if nothing else (and I'm by no means upset about that - just means we need more visibility for Daedalus next year!).

The venue was really cool:

Waiting for a laser and big ball of popcorn. 

And we got to see Leonard Balsera sing "Take On Me" and completely rock it. So it was all good, even though we lost to Hobomancer and (as expected) Deadlands: The Last Sons.

Next morning (which I guess would have been Saturday), I had a game to run at Games on Demand. So!

Kira, stylin'. 

She's running Dresden Files. Note the awesome board for scene Aspects. 

I wound up running curse the darkness (it was that or Tragedy). I had three players, and they put us in Boston, following an earthquake, and were trying to get their doctor another doctor. None of them played Openers, and the Between was largely ignored. I never realized how great a source of Between Points having Openers really is; they went pretty much unnoticed by Them the whole time. The Removal Challenges came from aftershocks, and that worked just fine. 

Lined up on the wall, ready to die. 

 We finished up early, so I did a stint in the dealer's room.

Kristen, still not a saint. 

Topher and Renee, trying to fix a broken robot. 

And then it was time for Better Angels! This is a one-roll engine game in which you play supervillains possessed by demons. The demon in question (played by the person on your left) will help you out and activate your powers, but it'll ask you to do horrible things. If you're eeeeevil enough, you can avoid doing really terrible, actually evil things. It's a cool premise, and I backed the Kickstarter (and later picked up my copy).

The GM kinda got thrown into running at the last minute, and it sort of showed - pregens, but all handwritten. I personally think we should have made the characters, because the game's terms and systems aren't immediately intuitive and making characters might have helped with that. But the game was fun, the GM listened to us, and it went pretty well. My grade: A-

Also Michelle played a tennis-themed villain named "Zero Love."

And, finally, Sunday, official day of shopping.

Ballonthulhu! 

A Klingon, a Wookie, and a pirate playing in a band. I don't remember what song. 

Will, with his swag.

Road Trip, part 2: Lizards and Gorges

I'm in Oklahoma! (Not the musical, the actual place.) We'll be here for the next few days, and then we'll escape leave on Sunday. Hopefully Ohio remembers us.

So! Last time we were in Nebraska. We drove from there to Denver, Colorado, and stayed in a lovely hotel called Aloft, where I left my fucking phone chargers. They're sending them back (via FedEx, which made me a little salty - you can't just put them in a padded envelope and mail them? No? FINE.), but it's made communication somewhat difficult.

We did, however, find an awesome little place to have breakfast.

Whaddup. I got a big cock.

I don't take pictures of my food, because I love you all. Here's a thing, though. Across the street was this:

This building just looked creepy as hell. Seriously, my first thought was "Infrastructure."

So from there, we went to the Garden of the Gods. Now, if you've read Hunting Ground: Rockies, you know that this is a meeting place for werewolves. I didn't see any while there (that I know of), but I can see how it would work. Here are some pictures of the natural splendor.

It rained quite a lot while we were in the area, but the bulk of it happened before we got there, so we didn't get drenched. We did quite a lot of walking. I was looking for rattlesnakes, but I did not seen any. More pictures?

A blue bird, for my mom.

A meeting of birds. "Who's for birdstrike, then?"

They must have had a contest. I think this is cute.

Rocks fall...

...everyone dies.

And then back at the parking lot, we saw a bighorn sheep, but waaaaay up on mountain. I did my best, but I don't have a terrific camera.

Majestic!

We were going to drive up Pike's Peak, but we were already running behind and had a bit of driving to do. So we drove into Manitou Springs for lunch.

Manitou Springs is an awesome little town, but the traffic patterns are...well, odd. The dude behind us was a local, and got really annoyed at how slowly I was driving, but I was a) figuring out where I could turn and b) trying to find lunch and parking. I was kind of hoping he'd zoom off in a huff and hit a tree.

A really cool map.

Note Al looming in the doorway.

We found a local cafe to have lunch (above), and then we headed on our merry way.

We wound up in New Mexico. We crossed the Rio Grande Gorge, and stopped for pictures because it's pretty awesome.

You're specifically asked not to throw things off.

Happy folks!

We stayed in Ojo Caliente (Hot Eye? Still haven't figured that one out), right across the street from a natural hot springs. More on that presently.

Now, when Michelle booked the room, the idea was to get a room in the main building. But we're in the off season, so I think we were literally the only guests. So they "upgraded" us to a cabin kind of thing, which was fine - slightly more space, and all. Two main problems.

1) The master bedroom has no door. This is fine if you're staying by yourself, but if you've got two teenage boys and would like some modicum of privacy, not so much.

2) No wifi. And Michelle asked about this, and the owner was utterly confused. Apparently these people are not from the Internet. Arrgh.

But, we managed to find really mediocre Mexican food for dinner (seriously, there is nothing in this town except the hot springs, and their restaurant was closed). Michelle and I went over to the springs and soaked for a while, which was nice. There are multiple pools, each of which supposedly have different mineral content that, allegedly, has a different healing effect on you. I suspect this is largely bullshit, but I'm a big fan of soaking in warm water, so that was fine.

Next day - rafting! We headed out in the morning, leaving early because we were worried about not finding the place (the instructions said "don't put this into GPS, it'll take you 30 miles in the wrong direction"). It was in a little "town" called Pilar, so we found that, and the Rio Grande Visitor's Center (our meeting point). There was a little cafe-type place across the street, though, and that means breakfast.

Michelle and Al are happy to be alive. Will less so. 

We ate breakfast (green chiles in everything, life is good) and headed over to the visitor's center to await our guides.

Our route. Kinda. I just like 3D maps.

The view from the back patio.

And then rafting! Water was low, but the rafting was a lot of fun. Our guide was really awesome, and we found a good flow, because we didn't get hung up on rocks. He said that there had been river otters released into that river, but we didn't see any. I did go swimming a bit in the...um...very bracing water, but obviously I have no pictures.

From there, we went back to the cabin, took the boys over to the springs to soak, got some dinner, and crashed for the night. The next day was a loooooong drive.

Yep. Next morning, we drove first to Santa Fe and had breakfast at Chocolate Maven, which was awesome (I forgot to get pictures). And then we headed in to Corvalles, and stopped at Village Pizza for lunch (I know that seems like two meals right in a row, but there's really not much but driving in between). Village Pizza was awesome (cheeseburger pizza with green chiles - yum). Also there were lizards.

He sat for a picture once he figured I wasn't going to eat him. 

We waited for the pizza a bit...

Waiting.

And then headed out to find a winery. The first one we kinda struck out on (they're only open weekends), but then we went to the Corvalles Winery, and they were open, and it was lovely.

We tasted some wine - they only had four, but holy cats, their Riesling is amazing. We bought some wine, and the boys waited "patiently."

Will, in the running for "world's saltiest boy."

Finally, we got paying for wine sorted (their credit card machine was being stupid), and off we went. We swung through Albuquerque to see Michelle's old house:

And then on to Oklahoma! I'm out of pictures past that point, but I didn't want to leave off on that note, so I saved this picture from New Mexico of a coyote. He stopped to pose for us.

Sup.

More pictures as soon as something interesting happens! In Oklahoma.