Arcanacon
Well, Arcanacon has been and gone. I was there, and now I am tired. Such is the way of cons.
Sarah and I were scheduled to run By a Dark River in the first and last sessions of the con, but I cancelled the first session an hour before session start, because we only had about half a dozen players. The other session, of course, was over-full (but not by very much). Running a 22 player freeform twice, when it had run at another con less than a year ago, was always going to be a very big ask, so we were happy to only run it once. I'll go into it in more detail in a separate post.
So I started the con with Martin Ludwell's For Bavarian Advancement, which was a basic kick-down-the-doors-and-kill-the-bad-guys, but run in an entertaining fashion. Then Mik Bonsall's Planet of the Bollywoods, which was an extremely Bollywoodian farce, and heaps of fun. I hatched a plot which required me to get myself poisoned, while half a dozen other people were specifically attempting to stop me getting poisoned. I had a blast, and it seemed everyone else did too. Then Aaron Fenwick's River City Tales, in which I played a man who had made a dumb deal, and apparently took ruthlessness to a whole new level. Hey, give me a character sheet which opens with a vivid description of how, as a schoolboy, the character had bashed a kid's face in with a rock, and the way I play it is unlikely to be pretty. Again, good stuff.
Day two of the con was what I took to terming "amateur hour", which was perhaps a little mean, but not unwarranted. I played three freeforms by relatively new freeform writers, and a tabletop by someone whose name I didn't recognise.Justin Puopolo's Titan: Into the Black was entertaining for me, and I think it was entertaining for at least most of the other players, but the character sheets lacked detail. You can't tell me that I've been on board a ship with only two rooms for four days and have learned basically nothing about anybody. Playing the captain, I had a lot to do (though, I could have been sidelined had I not been a very competent captain) and really, I was a shoo-in for the Players' Choice trophy I was awarded for this game. Anyway, while I think the game could have been better, it was definitely worth playing, and I felt it was a better implementation of its concept than a similar game I was recently involved in writing and running.
Walk On the Wild Side was a mystery about a missing young woman with completely unnecessary supernatural elements tacked on. The handouts the GM had were very impressive, but the game itself didn't grab me. I got another trophy for this. Meh.
The Pico Vault was, to me and to at least some others, utterly pointless. There was no plot worthy of calling such, and the character sheets were completely inadequate for anyone unfamiliar with his or her character from watching the show. (My character was also dramatically changed from the TV series, by way of having gone through a hell of a lot since his last appearance, which meant I could largely play him however I liked without breaking anything, but that's not the point.) The entire game seemed to exist solely to allow James Wright (the writer) to play the Doctor at the end. I'll acknowledge that another player said he enjoyed the game, but I fail to see how the game could be expected to entertain more than a tiny minority.
Felicity Harvey's The Butler Did It was also greatly lacking in detail. When investigating a robbery, for example, I should know what was stolen. Now, the thing about mystery games is that you need to have clues, and there really weren't enough of them here. However, we all focussed on interaction amongst the characters, and enough information came out that I was able to solve my mystery, and come close to solving a couple of others as well. (I reckon I could have, had the victims told me what crime I was really investigating.) So fun was had. Again, I think the game could have been much better, but here's the thing... Talking with her, Fel seemed to get that more detail would have been good. She has learnt something from the experience, and her next game will be better. For a first attempt at writing a freeform, The Butler Did It was really pretty decent, and I can forgive a first-time writer for not blowing me away when I'm confident she has learnt from it. I wish more new writers were like Fel, in this regard, and I will be looking forward to playing her next freeform.
On Monday, as I commented, I was being GMing by professionals again. I started out with a game that wasn't even on the schedule: Angel of Babylon, by Sarah Western (ably assisted in her GMing duties by her husband Philip Wilkie). I had had some cancellation that session (I don't even remember what) and Sarah had come up short on numbers for A Montgomery Family Christmas, but by adding in me and a few others who had also had cancellations and substituting the smaller earlier game, Sarah was at least able to get something going that session. So we played a game that wasn't even offered, and had a blast. This was my favourite game of the con, though I think Sarah has to share a little credit with Hilary, who played a character with a plot heavily interacting with mine, and who made it an awful lot of fun to play opposite her.
I moved on to Fiona McConachie's The Clockwork Heart. I found the way the game played out rather less than ideal, but then, I never really do get much of a kick out of that style of game. In this case, I found the resolution much less dreadful than is usually the case, and that was due to excellent handling of it from Fi and her GMs.
That evening, I was a bit flat in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Trolls, but my team covered for me, and I laughed so hard I almost (not quite, but almost) fell off my chair. Horror games shouldn't be that funny, but then, it was another Mik Bonsall Cthulhu tabletop.
On the morning of day 4, I considered taking an opportunity to make up numbers in something or other, but decided to prepare for running By a Dark River instead. After lunch, I played Sarah's A Montgomery Family Christmas, and again had a blast. For me at least, this was the second-best game of the con... after her other game. I got to shoo off the Wild Hunt by yelling, "Get offa ma lawn!" at them, so what more could I want?
Sarah and I then went straight into running By a Dark River, with me sorting name tags and props while still debriefing for her game (hopefully non-intrusively... I was certainly still listening, because I was very interested in that debrief). I'll talk about that session elsewhere, though.
Non-game stuff... I think the quality of the food was down a bit, but that was probably because the facilities available weren't as good this year (due to renovations). It was good enough to get by, anyway. The organisational side of things was easy. I provided name tags for most of the freeforms, which seemed to make almost everybody happy (especially me, because it meant I could actually read the tags). Prize-giving was fast and entertaining, with me receiving several slabs of solid marble. Scary trophies this year, provided by a friend of mine and a fellow gamer. Very nice, though heavy. There were several cancelled games, which worries me because I didn't think the selection was huge to start with. That could be a problem if the trend continues.
And that probably about covers it, apart from my own game, but I want to examine that in a little more detail than what I played.