I was thinking I’m going to be brief about Saturday, but apparently that was not in the cards. Less pics today, because I just forgot to take them.

Hearty breakfast (read: a lot of calories), although apparently the hotel wasn’t ready for the influx of overweight nerds as much of the food was subpar compared to last year. There were a lot more con-goers at the hotel. Perhaps I’ve now completely corrupted the whole scene with my personal need for a comfortable bed.

2.1 Adventures in Going Big or Going Home
or
… well, I’ve got nothing

Saturday morning, I took part in a Barbarians of Lemuria game. Its a Sword and Sorcery game in the spirit of Howard and other pulp fantasy writers. You get your share of strange monsters and rascist stereotypes of native people. Both were prominent.

I had some experience with the game from last year. At first, I was going to play a character with some magic and go against the stereotypical warrior. Then I saw the other players making similar characters, so I started from scratch (which doesn’t take long) and made a warrior. Not stereotypical, necessarily, but someone who can do damage with his mighty axe.

The game itself is not very deep. You hit things and you do your best to make it seem cool, so there’s a lot of leaps into huge monsters, chopping off heads, using the environment to your benefit and stuff like that.

Now, I had a secondary goal. I had promised to take part in the Live Bloodbowl tournament. So, I needed to get out of this game on time. Thankfully, the GM had managed to wrangle himself a spot on the game run by D. Vincent Baker, so he had a time limit as well.

I didn’t manage to kill myself in the game, but it wasn’t for the lack of trying. I did leap at the face of a giant sea serpent while seasick, then to the top of its head after it had thrown me down, threw an axe at a native, thereby losing my only weapon (although I did kill him against the odds), and later on I tried to get eaten by a giant worm/snail monster. Admittedly, I did let the red shirts take some of the risks, because if I die, I die like man, in combat, not like a red shirt, in a trap.

2.2 There’s an Actual Ball?
or
The Awkward Sight of Shirtless Nerds

Lauri has some pictures of this, so maybe I’ll edit this later on to add them. We’ll see.

There wasn’t any mention of this on the RopeCon website, but we had knowledge of this beforehand, so we had assembled a team. The team did have a few last minute additions, because of scheduling, but we had a team of four dwarves and a kraken disguised cleverly as our ogre reinforcement.

The other teams were our nemeses, the orcs, the undead and two different hobbit teams. For a single elimination tournament, five is obviously a very inconvenient number of teams. I guess we sort of got the bye for the first round… I don’t know. I couldn’t really follow what was happening. I do know we lost our only game to the orcs (who had… some insider help), but I personally got a moral victory by achieving more takedowns than being on the receiving end, so no problems there. Although, we dwarves don’t know when to quit, so wait until next year, Joonas. We’re not quite through yet.

All in all, too much waiting around. Some players were very good, like the Cute Hobbit (anyone there knows who I’m talking about) seemed to always read the situation very well and anticipate what the opponents would do. Wasn’t enough though. Generally, not really a spectator sport, although we made some attempts of being a more of a spectacle. On the other hand, there’s only so much you can do with a bunch of shirtless, overweight nerds.

Life of a Vorthos
or
Nice Idea, But Not Really For Me

As defined by Mark Rosewater, Vorthos is the kind of player who is mostly interested in the flavor. Keep this in mind. I am not such a player, which you should also keep in mind.

I went to a demo of a game called Serpent’s Tongue. Their preferred web address seems to be www.BecomeMagi.com. Its an interesting idea and I bet there are lots of players out there who think this would make a great game. I’m just not one of them, being more on the Spikey (out there to prove something) end of the spectrum (I probably shouldn’t call it a spectrum, but you get what I mean).

The basic idea is that you have spellbook. Actually more literally than in most games. You insert spells into the book and cast them from there. This involves both verbalizing and in some cases hand motions. This is where they lose me. If verbalizing and the motions had actual in-game meaning, instead of being a simple exercise in reading the cards correctly, I might have enjoyed it more.

The demo put its emphasis on the flavor, so the game mechanics didn’t shine that much. From what I saw, its a game of adversarial reasoning, in other words trying to outthink your opponent by being able to predict how he or she will play the game. I can’t say the tools for this are really there, because I saw so little of the game itself, but I suppose they are.

I don’t think the emphasis on flavor is a mistake. If the game is about that, why go elsewhere?

Again, this is not a game for me, but if flavor is your thing, you shouldn’t let my stance deter you from buying it. Also, I’m not sure they want it publicized, so I won’t put the code here, but they did have a special price for con-goers. If you want the code (which is eligible until August 4th of 2013), contact me. I’ll see what I can do.

Ok, I’m back. My shirt smells like sweat demon died in it, although I’ve slept pretty well, I feel like could crash at any moment and I have sunburned my face. At least I didn’t buy a bunch of crap. Except some Magic-cards (which we’ll get to in later parts), Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which I actually bought about a year ago, but only got my copy now, and an artist hand model, which I bought actually before even leaving on impulse, but I could immediately come up with different uses for. Most importantly, flipping people off.

Lets skip the part where our little group sailed (figuratively) to the con itself shirtless. That was not a pretty sight. Besides, this same group was in the same situation again later (which we’ll get to in the next part).

1.1 The Relatively Quiet Year,
or
How the Kraken Won Our Hearts

Because most of the RPGs offered by the Con were not that interesting and juggling the ones that were felt impossible with all the interlapping timeslots, I took the easy route and just took this opportunity to try this great little grem – The Quiet Year.

The game war run by a member of our little guild. Unlike most RPGs, its not the story of individuals, but a community. The community and its history is represented by a map drawn during the game and a few lists (abundance, scarcity and characters). The story is told through a deck of cards. This one was a limited edition done specifically for this purpose, but the normal version is just a pdf, which explains how you can play this with an ordinary deck of cards. In the deck, each suite represents a different season, beginning with spring. From the beginning, we know, the end will come during the winter, but the community doesn’t.

Its a very nice game. I’m not sure how much replayability it has, because obviously, there’s only 13 cards per season and although they are always in different order, two specific cards will happen in the same order 50% of the time. This often means similar things happen, they just happen in different order. I’d at least suggest not playing this game more than once or twice with the same group. New players will always bring something new to the table.

Of course, one problem with games like these is the lack of restraint. Not everything has to be earth-shattering, but its hard not to get competitive.

After a few weeks, the situation looked like this:

Just a few projects. A new cult is being born and there’s a kraken on the outskirts of the island our people are living on. Enemies were plentiful (but gladly, very slow), dried leaves not so much, plenty of snails, too many old people according to Konstantin.

The final product looked like this:

I don’t understand it either. (Actually, it’s probably upside down.) I guess, you had to be there. Like always in RPGs. They don’t translate well when recounting them.

So what was that thing about the kraken? There was one aroung the island. At some point it had a mate, its cult was one of the driving forces of the story, it fought on our behalf (at least we like to think so), it moved into the middle of the island through tunnels, where it was again a major recipient of worship.

1.2 Its Easy Being Transgressive When You Play a Fourteen Year Old Teen Girl
or
Who Needs a Plot When You Have Players Like These

Later that night, we played MonsterHearts. A great game, which I had some experience of. I decided to go for a witch. A 14-year-old nerdy witch, with an eclectic mix of arcane and modern methods of hexing. The others were a werewolf, fae, ghoul, ghost and a mortal.

Artists depiction of the player characters. By Wille Ruotsalainen
(sorry about the blurriness, didn’t have a good camera on me)

I can’t possibly even try to explain everything that happened, so bullet points from what I remember (understandably I remember mostly what my character did, sorry about that… we do have a comments section if someone happens to want to add something):

• My 14-year-old witch seduced a 17-year-old werewolf, broke several taboos as parts of spells (drank the semen of the werewolf from a condom, masturbated with a game console controller, forcibly sat on the face of the ghoul), lost control of herself and withered the faces of both the fae and the mortal, tried to kill the ghoul by undoing his stitches, and ate a huge amount of mushrooms (yes, the naughty kind)
• The werewolf contemplated killing the small dog of one of the NPCs
• The ghoul tried to eat the ghost and later my innocent, little witch
• The ghost creeped around stalking people, including stealing the bra of one of the owners of the camp
• The mortal fell in love with all PCs but the witch at some point, including promising to love the fae forever during sex, which he promptly forgot
• The fae tried to get revenge on the mortal by sabotaging some death certificates she found in a box which she thought belonged to the mortal, but was actually the ghoul’s instead.

I guess there was a plot that was supposed to happen, but the GM was good enough to let us go with what we were doing. This was a lot of fun. As far as I could tell, everyone at the table was really into it. Perfect storm of system, characters, players and the GM. This is why play at conventions.

In the end, my sweet, little witch walked half-naked, covered in blood and controlled by her dark side into the forest, where she met her werewolf lover, also controlled by his dark side, and left the camp together, probably not to live happily ever after. Although, in a true horror movie tradition, the sequel will forget everything great about this story and just be a slasher.

Sex, drugs and a lot of mediocre music (ok, not really mediocre, but that was funnier than ‘goth music’).

A note for the GM, if you happen to read this, remember: 18, not 15. Maybe 22 would be even better.