Origins, GMing, and Stuff I Bought

Origins was last week (I didn't get to this before now because I'm working a summer session at the ol' day job). I'm not gonna do a detailed blow-by-blow, but I did want to talk about some of the games I played and how they came out.

First of all, I want to note that Origins' event reg system is crap, and that's having some effects on the kind of gaming I like. For example, this year the event reg system went up...and promptly crashed...and then went up again, but a full third to half of the events (including all of the IGDN ones) weren't there. They did eventually get added in, yes, but that means we lost out on those initial few hours, and who knows how many people said "screw it, I'll just use generics" in disgust?

Also (and this is deeply stupid), you can't search the database by game title. You can search by the name of the game session, but that means that if you were to log on and see if, for example, anyone was running Chill, you wouldn't see anything. You would have to search "High Tide" or "Cold Dark Earth", and why would you know the session titles?

The effect that this is having is that folks who are doing the kind of gaming I enjoy (that is, not D&D, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu or the other big-name games) are doing it at Games on Demand. Let's be clear, I love GoD and what they do, but it leads to a problem where the only way to get players for your indie game is to run it there, which means all the indie players wind up there, which just perpetuates the issue, and that room will sooner or later run out of space. If Origins events was a little more competent, I'd say they'll increase the space, but eh?

But in any case, I got to play more games this year than I usually do, so let's talk about them.

Thursday: Overlight. I backed Overlight on Kickstarter because I liked the art, which is rare for me. Kai was interested to play it, so we signed up for a session together. I'm happy to report that the game is a lot of fun. It's your basic fantasy game inasmuch as there's a bunch of history, things got borked, there are different races, etc., but I found the history and the races interesting and compelling, which is pretty uncommon for me. Also the system is interesting (usually you wind up rolling three dice for a stat, three for a skill, plus a d4 that does good things if it comes up 4), and intuitive enough that both Kai and I picked it up pretty quickly.

As for the GM: The game was well-run. I felt like he listened to the players and got enthused by what we did and how we interacted, and he backed off and let us roleplay a bit. He was a little too quick to suggest things for Kai to do, which is something a lot of adults do to younger players, but he was nice and attentive about it, which is better than it could be. My Grade: B+

Kai's character did not actually have tentacle fingers.

Friday: Bedlam Hall. I...backed this game on Kickstarter, too. It's PbtA and kind of Addams-family/gothic inspired, dark humor with very Downton Abbey sensibilities, so Michelle and I signed up to play. I hadn't had a chance to read the game first, which is a shame, but I read through it while playing, which should be a bit of a warning sign.

Bedlam Hall commits to its premise - it constantly apologizes that you've chosen to play or read it, reminds you what a horrible choice that is, and tells you about all the weird and terrible things that happen. That's fine. I've read a lot of PbtA games and I'm reading more all the time (as I'm writing my own), so what different games choose to include and what they don't is interesting to me. Bedlam Hall doesn't focus quite as heavily on the "this is a conversation" aspect of PbtA, nor does it make the players' agenda or principles clear up front (at least not that I saw, but again I didn't read it real carefully).

However, none of that matter in this particular case because the GM wasn't prepared to run a PbtA game. He was very much attempting to run it like he was introducing new players to a trad game - instead of the characters being the established house staff, we were all on our first day. That meant that we didn't get to answer the questions that rooted us in the house and with the family:

Which means that the GM was coming up with all of this stuff for us, which just further pushed us out of the moment. Add that to the fact that we were given no chance to establish our characters; the second any of us got together and started to roleplay, the GM jumped in with an NPC to start the next "plot point" or whatever. And the whole notion of "moves" was hard for him; more than once he treated them like actions in a standard RPG, which means he didn't engage what they were supposed to do, and made our choices invalid by doing whatever came into his head and running the game like it was, well, D&D. He seemed to like performing for us and doing silly voices, but gave us very little chance to be part of the story. He admitted that he was not familiar with the game, this particular scenario, or PbtA in general, and apologized for that, so that was good, at least. My Grade: D

Also Friday: Numenera: Hey, one for which I didn't back the Kickstarter! Michelle wanted to play this, so we signed up for a late-night session (look, for me 8PM-midnight is "late night"). We had a full table, so that was cool. The game itself was a lot of fun and I like the system; I like any system that's forgiving of the players and gives them resources to manage in order to succeed. I felt like in general there wasn't a lot of threat, but it could be that it was a simple scenario for beginning players, which would have been appropriate. In general, though, it's a game that encourages players to buff each other and share resources, which, again, very much my jam.

As for the GM: Overall I thought he did really well. A little too over-reliant on reading shit off a page, but the real complaint I had was that he would ask what we wanted to do, half-listen to the answer, and then narrate for a full minute. This was actually something that the Bedlam Hall GM did, too, and you'll see this complaint again for the Saturday game. And like, I get it; you're pressed for time, you know what's going to happen next, you want to get into the plot.

But like...the players aren't here to watch you dance or listen to you talk. We're here to roleplay and be awesome, and that means you need to listen to us so you can respond to what we do. This is old, old, old, GMing advice, but you must be prepared to scrap your carefully-prepared plans in order for us to be awesome, or at least be able to fake that that's what you did.

Anyway, like I said, the game was fun and it definitely got on my list to buy (this was apparently a sneak-peek of the new edition, so I'll wait until that's out), and I'm being harsh but the GM was actually pretty good. My Grade: B-

Saturday: Trail of Cthulhu. This was the only game I played over the weekend that I was really familiar with; I ran it a few times and I've overall pretty solid on the Gumshoe system. I didn't notice when we (Michelle & I) signed up that it was based on a product called Cthulhu City, which takes the game and puts a Dark City kind of spin on it, but I'd have signed up anyway. The characters were pretty cool, and all of them had a couple of questions on the back about the strangeness of Arkham and how they'd encountered it; you chose one answer from an array of four for two questions.

The red flag, though, was that the GM didn't ask what we'd chosen. Here's a fact about GMing: If the GM doesn't know, it doesn't happen in-game. If the GM doesn't ask, it doesn't matter. So we all had these cool character bits that were actually pretty important, but they made no difference to the plot.

There were some tweaks to the system that I thought were pretty interesting, but honestly I remember very, very little about the game and I was falling asleep through a lot of it. That's bad. Now, some of that was because the group (4 players total) split up a bit (along gender lines ha ha, which turned out to be a problem), and the fella I was paired with was about as interesting as a wet sock; I tried to roleplay and he was giving me nothing back. But the larger issue was, again, the GM just kind of ignoring what the players did to keep the session going along its rails, and while he listened to me and the other guy, he all but completely ignored Michelle and the other woman at the table. (This, guys, is the sort of thing that women tell us happens but that we don't notice until we look for it, so look for it.)

Overall the game felt like it was an hour longer than it actually was, and the payoff at the end where Michelle's character sacrificed herself didn't have much impact because we'd never gotten to interact. My Grade: D

Sunday: Rockerboys & Vending Machines. You heard me. This is a hack of John Harper's Lasers & Feelings, run by Phil Vecchione of Encoded Designs and Gnome Stew. It's a cyberpunk game where you're playing a team of mercs/runners/whatever, and it's focused on the flash and the neon and the job. Michelle, Kai and I all signed up because we figured it would be a nice, light game for Sunday morning, and we were not wrong.

I remember more about this game than anything else I played all weekend. Granted, it's the kind of game that's built on player input, and so that helps, but Phil slowed it down, let us play with each other, let us talk, asked us what were doing and listened to the answer, and fit the events of the session around that, rather than trying to shoehorn our actions into his idea of what the session was. At the end of it all, we stole the Ultimate Meme from a corporation, defeated a rogue AI named Mark Anthony, and escaped (my character was an AI named MASHUP; I provided the soundtrack for my team looking awesome).

High praise: Kai was engaged enough that they asked everyone for a description so they could draw the characters later. My Grade: A

Stuff I Bought: Check it out!

Smaller haul than most years, because I'm strapped for money this year. I'm planning on buying more at GenCon, finances permitting, but I couldn't pass up a least a couple of purchases from the IGDN booth (gotta support my peeps), and the other two books were things I found at IPR that looked cooled. The board game is a legacy game about building a village that I showed to Michelle and she got bouncy, so that was that.

Overall, Origins was a good time. I know it looks like I complain about GMs a lot, and I do, but that's because I'm interested to watch other GMs work, so even when it's not awesome, it's still interesting. Plus the con was bookended with fun games, so overall it's a win.

Ongoing Fuckery: The Origins Story

I just got back from Origins Game Fair on Sunday. It was a good time - I got to hang out with folks I don't see often (disclaimer: if we talked this weekend and I don't mention you here, I'm sorry), I ran a couple of games, I played in a few as well, and I came home with a respectable pile of games.

That said, when folks asked me during the con how it was going, I would reply "fine, despite Origins' best efforts." Origins, it seems, doesn't really much care about RPGs, especially if they're not run by clubs. In years past, it was common to see individual GMs running their favorite games, or mashups or hacks thereof - hell, last year, Kai and I played in a Thundarr the Barbarian hack of Barbarians of Lemuria. I've seen people running obscure games like It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show and Street-Fighter at Origins over the years, but this year, RPGs were mostly run by clubs or companies: Lots of Shadowrun, lots of Pathfinder and various other D&D-related things, and a few offerings from Rogue Cthulhu. And Games on Demand, of course, but we'll get to that.

Why the lack of individual GMs? I assume some of it is just dwindling membership; while my contacts at Origins tell me attendance was slightly up this year, the place still felt pretty empty in comparison to previous years. Also, I think the tide of interest at Origins is moving towards board games (which Origins certainly does a lot to encourage). A lot of the folks who are interested in playing new or unique games, rather than the traditional standbys I mentioned above, hit up Games on Demand - if you want new or indie games, or, like anything involving Fate, that's where you go. I wound up in and out of that room a lot over the weekend, and it was usually full or full-ish (though I had this nagging feeling that I was seeing the same people playing all the time, so I don't know what that means).

Then there's the fact that we (the IGDN) submitted a whole bunch of events that Origins just...didn't include in their online reg system like they said they would. They claimed that they ran out of space, but that was blatantly false; the events that got added back in (too late to be useful; I'll get to that) were scheduled for the Harrison-Hayes-etc room block on the 1st floor of the Hyatt, and those rooms were consistently empty or nearly so. The whole situation smacks less of "we didn't have room" and more of "we don't actually give a single fuck."

On the "too late to be useful" subject: Origins claimed (falsely) that they would include our events in their online reg system, and then did not bother to inform us that they hadn't until the system went live. Because Origins outsources their (shitty) reg system, they couldn't make alterations to it, meaning our events went into the onsite book, but (get this) even onsite, people couldn't register for them! That means that the two intrepid souls who showed up for my Friday Chill game had to pay with generics; Origins could not sell them tickets for an event in their book because they don't have access to their own system.

IGDN will be back at Origins next year, but one of the things we're discussing is how much effort we really want to put into this con, since they seem wholly uninterested in meeting us halfway or, indeed, living up to agreements they've made with us. Which is sad, because I remember Origins of years past, when it was a big, national convention for business and gaming, not a medium-sized, regional con with delusions of grandeur.

Anyway, with all of that in mind, here's my Origins 2016 report, which, again, was very positive, despite the aforementioned fuckery.

Wednesday: The Day of Sweat

Wednesday we loaded up the van and drove to Columbus, so not much to report, there. We set up the booth, which always results in exhaustion and copious perspiration, followed by dinner (this time at Bare Burger, which I highly recommend). 

Ripe with potential! And...just ripe in general. 

Can we talk about this forklift having a goddamn harpoon on it?

 

After dinner, I returned to the convention center to stand in line and get my eldest's badge and my second badge. Why second badge? Well. 

I have an exhibitor's badge, which I need, because I run the IGDN booth. However, I'm also at this gaming convention to play games, which Origins apparently feels is some kind of wacky-ass happenstance, because their (shitty) badge reg system is set up so that if you have an exhibitor's badge, you can't buy event tickets. So I had to buy a badge (which fortunately I get at a discount because I'm a teacher; in previous years I've argued with them until they refunded it, but it's such a hassle that this year I said fuck it) so I could get event tickets so I could play games. I'm actually something of a chump, because I could just buy a bunch of generics and play at Games on Demand, which is where the games I like are anyway, but that didn't occur to me until later. 

Anyway, the first time I looked at the line, it was immense, because an extra 2000 people showed up on Wednesday (perhaps because of a Magic tournament). They had it sorted by the time I got back from dinner, though, and actually getting my badges was the most painless it's been in years (probably because I was asking the bare minimum of Origins). 

You maybe can't tell but that line is hella huge.

Games: None.

Awesome People: +Michelle Lyons-McFarland, +Tim Rodriguez, +Ryan Schoon, +Mark Diaz Truman (very briefly), +Jerry Grayson 

Thursday: The Day of Booth

Thursday I spent most of the day in the IGDN booth, sellin' books. Michelle was with me for a lot of it. 

The booth, and Michelle in her Dracula shirt.

The hordes.

I had a Chill game scheduled, but due to Origins' scheduling shenanigans, I had no players and it didn't happen. So I went back up to the booth for a while, wandered around for a bit, and just generally tried to be useful. 

Kai came and found us during the day, too, before zipping off to play Big Eyes, Small Mouth, which he really enjoyed (we didn't play in any games together this con, which was a little sad because I like playing with him, but it was cool that he was playing new stuff on her own).

We went to dinner at Kooma, which was lovely, and talked about games and so forth. 

Games: None.

Awesome People: See above, plus +Derrick Kapchinsky, +Andy Hopp, and probably others I'm forgetting. 

Friday: The Day of Games, Finally

Friday we actually got to play some stuff. Holy cats. First off, we had to get Kai up and out the door because he was running Cat at Games on Demand. Once again, the fact that Origins hemmed and hawed and ultimately tried to say that minors couldn't run games (wtf) worked against us; the "Kids' Games on Demand" idea didn't get publicized and he wound up running for adults. That said, he said it went well (if quickly) and he had fun being a GM.

Behold his commanding presence.

Meanwhile, Michelle and I had signed up to play Baker Street. Now, we'd backed this game on Kickstarter and Michelle's actually in the book as a hack driver (it was a birthday present), but we kept missing out on being able to play it at GenCon, so it was nice to finally get to experience it. 

Shy GM aside.

 

The scenario involved a dead child supposedly killed by the nanny - a vampire! Ha. We were investigators, here. The system for figuring out clues is done in rounds, where first you find evidence, then you narrow leads, and finally you figure out what the truth is. I'd run this game, I think; it's an interesting take on a Holmes-style mystery and (as you probably know) I love investigative games. 

My one complaint about the game (and it's minor): You ever have a guy at your table who gets a dumb idea into his head and just will not let it go, even if it's actively derailing things and is objectively a stupid thing to do? The conflict here centered in part on a poisoned dart, and one guy at the table got the idea into his head that he was going to lick it. Now, we'd already suspected it was poisoned, but this guy persisted and the GM wound up making another player roll against him to get the damn arrow away from him before he licked it. I dunno, I think there's a time for the GM to say "this is dumb, you know it's dumb, let's move on." Like I said, though, that was minor. My grade: A. 

Right, so, following Baker Street I had a Chill game to run. I was expecting not to run it, because, well, see above. But because I'd worked the booth the day before, I'd had time to tell folks about the game, and yep, a couple of awesome people showed up to play. 

I wound up running Big Sky (which will be written up for the site this month or next ETA: it's on DTRPG if you search), because the other scenario I had prepared (Black Diamond) really isn't suitable for just two players. The game went well - they wound up bugging out and calling in more help rather than confronting the main menace, because they didn't wish to be eaten by a werewolf, which is reasonable. 

So then dinner, and then I had an off-the-books game to run: Promethean: The Created 2nd Edition. +Meredith Anne had asked me to run it, in what's become an Origins tradition of "find an awesome person and run a game for them" (last year it was +Monica Valentinelli). So we found a room downstairs and got into it...only to discover that the room was going to be used for the Kobolds At My Baby Midnight Massacre. (ALL HAIL KING TORG!)

This does not make for a quiet room.

 

So we moved to a different room, and played through the game. It was a lot of fun - the players very easily dropped into their characters but also the notion that their characters had some history together; probably helped that the players knew each other. More to the point, the game played really well, which is gratifying to me as the developer. 

And then I forgot to take a group picture. Balls. Ah, well. 

Games: Baker Street, Chill, Promethean

Awesome People: Michelle, Ryan, Meredith, +Scott Holden, Nathan

Saturday: The Day of Even More Games

Saturday I was barely in the booth at all (Friday I was there a little, but I didn't mention it because it wasn't really relevant). But Saturday, man, lots of games. I got up early to go and play The One Ring. 

Now, I'm gonna lose a lot of you here, but I don't like Tolkein's writing. I find it overwrought and boring and hard to read. I started reading Fellowship before the movie came out, figuring it would be useful to know the story to better appreciate the cinematic version, but I got as far as Tom Bombadil and went "wtf even is this" and stopped. But with that said, I really love the movies. I'd just rather spend four hours watching all of it than 80 zillion hours reading it and getting a shitload of unnecessary backstory. 

So imagine my delight when the GM for this game quietly confessed to basically what I just said, including getting up to Bombadil frolicking through the woods before stopping. Also, the game was set in Rohan (we were riders thereof), and we had to do some diplomacy and matchmaking to prevent civil war among the horse-lords. My character was very much a straight-up warrior, but I managed to get some good use out of Awe and Song, too, so I felt useful even when we weren't stabbing people (stabbing was pretty minimal, actually). I wound up buying the game, and I think if Michelle wanted to pick up her "family politics" game The One Ring would be a decent set-up for it. My grade: A

Family trees are an essential part of the process.

 

From there, I had a brief break and we were going to go to North Market, but then a giant rainbow blocked our path. 

Wooo!

 

Pride was this weekend, and I knew that, but it meant that getting across the street to the Market required more finagling than we had time for, so we ate at the food court in and admired people in rainbow garb instead. And then off to the next game!

Turns out the next game was an alpha playtest of Pillar of Fire, a new game by +Cam Banks and run (in this case) by +Renee Knipe. 

The game was described as "Exalted in space," but I didn't feel like it played much like Exalted, which is a good thing (I love Exalted, but the system is not for the impatient). Pillar of Fire plays more like a stripped-down WoD game - it's a dice pool, sure, but actions are based on ability and intent, and non-successful dice pump up your other abilities. For example, the character I played could manipulate gravity, but had to roll a few 6s on dice to "prime the pump," so to speak, and get access to his more impressive powers. 

If you think about it, this is a change from games where you start out with your pool of points full and then spend them throughout the game - here, you start empty, have to build up your pool, so you're full by the time things are coming to a head. I didn't realize until now just how much I like that idea. 

Anyway, the game is intriguing and I very much want to see it from the GM's side. This particular session was fun - two conflicting invasive beings (an AI gone rogue and a malignant fungus monster), and we wound up dealing more with the AI and just nuking the fungus from orbit, which is the only way to be sure. Apart from one player with a habit of interrupting people (which he stopped when I called him on, in fairness) it was a really fun table, too. My grade: A

That put us up to dinner time, and so we (me, Michelle, and Kai) walked down the street to the Happy Greek to get flaming cheese and then to Jeni's for delicious ice cream. All was well until Michelle walked through a crowd of smokers on her way back, triggering her bronchitis that she's been fighting for weeks and making her struggle all the way back to the hotel, and then putting her on bedrest for the rest of the night. Fuck smokers. Smoking is gross. If you have to do it, do it somewhere private, like the bottom of a well. 

Anyway, so Michelle was toast, and Kai went off to play Are You a Werewolf, so I went up to Games on Demand because they'd emailed earlier and said they might need GMs. Turns out they needed players, and I'm there for that! I wound up playing Iron Edda with +Tracy Barnett. 

For Goldheim!

Now, I'd backed this game on Kickstarter but then kind of missed it, because I somehow didn't ever realized it was Fate-based. But man, it's pretty badass. It combines Fate Core and FAE, which at first made me think "...why?", but it made perfect sense in context - Fate Core for the characters, FAE for the giants, which need to work on a different scale. Also, there's a really fun "create your stronghold" system, and I love collaborative world-building, so that was awesome. I wound up playing a seer and teacher of the jarl's rowdy children, and giving a dwarf-piloted destroyed mech a serious case of head-ravens. My grade: A+. I fully intend to run this for some of my players at some point. 

Then, sleep. 

Games: The One Ring, Pillar of Fire, Iron Edda

Awesome folks: Everyone mentioned above plus +Hamish Cameron and probably other folks whose names I don't know, +Joel Sparks, +Steve Wallace 

Sunday: The Final Hours 

Traditionally, I run Clay-o-Rama on Sunday morning...but you know how that worked out. This added in the bonus of the dudes in the main gaming hall not even knowing where the table was that I was supposed to use, but I eventually found it with literally no help from them. I sat there for a little while and then said "fuck this" and went shopping with Kai and Michelle. 

Ain't this the saddest damn thing?

 

So we wandered the dealer's hall and bought things. Kai got some dice earrings and some art for his wall, and of course I bought games because I somehow don't have enough. 

I did, however, find a game that looked interesting at first blush, but then I read the back. 

Anyone care to guess how to make me quickly put a book down and wash my hands?

 

Also did some time in the booth, after shopping, and chatted with +Matthew Karafa and some of his buds. Sunday is the day for people to drop by and chat, too, so we saw +Jaym Gates and lots of other folks I'm forgetting. 

Not sure what Matt's looking at here, but it concerns me.

 

So then it was time to break things down, and we got the booth struck and the van loaded in slightly over an hour, which is reasonable, and home we went!

Swag!

Guys, I really love Origins, and I'm coming back, whether it's as a rep for IGDN or just on my own. But I would really love for Origins to bounce back, to absorb the spillover from GenCon (which is getting far too big), and for GAMA to pay attention to some of the other facets of the hobby they're ignoring. Here's hoping! 

Promethean! (One-shot notes)

I'm running a Promethean one-shot at Origins, so probably I should take notes. Let's talk a little.

It's been a hard week to be a humanist. People did terrible things to other people. That's every week. People also stood up and helped, and that's every week, too.

I did the first proof of Promethean last week, and it struck me again how much I love this game. Because as with people in general, the journey of the Created is our journey, except ours doesn't end. And like Prometheans, we can be subject to horrors that are just too grotesque to linger on (but some of us have to). And like Prometheans, we reach a state of grace, maybe, a state of acceptance of our humanity, and the journey does not end just because we decide we hate it.

So here I am, a few days after a profoundly broken person murdered 50 of his fellow human beings, a few days after a man gunned down a young singer, while any number of other violent crimes are happening, and I'm listening to "Glory" by John Legend and Common, and thinking about what kind of Promethean game I can run for my friends at Origins. The group includes someone who I really love and respect, who goes out of her way to be a light in a way that I wish I could be.

So. Let's do this. If you happen to be playing on Friday, don't read on.

Origins 2015!

Origins! Woo!

Yeah, I know. GAMA doesn't do administrative stuff well, their software is weird, etc. Don't care. Still love this con, and attendance was up this year, so that's great to hear. Let's see some pictures!

This year was special because my son Kai was in attendance, and ran his first con game. So we picked him up from his last day of school on Wednesday and hit the road.

We stopped at Grandpa's Cheese Barn on the way, because obviously. 

We got to the con and unloaded the stuff for our booth, and then I went to go fight with registration about exhibitor badges.

Michelle doing booth assembly. 

See, here's the problem. If you want an exhibitor badge, you have to wait until those become open to register. Which is great...if you don't plan to sign up for any events. I do want to sign up for events. That meant I had have them cancel my badge, cancel my events, sign me up for a new badge, and then sign me up for my events real quick. It worked, it just took a long time. But we got it sorted and the folks at registration were really nice and patient.

Back to the booth, then: We couldn't get it entirely set up, because most of the flooring hadn't been delivered. See, funny story, UPS randomly decided to deliver half of our flooring to our house in Cleveland, rather than the hotel that we'd specified as the delivery address. So...huh? But, Amazon and UPS worked with us, and got stuff shipping down to us. So we set up as much booth as we could...

TRAVIS IS A MONSTER.

  ...and fucked off to get dinner.

We got dinner at Bare Burger, a lovely little place across the street from the convention center that serves (you guessed it) burgers, many of them made from bison or wild boar. Very tasty food, though I think the staff isn't used to Origins. When I walked in, I just had Kai with me, and the host said, "two?" And I said, "no, eight, they're just not here yet. Actually, we're both four people." He just kind of blinked. I said, "dude, it's gonna get a lot weirder than me this weekend, best be ready."

Kai contemplates burgers.

Tim & Travis.

Anyway, dinner done, we went back over the convention center. I walked Kai around a bit so he knew the lay of the land, including the giant inflatable sheep.

You thought I was kidding?

And then he had his first game, which was Are You a Werewolf? I wound up playing, too, because I had nothing else going on and why not? AYAW is an Origins staple; we also often play it at our holiday party, though there are some differences. The Origins folks have everyone pat their legs during the night so that you can't listen to movement and try and figure out the werewolves that way (not that it mattered, as loud as the room was). I always find that weird, because it's not like there's anything else to go on, not if you don't know the people and know their tells. Ah, well. It was fun, I got eaten by werewolves, and then we headed back to the room for rest.

Thursday!

Eee!

So, first thing was finishing booth set-up before the hall opened. We got the flooring and got the booth completed, and I think it looked pretty nice.

Buy one of each!

The booth from the other angle.

Thursday I worked the booth, and then had an afternoon Chill game that didn't happen because I didn't get players. Bummer. So I wound up wandering the dealer's room a bit. Kai had a game earlier in the day...

I believe this would be the infamous "anime weird ninja school" game where they give out candy.

 I found Tim doing demos in the booth...

GHOST PIRATES.

 And Jerry in his booth...

Sellin' books. 

But that night, after dinner, Michelle and I went to Games on Demand, and there was a crazy line of people to get in.

Like a Cedar Point ride.

We wound up playing in a game of Feng Shui 2nd Edition, which was lots of fun. I was a magical cop named Stephen Wei, and lots of fun Jet Li-esque shenanigans were had. Michelle was a sorceress thrown forward in time to handle some Chi weirdness. We fight crime!

The games was really well-run, I think. There were a couple of moments were the GM paused to explain things for a bit too long, but it wasn't an ongoing problem, and the fight scenes (which are important to Feng Shui were evocative and quick-paced). This was run through Games on Demand, and they have yet to disappoint. My Grade: A

The GM, some sheets, my pen. Very minimalist. 

Then sleep! Then Friday!

Friday was the day that Kai was going to run his game of Cat. I was supposed to be free until 2 so I could be with him for his first hour of the game, but my GM got sick and lost her voice, so I had to run two Chill games back to back. Which was somewhat exhausting, but hey.

I segued directly into my second game of Chill, which also went well. That finished up about six, and we had some time to wander. Kai was supposed to be in a game of Mammoth Catan, but Origins fucked the schedule up, so that got cancelled.

Looks cool, though, dunnit?

 We saw a "rocket ship" made of balloons.

Sometimes, a balloon is just a balloon. 

We were supposed to play The One Ring that night, but that got cancelled, so we crashed out instead.

Saturday!

First thing: Kai and I played in a game of Barbarians of Lemuria retooled for Thundarr, the Barbarian!

Now, my dad used to watch Thundarr with me on Saturday mornings, and it was a show we liked. I didn't have time to show Kai much of it, but he got a sense of how it worked. He played Princess Ariel, I played Ookla the Mok, and we beat up a bunch of evil monsters and destroyed the Moon Men and saved the world. It was pretty awesome. The GM kept things moving and moved the spotlight appropriately, and, most important, he played off the 10-year-old at his table nicely; he didn't talk down to him or just tell him what to do (which is good, because Kai can have great ideas on his own if you give him a minute, but he'll go along with whatever folks suggest in a game otherwise). My Grade: A

Character tiles!

Fightin' rat monsters!

And then some lunch at North Market, and then I had a game of Chill to run, which went fine (got to see people I don't get to play with often, which is always neat).

And then more Chill! +Monica Valentinelli had asked me to run a game for her, so I gathered up some folks and we played a game of Chill in the Big Bar, at a Geek Chic table. I liked this game; it's quick and tense. I think maybe I will use it as a con game going forward. No PC deaths, though the monster used the Chill discipline at the end and threw everyone for a loop.

Captain America came to visit. 

Monica and Jerry review their mission. 

Bat Lord: Banished! Woo!

And then sleep? Naw, and then we sat up chatting and drinking forever. And then sleep.

And then Sunday! Sunday morning at Origins means only one thing: Clay-o-Rama! It was weird this year, though. I had eight people signed up, but only four showed, so it went really quickly.

Preparing for battle. 

So that was quick, and then back into the dealer's room to wander around for a while before it was time for tear-down.

Chill book, tokens, dice, and a character sheet. You know you wanna buy it. 

And then tear-down!

Rawr!

SMASH!

And that was Sunday. Monday, we were still there. We got everything packed up, and got on the road to Baltimore for a little mini-vacation, leaving the ruins of the con behind...until next year.

Wait...I still...function...

Origins!

A little behind, here, but that's because I lost time working on work stuff to Origins, which puts me behind on blogging about cons, like Origins.

Circle of life, I guess.

I did not take a lot of pictures at Origins this year, which was silly of me, but I will show you the ones I did take, and also recount my experiences.

I spent much of Origins 2014 at the Indie Game Developer Network booth. The IGDN, if you don't know, is exactly that - a collection of folks doing games from various angles (a lot of us are writers and designers, and we're making a push to get more of the art/layout/graphics folks in). One of the big perks of the organization is that we can buy into a booth for Origins and GenCon and get the benefits without the huge cost, so here we are.

Seriously, this booth would be catnip for me if I didn't already own all these games.

So I (and +Michelle Lyons-McFarland and +Tracy Barnett and +Mark Diaz Truman and some other folks) worked the booth all weekend, ran demos, sold games, it was a good time.

I also wound up running some games. Now, last year, I ran games through Indie Games on Demand, which was fine, but I felt wibbly about not knowing which game I was going to run until I got there. This year, I signed up to run World of Darkness: Innocents and was surprised when the game filled (it was Wednesday night), but it turned out that they were friends who kind of ambushed me, which was fun. I ran curse the darkness using the Apocalypse World hack that Olivia Hill wrote for Infinite Shadows (on sale now here and at the IGDN booth at GenCon!), and that was pretty cool - lots of in-character conflict. I had one scheduled use the Fate Accelerated hack that +Rob Wieland wrote for the same book, but that didn't get players, which is weird because Fate games generally fill.

(I also ran a pickup space opera game using Fate Accelerated for +Branden Webb, +Rachel Steiner and +Shane Allen, and that was fun, but I didn't take pictures because I'm dumb. However, Rachel played a drunk alien, Shane played a mustachio'd boxer and Branden played a prince-in-hiding, and there was combat against Tzimisce-like aliens, so that's cool.)

Anyway, I was also scheduled to run A Tragedy in Five Acts, but that didn't fill and it's not the kind of game you can run with one player. So instead, I went over to Indie Games on Demand and borrowed a couple of generics, and wound up playing Dream Askew.

Dream Askew is a post-apocalyptic game using (appropriately) the Apocalypse World engine. Unlike AW, it's GMless, and it deliberately takes the genre in the direction talking about marginalization, gender, sexuality, and the queer experience. With the right group, it's awesome. We had the right group. (Dream Askew is a game from +Avery Mcdaldno, the genius who also gave us Monsterhearts, and you should support the Patreon for the game.)

Anyway, we had our queer enclave in the ruins of Seattle. I played the Iris (psychic and kind of fucked up), a blind trans man named Brace, who experienced the psychic maelstrom as an inferno, and acted as a kind of angel of death for members of our enclave who were wounded beyond our ability to fix them. It was pretty badass.

See the chips? It's GMless, so unlike other AW games, you make your moves on your own. Weak move (which tends to hurt or at least complicate things for you), take a chip. Strong movie (you get to be badass and the focus of attention), spend a chip. It was a lot of fun.

Normally I'd give a GM grade, but since there wasn't one - or rather, we were all GMing! - I give us an A.

Oh, and there were some shifty characters wandering around that day.

Wanna know how I got these goggles?

Sunday, I ran my traditional game of Clay-o-Rama. This year they put me in the kids' room, which was awesome. Since it was explicitly labeled as a Kids Track game, I didn't have to worry about adults coming in and fucking it up (I mean, some adults played, but they were parents of other players).

The building phase. 

Look at the horrible monster! The Claydonian, I mean, not the kid; he's delightful. 

Tentacles: Always a solid strategy. 

But making a flat monster is also viable. 

Combat and carnage!

As usual, all the adults died off (but one did survive into the last four). As usual, a little girl won. I don't think her Claydonian is pictured, though.

So following the Clay-o-Rama battle, I headed back into the dealer's room to work the booth a bit more and do some shopping with Michelle. Another successful Origins completed!

My haul.