Morgan's CelestiCon 2011 Adventures

I'll try to keep out spoilers for the games and only mention elements already "spoiled" by the GM's description of the game published in the catalog.

---

1.  Gil Trevizo's Götterdämmerung (Delta Green), Fri 6pm.

Berlin 1945: With the city surrounded by the Red Army, a lone glider flies into the
flames and ruin, carrying a group of Allied agents, haunted veterans on a final
mission that will take them from this world at war to a land of dreams, where the
SS and their occult research division known as the Karotechia have built Project
HODDMÍMIR, the final gambit to escape their reckoning. Mature themes, adult
complexity.

At KublaCon, I tried to get into this game and the shuffler and wait list failed me, Mike G, and Shannon M.  We all wound up in Jill's game instead.  Well, Gil said he was running the game at CelestiCon, so we all tried to get into Gil's game again and we all made it this time.

Gil again shows why he is one of the top GM's in the Bay Area.  Unbelievable props, well paced story, and interesting choices for characters to make.  The game is set near the fall of Berlin at the end of WWII.  For props, he created the most amazing German SS id booklets for us as character sheets, secret sealed orders, period music, customized GM screen with scenes of Der Fuhrer, maps of Berlin, and a miniature model of a glider.

Cover of ID booklet

At a recent MiniCon, I played in Matt Steele's Dr Who Torchwood game and got the left-over character and that character had the most cool and useful abilities.  This time, I again got the left-over character and I think I got one of the buried treasures again.  I think we have in our minds several stereotypes for characters and it bias us towards certain choices.   Good GMs do not give you boring pre-generated characters.  So, I think no matter how boring the outward template is, there's always something cool underneath.

Inside page of ID booklet

Using movie stars portraits (photo shopped with SS uniforms) was the right move for our character sheets.  Gil mentioned he could have used real pictures, but thought it would be too creepy.  I think using movie stars make this game a "fun" movie vs. a glorification or re-enactment.  It sets the right tone.  We are movie stars and heroes trying to stop another evil plan, not Nazi war criminals.  An "Inglourious Basterds" meets "Cthulhu."

At one point, the party had to decide who would go into the dream lands.  In most games, if the party is split up, one team may wind up holed up somewhere with nothing to do whereas the other team would get all the action.  So, I had to ask metagame-wise about this.  Gil actually said that the other two times he ran this, the party did get split up and he had prepared for this.  So, we split up the party.  I thought that since the game was about the dream lands, that going into the dream lands would be the more interesting than staying behind.  After the players made their character decisions of who went and who stayed behind, I decided it would make more sense to stay behind.  The good news was that out of character we got to see what happened in the dream lands, so we didn't miss the coolness happening there.  I stayed behind with another character and got to kill Nazis.  After seeing what had happened, I think I made the right decision as my character didn't have the skills to deal with the dream lands whereas the other characters did.

In the end, we saved the world and had a great time doing it.

---

2.  Dovi Anderson's Have Ship, Will Smuggle (FATE, Star Wars), Sat 9am.

Setbacks and differences of opinion have left your crew on the verge of selling off
the ship and going your separate ways. But every smuggler worth his spice
would be crazy not to compete in Thespa the Hutt’s Gunrunner’s Gauntlet, a high
speed, high risk scavenger hunt set to rage across the galaxy. Perhaps the
winning ship’s 6,000,000 purse and lucrative contract position is just what you
need. High roleplay/storytelling game with mature themes.

At KublaCon, people kept raving about Dovi's Star Wars game, so I used my priority slip to get into his game.  Again props galore.  Music, opening credits, pre-generated characters, card games, encryption puzzles, tons of NPCs with portraits and customized space ships.  Dovi showed that he knew his Star Wars universe inside and out.

Dovi is also one of the top GMs of the Bay Area.  He was able to balance the screen time for every player.  We made our own choices as to how we would gather cargo for this Gunrunner's Gauntlet.  We begged, borrowed, and stole our way across the galaxy.  There was also character tension, so near the end of our mission, there was a shootout between characters.  Gil T. and Matt S. faced off each other and by luck shot each other simultaneously.  We also had to decide whether to hand over our cargo to the Rebel Alliance or not.  We also got cameos from the original Star Wars cast.

We didn't save the world, but we had a great time robbing it.

---

3. David Weinstein's In space, no one can... braaaaiiins.... (All Flesh Must Be Eaten), Sun 2pm

Something has happened to Science Mission 1! Perhaps space is a more hostile
environment than anyone has imagined! Can the brave captain and crew, along
with the scientist and his family, survive the nightmare of Space Zombies?

Celesticon 2011 Program Book Cover

David's game was featured on the cover of the CelestiCon program book.  David really got the mood set right with music from Forbidden Planet and rocket ships from the 1950's.  The game was campy and humorous and everyone played their characters to the hilt.  We had the oversexed captain, the rebellious second in command, the over-logical robot, the ship's cook, the absentminded scientist, and the scientist's beautiful daughter.  The planet looked like flecked styrofoam and there were zombies in addition to other subplots and complications.  I was glad we went back to visit the palace -- David pulled out the prop "box" for us to see.  What are Zombies without brains?   Another great game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The prop box was a megalomaniac scientist's brain in box that controlled all the zombies on the planet.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

This time, we didn't save the world, but we saved Earth.

---

4. Morgan Hua's Protect At All Costs (Ghost in the Shell: SAC), Sun 8pm.

You work for Chief Aramaki of Public Security Section 9. You're on the graveyard
shift and rarely see the Major or Batou, and they make jokes about your team as
being Section Point Nine. Your team is sent to protect a visiting Prime Minister. A
simple baby sitting assignment, what could go wrong?

This was my homebrew system for Ghost in the Shell.  It ran this game for about 1-1/2 years (once every two weeks) for my regular crew of gamers.  I was worried because this game was scheduled on the 3rd day of a con and late at night.  I was worried that no one would show up or people would be dead tired.  From looking at the signup sheets for other people's games, they would either be filled or not at all. The good news was that my signup was full and there was only one no-show that got filled by a walk-in.  The bad news was that people were tired.  My system required some addition of handfuls of dice and groupings of dice.  I could tell that people were having problems aaaadding nuuummbers.

Also it was a homebrew system and I wanted people to create their own characters.  The system is pretty simple and dynamic.  The character creation is very open ended and I could tell that people got stumped as to what to do.  It also didn't help that 2 people were not familiar with the Ghost in the Shell universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell_mecha#Mecha, http://ghostintheshell2ndgig.manga.com), so creating characters from scratch would be even more difficult.  If I run this again, I think I should offer the alternative of pre-generated characters.  Before I ran it for my group at home, we watched several episodes of the Anime and I think that helped give everyone a common view of the world -- too bad there's not enough time for that at a con game.

The game started a bit roughly as one of the characters decided to attack an NPC right off the bat (which surprised me) and another decided to be cute and send porn through a planted bug.  The attack failed and the PC wound up unconscious on his living room floor and the people on the other end of the listening device immediately shut off and "burned" the listening post.

Once the players figured out how serious this world was, they got into gear.

The group did great planing and covered multiple contingencies.  The only flaw I felt was that due to the nature of planning and coverage, some characters would always be left out of the action.  For instance, the characters were on security detail, so it is necessary for the characters to be spread out, covering all aspects of a location.  When something happens, only a few could respond and the other characters are left out.  I felt a few players didn't get enough screen time and I felt bad about it.  (Dovi, I need to figure out how you do this.)

In the end, they completed their mission, but didn't completely figure out what was really going on.   They found bits and pieces of info, but didn't follow up on all the clues.  I think being unfamiliar with the universe hindered their investigation.  At one point they reviewed video to look for a possible suspect and failed, but they didn't use the same technique elsewhere -- where they could have picked up a different suspect's trail since in that instance they had a complete description.

I didn't want to tell the players how to investigate or spoon feed them clues.  I felt as part of RPG, they were free to do as they pleased and follow the avenues of investigation they deemed important.

It is the free form collaboration between players and GM that generates "gems" in a game.  There were quite a few:  Twin synchronized pole-dancing Padme's in Geisha outfits, a trapeze strip, Cyberbrain Condom's, and a fantastic action sequence involving silenced 50-caliber rifles, hand-to-hand fights in active camouflage suits, falling elevators, and a surprising reveal when they take the camouflage mask off the dead guy at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Imagine two of these pole dancing in mirror image sync with large Japanese fans and stripping erotically.  Also broadcast in multiple feeds from various angles to all the team members as part of their surveillance.

As June mentioned, I don't think we would have gotten some of these gems with pre-gens.  So, there's this trade off to consider.

In the end, I felt there was much more room for improvement.  Maybe this isn't the right scenario for a Con game, maybe 4 players would be better and give everyone the right amount of screen time and give me more time to help people customize their characters, maybe 8pm on the 3rd day of a Con is bad for an investigative game with lots of dice.  I'm not sure.

The characters saved the Prime Minister and didn't, but that's another story.