BigBadCon is the best indie RPG (e.g. non-pathfinder, non-D&D) convention.
This year there were a lot more private rooms and a good variety of food trucks so there was no need to leave the hotel to grab a bite to eat. I only played one game in a shared room, the rest in private rooms. I'm glad Sean got rid of the those room dividers, so even in the shared room there was good air flow.
Lots of good games and I ran into lots of people that I knew.
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Collision on I-81
Date/Time - Oct 16, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PMGM: Todd Furler
System: Unknown Armies
Maturity Rating: Adult themes
Available Spaces: 6
Game Length: 4
Characters: Provided
What’s supposed to be a simple week of training starts off with a horrific car accident. And things get unimaginably worse from there.
Todd always runs a good solid game and this was no exception. We play normal people and things just got stranger and stranger until we realized we had to fix the anomaly.
Tod runs very well paced games and controls the time very well. We ended on time and I felt as if the game ran its course. Nothing was rushed and everything felt organic.
I had a very good time.
Extraordinary Mission
Date/Time - Oct 16, 7:00 PM - 1:00 AM
GM: Dennis Jordan
System: Morrow Project-Fate Hack
Maturity Rating: Adult themes
Available Spaces: 5
Game Length: 6
Characters: Created at the table
“You know what the hardest part about being a Morrow Project recruiter is?” “Finding people that straddle the line. You know how hard it is to find a stable, compassionate, caring person…who hasn’t started a family or has close community ties?
“Then there is the other side of the line. We ain’t putting on a bake sale here. We need killers, men and women that will not even blink at the idea of using force to protect or even further Morrow’s goals, all for the greater good.”
“Take me for example…a former Force Recon Marine with degrees in Psychology and Engineering, with a passion for Krav Maga and ceramics.”
“So yeah, I love my job…and deserve a raise.”
So…in the continuing BBC tradition of taking classic games with a great premise but horrible mechanics, and hacking them up with equal parts Diaspora crunch and tiddly wink spirit , we are tackling Morrow Project this year. Morrow Project is a post apocalyptic RPG about a dedicated paramilitary organization that knows the USA will be devastated by a nuclear war and volunteers to go in cryogenic sleep in hidden bunkers across the nation, to rise up 3-5 years after the nuclear chaos to rebuild a great nation.
Dennis ran this game on short notice in place of Gil's game. Originally Gil was going to run his Star ORE game which I really, really wanted to play in, but he had a family emergency and was unable to attend BigBadCon.
So a big thanks to Dennis for GMing.GM: Dennis Jordan
System: Morrow Project-Fate Hack
Maturity Rating: Adult themes
Available Spaces: 5
Game Length: 6
Characters: Created at the table
“You know what the hardest part about being a Morrow Project recruiter is?” “Finding people that straddle the line. You know how hard it is to find a stable, compassionate, caring person…who hasn’t started a family or has close community ties?
“Then there is the other side of the line. We ain’t putting on a bake sale here. We need killers, men and women that will not even blink at the idea of using force to protect or even further Morrow’s goals, all for the greater good.”
“Take me for example…a former Force Recon Marine with degrees in Psychology and Engineering, with a passion for Krav Maga and ceramics.”
“So yeah, I love my job…and deserve a raise.”
So…in the continuing BBC tradition of taking classic games with a great premise but horrible mechanics, and hacking them up with equal parts Diaspora crunch and tiddly wink spirit , we are tackling Morrow Project this year. Morrow Project is a post apocalyptic RPG about a dedicated paramilitary organization that knows the USA will be devastated by a nuclear war and volunteers to go in cryogenic sleep in hidden bunkers across the nation, to rise up 3-5 years after the nuclear chaos to rebuild a great nation.
Dennis ran this game on short notice in place of Gil's game. Originally Gil was going to run his Star ORE game which I really, really wanted to play in, but he had a family emergency and was unable to attend BigBadCon.The whole background behind the Morrow Project was that we were put into suspended animation and we're supposed to wake up 3-5 years after a nuclear holocaust and help put humanity back on it's feet. Of course, things never happen as they're supposed to.
I loved the depth of knowledge that Dennis brought into the game. What was curious is that he has so much technical detail, but Fate is such a low crunch game. It's a sort of an odd system choice.
We spent a fair amount of time creating our characters and getting equipment, but I wound up rolling no dice in the game, so it didn't really matter what skills my character had. This is the fault of nobody, but it just happened that the players were not Gung Ho kick-the-door-in players, but more cautious and rational. I think we played very realistic and very smart for the situation we were in.
I found this an interesting game, but I thought we spent too much time making characters. In these situations, I would have preferred pre-gens.
Hey Gil, we were in a Dennis game with all this equipment and ordinance and we didn't fire a single shot. :-)
Super Train
Date/Time - Oct 17, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PMGM: Morgan Hua
System: Godlike
Maturity Rating: Graphic Violence
Available Spaces: 6
Game Length: 4
Characters: Provided
Allied Talents, WWII soldiers with superpowers, are notified by the French Resistance that a Nazi Super Train is loading secret cargo. Your mission, stop whatever the Germans are doing.
Godlike is a brutal WWII system where one lucky bullet can kill a PC. Not only do you have to deal with trained soldiers, but the Germans have their own supermen too.
This time the players dressed up as German soldiers and ambushed the train at the station. This was much different from the other two times where they attacked the train before it arrived at the station. But in such close quarters it was much more dangerous and 2 PCs got killed before the party decided to retreat hastily. With backup characters they were able to complete the mission by attacking the disabled train a second time.
I'm probably not going to run this game again. Inside the spoiler section is the description of the game and some images from the game.
Eagle’s Nest
Date/Time - Oct 17, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PMGM: Morgan Hua
System: Godlike
Maturity Rating: Graphic Violence
Available Spaces: 6
Game Length: 4
Characters: Provided
Allied Talents, WWII soldiers with superpowers, are sent to capture the Eagle’s Nest, one of Hitler’s retreats.
Godlike is a brutal WWII system where one lucky bullet can kill a PC. Not only do you have to deal with trained soldiers, but the Germans have their own supermen too.
I think most people can read between the lines and know that they get to kill Hitler. This time, different characters killed separate Hitlers, so no one got to kill Hitler twice.
I'm probably not going to run this game again. Inside the spoiler section is the description of the game and some images from the game.
Generation Starship (working title)
Date/Time - Oct 17, 8:00 PM - 12:00 AM
GM: Aaron Vanek
System: Songlines
Maturity Rating: Adult themes
Available Spaces: 7
Game Length: 4
Characters: Created at the table
This is a playtest for a new RPG system that uses music as a story guide. In this scenario, players will represent generations of one family line aboard a starship looking for a new home among the stars.
The game uses dice rolling for task resolution, but also elements of larping and creation/making.
Triggers: There will be elements of death (players represent a family line, so individual characters are going to die, hopefully of old age) and birth (sex is merely implied, however). Some of the songs might be very sad or at least emotional. There will be a few instances of CvC (character versus character) which could be intense or aggressively argumentative.
Aaron was playtesting his own system which is pretty interesting. There's several aspects to it. One is a playlist with an associated image. The song also determines the duration of a scene. At the end of the song, the players must have either fulfilled certain criteria by dice rolling or by role-playing. The system is interesting and pretty flexible.
Aaron designed the Generation Starship game to have a balance of 1/3 role-playing, 1/3 dice rolling, and 1/3 making. Making is basically writing a note, puzzle solving, or drawing a map cooperatively. Dice rolling consists of rolling dice and either pattern matching (a preset pattern) or getting a specific total.
Since this was a playtest, we found several things that were tiresome:
- We were naming each generation and that got to be a chore when someone had 20 children and at some point, the previous generation dies off, so all that work was for nothing.
- Each child also allows you to gain or lose aspects, but at some point, rolling 20 dice to add and remove aspects became too cumbersome.
- Some of the die rolling reminded me of the game Escape, which is a fun game, but that game only runs for 10 minutes. Die rolling for long periods of time and adding handfuls of dice became more of a chore than a pleasure. The die rolling became "The Thing" vs the role-playing which should have been the thing.
Overall an interesting, but mixed experience.
Treasure Trapped!
Date/Time - Oct 17, 11:59 PM - 2:00 AMGM: Terror Rabbit Ventures
System: Movie
Big Bad Con Screening of Treasure Trapped! Three unlikely heroes journey into the curious world of LARP (Live Action Role-Play) to explore what happens when you take pretending to a whole new level.
I'm glad that Matt S. brought this documentary to show us. It was quite interesting even though the movie failed (bad disc) in the last 7 minutes and we lost the ending.
It starts off with SCA-style Boffers and D&D LARPs. The Boffer training seemed very odd. I've seen SCA and I've fenced and done Kendo, and what they were teaching didn't seem very realistic to me. They also didn't wear any head protection. It reminded me more of kids with foam swords than combat training.
Then it goes to more and more extreme LARPs where people have bought part of an abandoned mine to dungeon crawl, people who have opened up a high school where kids learn by LARPing, a group that spent over $1M to make the inside of a naval destroyer into a Battlestar from Battlestar Galactica, to a group that does a 36 hour immersive LARP as employees of a marketing firm for questionable products or PR for despots of a dictatorship.
At some point, I began to become disturbed by the lengths of what was going on. At first the high school seemed cool until I saw scenes where some students were wearing yellow Juden stars and it was clear they were roleplaying the Holocaust. Umm, that crossed the line for me. They also showed that they were going to roleplay a Salem Witchhunt (they talked about future events and pointed at upcoming schedules). My mind reeled. What was on the future schedule? A Lynching in the South? Killing Fields? ISIL beheadings? They should have learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment which went very wrong and I don't think there's people on staff that understood that some of these high school students could be damaged for life. One student said he loved the place because he was such an outsider before and he felt like this was a family -- yeah, like The Manson Family, especially if they roleplay Nazis and Jews.
The Marketing Firm LARP was painful to watch. I personally would not do it as it reminded me too much of real work. I roleplay to escape work stress. At one point, a player got fired. I turned to Jack and said, "I would have gone postal." I bet they wouldn't have counted on that.
The beginning was a bit slow with the SCA-style Boffers and D&D LARPers which most roleplayers are familiar with, but it got more and more interesting as it got more and more extreme.
Definitely worth a watch.
It starts off with SCA-style Boffers and D&D LARPs. The Boffer training seemed very odd. I've seen SCA and I've fenced and done Kendo, and what they were teaching didn't seem very realistic to me. They also didn't wear any head protection. It reminded me more of kids with foam swords than combat training.
Then it goes to more and more extreme LARPs where people have bought part of an abandoned mine to dungeon crawl, people who have opened up a high school where kids learn by LARPing, a group that spent over $1M to make the inside of a naval destroyer into a Battlestar from Battlestar Galactica, to a group that does a 36 hour immersive LARP as employees of a marketing firm for questionable products or PR for despots of a dictatorship.
At some point, I began to become disturbed by the lengths of what was going on. At first the high school seemed cool until I saw scenes where some students were wearing yellow Juden stars and it was clear they were roleplaying the Holocaust. Umm, that crossed the line for me. They also showed that they were going to roleplay a Salem Witchhunt (they talked about future events and pointed at upcoming schedules). My mind reeled. What was on the future schedule? A Lynching in the South? Killing Fields? ISIL beheadings? They should have learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment which went very wrong and I don't think there's people on staff that understood that some of these high school students could be damaged for life. One student said he loved the place because he was such an outsider before and he felt like this was a family -- yeah, like The Manson Family, especially if they roleplay Nazis and Jews.
The Marketing Firm LARP was painful to watch. I personally would not do it as it reminded me too much of real work. I roleplay to escape work stress. At one point, a player got fired. I turned to Jack and said, "I would have gone postal." I bet they wouldn't have counted on that.
The beginning was a bit slow with the SCA-style Boffers and D&D LARPers which most roleplayers are familiar with, but it got more and more interesting as it got more and more extreme.
Definitely worth a watch.
Death By Moonlight
Date/Time - Oct 18, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PMGM: Carl Rigney
System: Night Witches
Maturity Rating: Adult themes
Available Spaces: 4
Game Length: 4
Characters: Created at the table
In World War II’s darkest hour, natural born Soviet airwomen volunteered to take to the skies to defend Mother Russia from the Hitlerite bandits. They flew terrifying night missions in obsolete biplanes, dropping bombs on the invaders and when they couldn’t get bombs, they dropped railroad ties. By day they struggled with repairs, parts shortages, political officers, and all the forces that wanted to see them fail. This is the story of their triumph anyway, as told by you. Beginners welcome, system will be taught.
Your biplane is made of wood and canvas with an unarmored fuel tank that goes up like a candle when hit. You don’t wear parachutes because that weight could be better used for more bombs, and because you fly too low for a parachute to be useful. The cover of darkness is your greatest ally as you glide in, engines off, to torment the invaders. But even when the moon is full, still you must fly.
A very fun game. Carl does a great job of balancing between players and giving everybody enough screen time. He did a great introduction to the Night Witches game. The game was designed to be more of a campaign, so he picked and chose some interesting parts for us to play.
Even though Carl picked and chose various parts of the campaign, it felt like a full game to me. Nothing was rushed and everything was fully fleshed out.
I loved the game, but I'm worried about the repetition of mission after mission in a campaign, whether that would get boring. I'll get into a campaign game of this to see if that's the case.
Dead Dogs
Date/Time - Oct 18, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PMGM: Chris Czerniak
System: Feng Shui 2
Maturity Rating: Adult themes
Available Spaces: 5
Game Length: 4
Characters: Created at the table
The triads have infiltrated the Hong Kong Police Force and crime has become rampant. However, there is something that lurks under the crime family and since the Triads killed your family, or ruined your career, or your brother works for them and you want him out; you’ll do anything to find out what is really going on and make things right.
This was the funnest game that I played in. I had a great time as the Scrappy Kid. My character concept was Wednesday from the Addams Family, but wearing a Girl Scout uniform and selling stale Girl Scout cookies which she used as Throwing Stars. Her motivation was that Pugsley was selling drugs in Hong Kong and got grabbed by Mad Tiger's men for failing to get the right amount of money.
What was amazing was that this game was only two set pieces and even though it was combat in two areas, we created full stories for all the characters and the game was organic and fully fleshed out and not rushed. I loved it.
One technique that Chris used was that we were required to make one connection between our character and another character, so when the action started, we had a reason to support each other. We also had our personal flashback which gave each of us our own bit of screen time to either expand our character or flesh out the plot.
In the set pieces, he let us add one element per player, so we could customize the layout. Again this game depends on cooperation and imagination from the players, so good players is a key to a good Feng Shui game.
Overall, very fun.
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