Conventions

Gen Con 2016: The Seminars

I found myself taking notes at all the seminars I attended at this year’s Gen Con, so I figured I’d put them here in case any of you are interested. They’re certainly not comprehensive notes, in some cases, because I wasn’t planning on reporting them. So I just noted the stuff I thought was especially interesting and that I didn’t already know.

Designing for the Cypher System (Monte Cook Games)

Monte Cook and company talked about designing products for the cypher system. Here are a few bits of advice that stuck with me:

  • Put specific cyphers in an adventure, cyphers that will shape how things happen. For example, an adventure with a barrier that must be passed might feature a phasing cypher.
  • Every good GM Intrusion should end with, “What are you going to do?”
  • Look at cypher limits (and the number of GM intrusions you use) as suggestions.
  • Sean Reynolds said designers shouldn’t worry about competing with MCG. For example, if you come out with a book of Western adventures for the cypher system, don’t worry that MCG will come out with a Western setting and outshine you. The customers will want both!

Monte also mentioned that 90-95% of the products from Monte Cook Games are the result of Kickstarter projects.

Cultivating Healthy Relationships With Publishers (Atlas Games)

Panelists: Jess Banks, Cam Banks, and John Nephew.

I wasn’t good at the note-taking at this seminar, so forgive me for not having much to share. (It was a good seminar!)

  • Atlas Games supports conventions by providing support in exchange for ad space.
  • Tools they use internally: Slack, Trello.
  • Playtesting can get their attention at Atlas Games, leading to design opportunities. They like helpful, interactive playtesters.
  • Jess likes chocolate. Send her some.

What’s Happening At Chaosium

Panelists: (left to right) Greg Stafford, Michael O’Brien, Neal Robinson, Jeff Richard, Rick Meintz, and (unpictured) Sandy Petersen. Also present were Todd Gardner and Mike Mason.

A lot of the talk involved reassurances that Chaosium has turned around its financial problems and is making things right with customers and professionals. Personally, I get the impression that this is true.

Here are a few more tidbits I caught…

  • Now when you buy a Chaosium book, you get the PDF free. (Love this news!)
  • Sandy Petersen was wearing an excellent shirt. The front showed the DOOM logo, and the back said, “Wrote it.”
  • For Call of Cthulhu playtesting, contact Chaosium’s “Cult of Chaos” (through Mike Mason, I believe).
  • Chaosium isn’t doing monographs anymore. They want to put more polish into what they work on.

Meet FASA Games

Panelists: Mary Harrison, Andrew Ragland, and Josh Harrison. Also present: Ross Babcock, Todd Bogenrief, Morgan Weeks.

The FASA crew talked about all their product lines:

  • Demonworld is a miniatures game featuring “shamanic humans vs dwarves.” FASA is now creating a Demonworld RPG. Most of the writers on Demonworld are women. The RPG will be based on the same system Earthdawn uses. FASA is hoping to have the Demonworld RPG out by Gen Con 2017.
  • Fading Suns has been around for a long time, and is my favorite (current) FASA game. New products in the works include Merchant League (which is mostly done) and several Noble Armada books. Fading Suns will also see a book called Where Shadows Lie (about dark evil things between the stars) and one called Rise of the Phoenix (about the empire).
  • 1879 is like an “earlier era Shadowrun,” a setting where magic has returned in the Victorian Age. The Player’s Guide is out now. The game has are Lewis Carroll tie-ins (such as orcs are called snarks). 1789 has a London sourcebook in the works, as well as a plot point campaign book.
  • Earthdawn: The latest edition has been out for a year. Some books were delayed.

Ross and Josh talked a bit about strengthening FASA. “We’re back to being like an indy publisher,” Josh said, mentioning that all of them also have day jobs. Ross is pushing for releasing more than one book per line per year; he wants to increase that to one per quarter, and eventually one per month.

Ross said, “FASA has returned from a slumber.”

Instant Adventure With Monte Cook

This is the second year Monte has done this amazing event. I went last year and loved it, so I was happy to drag my wife and son to it with me. (Spoiler alert: they loved it too.)

This year, Monte’s players were Bruce Cordell, Shanna Germain, Sean Reynolds, and Tom Lommel. The audience chose the following story elements, and Monte improvised an adventure around them:

  • Genre: noir
  • PCs: wizard mobsters
  • Where the PCs just came from: a PC’s daughter’s wedding
  • An ally: shady cop
  • The enemy: a priest

I can’t do justice to this event in words, so I’ll put a video here as soon as MCG releases it. Until then, enjoy this replay of last year’s event.

UPDATE: Here’s this year’s Instant Adventure seminar video…

Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff

I didn’t take notes on this one because Ken and Robin recorded it for an upcoming episode of their podcast of the same name. So go listen to that, when it comes out, and pretend you’re sitting right next to me!

Monte Cook Games Seminar

Invisible Sun

I took more notes in this one because Monte had big news: they’re releasing a new RPG called Invisible Sun. A Kickstarter for the game launches August 15, 2016, with a planned release timeframe of late 2017.

This is the introductory video MCG showed us at the start of the seminar:

And this is a video of the seminar itself:

Invisible Sun will ship in a complex-looking big black box. In addition to the game book, the box will contain “sooth cards” and apparently some kind of statue of a hand. The hand will be used in-game to hold a card. This will be a “deluxe game,” meaning not cheap. They don’t have a price yet, but mentioned that a past Monte Cook whopper, Ptolus, cost $120 ten years ago.

One thing Monte focused on was his intent to address the challenges of modern gaming with this product–such as players and GMs having busy schedules, players missing games, and players having different interaction preferences. Monte mentioned knowing players who don’t talk much at the table but enjoy the game on a deep (but quiet) level that they’re more comfortable discussing away from the table. Invisible Sun will support this in a number of ways, including its own smartphone app (in which the GM can send sooth cards to players) and the possibility of occasional one-on-one gaming.

In the world of Invisible Sun, the world that we as players know is called “Shadow.” It’s not the “real” world. The real world is hidden to most, and it’s called the “Actuality.” Sometimes, player characters feel the pull back to the shadow. This is how Invisible Sun will explain player absences–the player character has succumbed to the pull and vanished into shadow for a while.

The game will also feature a “directed campaign.” Players will tell MCG when their campaign starts. After that, the Invisible Suns website will have a new monthly offering for your campaign, which will be tailored based on input provided by the group of players. MCG will even send props in the mail to players! (The audience LOVED this.)

The game’s website (designed by Gnome Stew‘s Head Gnome, John Arcadian) is at pathofsuns.com. Monte suggested we go there and look for secrets. The site will be updated daily until the Kickstarter begins (or ends, I forget which).

This is not a cypher system game, but it has similarities. Monte says that the system in Invisible Sun has a “different but similar core mechanic.” He mentioned that the system is very tailored to the setting, so it’s not designed as a general-purpose system like cypher. The game does have a GM intrusion mechanic; in Invisible Sun, they call it “complications.” These are usually associated with magic.








Invisible Sun’s system uses 10-sided dice. A zero is a failure. When a player is using magic, she’ll add a “magic die” (or sometimes more than one), and the magic die has a symbol in place of the zero.

Monte says you could describe the setting thusly: “It’s the Harry Potter books if they were written by Philip K. Dick.”

Miscellaneous notes:

  • The key word for the game is: surreal. (This–backed up by the images MCG showed in their introductory video–is what really grabbed my son. And he’s not even much of a gaming fan!)
  • Features joy and despair points as a type of XP.
  • The game has a “story point” mechanic.
  • Magic will be presented as weird and wondrous.
  • Inspirations for Invisible Sun include: Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, The Invisibles, China Mieville, Philip K. Dick.
  • Every player character has an arc. There aren’t levels or tiers in the game, but there are story arcs. Reaching a milestone in your story arc can unlock things for your character.
  • Each PC has a “house” they can develop and define.
  • MCG gave out shirts to panel attendees. The shirt (which my son wants to wear every day) depicts “the path of suns,” serving as both a map of reality and also of the human spirit.
  • They also gave out mysterious sealed envelopes which we were urged not t open until August 15. Dammit.
  • Monte says this is probably the most complex project he’s ever worked on.

Cypher System News

After the Invisible Sun discussion, MCG moved on to talk about products related to their cypher system line.

  • Numenera Character Options 2 is coming. Among other things, it includes two new character types: the glint (a face man) and seeker (Indiana Jones).
  • The Numenera Starter Box (intended for new customers, not folks who already have the core book) will be $15. It will be out by Christmas.
  • Into the Outside won’t give us just any old alternate dimensions for Numenera; it’ll give us extra weird ones. For example, a place where you exist in 3 dimensions at once, and one where you exist as sound only. The book will include instant adventure spreads for each major dimension.
  • Predation will be out in 2017. They playtested it at this Gen Con.
  • Unmasked was also playtested here. Dennis Detwiller said that a player told him Unmasked feels like “The Breakfast Club if it were directed by Stanley Kubrick.” In this setting, cyphers are mundane objects that are revealed to be something special when viewed while wearing a mask.
  • Expanded Worlds will be a companion to the Cypher System Rulebook. It includes new genres, including mythology, childhood adventure, post apocalypse, and near future science fiction.
  • Numenera Bestiary 2 is coming.
  • A Numenera novel and a Strange novel are also in production. (I remember talk of these during a recent MCG Kickstarter, and I’m eager to read them.)
  • Organized play: Season 0 is going on now in 20 stores. Season 1 starts Sep 15.
  • Will we see more Numenera world books or adventures? Yes. Monte said they’ll keep supporting whatever games have demand, so that’s up to the customers.

What’s New at Goodman Games

Panelists: Joeb Bittman, Michael Curtis, Joseph Goodman, Jim Wampler, Brendan LaSalle, Harley Stroh, and Doug Kovacs.

(I also spotted Rick Hull and Terry Olson in the audience.)

  • DCC Annual #1 is due out at the end of the year, or early next year. The art for the book is done.
  • Mutant Crawl Classics is due to release by August 2017 at the latest. They expect it earlier than that, actually. They expect to offer an open license for MCC some time after release.
  • A DCC Lankhmar Kickstarter is coming at the end of the year. It’ll feature a boxed set with maps.
  • Big news: Goodman Games has landed the license for a Jack Vance game covering the Dying Earth stories.

UPDATE: The Spellburn podcast has provided an episode featuring the audio of this seminar. You can find it here: Gencon 2016: What’s New at Goodman Games.

AND: Here’s a video of the seminar…

Cthulhu In Games, with Ken Hite

I arrived late for this one, so only have a few notes.

  • Ken says horror games are the best kind of game because they tap into emotion. “Most emotions are too ugly or too personal,” he said, so you don’t want to tap them in public.
  • Ken says the roller coaster analogy of horror (using a series of ratcheting up tension followed by release) is dumb, but it works, “every goddamn time.” Like when you follow a recipe and put together bread and egg and cinnamon you come out with french toast.
  • He does suggest you vary the pacing to keep players guessing, though.

That’s it for the seminars I saw at Gen Con 2016. You should come with me next time!

Ghostbusters at Gen Con 2016

So, this happened at Gen Con last week…

Sandy Petersen and Greg Stafford signed my Ghostbusters RPG! Both seemed genuinely happy to see the book, and I think they also liked the fact that someone is still playing it.

Sandy Petersen

I saw people playing the Ghostbusters board game, but not the RPG (sadly). I tried to make up for this by using my Ghost die in an RPG I played in. I rolled a ghost several times, which in this game just meant a 6, and that was good! Happy ghost!

Here are some other fun Ghostbusters-related shots from the con.

Gaming at MidSouthCon 34

Memphis’s oldest and biggest science fiction & gaming con is MidSouthCon. This year was number 34, and yes of course I went (like I’ve been doing since high school).

Most of my activities were gaming-related, so I’ll focus on those. The con also featured seminars, writing & artist guests, kid-friendly activities, a dealer’s room, an art show, video gaming, a dance, a banquet, and probably other stuff I’m forgetting, so this won’t be comprehensive coverage. Hell, it won’t even be comprehensive coverage of the gaming–just the things I personally played.

Shadow of the Demon Lord

Of course I had to get into a Shadow of the Demon Lord session, being run by Gaming Guest of Honor Rob Schwalb, the game’s designer. I’d read the book but hadn’t played the game, and I’m happy to say it’s lots of fun to play. Rob ran “The Apple of Her Eye” by Steve Kenson. He’s an animated GM, and skilled at using voices and evocative description.

I didn’t know until this game session that Rob had added a lot more playable races to the game than the ones featured in the core rules. Just from my choices from his stack of rogues, I could pick between a revenant, a vampire, and a pixie. I chose the latter, and had a blast. Another player made good use of a revenant priest. Our youngest player (who plays Catastrophe in my Numenera game) chose a changeling, which she played to horrific effect. (She took the form of a bartender, then killed him so he wouldn’t jeopardize her disguise.)

Munchkin

Playing Munchkin is a MidSouthCon tradition for me—at least in the years when my friend Kerry Jordan attends. He brings his huge collection of Munchkin games and runs a few slots to teach people to play it. Indeed, this is how my wife got her introduction to the game—and went on to win it, totally trouncing the young kids we were playing against.

This year we played the Guest Artist edition of Star Munchkin, while another table played the Nightmare Before Christmas version. (Kerry received this edition from a close personal friend who sees him every year at MidSouthCon.) My wife got close to winning this game, too, but another player—who had never played before—kicked our asses. We agreed he deserved the win!

Paranoia

Speaking of Kerry…another of his traditions is running Paranoia. That’s how I first met him! This year he ran “Stealth Train,” a wickedly clever adventure where we had to test an invisible train that wasn’t really there. Kerry is great at running Paranoia, right down to his extensive use of handouts and props. He made a custom notebook for the Loyalty Officer, gave us Bonus Duty lanyards to wear, had name placards on the table to remind us of our character names—all superb details.

The game started out with plenty of the usual shenanigans: sabotaging each other, finger-pointing, tattling on each other to Friend Computer, things like that. One player got a little too hostile, taking things a smidge too seriously, and the rest of us came down on him hard. It was a surprising display of cooperativeness for a Paranoia game. After he lost two clones (and the rest of us hadn’t lost any), this player said he had to go. (#ragequit) For a while, the rest of us continued being cooperative, and actually managed to reach the mission site! Then we remembered what game we were playing, and the backstabbing resumed with a vengeance. One of my favorite moments was when my (former) friend Jerrod used a mutant power to control my hand, making me draw my laser and kill a teammate. Well played, Jerrod. Bastard.

Toon

Rolling double sixes in Toon is bad. Doing so on Demon Lord dice is more so.

I’d never played Toon before, so jumped on this chance. The GM ran an adventure where we were auditioning for the Muppet Show. We made characters, which went pretty fast. I was proud of my character, a hippo who aspires to lose weight and thus become a unicorn. In the adventure we ended up having to search for Gonzo’s “friend” Camilla. The search led to Colonel Sanders, but we got confused and ended up meeting Bernie Sanders. Then we flew to Kentucky, and someone gave us directions to Norm McDonald’s house. Eventually Camilla made her own way back to Gonzo, but we (of course) took the credit.

I want to play more Toon, so I’m disappointed it’s out of print. Come on, Steve Jackson Games, bring it back!

The Con’s Over. Go Home.

Yep, four games. That’s all. There were others I wanted to play, but they either conflicted with the ones I did play or conflicted with my need for sleep. I saw that people ran Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, 3 editions of D&D, and even playtests of Pugmire and the next edition of Paranoia.

I’m curious about what games people are running at other small cons. If you’ve been to any, please share in the comments!

GenCon 2015: Games I Played

Wanna hear about some of the games I played at GenCon this year? I hope so, ’cause here they are!

Ghostbusters: The Board Game

Ghostbusters is a cooperative board game with light roleplaying elements. You play as one of the Ghostbusters and undertake different missions. The one we played in the demo game involved one open ghost portal on the board, several weak ghosts, and one tougher ghost (Slimer).

We started in the Ectomobile, and used one of our actions to disembark. We could then move, zap a ghost, clean slime off a teammate, or deposit ghost traps back in Ecto-1. Your number of actions depends on your level, and is reduced by how many times you’ve been slimed.

Each Ghostbuster has his own special abilities and a unique way of gaining XP. (Everyone gains XP by busting ghosts; these are additional paths to XP.) Playing as Ray Stantz, for example, I could gain XP by cleaning slime off my teammates.

Weak ghosts can be captured by a single zap, while tougher ones require the Ghostbusters to score several hits with the containment beam (represented by putting a ringed token on the ghost in your Ghostbuster’s color). After the Ghostbusters have acted, the ghosts move. If a ghost moves through a Ghostbuster’s square, that ‘buster is slimed. Finally, we roll the special die with parapsychology symbols to see if more ghosts emerge from the portal. (I hope they call this the Zener die.)

Most of the game pieces were still in prototype state during the demo, so it’s hard to tell how impressive the final product will be…except that the ghost pieces were pretty nice.

Dungeon Crawl Classics

Jim prepares to destroy us.

My Internet friend James Walls invited me to join his unofficial game of DCC before GenCon started. I’d never played before, and was eager to try it after reading James’s blog posts about running the game–especially his Star Wars: Stormtroopers version where his players were stormtroopers trying to take down a Jedi.

My Three Characters. None survived.

James ran The Well of Souls for the eight of us. We each controlled 3 level 0 characters. We faced ritual sacrifice, animated skeletons, a wicked puzzle we never did solve, and the most dangerous foe: each other. (James added an evil blade to the adventure to mix things up; he describes it in his blog post “The Blade of Eight Souls.”)

In general, I like how RPGs have evolved over time. I’m not one of those gamers who misses the Good Old Days when we rolled up characters randomly and played simplistic scenarios where gaining treasure was more important than roleplaying. But I found DCC charming for some reason, and after our game I had to buy my own copy.

The Strange

Now available for purchase

Though I’ve read The Strange and enjoyed it, I hadn’t had a chance to run or play it until now. I got to play the Mastodon adventure (available for sale now), written by Bruce Cordell and superbly run by a GM named Randy. As it turns out, none of the players in this session had played the game before either.

This session was one of those where the game was even more fun than I’d been expecting. The end of the adventure was set in the Ruk recursion (which is a sort of alternate universe), and while it was cool to read about Ruk, it was even cooler to be there. My favorite thing about The Strange is the way part of your character sheet (and therefore, your abilities) gets replaced when you travel to a different recursion.

The Strange won several ENnie awards at this GenCon (the silver awards for Best Game, Best Setting, and Best Interior Art), which made me even more glad I got to try it out. And the next day, I was fortunate enough to get my rulebook autographed by Monte, Bruce, and Shanna.

Like many things that happened at GenCon this year, this alone made my trip worthwhile.

Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space

Our MVP

I continued my streak of playing Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space at GenCon—this year being my second. (Granted, it’s not a long-running streak yet.) The adventure was “The Northern Knights” by Walt Ciechanowski. I won’t describe the plot of the adventure, in case you get a chance to play it. (Also, I was focusing too much on being clever to remember all the plot details.) But I wanted to say a few general things about the game.

My fellow players took the roles of the 12th Doctor, Clara, Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax, and I got to play Robin Hood! In my opinion, the MVP was the player controlling Strax. He was hilarious and had a great grasp on the character.

We also had a good GM (Jen). She was cosplaying as Captain Jack. What I noticed most about her was her skill at answering player questions in character. For example, a guard was delivering some expository information to us, and one of the players interrupted to ask a question. Jen kept speaking in the guard’s voice, but shifted his conversation pretty seamlessly to answer the player but still impart some extra information. She was also liberal with handing out story points, which I think made us more likely to try actions we weren’t super-skilled at.

Jen also gave us each two tiny plastic cybermats (adventure spoiler!), which cemented her as my favorite GenCon GM ever.

That’s it for this year’s games! Maybe I’ll play more next year, or maybe I’ll go even deeper into the pool of seminars and play even less. We’ll see!

GenCon 2015: New Releases and Other News

I’m still processing all the Gaming Goodness(tm) I encountered at GenCon last week, but I wanted to go ahead and get this info up first. I’ll bore you about the games I played in a later post.

Lots of companies announced new products or presented other breaking news at GenCon. This isn’t a comprehensive list of GenCon announcements, just the ones I personally witnessed.
Monte Cook Games announced a new series of sourcebooks for Numenera, collectively called Into the Ninth World.

“The first product in this line will be a sourcebook called Into the Night, to be followed up next year with Into the Deep and Into the Outside. Into the Night explores the vast reaches of space beyond the Ninth World, Into the Deep details regions beneath the sea, and Into the Outside peers into ultraterrestrial and interdimensional realms beyond our universe.” – MCG

The Into the Ninth World Kickstarter campaign started on August 5th.
Monte Cook Games seminar
Pinnacle Entertainment Group announced three new product lines. The one I’m most excited about is a Flash Gordon Savage Worlds roleplaying game, which they announced with a cool teaser trailer. Gordon’s alive! The other two are Fear Agent and The Goon, both based on titles from Dark Horse Comics. Pinnacle has posted a video of the Pinnacle GenCon seminar on YouTube.
And Wil Wheaton announced at the Titansgrave Q&A seminar that Tabletop season 4 and Titansgrave season 2 will begin production early next year.