the GenCon haul

So I went to GenCon yesterday mostly for the shopping.  I'm sure there were a ton of people there that would be fun to play some D&D with, but I just didn't feel like navigating both the convention and the bureaucracy needed to sign up for a game.  And is it just me, or is the portion of the GenCon site devoted to con listings a total piece of crap?  I couldn't find jack or squat there.  Anyway, here's what I bought at the big show:

A couple old issues of White Dwarf from the eighties - Found at the auction area second chance consignment shop.

The Dragon Tree Spell Book - Yet another vintage book of spells from some folks' campaign, also from the auction shop.

TSR module UK3 The Gauntlet - My best buddy Dave ran this and UK2 when we were kids, so I never read it. Also from the auction area.

The Swords & Wizardry Core Rules Reference Sheets booklet - I could run a pick-up session of something like D&D with no books at hand, but this represents pretty close to the absolute minimum written rules I would need for a campaign.  Bought at the excellent Old School Renaissance Group booth.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing boxed set - Also from the OSR Group booth.  The free PDF rules excerpt convinced me that Raggi knows how D&D is supposed to work mechanically, maybe better than any of the rest of us.  The GM advice in the referee book proves that he doesn't just understand the rules, he understands the game.  The gross art doesn't freak me out.  Most of it is a less whimsical version of the sorts of things that happen to adventurers in nearly every dang illo in the HackMaster line.  The only thing I don't like about the art direction is that everyone seems to be wearing clothes about 5 centuries too modern for my medieval tastes.  My recommendation to everyone: get over the art if you can, as this is one of the best versions of the Game ever made.

Cheers, Gary - This book of compiled Gygaxian wisdom was being offered as a fundraiser for the Gygax Memorial.  It's neat to have a new source to cite for the periodic "Let's pretend we know what Gary was thinking" dramafests.

DungeonMorph Font from Inkwell Ideas - It's a damn shame that Joe Wetzel's sweetass dungeon geomorph dice were delayed, but at least I now have a new font full chock o' geomorphic goodness.  I did get to see the prototype dice up close.  They looked pretty rad.  They were bigger than I expected and the geomorphs were etched in, not just inked on.

None of these purchases were unexpected in any way.  I didn't know exactly what I was going to get at the auction, but it was definitely going to fall into the categories of "old" and "cheap".  This last item was a complete surprise for me.  Some of you may be familiar with my fondness for the Savage Worlds brand customizable GM screen, as pictured in this old pic of a session of mine:



The three panels are laid out landscape style, opening up a little extra space compared to standard screen design. And the front and back of each panel is a transparent pocket, allowing you to custom make your own insert sheets. It's the only thing in my game collection that's almost as universally useful as my dice.

Hammerdog Games, who I had never heard of before, was at the con selling four panel versions of both the landscape and upright customizable screens.  But what caught my eye was their nifty mini-screens.  Each panel only measures 4 inches by six inches, but there are six panels instead of three or four.  I love it.  With it I should be able to have at least six charts handy and still have a security blanket on the table, but on a less obtrusive scale.  And the size of the panels are just right that I could jot a chart or map or whatever comes to mind into one of my ever-present Moleskine pocket notebooks, then later tear it out and slip it into the screen.

The Stewpot is full

Sorry, the troll can only fit so many halflings in his stewpot.  If you didn't get an email from me letting you know you're in, then your grisly end will have to wait another day.

Get in the stew pot!

Like some gaming Krishnamurti, Zak S. has declared that we are all free to run games whenever we want, thanks to Google+ hangouts.  I've stayed the hell away from online play for a long time, but at his urging I am giving it a go next Monday at super-early o'clock, as part of his ConstantCon 2011 effort.  Details follow.
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HALFLING STEW

Day - Monday, August 1st, 2011

Start Time - 4:30 AM Chicago/6:30 PM Tokyo (Did I do that right? I'm a provincial yokel.)

System(s) - Basic/Expert D&D/Labyrinth Lord/etc.

Level - 1

Everyone bring a first level halfling. Roll 3d6 in order. If you don't get a Dex 9 and a Con 9 you may swap stats to achieve those minimums. If you didn't roll two scores of at least 9 please cheat.

Don't bother buying equipment, as you start without any, in the troll's stewpot.

When speaking in character you are encouraged to use an outrageous French accent.

This session will last no more than 2 hours.

Contact info: jrients@gmail.com
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Shoot me an email if you want on the player list.  As I type this I have one player.  I believe there can be up to ten people in a Google+ video chat.

What is going on here?

As reported previously the totally legitimate journalistic venue that is Jeff's Gameblog will be sending a reporter (i.e. me) to cover Gen Con this year. Today I decided to do a little research on the exhibitors, so I would know where to go to get to the Old School Renaissance Group booth and to see if any other exhibitor might interest me. Here's the map and exhibitor list I found.

You know what is bugging me about that list? More than half of the exhibitors don't have anything listed for a website. These people need to get with the program. If you think you're big time enough to go to Gen Con, get yourself a dang website.  I shouldn't have to hunt down info on your company, for crying out loud.  (And if you sent Gen Con a company URL when you signed up but it's not listed, get them to correct the file.)

PS - If any Gameblog readers are going to Gen Con and maybe want to meet up for lunch that Saturday, let me know.  At this stage I literally have no plans beyond pestering whoever is running the OSR Group booth followed by wandering aimlessly about, mouth agape like a slack-jawed yokel.

Edit: I just remembered one other booth I need to stop at.  Inkwell Ideas.  That guy is awesome.

a legitimate journalistic outlet?

So it looks like I have been cleared for a press pass for the next GenCon Indy. Which is pretty funny, given the normal levity to gravity ratio around here. My plan is to visit for one day (probably Saturday) and try to come up with a little report for all the folks who wish they could go but can't. I'll bring this up again as we get closer to the con, but I just wanted to put this idea in everyone's head: if there's something you specifically want me to try to get info about let me know in a comment here or via email (jrients, gmail, etc, etc.).  Right now I don't have a plan beyond hitting up the OSR Group booth and seeing if Goodman Games has mock-ups of the DCCrpg.

I will try to suppress the urge to wear a fedora with a little card in the band labeled "PRESS" and refer to myself as Scoops Rients.

a few GaryCon III images

My camera pooped out on me, so I only have stills today.  I got a little video with my wife's camera, but I haven't had time to review it yet.  Anyway, here's some info on GaryCon III, which I visited for a while on Saturday.

I dig this program cover.

This Troll Lords ad from the inside cover of the program perplexes me a bit.  I enjoy pictures of hot fantasy ladytypes as much as the next straight dude, but in the far future world of 2011 it's really odd to see the male gaze feature so prominently in both the illo and the ad copy.  And C&C doesn't really fit any definition of "harder" that I can think of.  It strikes me as a legit middle-of-the-road option in many ways.  Advertising, what can you do?

Kenzer, on the other hand, seems to have this stuff down pat.  Here's some monsters, here's a cover of our monster book.  And look how awesome we are:

One of things I wanted to do at GaryCon this year was to get in on one of the HackMaster 5 demos being run this weekend.  I own the basic rulebook but it strike me as the sort of game that maybe runs slicker than it reads.  But when I got close to one of the tables I saw them plotting out movement on a one inch:five foot tactical grid and all interest in the system immediately left me.

The other game I wanted to check out this weekend was the forthcoming Dungeon Crawl Classics rpg.  "Glory & Gold Won by Sorcery & Sword" is a great new tagline for this game.  And check out the covers of the modules.  Somebody has been going over old editions of books listed in Appendix N, because those babies just screen "lurid 70's fantasy".  Here's a close-up of my favorite:

Holy crap, that bad guy rules!

The DCCrpg ad was a flier rather than part of the program book.  Above is the flip side.

So I got into one of the DCC demos again and I am totally digging the way this game is shaping up.  Here are some of the handouts I got:

The spell charts are possibly both the best and worst part of the system.  On the one hand I found using them to be a ton o' fun.  On the other hand, I kept imagining how newbie unfriendly they could be.  And will there be a separate spellbook?  My 3rd level MU (see below) needed like 8 pages of these charts just to do his wizardly job.  Still, the results in play were pretty dang awesome. 

So above is my guy from the demo run by Harley Stroh, author of the module with the awesome eyeball monster up above.  The other players included Michael Shorten, the Chicago Wiz.  It was great to see him again.  He's a hoot to game with.  He was playing an elf wizard-astrologer he names Carls Agan.  At one point he took a crit that resulted in "+d8 damage and loss of that many teeth", which tells me everything I need to know about this game's critical hit system.  For the rest of the game Mike said all his in-character lines with a mushmouth.  Meanwhile I got a natural one on a spellcasting rolls, which sent me to some sort of totally metal Magic Corruption chart, resulting in my poor orphan-wizard growing a pair of horns.

My favorite incident of the game came early on.  Jim Skach brought his two kids to the con (ages 9 and 11 or so) and all three were playing.  These two kids were really fun.  The whole party was traversing an iceflow when a monster errupted up from the water below, wildly tilting the ice.  Jim's daughter immediately announces that her big strong warrior is jamming her spear into the ice and holding on.  My puny little wizard is standing right behind her, so I tell the GM as I fall over I'm grabbing onto the warrior.

GM: Tiny Tim, you're hanging onto the boot of Christina the Warrior for dear life.  Christina, what do you do?

Christina: I take off my boot.

Stone.  Cold.  I end up sliding down almost to the water.  Meanwhile another PC is already drowning but I can't quite reach him, so I use the boot.  "Here grab this boot."  Unfortunately, that guy is too heavy for my Str 6 MU to pull out, instead he pulls me in.  Mike has help both of us out.  Good times.

The vendors included Troll Lord Games, Black Blade Publishing and Kenzer & Co.  I only bought three things.  Black Blade was selling these great pads of graph and hex paper.  At the moment I don't know the exact dimensions but they're bigger than standard 8.5" x 11" so I could not resist.  I got the above book from the Troll Lords.  It's 28 pages of random dungeon stocking charts and advice.  I probably don't need another set of random dungeon charts and the advice is clearly aimed at novice DMs, but it was only seven bucks.

Winter War!

So I was paying attention as last month event submission opened for Winter War, my groovy little local game convention.  All y'all should come to Champaign, Illinois next January 28th through 30th and play some games.  Here are the events I just submitted.

The King's Own Frankenstein
His majesty's corpse-collage duplicate has escaped!  Bring him back alive before his stitches/the kingdom/all time and space unravel.
six players for Encounter Critical, Friday night

Revenge of the Bad Guys
You and your dungeon buddies are sick of those jerks over at the Village of Omlet.  Time for some payback!
up to twelve players for Monsters! Monsters!/Tunnels & Trolls, Sunday afternoon

Images from Gary Con 2

I really dig this ad from the insider front cover of the program booklet, despite the terrible wrong it does to the work of Erol Otus.

More Erol Otus art from inside the program booklet. 

Rob Kuntz wins the award for Creepiest V.I.P. Photo in the program.

DCC-rpg flier from the freebie table.

The dude selling official con T-shirt's was just giving away this nicely produced 88 page module!  As an early bird registrant I also scored a swag bag containing Knights of the Dinner Table #147, the Kingdoms of Kalamar Campaign Setting Sourcebook, Kingdoms of Kalamar Atlas, and Jim Raggi's awesome The Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Role Playing Games And Their Modern Simulcra!  (Regarding Raggi's book:  Like dice?  Also monsters?  Then buy it!)  That stuff retails for over 80 bucks and the con only cost $20 to get into.

The back cover of the module above depicts a mock-up of the proposed Gygax Memorial.  The pic is a little too dark, but that's a gold dragon sleeping on top of a tower fortress.

Lot item from the silent auction: one (1) VHS copy of the Tom Hanks classic Mazes & Monsters and one (1) claw hammer.

Nevermind the Pathfinder screen: I got in on one of the playtest/demo sessions for the forthcoming Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.  Joe Goodman was a pretty good GM.  The guy reaching for the paper is James Mishler.  It was neat to play a game with James again.

For this particular playtest session everybody got two or three zero level characters with randomly determined races and professions.  My locksmith died fairly early on, but ol' Stinky McGee here not only survived the session, he never attacked a foe even once.  I did a fair amount of encouraging others to take all the hard chances.  At the end my character ended up with half a magic artifact (the 'demonface rod') and instructions from some goat-headed demon on the evil deeds necessary to secure the other half.  The best anybody else got were a handful of gems or some weapons or armor.  Therefore I am declaring myself the winner.

Mishler got to play in an earlier DCC-rpg session with first level characters.  He reported what sounds to me like a totally awesome but potentially cumbersome mechanic for spellcasting.  Every spell comes with a success chart something like this:

SLEEP
1-10: Fail
11-13: 1 foe drowsy d6 rounds
14-16: d8 hit dice put to sleep for d6+6 turns
17-20: 2d8 hit dice put to sleep for d6+6 turns
21-25: 3d8 hit dice put to sleep for d6+6 turns
26+: 4d8 hit dice put to sleep for d6+6 days

That's not an exact duplication of the system, but it gives you the basic idea.  Every time you cast a spell you roll d20 plus Int mod plus Caster level and look at the chart.  You only forget a spell if you fail.

Using the original notes from 1967, Paul Stromberg put together the Siege of Brodenberg using the same line of 40mm medieval figures and the same castle model as the original running of the event.  What's the big deal about the Siege of Brodenberg, you may ask?  It turned a young fellow named Gygax on to medieval miniatures.

The other game I got to play was an OD&D session run by Tim Kask.  Mr. Kask was the first full-time employee of TSR Hobbies.  The program said this run was for "Expert dungeon delvers" only, so I felt a little dumb sitting down at this table.  Turns out I was the only guy their besides Mr. Kask with any specific OD&D experience, so I didn't really have that much to worry about.  I ended up mapping and assigning marching orders, helping the elf next to me pick out and throw spells, while the dwarf across the table (who I put in front) determined many of our actions out of combat.

See the head of black hair bottom center?  That dude and his buddy flew in from Italy specifically to attend this convention.  They had taught themselves English in order to learn to play D&D.  I handed him the last of the three copies of Encounter Critical I had brought along to give away.  I wish I had brought my own copy to get Mr. Kask's autograph (see the inside front cover for why).

In the middle of Kask's run I look behind me for some reason and notice that if I scoot my chair back more than an inch or two I will totally bump into Frank Mentzer, who is running a game immediately behind me.  Meanwhile Jeff Easley is about ten feet away the whole time, just relaxing next to some original art that's graced the cover of many old TSR products.  Additional incidental name-dropping:  I brought along my brother-in-law-in-law's copy of Metamorphosis Alpha to get Jim Ward's autograph in it, which he was very pleased to do.  As he's signing it Tom Wham walks by and says something like "the value of that collectible just went down 10%".  They both laughed heartily.

My character from Tim Kask's game.  When in doubt pick the viking.

some news items

• TARGA, the Traditional Adventure Roleplaying Games Association, has scheduled another International Traditional Gaming Week, this time for March 21st through 27th. The basic deal is that people are challenged to work some old school gaming into their schedule that week. Run a one-shot for some friends, do a store demo, etc. Since my Mutant Future group should be meeting the Wednesday of that week I should be covered for this event. But I would be more than happy to run a second game that week if anyone in the Champaign-Urbana area wants me to do so. Or if you're willing to come to CU for a visit. Shoot me an email to jrients at the gmail to the dot com and we'll work something out. For that matter, even if it's not that particular week don't ever hesitate to email me and ask me to run something.

• Also on the TARGA front is the Gary Gygax Pledge-An-Auction, a fundraiser for Gary Con. There's three neat items up for bid right now and I believe more are on the way.

• Speaking of Gary Con, I just noticed that the event schedule is now available for Gary Con 2. I'm not sure what I want to play, as there's a crapload of interesting stuff. I gotta say, the idea of playing in a game that Rob Kuntz labels for advanced players only gives me the willies.

• So James Mishler sent me a copy of his latest Wilderlands of High Adventure release, 100 Street Vendors of the City State. I'm really digging it. James always makes great use of the larger Wilderlands setting, but he also takes great pains to make his stuff work in other campaigns with minimal hassle. Want to liven up streetside encounters in your D&D city? Get yourself a copy.

• Turns out there's a game convention in Indianapolis. Who knew? Who's Yer Con, March 12-14.

Jeff's Big Dumb Tekumel Adventure

So on Sunday I finally got a chance to run Empire of the Petal Throne, the first published RPG system for M.A.R. Barker's legendarily byzantine Tekumel setting. Put out by TSR the year after D&D, it was the Game Lizards second rpg and possibly the second rpg published by anyone. As such I tend to lump EPT in with Holmes Basic, Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign, the Perrin Conventions and Arduin as early examples of individual referees bending OD&D to their own ends. There's been some jibbajabba on the OD&D boards about publishing a setting-generic version of EPT's mechanics, and after running one session of the game I can certainly see the appeal. There's a nifty little swords & sorcery system hidden under the elaborate backstory and hard to pronounce names. When I first got EPT as a college kid I couldn't see past all that stuff, but nowadays I'm hep to the fact that part of being a good GM involves knowing what sections of the rulebook to ignore. So for this con game I only used as much of the game as I needed and not one iota more.

I own a few EPT items besides the rulebook, but early in the process I decided that I wanted to focus on the core game and not overly junk things up with stuff imported from other products. So when making this adventure I used only one other book, the Gamescience Book of Tables. I've long wanted to use the random dungeon generator in the front of that book for a while now, so that's what I did. The dungeon under the ruined temple of Hyashra ended up as a three level affair with not quite 90 total rooms. Thanks to the random dungeon charts I had some unguarded treasure, traps, secret doors and magic fountains sprinkled across my maps. But I also added/edited/amended the generator results to suit my nefarious purposes.

On the convention schedule I put down that I would take a dozen stalwart adventurers and the sign-up list filled up, but only ten people showed up. This was not a surprise. I was running a Sunday morning game and some people just can't make it no matter what they think when they sign up. The ten people that showed up had a high degree of overlap with previous Winter War outings when I ran Under Xylarthen's Tower for OD&D, Rat on a Stick converted to Moldvay Basic D&D and "The Pyramid of Ra-Dok" for Labyrinth Lord. So Michael, Chris, Joe, Kathleen, Josh, Doug, Brad, Jeremy, Shumate and Marc all knew what kind of shenanigans they were in for.

I started by randomly distributing out my random pregens. Some of the best and worst of the available PCs came out right away, but most of the time I couldn't tell who had an awesome character and who was running one of the suck monkeys. In this way gaming is a lot like poker: a strong hand certainly helps but a good player can do more with a pair of deuces than a greenhorn can with a full house. Especially in a system with fewer mechanical points of contact.

After taking a few minutes to figure out what there characters could do, I read a slightly tightened up version of this introduction. The basic deal is that the PCs are all foreigners in a society so xenophobic that even changing residence from one crummy Foreign Quarter flophouse to another slightly less crummy Foreign Quarter flophouse requires a permit. A bureaucrat with a nympho-cultist girlfriend is holding up the paperwork until they bring him a sacred statue from a ruined temple full of monsters. So into the dungeon they go.

The bureaucrat sends three slaveboys along to carry the torches for the party and lead them to the dungeon site. I was surprised no one asked why the slaveboys had been assigned. In Tekumel torchbearing is a low class task that no self-respecting adventurer would stoop to perform Fortunately for the party, two of the PCs in play had 'slaver' as a secondary skill, so they never acted up. Except when one of the PCs made lewd advances toward them. Somewhere along the way the player of Changuu the Bearded decided his character was a bit of a lech.

One of the many mechanical gimmicks in EPT that I enjoyed in play was the marching order rules. In a standard 10 corridor the following rules apply:

• Three warriors may march and fight side-by-side
• Unless one or more are using two-handed weapons, in which case on two may fill a rank
• Unless the weapon is a two-handed sword, in which case only the tw-handed wielder will fit
• Meanwhile, priests and magicians fit four a rank, presumably because they are skinnier/wimpier

There happened to be four spellcasters in the party, so they formed the middle rank. After inquiring whether spears could attack from the second rank (I ruled they could) setting marching order became pretty straightforward but not entirely trivial. Of course several times the marching order broke down. One great encounter with multiple rooms of rat-people involved one sub-group in the Temple of the Ratlings, a second group outside the room and a third group forty feet down the hallway trying to fend off rattish reinforcements. It was glorious.

One of my little disappointments with the run was the second room on level one. It was designed to mercilessly kill the foolhardy. In that room some Tekumelish ghouls had burrowed up from some obscene pit deep below the surface of the planet, and they still lurked not far down the tunnel. Every turn spent searching the room resulted in a 2 in 6 chance of 3d6 baddies pouring out of that tunnel at d6 appearing per round. And if someone ventured into the tunnel at thirty feet in they would be killed and eaten. No save, just screams and the wet, sloppy sounds of the rending of flesh. Too bad they didn't stay long and no one was crazy enough to go into the tunnel.

Instead, the party eventually encountered some not-completely-hostile Pe Choi (a vaguely centauroid insect/reptile sort of race) who passed along that the statue they sought was on level two. And they weren't even lying! Of course the first way down the party locates is a ladder to level three, but Chris pointed out that just because the group had descended didn't mean they were on the right level. Eventually they found stairs up to level two, but they had to kill some disgusting giant carrion beetles first.

My favorite encounter had to be the Secret Treasury of the Temple. A room behind a secret door and only accessible via a very narrow passage. So narrow only the skinny ass mages might fit into the room. Inside is a trio of treasure chests. Absolutely everyone at the table immediately assumes that two of the chests contain fabulous treasure while the third is home to a deadly trap. Never being one to flinch from a good cliche, this is exactly what I have set up. Two wizards end up in the room alone and start opening the chests. One gets 10,000 friggin' gold pieces. The other wins a shield +2 which he will later sell to another party member for a hefty sum of gold. The third chest is full of purples poison gas, which fills the room and starts to roll down the corridor towards the rest of the party.

This is where it gets awesome. Pretty much every M-U in Empire of the Petal Throne starts out with the spell Control of Body. This allows all sorts of stupid yogi tricks like unbreakable grip on an item, entering suspended animation, or holding one's breath indefinitely. But all spellcasters in EPT also must roll spell failure with every casting. For first level PCs there's a whopping 60% chance to fail, possibly modified by a high Psychic stat. Both wizards make there roll, allowing them to continue to operate in the poison fog. Meanwhile, the rest of the party closes the secret door, sealing in the two wizards and writing them off as dead! Furious pounding on the secret door leads the party to re-open the door and a third wizard uses breath control to join the first two. The three of them cram as much gold as possible into their packs and bring out the 1,000gp left. Look! We brought you treasure!

You can read some other incidents in the game over on Ch'gowiz's blog and see pictures of these rowdies as well. Maybe over the weekend I'll blog a little bit about some of the groovy mechanical aspects of EPT.

Blind Sniper

Sniper! was a little wargame of man-to-man fighting on the Eastern front in WWII, publihsed by SPI in 1973 and written by wargames guru Jim Dunnigan. I've never played Sniper! outside of the Winter War variant, so I can't really tell you how the original game plays, other than it uses hidden movement and written orders, both of which are crucial factors in the local con version.

In the Blind Sniper tournament there are no teams. Every player is trying to win individually via one of two methods: Visit all five Objective Hexes and exit the board OR be the last one standing when the smoke settles. The game starts immediately after the Saturday afternoon live auction, usually 4pm or so, and the game continues until it is done. I'm told this year the last turn wrapped up about 4am. I didn't stick around since I was dead well before that and wanted to get some sleep before my Tekumel game the next morning.

The game takes so dang long because one moderator (local gaming legend Bruce Gletty) has to process all the written orders and write individual responses. At the start of the game there are usually 20 people on the board, so it takes the dude a while despite keeping the written orders as dirt simple as possible. Each turn is two seconds, so something as simple as running up or down a staircase takes a whole turn. Switching weapons also takes a whole turn. When just running around the hexmap you get 10 movement points. The map includes a little compass with hex facings labeled A through F, so a move could be written as simply as "6B 4C". Or maybe your last turn results showed "Man in hex 2210" so you simply write down "blast him!"

Which brings us around to the inherent tension of the game. Everyone starts with a gun of some sort. Some years everyone gets a pistol. This year we all got a shotgun with a single round it in. Sprinkled around the map are more guns you can pick up: rifles, machine pistols, flamethrowers, etc. And some satchel charges with variable fuses you can set and leave for others to find. So here you are running around the map trying to tag the objective hexes when you stumble across some shnook who's only a couple of hexes away. You see him and he sees you. What do you do? If you both run you get to continue the game. If you run and he shoots you're probably at least wounded (fewer movement points, worse to-hits), possibly crippled and maybe dead. If he runs and you shoot maybe you'll get him, maybe your turn is wasted due to bad dice. If you both shoot you could end up spending the rest of the game looking eye to eye and bleeding out on the ground.

The critical psychology here is that none of the players want to exit the game without having gotten off some shots at someone. This leads to a lot of sub-optimal behavior. This year I made a pact with myself to run at every opportunity and I ended up dead with that one starting shotgun shell still in my weapon on turn 11. Frustrating. I had been doing well avoiding danger, except for one run-in with my brother-in-law Jim. We both ended up in the same hex at the end of a turn so Bruce called us aside and asked whether we wanted to shoot or run. I declared "run" and went back to my seat. Jim apparently opted to run as well, because he didn't kill me until several turns later, when I ended my movement on a hex containing a satchel charge he had armed. It exploded before my next movement opportunity.

Anyway, here's part of the map, in all its pink and white glory:


Given that the scale is obviously 2 or 3 meters per hex, I have long wondered what the hell is up with that one hex wide building near the center of that pic. What use is a building that narrow and long, one story tall, with extra wide doors? One of the trickiest things about the Winter War variant of Sniper! is that everyone picks there starting hex. You can choose any outdoor hex that does not contain an exterior ladder. For many years I chose one of the three places on the map where a building corner touched the map-edge, creating a corner with only a single open hexside. I hated the idea of starting with my back to someone. But then somebody else had that same idea and we both started in the same hex and blasted each other on turn 1. I think that was one of my nephew's doing. This year I looked at the shotgun rules and saw that they were ineffective past 8 hexes, so I opted to start at the end of a nice broad street. Three others started in view but not in range, so I just ran like hell to the nearest building interior.

I think the best I've ever done in this game is 4th place, but it continues to be a fun way to spend one Saturday a year.

Winter War recap, part 2

For Saturday at Winter War I focused on two main things: playing boardgames and finishing my Empire of the Petal Throne dungeon. Yes, I really do wait 'til the day before to finish my con games. Unless I don't bother finishing at all. In these matters my motto has long been "If you've got pregens you've got a con game". And for a simple enough game I can skimp on that. I use to worry that my tardiness in preperations was a disservice to my players, until I realized that some of my best DMing happens when I am working with a shoddy dungeon map and a half-formed premise. But for EPT I really wanted at least three complete levels. In between finishing level 2 and creating level 3 whole cloth I managed to get in a lot of other fun stuff.

Legendary downstate Illinois gamestore Castle Perilous was open for business when I arrived Saturday morning. Armored Gopher Games is my home turf and store of choice. I'm happy to buy any and all game stuff I can from them. But Castle Perilous always has something neat in their used section. This time I found an issue of Pegasus (one of the old Judges Guild mags) and the Boot Hill module Range War. Spent five buck apiece for them. Nowadays Boot Hill is one of the few RPGs lacking both robots and witches that interests me and I'm always up for something from Judges Guild. Unfortunately, the Castle didn't have any Bella Sera cards. My daughter asked me to pick some up for her at the con and Castle Perilous was my last, best hope for little cards with ponies on them.

For the past several years lunchtime on Winter War Saturday has involved my sister and I getting together at the nearby Monical's Pizza with whoever else we can connive into joining us. I don't think I've mentioned ol' what's-her-face in a while on this blog, but my sister Jenn has really gotten into boardgames and Euro-games over the past five years or so. She now has her own Wednesday night game group in her home and she can pretty much whoop me at any game where I can't hide behind a screen and change the rules to suit my purposes. Her boyfriend Kirk was with her for the second year in a row and my wife Amy joined us at the restaraunt. The official fifth wheel of the group was Dane, a member of my Mutant Future group and hoot to hang out with. We had a nice meal but the guy sitting in the booth behind Jenn kept turning around and staring at us. I made eye contact with him more than once but he was undeterred. At first I thought he was one of the con-goers (the place was lousy with games, being right next to the hotel.) and was waiting for a moment to jump in on the conversation. But no, he was just the world's least subtle eavesdropper.

The lunch break on Saturday is also the time of the live game auction, which wasn't quite over when we got back. Dane ended up buying three different lawyer-themed games for the minimum bid. The only thing I bid on was a copy of Age of Mythology. Have you seen the plastic pieces in one of those? Perfect monsters for 1:72 scale, I tell's ya. But it went for well over the cheapskate level I bid at. I sold a bunch of stuff this year and made out like a bandit on that end. I felt a little silly when my sister bought one of the items in the auction. Especially since it was a birthday present from my brother-in-law, who was also in the room. When I first got it I was all "Puerto Rico for the PC! Huzzah!" But six months later it was still sitting on my computer desk, box still sealed. It might as well go to someone who will actually play it.

After the auction comes the event I consider the centerpiece of the convention: the Doctor Metcalf Memorial Blind Sniper Tournament. Some of you grognards might be familiar with Sniper!, an old SPI game about man-to-man fighting on the streets of Stalingrad. The Winter War variant is basically an every-man-for-himself hidden movement shoot-out, usually with 15 to 20 people scrambling around the map. The game can last up to twelve hours but most of the players are dead well before that. Since the referee (Bruce, one of the founding fathers of the local game scene) takes a lot of time processing written orders and writing responses, whole other boardgames are played during the tournament.

This year I played three other games before being killed on turn 11/hour 6 of the game. My sister and her fella crashed the Sniper room and played Alhambra Dice with Jim, Dane and I. I did absolutely terrible at this game but I got to roll a bunch of funny dice, so who cares? Jenn and Kirk headed off for their Settlers of Catan tournament, so the three of us remaining broke out one of Dane's newly-acquired lawyer games. We tried Judge for Yourself, which is a basic 'guess the actual verdict' sort of thing. What made the game fun was that on some turns you are part of a jury and must return a unaminous verdict, so when someone talks you into a wrong decision you can give them lots of crap about it.

The last game of the night for me was Endeavor, a Euro-type game of brutal colonial exploitation and power politics. Dane had to leave, but Jim and I were joined by his son Ian and a couple of other Sniper players. It must be an easy game to pick up, as I managed to finish third, ahead of the other newbie and someone already familiar with the game. If you like Puerto Rico but wish there was a map to fight over, you might want to give Endeavor a try.

Winter War recap, part 1

So last weekend was my local awesome con, the thirty-seventh annual Winter War shindig. I've been going every year since 1992 and running games at it going back either to then or '93. I'd have to say this was one of the best Winter Wars I've attended. I had a couple of rough spots during the course of the weekend, but they had very little to do with the con and were more about issues arising mainly in my own skull. For example, I positively did everything in my power to screw up my own schedule Friday. That was very frustrating, but I got my act together by the time my game started.

Friday was still a hoot though, as I was able to have a nice lunch with Michael Shorten, the Chgowiz. Not only did we eat at my favorite Mexican place, but Mike bought. That guy's all heart, let me tell you. He played in both my games and the events were awesomer for it. When I arrived at the con around noon lunchtime only two people had signed up for my Encounter Critical game. That threw me for a loop. I eventually ended up with four players total: Mike, rogue attorney Chris Tichenor, my brother-in-law Jim (who may have only signed up out of pity, I was feeling a little dejected about the situation when I saw him at supper) and Marc, teenaged heir apparent to my local game store (i.e. his folks own the place). Missing from the roster were Josh, Kathleen and Doug, normally stalwarts in my games. Later I found out they were running their local White Wolf LARP that night. I'd be put out by that except that I feel confident that their game didn't involve unicorn-riding pink robots kidnapping Gary Gygax, so I win.

Everybody here a Futurama fan? If not, you should be. My Encounter Critical game was designed around one of the "What If?" type segments from the episode "Anthology of Interest". In the segment in question the only survivors of the destruction of the universe are Fry, Vice President Al Gore and his Action Rangers (Gary Gygax, Stephen Hawking, Nichelle Nichols and chess computer Deep Blue). I wanted to find out what happens to those people after the end of the universe. This involved me ripping off various TV shows, movies, etc., to populate the Great White Void where the universe used to be. Most of the game was spent exploring the Land of Fiction from the ancient Dr. Who episode "The Mind Robber" and a monster-infested Yellow Submarine.

Marc managed to get Stephen Hawking killed by hotdogging on his rocket-propelled wheelchair and the poor kid also missed all the cues that the cave full of statuary was haunted by a medusa, so Fry was added to the collection of stoned victims. Both those losses happened in the first half hour of play. At that point Marc caught on that in my games for every action there is an equal and opposite fiasco, so he managed to keep his third PC (Xanthor, inexplicably) alive through the end of the adventure. Meanwhile Uhura, the Vice President and Deep Blue were able to rescue Gary from the aforementioned Pink Robots. Eventually the group combined the Mind Robber's Brain Machine, the Rainbow Hippie Power Crystal of the Yellow Submarine, and Deep Blue's chess processors to build a Universe Reboot Device. Only Deep Blue decided that this time the machines should be in charge, so everyone woke up in the Matrix. And somewhere along the way the PCs ended up driving around in the Arc II, just 'cause they could.

This might've been my dumbest EC adventure yet.

too many good games is a helluva problem

So I'm trying to put together a list of games I want to sign up for at next month's Winter War. To try and wrap my head around the options I put together this spreadsheet of games that interest me in the various time slots. The two main problems:

• The incredibly awesome Blind Sniper game has no official end time, thus taking up Saturday afternoon and very likely Saturday evening as well.
• Saturday evening is positively clogged with good events. I'd like to play in both Chgowiz's Battletech game and Alex Riedel's OSRIC game.

As a side issue I'd really like to play the wild west minis game Desperado this year. It's a regular feature at Winter War and whenever I've walked by a table of it everyone was having a hootin' hollerin' good time. So here's a draft if I play Blind Sniper:

Friday afternoon: maybe hustle a pickup game of something
Friday evening: my Encounter Critical game
Saturday morning: Desperado
Saturday afternoon: Blind Sniper
Saturday evening: if I'm dead in Blind Sniper, hop into whichever game has fewer players, Alex's or Mike's
Sunday morning: my Empire of the Petal Throne game
Sunday afternoon: Roborally w/Al

If I skip Blind Sniper, then I'm looking at this:

Friday afternoon: maybe hustle a pickup game of something
Friday evening: my Encounter Critical game
Saturday morning: Kingmaker
Saturday afternoon: Desperado
Saturday evening: man, I just don't know
Sunday morning: my Empire of the Petal Throne game
Sunday afternoon: Roborally w/Al

Winter War approaches!

The latest installment of Winter War, my local game convention, will be happening on the last weekend in January. My games aren't on the schedule just yet but I've signed on to run Encounter Critical in the Friday evening slot and Empire of the Petal Throne on Sunday afternoon. Don't let Tekumel's reputation for setting heaviness scare you off my EPT game, as my approach will be the same as when I run D&D at cons: we're here to fight monsters, find loot, set off traps and laugh at it all. Don't think of it as Professor Barker's Masterpiece Milieu, but rather as Crazy Uncle Phil's Weirdo D&D Variant.

felt flat

FlatCon just didn't do much for me today. It was nice to see my nephew the ninja, even if he could only vaguely sit still for a pick-up game of Tier Auf Tier. There just weren't any games available this afternoon that lit my jets. Not that the program booklet or online schedule made it easy for me to find out. Both were arranged by game type. To find out what started at 2pm I had to look at all the minis games scheduled for then, go to the board game section and do the same, then flip to the RPGs, etc. What a pain in the butt.

I had a good time running my own game last year but upon further reflection I've had trouble coming to grips with the thought that my wife and I had paid forty bucks for the privilege of running a game I could have run for free at the local game store. Not that I'm against running stuff at cons, but I guess a decade and a half of running games at Winter War has gotten me used to getting comped part of my admission for GMing. There have been plenty of Winter Wars where the only games I played have been my own, but by running two games I got free admission. That seemed like a fair deal to me. In comparison FlatCon feels like it was charging me to help make sure the other con-goers had a game to play. I don't mind volunteering, but this felt like paying to volunteer. So this year I opted not to GM anything.

And then there was the shopping. The only vendor with any used stuff was the guy from last year that I wanted to punch in the face. Did I tell you this story? I don't think I did because I wanted to calm down before I talked about it. So here I am doing a little bit of shopping when I overhear this gamestore jockey talking to a younger guy about Judges Guild founder Bob Bledsaw. Keep in mind that Bledsaw had been dead about six months at this point. This douchebag is explaining to the kid how he was absolutely certain that Bob was a card-carrying fascist. I look up from the nerd merchandise I was perusing, mouth agape, to see that this jackass was talking to someone my sister had introduced me to at the previous year's con. The young guy in question was Bob Bledsaw's nephew. It said 'Bledsaw' clear as day on the dude's badge, so I know it was the same guy. Maybe I was just overly sensitive due to my own uncle passing away the year before, but I don't even give a good goddamn if Bledsaw was a fascist, you don't go saying that in casual conversation to his nephew! So there was no way in hell I was giving that fucko any money this year.

I did enjoy two things. As in previous years we bought boffer swords from Gamers for a Cure so that Elizabeth and Cameron could beat the snot out of each other. They had a great time. And I took some homemade copies of Encounter Critical along to leave laying about. One I left on the freebie table. Another I hid under a program booklet laying in the boardgame section. And the third I surreptitiously slipped into the copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics #51: Castle Whiterock that I found in the silent auction. I registered all three copies with bookcrossing.com, so I may eventually discover the identity of whoever found them.

random con pics!

Most of the pics I snapped at Winter War didn't turn out very well, but here's a couple of cool shots.

In the main room with the dealers and most of the minis and roleplaying games some guys had this rad to the max 55mm World War II game going. Dig it:

Every table in that shot is part of the same game, except for the one with the white cloth on it to the right. They arranged five tables in a column, with a steel girder bridge between each table. Below is the same set-up from another angle, where I'm standing at one end of the battlefield. The other side of the battle ends just in front of the dealer table at the far wall.

I took eight shots of my Encounter Critical game. This is the only one that didn't turn out terrible:

Joe felt awful that he nodded off halfway through my game and kept trying to apologize the rest of the con. Poor guy, he missed abotu half the game and then felt guilty about it!

I found out later why he was so dang tired. He worked the late shift at his job, then immediately went to help Armored Gopher set up their con booth, then he showed up for my game. Dude had been up thirty hours by the time he started playing.

These last two aren't photos, but I thought you might like to see them anyway. I own a Savage Worlds customizable GM screen, which I love loading up with homemade stuff. When the players showed up to my Big Stupid Dungeon Party, this is what was facing them:

That's the Erol Otus cover art for Dragon #55 bordered by S. John Ross's Tombs of Rivulax hand-drawn dungeon geomorph font. I'm pretty proud of the color scheme I used on the custom Labyrinth Lord logo. That was actually a dry run for the logo I made for the Erol Otus art contest. The font for the logo is called Angular. I slightly tweaked it for the art contest logo, but here it's unmodified.

The two side panels of the screen each used four pieces of classic Otus art also flanked by the Tombs of Rivulax. For some reason I can only find one of the side panels on my hard drive.

Does anybody have a big, clean scan of the cover art for The Expedition to the Barrier Peaks? That's the one in the bottom right on the above image. I'd really like a better version of that one.

Check out this post on Chgowiz's blog if you want to see some pics of the Big Stupid Dungeon Party. I was a little distracted by the twelve players and the mummies and the twinkies and what all and forgot to get out my camera.

Winter War report, part 2

My Sunday afternoon game, Jeff’s Big Stupid Dungeon Party, ended up with twelve players: Alex Riedel and his buddy Michael (a.k.a. Chgowiz), Max Davenport, rock-n-roll astronaut Chris Tichenor (more metal reviews, please!),Kathleen (a.k.a. coeli) and her housemate Doug, Josh “Shumate” Shumate and Shannon “Shannon” Shumate, Marc “DJ Scribble” Hoover, Brad, Mike and mighty Joe. You couldn’t hardly ask for a better group of players; they came ready for some D&D turned up to ‘11’ but remained cognizant of the fact that a twelve player game might be a little rough around the edges.

It has become my regular practice to ask people for these sorts of outings to generate their own PCs on the spot. To make this go more smoothly, I handed out a slightly modified version of the 4-page document I use in my new Labyrinth Lord campaign. It has all the information you need to put together a new 1st level PC. Except the price of friggin’ torches. Candles and lanterns made it onto my abbreviated equipment list but I somehow omitted the cost of torches. I suppose it could have been worse.

The people who were a little quicker on the draw took advantage of the fact that I handed out three charsheets per person and made up more than one PC. I’m glad they did because we lost 6 or 7 party members over the course of the session. As far as I can tell no one signs up for this kind of game hoping that everyone makes it out alive. Senseless slaughter is part of the fun of a stupid con one-shot. That’s why I tend to arrange for Total Party Kills when I run Call of Cthulhu as a con game and that’s why when picking an adventure to run Sunday I made absolutely no effort to limit myself to dungeons suitable for first level parties. We’re here for the excitement of a demolition derby smash-up, not the idle pleasures of a casual stroll through the park. Why hold back?

I pitched two possible missions to the party. One was an attempt to wrest the Crown of Power from the Pyramid of Ra’Dok, an evil old pharaoh. The other was to generally knock about the Rat on a Stick dungeon. They opted for Ra’Dok’s Pyramid, as several of them had been present when I ran Rat on a Stick using OD&D a couple years back. Neither of these dungeons is strictly compatible with Labyrinth Lord, the game I professed to be running for the group. I have all but given up on caring about such niceties. There are too many good adventures out there to get in a tiff over how well the stat blocks match up with the rules the party thinks are in play. The adventure they chose seems to be written for OD&D plus Eldritch Wizardry. Ra’Dok’s crown is one of the few magic items I’ve seen outside the DMG/Eldritch Wizardry that was statted up using the canonical artifact/relic power charts. That’s pretty cool. Rat on a Stick, meanwhile, is actually a Tunnels & Trolls adventure. Occasionally I get the urge to actually write conversion notes for the module, but I actually enjoy having to figure out what Fire Demon (MR 75) means with 12 pairs of eyes on me. Weird, I know.

You know what the coolest thing is about running a large group of people? There’s no chance in hell that they’re all going to have the same ‘creative agenda’ as the GNS gurus might say. You just can’t sit twelve people down to play D&D and expect to get 12 hardcore dungeoneers or 12 gonzo ad hoc worldbuilders or 12 serious thespians or whatever. It just ain’t gonna happen. As a con GM, you’ve got to work to accommodate all those needs, as all twelve paid their money to come sit at your table. Again, that might be frustrating to some people, but I think that push-and-pull dynamic of competing interests adds a little extra frisson.

We established pretty early on that dungeon operations like establishing marching order, listening at doors, and providing sufficient lamination were being taken semi-seriously. One player volunteered to map. I personally thought it would be better if two people mapped in case the mapper was killed or the map stolen or something, but I remained silent on that point. The issue came up later in my favorite room on level 1, the quicksand trap/will-o-wisp combo.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong about the Pyramid of Ra’Dok as published, but much of it is unadorned. I had to put in or ad lib a lot of dungeon description to make the place come alive. One bone thrown to the DM is a line to the effect that the will-o-wisp in the quicksand room is “diamond shaped”. I decided to push that idea further and actually make the will-o-wisp into a cunning and malevolent gem. Same stats as a standard will-o-wisp, but its intact corpse would be worth 20,000gp. That’s a lot for a first level party but the same dungeon is stocked with a 100,000gp that is both trapped with a heat ray that is almost assuredly fatal AND cursed to kill anyone who touches the gem (no save).

Anyhoo, the PCs open this door and see a floor covered in white sand, with a bigass gem set into the far wall and crackling with electricity. I could see a more focused party closing the door and forgetting about the whole thing. They were here for an uber-powerful crown, not some lightning-powered wall decoration, right? But they decided to mess with the thing. The group did a good job determining that the sand was, in fact, quick (a dead halfling flung into the room solved that mystery, as I recall) and also managed to figure out that you could cling close to the walls to find a safe path around the quicksand. Why the mapper decided he needed to be the one to go after the gem remains unknown. He removed all metal gear to reduce his conductivity, tied a rope around himself and went after the gem. The will-o-wisp waited until he was reaching out his hand to zap him dead.

That’s when I reminded his that he was the mapper and that, not being made of metal, I assumed the map was on his person, i.e. in the room with his corpse next to the electric death diamond. Ah, the howls of protest were like music to my ears! Here they were, on level 1 of a fairly simple dungeon and still the thought of losing the map sent a wave of panic through the party. Sweet. To demonstrate my benevolence as a dictator, I eventually relented to a 3 in 6 chance that the map had been handed to one of the other party members. The die throw indicated that the map was safe. Eventually someone (Shumate, perhaps?) took a shot at the gem with a bow. The party was not expecting it to respond by detaching itself from the wall and flying into their midst to zap people at random. I thought maybe they would route at this point, but instead they got their act together and trapped the poor wisp in a canoptic jar, thanks in no large part to Kathleen shorting it out by dousing it in cheap wine. One of the PCs then carried the jar around in his backpack. I tried to look for an chance to break it open, but no such opportunity ever arrived.

Lots of other extremely cool stuff happened at the table. It was one of those nearly non-stop sessions that leave me exhausted. It felt like 16 hours of fun packed into four. Here are some of the other highlights:

• Kathleen's magic-user distracting some giant bees with a pack of Twinkies she got out of the Deck O’ Stuff.
• Kathleen burning her dwarf’s beard off trying to spit fire using a flask of cheap hooch she got out of the same deck/
  
• Max’s second PC spending a large part of the adventure riding a donkey and writing haiku (Max, please share!)
• Chris donning the pharaoh’s armor and using it to convince some guards who were in stasis that he is the reincarnated Ra’Dok. Chris ended the adventure with two loyal henchmen, the armor, and the artifact crown. Not too shabby for a 1st level fighter!
  
• The party’s first encounter being a bunch of zombies. Only then did they discover that by independently rolling up 12 PCs they somehow ended up with nary a cleric between them!
• Joe’s 1 hit point magic-user with Hold Portal as his memorized spell surviving the entire session. Joe was cautious, but no coward hiding in the back and leaching XPs. Shannon also spent most of the adventure at 1 hit point. She was wounded early on and the party never seemed intent on resting or going back to town or any of that stuff.
• Chgowiz collecting PC corpses, which he would tie onto the backs of his mule, Stupid. The bodies came in handy on occasion but it still creeped me out.

Any players recall any choice bits I missed? I'm definitely going to continue running games like this at future cons. In retrospect I think shooting for 20 players was over-ambitious. With twelve I had a big table, but I could handle the player load without relying on callers or anything like that.

Winter War report, part 1

Man, do I regret not blogging over the weekend. Now I have to try to remember all the cool gaming stuff that happened. Despite only drinking one gin-n-tonic the whole weekend, I still have that post-con hangover thing going on this morning. You know what I mean? Back when I was a bachelor and could get away with it I would take the day after the con off just to rest and recuperate.

Friday night's Encounter Critical game was a blast. I had eight players, more than I've ever had at an EC game. It was an interesting mix of people. Two players, Max Davenport and rogue attorney Chris Tichenor, are guys I know primarily from the internet. Two others, Joe and Marc, are locals that I've gamed with many times before. Max and Chris showed up with their own PCs: Zerok, a mad scientist bionic planetary ape modeled after this guy, and Bizarro #38, a mutant frankenstein with a black hole metal club, photosynthetic skin, and an evil talking magical birthmark on his left hand. Playing the role of the birthmark I kept trying to warn Bizarro #38 that Murderfrog was not to be trusted, but he just wouldn't heed my warning.

The other fours guys, as near I was able to gather, were some 40K players who had no friggin' idea what they were getting into. To their credit, they adapted pretty quickly to the fact that EC is basically the Schroedinger's Cat of roleplaying games, where the rules are in a quantum indeterminate state (alive/dead/phasic). Of course most normal players will react well if you hand them a charsheet with a skill like 'Murder' listed right on it. Long John Silverback, the ape pirate, was all over that one. And the player with the psi witch improvised several good psionic effects. My favorite was encasing an explosion of knock-out gas in a telekinetic force bubble. Of course when he later released the hold on the gas it knocked the whole party out anyway, but it was for a good cause, as it also took out a jungle flower monster straight out of Little Shop of Horrors. Fortunately for the party some of them woke up before the monster did.

The adventure was an Encounter Critical adaptation of the Gamma World mini-module that came with old 1st edition GM screen. Man, dig that classic Erol Otus cover. The adventure comes in three parts. Part 1 involves finding a starport buried in the desert sands. Power is off at the joint when the PCs arrive, so it's a basical sci-fantasy dungeon crawl with lurking mutant menaces (snakemen, sand sharks, giant insects, the aforementioned killer potted plant, and etc.) and vaguely useful techno-treasures. The party managed to get the emergency power up and running, which allowed them to communicate with some of the robots in the complex. They then proceeded to phase two of the adventure, taking an automated shuttle trip into outer space. The main threats here are self-inflicted. The players did not seem to realize that every attempt to manipulated the ship controls could spell their doom. After all, something as simple as accidentally switching off the autopilot would have vectored them off into the endless voids of space.

The other big spaceship hazard was the effect of escape velocity-plus forces on the human(oid) body. Six of the players got wise to the fact that maybe they should strap themselves into the big comfy-looking acceleration couches. The other two hung out in the cocktail lounge even as klaxons were sounding and alarm lights flashing. Even the robo-barkeep putting away all the breakables didn't clue them in. Taking 2d6 damage per round from extreme G forces didn't quite seem to get the message through that they were in danger! One of the two intrepid barflies eventually saved himself by pulling the lever that activated the airbag-like emergency acceleration couch, but not before Murderfrog was reduced to a reddish amphibian paste. That was the only PC casualty of the night, not done in by mutated horrors or rogue robots but by failure to give proper respect to the laws of physics.

The final section of the adventure takes place on an abandoned space station haunted by Canopan Plague Zombies and a few mummies I threw in just 'cause I could. Early into this section of the adventure Zerok found a small sample of Canopan plague goo sans zombie and decided to taste it, giving him a slow-burning case of the zombie plagues. When they later encountered the first of the plague zombies and Zerok understood his eventual fate, he set up an alchemy lab in the starport lounge. Using med's stolen from the starport pharmacy, Romulan ale, various monster bits, and whatever other ingredients he could lay his hands on, Zerok eventually developed an antidote. Meanwhile the others were busy fighting plague zombies. Each hit by the zombies had a chance of infecting them, and every time the PCs splattered a zombie they stood a chance of infection as well. But the dice favored the PCs and no new cases of the plague were reported to the CDC.

After much mucking about in his makeshift lab, Zerok drank his antidote. I told him he was cured by means of vomiting up a stomach full of frothy brown zombie slime. Max one-upped me by noting that his cyborg head was entirely mechanical, so to purge he'd have to unscrew it and puke out of his gaping neck-hole. I'm still kind grossed out by the mental image of a headless gorilla vomiting.

When the party arrived at the station the robo-intercom announced that the shuttle would be returning planetside in two hours. They burned through those two hours pretty quickly, between looting boutiques and fighting zombies. As they hussled towards the spacedock they saw a big glowy techno-pyramid shimmer into view, all TARDIS-like, right up against another docking ring. This triggered a bit of debate between returning home via the shuttle or seeking new adventures in the mysterious pyramid, and then some tense negotiations with a half dozen shotgun-toting space orcs seeking to debark from the pyramid. The call to adventure won the day (huzzah!) and the party agreed to swap rides with the orcs. Thus the seven surviving PCs were whisked away on strange new adventures and the space orcs exploded when the autopilot winked out during the landing back at the starport.

Winter War on the horizon

My local convention is next weekend. Here are my picks for the coolest stuff happening at the con this year:

Left Turn at Alba-Quirky - My Encounter Critical game on Friday night (7pm).
Kingmaker on the Big Board - Fight the War of the Roses on John Satterfield's custom set-up. Mr. Satterfield is an absolute hoot to play with. Saturday morning.
The Dwarven Rail - Saturday afternoon 2nd edition AD&D game. Don't know much about this one.
Arcane Vault of the Magic Goddess - AD&D/OSRIC adventure by Gameblog reader Alex Riedel, also Saturday afternoon.
30th Annual Blind Sniper Tournament - This is a long slog of an event, but because of its hidden movement nature a lot of other boardgames games get played while the ref processes the turns. In my humble opinion the best boardgaming at the con happens at this event. Also a Saturday afternoon, but clearly the best non-RPG event to shoot for if you can't get in on either D&D event.
A Mob Is A Terrible Thing - Old school fantasy adventure using Microlite20, a d20 variant that I would cheerily recommend to the grumbliest of d20-haters. Sunday morning.
Jeff's Big Stupid Dungeon Party - Maybe not the biggest event at the con and possibly not even the stupidest, but we'll try our best. Sunday afternoon.