Morgan's BigBadCon 2015 Adventures

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.

I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked. 

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Collision on I-81

Date/Time - Oct 16, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM
GM: 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.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We started off viewing an auto accident ahead of our car and we noticed that the car that gets horribly mangled with a fatality has the same license plate number as our own, but from a different state.

Then we started noticing more and more changes.

One of the real gems is that we couldn't seem to open bottles and other people could do it.  We finally realized that the bottles we're all reverse threaded from the way we're used to.

Then more time and space anomalies started to happen like a barking dog at the corner was replaced by a sheep which the owner also noticed, so it wasn't just us.

We finally figured out that we had skipped into a different dimension when our van had somehow got confused with the other van in the other dimension.  This intersection of dimensions allowed us to cross over.  Our event was propagating through time and space, like the ripples of a pebble dropped into a pond, and was messing things up.  To fix this, we decided to re-enact the auto accident, and maybe cause an interference pattern.

I wanted to reverse the position of everything, so that we would be the van that had the accident and the other van would be the one that survived, but this was too much for the other players as the driver of the damaged van had a fatality.  So, we only re-staged the accident with some necessary changes: We took the license plates off the totaled van and put it on a rental van.  The driver of the damaged van was the fatality, so we swapped the passenger and driver occupants, but kept everything as before.  Then we staged the accident.

The result?  We wound up in another dimension, but did we fix everything or not?  Well, that was where we faded to black as we find that the driver of our van also suffered a fatality and that snow was on the ground where it wasn't before, but the speed limit signs matched our home dimension.  So, did we or didn't we?

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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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.

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.  :-)

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We were a MARS team, an elite tactical attack team.

We woke up 32 years later instead of 3 to 5.  There were no biologicals or nuclear fallout residue, but our team leader had a software fault in her hibernation pod.  She was still alive, but if we woke her she would need a full medical team to fix her.

First we wanted to find out if we had a mission:  nope.  We found out that our power generator was way below where it should be.  So we wondered if we were woken up because our power system was at a critical level and we were woken up because otherwise it wouldn't be able to sustain us: nope.

So, we went through our check list and prepped everything to leave our bolt hole as we listened for any incoming message.

Eventually we got contacted by Section Leader, but it was an unauthorized transmission from Beth the bio-tech, asking us to come and "fix things."  People were disappearing and people were unhappy.  She gave us the coordinates for that local HQ and told us she couldn't contact us much more after this.

As we traveled to the local HQ, we scouted out areas trying to figure out how badly damaged society was.  We found it it wasn't too bad, not Max Max bad, but down to steam powered equipment, horses and cattle.

In the end, we saved our team leader, woke up other teams that were left in cold sleep, and didn't really hurt anyone.  We only slapped the Section Leader around and got him to give us the codes to wake up the other teams.  We also figured out most problems were due to incompetence and not deliberate acts of evil.

I really liked the puzzle of discovering our environment and piecing things together.  Dennis was able to fill out enough details when we wanted it to make it feel real.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Super Train

Date/Time - Oct 17, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM
GM: 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.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Here's the build out of the game:

1. Players are sent by HQ to investigate a message from the French Resistance:  The Germans are stacking crates at the train station and are preparing to move the crates to Berlin.  Contents unknown.
2. Upon surveying the town:


1. Train Station.  There are various sized crates on the train platform and a loaded military truck.  There is a published train schedule between Paris and Berlin, but there's a hidden schedule of the Super Train.  That comes at a different time.  There are various ways, the PCs can ferret this information out.  The French stationmaster has the schedule and it is written down.
2. In a two story house commandeered by the Germans, staff car and motorcycle outside.  3 old French Resistance fighters are held here being questioned.
3. There is a burned out house with posts set up inside.  This is an area for a firing squad.
4. It is difficult to find the French Resistance as the 3 old French Resistance fighters have been captured.
3. The players will generally attack the Germans, rescue the Resistance fighters and open the crates.  One of the crates contain Winged Victory and the other the Mona Lisa.  Other crates contain various national treasures of France.  (In one game, the players blew up the crates thinking that if it's important to the Germans, we should deny it to them.  During the fire fight, pieces of plaster, splinters of wood, and canvas rained down.  I had printed a picture of the Mona Lisa and I tore her head off and said that this floated down to the ground in front of the player who blew up the cargo.)
   
   
   
4. If the players dawdle, I have the Germans take the 3 French Resistance fighters out to the firing squad and have the players notice this.  (In one game, the players ignored this and let the Resistance fighters get shot.)
5. The players will generally damage the tracks and setup an ambush.  What they don't know is that the German send down a Rabbit first.  A small armored train that checks to make sure the tracks ahead are ok.
   
6. This generally leads to full combat with the Super Train.  The Super Train is an armored train with a Talent that has added detection equipment.  The Talent also has a ray gun.  There are other Talents on the train.  One can transform into a T-Rex.  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
7. Then it's straight combat until the players disable the train and eliminate the Germans.
8. On the train are more National Treasures.

This is a fairly simple and straight forward scenario and designed to fit in a 4 hour time slot.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Eagle’s Nest

Date/Time - Oct 17, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM
GM: 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.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Here's the build out of this game:

1. Players are sent by HQ to capture Eagle's Nest, just in case Hitler decides to go there.  They do not expect him to be there.
   
2. The players find that a full division of Germans are there.
   
3. If they scout around they'll find the Tunnel that is heavily guarded and they'll also find out that there are rumors (if they talk to people) that some of Hitler's personal Übermenschen (Axis Talents) have been spotted.  Which may mean that Hitler is in Eagle's Nest.  But it has been known that Hitler sometimes sends his personal Übermenschen on small missions.
4. There are two ways into Eagle's Nest
1. Tunnel and Elevator (which to date, no one has decided to take this route).  Inside would be several Übermenschen.  They would have been warned by Hitler's Weissager (Prophet) that the Talents are coming.
   

   

   Tunnel to Eagle's Nest

   

   Eagle's Nest Tunnel

2. Climb the Mountain
1. They must make 3 climbing rolls to get to the top.
2. After the 2nd climbing roll, the Valkyrie will attack them.  It's Eva Braun with wings, armor, and a spear.  

   

   The Valkyrie

   3 search lights will try to spot them.  Hitler's Weissager (Prophet) is a precog and has warned the Germans that the Talents are coming.  If the 3 search lights are eliminated, the Germans will work on moving the search lights from the other side of the Eagle's Nest to this side.  If the Germans have been fooled into thinking that the threat has been eliminated, then they'll balance out the lights.  If players are found by the spot lights, they'll be attacked by machine gun fire.

   

   Eagle's Nest

5. Once the players make it to the top, they battle several Germans and one or two Übermenschen from the list of Hitler's 12.  If the Germans think they've eliminated the threat, the players may have a chance to see this:

   

   Hitler relaxing at Eagle's Nest

    

   

   Watercolor of Eagle's Nest Interior by Hitler

   If they kill this Hitler, he'll revert back to his original form,.  This is Nachahmen (fake) and exact copy of Hitler.  Otherwise, they'll find 2 Hitlers in the main bedroom.
   
6. At the top, they'll find the elevator going to the tunnel and a short flight of stairs going down to a level with just a hallway and doors leading to bedrooms.  At the entrance to the hallway is a hallway monitor, Weissager (Prophet), but he'll not have enough will to make another precog talent use, so he's mostly useless now.  He'll be unconcerned as he thinks all the troops upstairs can handle whatever the situation is.
7. The bedrooms are either:
1. empty if there's fighting going on.
2. has several Talents if they think the threat is over.
8. If the bedrooms are empty, all the Übermenschen are gathered in the bedroom at the end of the hall protecting Hitler.  Otherwise if combat starts in the hallway, several Übermenschen will come out and defend themselves.
9. In Hitler's bedroom: 
1. Tor (gate) will be drawing a door-sized rectangle on the wall.
2. The 3 Furien (Furies) will be holding hands.
3. Wand (wall) will be invisible and standing in front of the Real Hitler.
4. Nassen Lappen(wet rag) will be preventing gunpowder and explosives from going off.
5. Aura (aura) projecting a force field.
6. Others if they're still alive.
7. Real Hitler will try to command a player (the most effective one he's seen) to kill the other players.
   
10. If it goes badly, the Übermenschen will try to escape through the portal that Tor has opened up.  Tor's gate goes to rolling hills and meadow land in full sunlight.  A hint that this is a different time zone from Eagle's Nest. The gateway goes to Argentina.  If Tor is killed or goes unconscious, the portal will close.

Hitler's 12 Übermenschen:

1. Valkyrie: Flying Female -- Eva Braun.  5d flight, +2 pt armor & spear (7d), 10 will
2-4. Furien (Furies): The 3 Zeds: triplet zeds, 6d, 6d, 3hd, can aid each other to max of 10d, 6 will each.
5. Nachahmen (fake): Perfect Copy Cat, walks around as Hitler, 2hd, 15 will
6. Weissager (prophet): Predictor 2hd, 2d, 25 will
7. Luftzug (draft): The Wind: Speed guy, 10 Coordination, 16 will
8. Nassen Lappen(wet rag): No chemical reactions (gunpowder/explosives), 7d, 7 yds radius, 15 will
9. Ohren (Ears):  Hyper sense, 10 sense, 16 will
10. Aura (aura): Force field bodyguard, 5d, 20 will
11. Wand (wall): 2 hard armor, stands in way of bullets, invisible, 2hd, 5 will
12. Tor (gate): Teleporter by drawing a door, 2hd, 10 will
The Furher:  Massive Will, Thought Control, Command 10, 50 will

The conceit is that Hitler is a Übermenschen with HyperCommand and has built his army and influence due to his Talent.  He has 12 Übermenschen with him just like Jesus's 12 Apostles.

This is a fairly simple and straight forward scenario and designed to fit in a 4 hour time slot.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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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.

So some of the problems were with the scenario (which Aaron will adjust) and not the system that Aaron was trying to playtest.  I think less die rolling and tying the die rolls to role-playing would serve the game better.  Maybe 10% die rolling, 25% making, and 65% role-playing would have been a better mix.

Overall an interesting, but mixed experience.

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Treasure Trapped!

Date/Time - Oct 17, 11:59 PM - 2:00 AM
GM: 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.

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Death By Moonlight

Date/Time - Oct 18, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM
GM: 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.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

On our first mission, we crashed and burned two planes.  So, I had to scrounge for another plane. I was a NKVD snitch, so I blamed the repair crew for our crash.  On our next mission, I crashed another plane and continued to blame a member of the repair crew, so she was being fingered as a saboteur.

At one point, our base was being overrun, so we had to evacuate and one of the better scenes happened where Kim F. wound up mercy killing her Navigator as the Germans closed in.

In the finale, we had to bomb our own abandoned landing strip, grounded bombers, and fuel depot to prevent it from getting into enemy hands.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Dead Dogs

Date/Time - Oct 18, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM
GM: 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.

I got to Toss My Cookies and kill people with them in a variety of ways.  I also had a distraction move, so I used a lot of improvised weapons in order to slow the bad guys down.

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.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The main bad guy was named Mad Tiger.  The first set piece was at a fighting ring.  There's a VIP box above the fight ring and stairs leading up to the VIP box.

We were allowed to add one custom item each.  Here were were the customizations:  jetting flames in the fighting ring (Chris added the periodic jets, originally it was just flames), a giant gong, a betting booth, a giant buffet table (my addition), and caged tigers under the VIP box where a trap door drops people into the tiger cage.  The floor is clear glass, so you can see the tigers pacing underneath the VIP box (my modification of another player's add which Chris allowed).

I added the buffet table because I needed various food items to throw at people in order to distract them.  I used a creme pie, crushed Wasabi peas (as a blinding agent), a high alcohol bottle of liquor (thrown into the jetting flame during the fight), and a bowl of guac (as a threat).

Chris asked us where we were in the set.  I was selling Girl Scout cookies.  The Everyday Hero was in the fighting ring.  The Thief was working for one of the Bad Guys and was in the VIP booth.  The Masked Avenger was pickpocketing people in the audience.  The Undercover Cop was inside waiting to give the signal for the HK police to raid the place.

A large fight ensued and we used everything in the fight ring and there was a lot of controlled confusion.

The players find out that a train containing a large shipment of illegal drugs were being taken into China.  So the next set piece was the train.

We find that our loved ones:  The Masked Avenger's brother, Pugsley, and others were buffed-up by the illegal drug and were under the bad guy's mind-control.

So we then had the big fight on the train and after all the bad guys were defeated, the train stops and we end on a cliff hanger for a sequel as we're surrounded by the Chinese Army.

My favorite bits were:
1.  The conflicted Thief helping and hindering us several times due to divided loyalties.  At the end, she grabbed the body of her unconscious evil mentor and fled the train.  Her love interest was the Masked Avenger's brother who was another Masked Avenger.  There was some mistaken identity-fu between the brothers which was quite amusing.
2. The two Masked Avengers fighting each other.  The PC Masked Avenger unwilling to hurt his own brother and the NPC Masked Avenger willing to kill us all.   Eventually, the PC Masked Avenger was able to snap his brother out of the mind control.
3. Wednesday saying to the Mad Tiger who had fallen into the tiger cage (and who was able to control the tiger who had already eaten someone else), "Hey Mister, where's my fat brother?"  And Mad Tiger telling her if she let him out by using the door code that he knew, he'd take her to him.  Of course, Wednesday let him out and she was taken to the train.
4. Wednesday taking out two of the major bad guys by using Girl Scout cookies.  One move was to ricochet a cookie off a train poster of the Girl Scouts and hitting a major bad guy in the back of the head -- that was a knock out blow.  Another was to throw a whole package of cookies up and firing it as a tube of cookies, each smashing into the guys face, cookie after cookie.  That took out mind-controlled Pugsley.

There were more great bits.  You just had to be there.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

Morgan's CelestiCon 2015 Adventures

Special guest of CelestiCon this year was Sandy Petersen, game designer of Call of Cthulhu.
They also had a special drawing to see who would get into a game run by Sandy.

I didn't win a seat, but Shannon M. and William L. did get into the game.  Funny thing was that William L. played in my Eagle's Nest game instead of Sandy's game.  Mic DROP.  :-)

I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked.

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Fifty Shades of Earl Grey

GM: Jeff Yin
Friday Noon for 4 hours
Type: RPG
System: Fading Suns
Edition: 2nd Ed
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Game Content: Mature Themes
A Questing Knight is charged with investigating the death of the Emperor's cousin. Fading Suns is a game of science fantasy, with a medieval Europe in space feel. Beginners welcome!

Interesting setting with a very good table of players.  We wound up f**king around so much doing side things that we didn't get into the murder mystery until the last half hour, so we poked around the crime scene for a bit and then stopped the game.  This means we can play this game all over again.  Yay!

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Shannon sent Frank's character as a messenger, an alien that is very looked down upon by the human populace, to tell the Emperor's cousin that we have arrived.  Frank's character was also our lawyer.  Well, he wound up beaten up and his family relic was stolen (in addition to everything else).

So, we wound up hunting down the muggers and also investigated an issue of refugees from "Viking" space raiders.

We also got snubbed by the Emperor's cousin and we were trying to figure out if the guy was snubbing us deliberately or whether he was in some dire situation.  We decided on the former.

The Emperor's cousin also had this odd history of picking one of the loveliest women each year during a festival to keep for a while.  His own wife vanished mysteriously and his son hasn't left the castle for decades (and maybe not seen).  He also collected odd curios.

In the last half hour of the game, the Emperor's cousin wound up dead in a kinky torture room. We knew we didn't have time to solve the murder mystery, so we just looked at the murder scene and stopped the game.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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It's a magical place

GM: David Weinstein
Friday 4 PM for 6 hours
Type: RPG
System: All Flesh Must Be Eaten
Edition: First
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Power Level: Norms
Game Content: Mature Themes
It's summer, and that means vacation! People of all stripes are packing themselves into the amusement park for summer fun and adventure! This year, however, some folks are going to get more of an adventure than they bargained for...

My two favorite games this CelestiCon was this game and Hamel's Cthulhu Azorian.

Pacing was great in this game.  No dead spots and the tension was kept up until the end.  A very fun game -- or at least I enjoyed it immensely for the fear and terror.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

In Disneyland, there's no access to weapons.  It's pretty bad when a fast spreading disease causes the park to lockdown and shutdown.  Worse when people turn into fast moving zombies with infectious projectile vomiting.

What was great and an interesting level of misdirection was that a number of characters had weapon skills, but no access to weapons.  We kept on looking for guns and stuff to no avail.

We kept running and running and trying to survive as we got overwhelmed and either got turned or killed by the military sent to contain the infection.

Best two scenes:
My character was a LARPer and nerd with every Disney item possible.  He had a plastic light saber which came in handy to light up some dark areas.  At one point, we rescued some teenagers, but as the PCs ran they stood there immobile as the horde of zombies came after us.  My character turned and attacked the zombies with the light saber.  The light saber shattered on the first attack and four zombies tore him apart, giving the rest of the PCs and the teenagers time to escape.

One character decided to climb down some rungs of a support structure for the monorail to escape some zombies.  Below were soldiers shooting and flamethrowering zombies, so it wasn't safe to go all the way to the ground.  Above, the zombies couldn't reach him, but they then projectile vomited on him.  His goofy hat saved him, but now the rungs were coated in slime, so he hunkered down and pretended he wasn't there.  The soldiers fired at the commotion above and took out the zombies and also hit the character.  The character continued to pretend he wasn't there.  He got shot again and died.

Yeah, this game was harsh, as it should have been in the "Happiest place on earth."

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High and Dry

GM: Jeff Dee
Saturday 9 AM for 4 hours
Type: RPG
System: Bethorm: the Plane of Tekumel
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Power Level: beginning characters
Game Content: Mainstream
Grain shipments from the town of Mishábar, near an ancient ruined castle, to the Temple of Hnálla in the city of Katalál have inexplicably ceased. As priests of Hnálla, Lord of Light, you are sent to discover the reasons for this lapse and set things aright!

Jeff Dee, one of the writers of Tekumel, ran this game.  He had in depth knowledge of the world and this game had great NPC motivations and gave the PCs hard choices.

My main complaint is that the combat system seemed unnecessarily drawn out -- very old school.  I picked a sorcerer of light and wound up being a more effective combat character than our four-armed insectoid warrior (due to a lot of bad rolls).  I can create fighting phantasms and my quarterstaff seemed to do as much damage as the insectoid's weapons.  The only difference was the insectoid had natural armor.

After one and a half combats, we ran out of time, so we rushed through the ending and hand-waved through the remaining combats.

Overall, I liked the world and enjoyed the game, but I didn't like the mechanics and the long drawn out combats.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The first combat was with giant spiders and it was touch and go for a moment when it looked like we wouldn't be able to beat them due to a long series of bad die rolls.  The spiders seemed like a warm-up introductory combat that didn't have anything to do with the scenario.  The main issue is that this took time away from the later combat that was more key to the scenario.

The next combat was in an underground section of an ancient castle against undead.  We got half-way through the combat and it looked like we might win, but we cut the combat short in order to finish the game.  Thus my above comment about having more time for key combats.

Then when we returned to the local lord with his missing wife, we told him (without thinking since we were already running over in time) that his wife was infected and turning undead and we cured her.  Well, he worshiped a Death deity and got really angry at us and there was a non-combat by GM fiat, where we beat him and we resolved the scenario -- he might have kicked our ass as we would have been sorely hurt by the undead.

Under the local lord were several underlings who mainly favored removing their lord -- we had found this out through earlier role playing.  They seemed more reasonable than the local lord, so they were willing to stand up for us after we killed him.

Due to the social hierarchy, we were probably in deep trouble for killing the lord since he was five societal levels above us; so high that we were not even allowed to speak to him directly, but had to speak to him through an intermediary in the same audience chamber.  It was the society and the social interactions that I found interesting.  The combat less so.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Reunification III

GM: Andrew Davis
Saturday 2 PM for 6 hours
Type: RPG
System: Star Trek RPG
Edition: Decipher
Players: 8
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Power Level: Enterprise Officers. Characters provided.
Game Content: Mainstream
Ambassador Spock and his party have been working with Romulan dissidents for the past 20 years on Romulus in the hope of forwarding an eventual reunification of Vulcan and Romulus. Ambassador Spock and his two Vulcan aides have been kidnapped on Romulus. Unknown agents are at work. The Enterprise must investigate his disappearance, recover Spock and his Vulcan aides and escort them to safety in Federation Space, and bring his kidnappers to justice. 

I loved the props and toys the GM brought.  It required a hotel handcart to bring everything into the room.
It's clear that the GM had in-depth knowledge of the world of Star Trek and was a great fan.

I had fun because I was able to play Jean-Luc Picard, but there were several issues with the game:

1. We had seats for 8 players, but only 6 were filled, so a lot of people showed up trying to fill the empty seats.  The GM let 11 players into the game and even said 12 would be ok.  IMHO, I think the ideal game should have been 6 players, not 12.  During play, I felt guilty that I had a lot of screen time and it seemed like the extra players had nothing to do.  So, I asked Riker to pick the away team members to give him something to do.   At some point, I started asking Riker to pick people who didn't have enough screen time, so they would have something to do.  I felt I was making a balancing act that the GM should have designed into the scenario.

2. If certain players made specific rolls, or needed plot nudges, they were given 3x5 cards to read out loud.  I understand what that was for, to give us clues and Trek-speak, but it also felt like giving lines for the players to read instead of letting them role play.

3. The plot was very complicated, but the solution was very A to B to C, so although what was going on had a fair amount of complexity, the solution felt like it was on rails.  We did finish the game early, so maybe we were better or luckier than expected.  Not sure about that, but events seem to gallop by and on auto pilot.  At one point, I asked the officers to gather in the ready room to discuss what was going on, just to get other player's impressions and input because things were just happening so fast without us being able to decide if what was happening was some elaborate deceptive plot or whether what was happening should be taken at face value.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

I felt like we were playing scripted parts in a well-written fanfic.  I got a major part, so it was fun, but the game lacked player choice.  I assume if we didn't play our parts as intended, according to the cannon character profiles, bad things might have happened.  So, maybe we played our parts too well.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Eagle's Nest

GM: Morgan Hua
Saturday 9 PM for 4 hours
Type: RPG
System: Godlike
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Game Content: Mainstream
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.

William L. got into Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu game, but he didn't know he did, so he signed up for two other games that overlapped with Sandy's game.   One of those games was this one, so I get to brag that someone picked my game over Sandy's.  :-)

Actually, the game pacing felt a little flat to me as the GM; when I ran it at KublaCon, there were more ups and downs and more excitement.  The players finished the game early.  When I ran this game at KublaCon, it took 5 hours.  The players this time finished an hour early.  Only one player wasn't familiar with the ORE system and I was short two players, so maybe not having to take time to explain the system in detail and having less players shortened the play time.  See spoiler section for more musings on this.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The players didn't do much investigation and actually just killed their way into the Eagle's Nest and whacked Hitler.  Which leads to an interesting idea:  I didn't intend to design a game that can be solved through brute force only, but it appears that this game could be done that way or with more careful investigation.  So, it means that a game can be designed to run with or without investigation; it can be tailored or designed to be run to match the style of varying players.

Another factor for the shortened game time may have been the lack of investigation.  If the players spent more time talking to NPCs it would have made the assault on Eagle's Nest easier.

I also forgot to put two NPC Talents in Hitler's room which would have extended the final fight.  But then I was short two players, so leaving out two NPC talents was probably fair.  By the time they reached Hitler's room, they were down to three PCs and one was missing a leg.

The players were pretty smart in that in the end, facing a room full of Talents, they just opened fire without using their talents, so there were no contest of Wills.

In this game Gil wound up killing Hitler twice.  This is like three for three; the same PC kills both the fake Hitler and the real Hitler.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Cthulhu Azorian

GM: Richard Hamel
Sunday 4 PM for 8 hours
Type: RPG
System: Call of Cthulhu
Edition:7
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Game Content: Mature Themes
June 1974. The CIA has assembled your team to assist with the covert recovery of the K-129 submarine that mysteriously sunk in the Pacific Ocean in 1968. What forgotten horrors lie on the ocean floor?

My two favorite games this CelestiCon was this game and Weinstein's It's a Magical Place.

The setup and plot had enough twists and turns to keep us on our toes.  I really enjoyed this game.

There were some issues with pacing and division of labor between PCs.  More in the spoiler section below.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

It was clear Rich did a lot of research for this game.  The start was like the beginning of a James Bond movie where every starts in media res.  We're all setup and ready to see what's going on and the action starts.  I think this took maybe 30 minutes to complete -- I didn't time it, but it felt like that.

Where the pacing lagged was after this great action scene, Rich then goes into a long description of the special boat we're on and the mission.  The mission briefing didn't stop until 2 hours into the game (I looked at my watch at that time), so the briefing took more than one hour.  Ugh. I would have just told us to get the code books, the nukes, and the submarine and dropped us on the special subraising boat and let the players explore the boat and ask questions of the engineers instead of explaining everything about the boat before hand.

One issue was the division of labor.  We had two add-on players.  So, we had 8 players: 4 navy seals and 4 CIA operatives.  The seals were the muscle and had nothing to do when the CIA operatives did investigations.  That also happened in the James Bond intro -- the seals waited for the CIA to give the go ahead.

When the action started, the seals then got stuff to do, but even in that instance the CIA operatives got into the action by shooting guns.  I'm not sure whether the issue is that we had a team of 4 and 4 (with two extra seals) or whether the game would have been served better with just a team of CIA operatives (though not realistic, but maybe a better game dynamic).

Our game ended in a TPK as one of the add-on navy seals (Frank) detonated the nukes we had recovered -- on orders of the CIA lead.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Super Train

GM: Morgan Hua
Monday 9 AM for 4 hours
Type: RPG
System: Godlike
Players: 6
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Game Content: Mainstream
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 game went well and took exactly 4 hours.  The players were less tactical than the group of players I had at KublaCon.

It seems like the less tactical the group, the more foobar happens and actually the more ups and downs during the game with more interesting and unexpected things happening.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

In this game, Clyde, Eastwood's invisible monkey flipped the Rabbit (an advance train that checks the rail before the Super Train).  This alerted the Super Train, so troops were deployed.

The players advanced on the Super Train and actually hit the Gizmo turret with a rocket propelled grenade and got a lucky roll and knocked out the Nazi Talent in the train.

So, it was an easy cleanup at that point.

An interesting scene was how the players rescued the three French Resistance members from the Nazi HQ.  Lots of sneaking around, punching Nazis through helmets, and then lots of shooting.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

Morgan's KublaCon 2015 Adventures

Memorial Day weekend at KublaCon.  Most of the RPGs I was in or running had to do with war -- sort of appropriate for Memorial Day, huh?

I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked.

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All’s Well That Ends Well: Blood of The Gods
Thursday 6pm, invite-only pre-convention game, 6 hours 
GM: Nick "The Orange Duke" Szczech
System: Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition

My Version of a Colin Dimock classic. Our heroes have just returned from a deadly but successful mission. They are tired, wounded and in some cases dead. At least it is over, or is it? Play one of the Men in Black as you battle a horrible beast inside the confines of your own secret base. What is going on? What went wrong? Who can you trust? Only time will tell. It’s character against character in an all out battle to the death, but be sure you kill the right ones!

Hyle Hooper – ex FBI, dream warrior
Black Basil Thorn – world Traveler
Shannon Mac – navy seal, black ops agent
Clarice Scully – Bio/forensic expert
Kurt Salu – Computer expert, hacker
Madame Rotunda – power psychic
Arthur C. Carter –archeologist, dreamer
Eddie Dane – Killer, Stake Team leader

I got invited to a game before the convention started.  This is great.  No shuffler, no loss of weight for getting into games.  Also the Atrium is pretty quiet before the convention starts and is a great place to play a game.

This was an interesting game.  My only complaint is that this game needs 2 GMs.  When players were doing secret things (which was most of the time), the rest of the players wind up sitting at the table without anything to do.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game is basically Player vs Player, but we didn't know that, so all the secret conferences were Players that were infected doing nefarious things to other players.  The players basically didn't have a chance, so this game was mainly a survival horror game.

I actually made it to the end of the game with my original character, locked in the lower level with another character.  I assume we would eventually escape through the incinerator flue, but then it would be too late to stop the infection of the rest of the world which we didn't know was at stake since we thought the facility was completely locked down.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Death From A Jeep
Friday 7pm, 6 hours
GM: Thomas Vallejos
System: GURPS 4th Edition

January 1944: You are members of an Allied Team of special ops who operate behind enemy lines. Your methods include the use of heavily armed jeeps, explosives, knives... Just about everything you will need to convince "Jerry” that starting this war was a bad idea.
You come back from Christmas leave only to find your next assignment is waiting for you. Destination: Somewhere in France. 

Tom had lots of technical details and info.  It's been a long time since I played GURPS and I love the bell curve that comes with 3d6 vs straight percentile die rolls.  Glad that Tom had pre-generated characters since there was a lot of crunch on the character sheets.  The mission was pretty straight forward, but we had a lot of fun in this game due to character interactions.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We're dropped behind enemy lines in gliders with our Death Jeeps.  We meet up with the French Resistance and are given several possible targets:  Radar installation, Gestapo HQ, and extraction of a Nazi Rocket Scientist.  Well, being the overachievers that we were, we extracted the Nazi Scientist and attacked the Gestapo HQ.  Given enough time, I think we would have invaded Berlin too.

We had a great group of role players and that was where all the fun was.  We also killed a lot of Nazis: at a castle, at Gestapo HQ, at a check point, at our extraction point.

The extraction plane didn't have enough seats, so a number of the PCs decided to stay, to kill more Nazis.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Super Train
Saturday 10am, 4 hours
GM: Morgan Hua
System: Godlike

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 game is short and pretty straight forward.  I took two of the highlights from my Godlike campaign and created two standalone scenarios.  The other scenario is Eagle's Nest.

I got some Godlike veterans in my game:  Jack Y., Gil T., Jason F., etc.  I think only one player didn't know the system.  To my amazement, no PCs were harmed in this game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

I think it shows that if a group of soldiers know what they're doing and do things smartly, they can survive the chaos of war.  The players did smart things and did things right.  It was slaughter-fest of Nazis.

In my campaign, the players deliberately blew up the cargo thinking that if the Nazis want it, we should deny it to them.  Well, the cargo contained France's national treasures.  I had a print out of the Mona Lisa.  I tore out a piece that contained her head and told a player that wood chips, plaster, and dust rain down with the explosion and this fluttered in the air and dropped at your feet.

In this game, the players were smarter and actually saved the art work.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Eagle's Nest
Saturday 7pm, 4 hours
GM: Morgan Hua
System: Godlike

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.

This time, due to a tactical mistake on the players part, two PCs died.  But I think I'll change the talent on one of the PCs, being able to do two things at once isn't much of an advantage.

One PC kept on getting the killing shot and racked up massive will points even though the other players helped in knocking the enemy NPCs down.  Didn't know you could be a Godlike Will Hog by getting the killing shot.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

I got a lot of crashers for my game, unfortunately, everyone who signed up for the game showed up.  I guess people who can read between the lines want a chance to kill Hitler.

One of the best moments was when a player did a Precog during combat and everyone had rolled their dice.  By looking at the dice, we can tell that Hitler was going to go through a portal to Argentina and right afterwards, another player would kill the enemy Talent that had opened the portal and in effect would close the portal and save Hitler.  The Precog PC threw himself infront of the friendly fire, taking the bullets that would have killed the enemy Talent, so the portal would stay open -- and in effect sacrificed himself.  This allowed the other players to chase after Hitler in Argentina and finish him off.

What's better than killing Hitler?  Killing him twice.  This happened in my campaign and in this scenario too -- lucky Will Hog.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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The Treaty Worlds
Sunday, 10am, 6 hours
GM: Jeff Yin
System: Dark Heresy

Inquisitorial Acolytes are dispatched to conduct a diplomatically sensitive investigation.

Jeff is a very under-rated GM.  He does great NPCs and has their nuances down.  Their actions and dialog tells the players oh-so-very-much without having to explain to us what is going on.

I've never played Dark Heresy and got a good introduction to the world and enjoyed the game very much.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Jeff put us in a very interesting situation.  Most Inquisitors have absolute power, but on Treaty World, we would be in the instigator of a War if we over-stepped, so we weren't allowed to do our bad-ass Inquisitor stuff until near the end of the game.   It was an exercise in restraint as we investigated without torturing and killing our way through the planet.

In the past, the Imperium did have a War with the Treaty Worlds and after hundreds of years and many lives and material lost, the treaty was signed.  The Imperium allowed the Treaty Worlds to stand because it provided ancient technology that couldn't be replicated elsewhere.

Due to the War, the inhabitants of the Treaty Worlds hated the Imperium and protested our presence.

Inquistors aren't very subtle, so we marched around with large cloaks thrown over our power armor as we investigated stuff and got into bad situations of our own making.  Lots of fun.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Oh, The Unspeakable Things
Sunday, 5pm.  7 hours
GM: Matt Steele
System: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition

27 June 1918, the Canadian Hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle is bound from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Liverpool, England to pick up soldiers wounded in The Great War. In theory, hospital ships are immune from attack by ship, by air, or even by U-boat. In practice, the Germans have been known to fire at hospital ships, even though it’s against international law and standing orders of the Imperial German Navy.

But the dangers don’t end there. Mines drift unseen around the British Isles. Spies and saboteurs are everywhere. And on the high seas, one never knows what nightmares might rise from the deep – or what horrors of war might be found drifting in the current.

My favorite game of the convention.   Definitely creepy and I definitely felt threatened throughout the whole game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Matt started off the game by torpedoing the ship and machine gunning survivors in the water.  Yeah, it's that type of game.

We wound up on a mysterious island and only slowly did we discover that the island wasn't what it seemed.  That it wasn't normal in any sense and that some characters flickered back-and-forth between the eerie safety of the island and drowning at sea.

We eventually found that a powerful magician was trying to sacrifice us for great power and we had to stop him.

A great conceit of the game was that the characters had names of people who survived the sinking of the HMHS Llandovery Castle.  So, if we survived the game, we would know what had really happened at that tragic event.

It was a great game.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===