Morgan's Dead of Winter 2012 Adventures

This year, Dead of Winter moved to Placerville or what used to be called Hangtown. You can tell from the boastful street signs -- nice, huh?  Placerville has a mixed population of young ski bums and old retirees.  The store fronts are old antique stores and leftovers from an era long ago.  Numerous restaurants fill the main street.  The hardware store celebrated its 160 anniversary and is the 2nd oldest running establishment in California and the oldest store west of the Mississippi.  The Cary House Hotel, where we played our games, has the 2nd oldest elevator in California.

Old Hangtown Street Sign

California Historical Landmark.  Nice, huh?

Historic Cary House Hotel

It took us 5 hours to get to Hangtown from the South Bay Area.  We took a local's recommended route and it was a bad decision.  Other people from the Bay Area took only 3-1/2 hours to get to Hangtown. The return trip to the Bay Area without recommended route took only 3 hours.

In this discussion of the games I was in, I'm going to focus on pacing.

I like to think of the games I run like a movie.  Where the GM is the director, setting up the scene, costumes, props, and plot.  The players are improv actors, making up their lines and action.

For me, pacing is defined by the tension level in the scene.  Generally, the more tension, the faster paced the scene; the less tension, the slower pace.  Tension also depends on the system used for the game.  For example, I playtested Mike G's With a Million Voices, it suffered from pacing problems because it was the first time Mike ran Dread.  One of the lessons of Dread is that the GM has to watch the tower very closely.  The GM can't just pay attention to the plot and characters.  In other traditional RPGs that use dice, the dice are random number generators, which the GM has no control over.  The GM can adjust the bonuses and such during the game in an effort to fudge the results, but the GM can't control the tower that way.  The only way the GM can control the tension level is to gauge its stability and throw "preset" encounters at the players to destabilize the tower as they reach a crisis so the scene becomes fraught with tension.  If the tower falls, the tension level suddenly drops and it is a bad time to have a boss battle or critical scene since every test becomes easy.  I mentioned this to Mike after the playtest and I heard that when he ran his game at DoW, it went very well.

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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Saturday, December 8, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Fear Itself / Unknown Armies
Scenario Title: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
GM: Morgan Hua
Power Level: Varies
Number of Players: 5
All Characters Provided
Description: Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, Velma, Daphne, and Fred investigate the disappearance of a professor from Coolsville University.  The game starts as a standard Scooby-Doo episode, but things aren’t what they seem and events go very, very wrong.  As the characters “harden” we will switch to another gaming system to reflect the changes in characters and the world as it descends into darkness.

In The Misery Machine:
Jim M. (Scooby-Doo)
Wayne C. (Shaggy)
Nik G. (Fred)
Alicia H. (Daphne)
Elisabeth B. (Velma)

Matt contacted me and asked me to run a game.  I told him that I remembered that he told us "No Scooby-Doo games" but the only game I have that is new is a "Scooby-Doo" game.
"Really," he asked.
"Seriously, Scooby-Doo, for real," I replied.
I emailed him pictures of the setting and character concepts and I got the Matt S. seal of approval.
So, you can't run a Scooby-Doo game at DoW except if it is Scooby-Doo.  Matt S. accepts no imitations.  Disclaimer:  When Matt says, no "Scooby-Doo," he means a game with no supernatural elements and it's just a guy with a mask.

The game starts with the Scooby-Doo characters that we know and love.  I used Fear Itself for the starting system since the game starts off as a pure investigation.

My whole plan was to go through an investigation phase and then an escalating action phase.  One flaw with the Gumshoe system (Fear Itself, Trail of Cthulhu, etc), is that the combat system is dull and lacks drama.  Basically, combat sucks.   One of the better fixes for Gumshoe is Lorefinder where it uses Gumshoe investigation skills and Pathfinder combat skills.

I originally designed the game to be 3 acts with 3 game systems.  But due to time constraints and the difficulty of explaining 3 game systems in a six hour time slot, I decided to switch it to two acts with two systems, merging the 2nd and 3rd act into a single 2nd act.

Well, the players actually skipped a part of the investigation and finished the first act in 1-1/2 hours.  So, that meant that I could actually go with my original 3 act structure.  If I knew this would have happened, I would have brought the 3rd act Feng Shui character sheets and introduced them to Feng Shui.

They continued to gallop through my scenario at breakneck speed and when they went through the three acts, we were only at the 4th hour.  The good news was that they didn't reach a satisfactory ending with their solution to the 3rd act.  So, I added a 4th act (I re-purposed material and conflict from the 3rd act that they had handily avoided) and added an entirely new 5th act to the game.  We finally wrapped up at the 5-1/2 hour mark with a satisfying ending.

The game didn't really go as planned, the pacing felt a little dead in a few spots as the players struggled to figure out what to do next. At the end of the third and forth act, some players wondered whether that was the end of the game.  I asked them what they wanted to do next and that prompted them to come up with additional plans to save the world and thankfully, if it weren't for those meddling kids, we'd be up to our eyeballs in non-Euclidean zombies.

In the spoiler section is art work from the game, the game plot, and surprises from the playtest and the DoW game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Act 3 Post-Apocalyptic Velma and Scooby-Doo

The whole game was inspired by a post-apocalyptic picture of Velma and Scooby-Doo by Travis Pitts. I wanted to tell the story of how you can get from Scooby-Doo to post-apocalyptic Scooby-Doo.

The progression was to be from non-combat (Fear Itself) to gun combat (Unknown Armies) to uber-hand-to-hand combat (Feng Shui) as they survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape low on bullets and supplies.  But when I merged the 2nd and 3rd act, I just created powered up Unknown Army characters and discarded the Feng Shui character sheets.  I actually playtested with the Feng Shui characters and they worked well.

But the problem with Feng Shui is that it seems like half the players can't get the hang of a descriptive cinematic system -- even for people with a black belt in Kung Fu movie viewing.

Some non-Euclidean math

So, the game really starts with a missing university professor, Prof White.  The Mystery Machine is asked to find an old woman's missing husband.  Gone for only half a day -- he didn't return for dinner -- she resorts to calling in the Mystery Machine to find him since his disappearance isn't technically a missing person until he is missing much longer.  The professor teaches Metaphysics -- why we exist, why we are here, religious studies, etc.  In the home are pictures of him and his wife meeting at the 5th Annual County Fair many years ago.  He was a judge for her Rhubarb pie which won first place.  On his desk are journals of what he is working on.  Only Velma can tell it has something to do with particle physics.  11 dimensions: our standard 4, plus 7 more tightly wound dimensions.

On the way to the Coolsville University, a bunch of grad students and a professor stand around the University's dead Mascot, Betsy, the Cow.  Apparently, something has chewed on parts of Betsy and killed her.  After some investigation, the Mystery Machine can discover that several individuals chewed on Betsy and another had arrived at the scene and shot one of the individuals with a gun and dragged the body into the surrounding corn field.

At Coolsville University, the Mystery Machine would find that Prof White is collaborating with a physics professor and sharing a lab.  Prof White has grad students who are also missing.  Prof White's car is still in the parking lot.  They would find that Prof White was working on non-Euclidean math, trying to find a Unified Theory for the Universe.  This was the part that was skipped by the players at DoW.

Further into the corn field, on the edge of University property is an abandoned amusement park.  The same park that Prof White met his wife.  The players at DoW just kept on tracking through the corn field until they found the amusement park.

The sign says, "Welcome 2 Zombie-land, Kids."

After the players see the above sign, flesh eating zombies show up and chase the characters throughout the park.  Getting the rusty roller coaster ride to work is a favorite -- with zombies riding in the car trying to get to the characters.  The roller coaster ends with broken tracks and dumps the players into the water ride's tidal pool.

Eventually, the characters find an abandoned highrise hotel in the park.  In the basement is a working kitchen and a chocolate cake in the fridge that hides behind it a cleanly severed head -- one of the missing graduate students.  Close examination will uncover that the head was severed with an unnaturally clean cut.  The grad student was killed by a dimensional shear.  In the penthouse is the owner of the abandoned theme park.  He reveals that he has hired Prof White to complete mysterious drawings he has found in a cave in one of the park's hidden basement areas.  The owner, if asked, does confess that he shot the zombie that killed Betsy and zombies did appear after Prof White started working on the mysterious drawings.  He will also lead the players to Prof White.

In the playtest, the players built a trap and lured Prof White out of the cave and then Velma went into the cave and smudged the drawing.  At DoW, Velma convinces the owner that she is another grad student of Prof White and winds up in the cave and finds an error in the drawing and completes it for Prof White.  In either case, the Drawing comes to life, glowing unearthly green, and opens 7 portals throughout the Earth where zombies pour out.  At the playtest, Prof White quipped, "Look at what you've done, you meddling kids have destroyed the world.  I was trying to gracefully shut down the gate and now you've ruined everything."

This ends Act 1.

Act 2 Gun Toting Characters

Act 2 starts with the Mystery Machine several years later and the characters converted to Unknown Armies.  They've got guns and knives. Velma has developed a metallic grapefruit-sized device that lets them shutdown gates gracefully, but they must be in the gate's center for it to work.  They've shutdown all the small and easy ones and have two left.  They follow Velma's gate detector to Texas near Dallas where the SSC, the Superconducting Super Collider resides. It was a massive multi-million dollar abandoned cyclotron.

Texas Superconducting Super Collider

They have to get through a clogged freeway filled with abandoned cars and some zombies as civilization is collapsing.

As they approach the SCC, an odd thing happens, the players may discover that they are now left handed.  This gate is so massive that it affects an area much larger than anything they would have encountered before.

Control Room of Many Random Doors

At the facility, they'll have to shoot several lab coated zombies.  Once inside, they'll have to find the "center."  One of the key areas is the control room with multiple doors.  Once the players start searching the tunnels, they'll be chased by zombies and one of the center pieces of the location is the doors that open to other doors in the same room.  If done right, the characters should be running away from zombies from door to random door echoing one of the chase montages from the TV show.

While in the tunnels, they should encounter some non-Euclidean geometry.  At one point, they should see themselves in the tunnel ahead, but facing away from themselves.  They would see a zombie trying to attack one of them.  They can either react to the threat by shooting in front or turning to the threat and attacking.

Eventually, the players will find the center. It is where the supercollider is and the gate.   A strange creature is being paid homage by extra-dimensional zombies.

By now the players should have found out that the zombies are odd and some have extra limbs, but in an extra-dimensional way.  e.g. if they follow the extra limb, it folds into the body somehow in a logical fashion.  Hand, arm, elbow, shoulder, torso, etc, but folded upon itself in an extra-dimensional way.

The gate glows green and zombies and strange creatures are shuffling through the gate.

King of Escher-land

At this time, the players should find a way to get to the base of the gate and activate Velma's device.  In the playtest, the players fought their way in.  At DoW, Velma got captured and was taken to this location.

One weirdness is that sometimes they have to miss badly to hit as the non-Euclidean space affects their linear geometry in this warped space.

In both cases, the players shutdown the gate and ran for it.  Outside, they find that they have shutdown the gate from the wrong side.  They are stuck in the wrong dimension.  They remain left-handed.

This ends Act 2.

Oops, we're not in Kansas anymore.

Act 3 Dope Fiend Shaggy

Act 3 starts with the characters buffed up.  They've been living off the land in the foreign dimension.  They're mostly out of ammo and are now hand-to-hand combat experts.

Act 3 Homeless Fred

Act 3 Dominatrix Daphne

They now have contacts with locals and their goal is to find the last gate, go through it, and close it from the correct side.  In the playtest, the players actually got their Mystery Machine Van to go 88 mile per hour and returned to their own dimension "Back to the Future"-style and then assaulted the last gate and closed it from the correct side.  At DoW, the players schemed to get enough cash to pay their way through the long lines of emigrants wanting a better life in a new dimension.  Once on the other side, the players shutdown the gate and find that the King of Escher-land has taken over Earth.  In both cases, the players get into a boss fight with the King and his body guards.  The guards use swords that are extra-dimensional shears.  They basically erase parts that they hit.  Pretty bad if you're a cartoon character.  :-)

The DoW players made their own gate, as Velma is now an expert in non-Euclidean geometry and math, and lured the King to them with promise of a way back home.  The new gate actually was flawed and opened up into R'lyeh.  The players actually pushed the King through the gate and shut it down as the King tried to climb back through, shearing through his hand that was gripping the rim of the gate.  But a survey of the world after the King showed that Earth was trashed.

So, the players decided to open a gate through time, to attend the 5th Annual County Fair.  They went back in time and killed Prof White and destroyed the cave drawings.

In both the playtest and DoW, during Act 1, one player went with the Scooby-Doo trope and ripped the face off of a zombie, thinking that it was a mask, but revealed bone and muscle instead of Mr Jenkins.  Score 1 for insanity.  :-)

In the playtest the players really got the wacky flavor of Scooby-Doo as they ran from zombies and offered Scooby snacks as incentives.  At DoW, the players went very, very dark.

At the beginning, the DoW players ran from the flesh eating zombies.  At the end, Scooby-Doo and Shaggy started eating people alive -- just like what the zombies did.  They became what they feared at the beginning of the game.

Citizens of non-Euclidean-land

To make money to cross over back to Earth, Fred and Velma went on a killing spree.  Daphne performed erotic Euclidean services for non-Euclidean clients -- the perversion, the horror.  Scooby-Doo made and sold Euclidean art which was heralded as the new, new modern.

To poison Prof White, they asked his wife in the post-apocalyptic future to bake a Rhubarb pie (a reoccurring joke in the game) and poisoned it.  They then took it back to the past and fed it to Prof White at the 5th Annual County Fair's pie contest.  While this was happening a dog catcher went after Scooby-Doo, but with help from Shaggy, they turned the tables on the dog catcher and ate him alive.  After this, the gang entered the cave and defaced the inactive drawings on the wall, thus saving the world.

As the very dark versions of the Mystery Machine (or should I say Misery Machine) left the fair, Velma noticed 5 kids, their younger selves, enjoying the venue.  And maybe later, the kids would look at the newspaper and wonder about the missing persons at the County Fair -- A new mystery to be solved.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Saturday, December 8, 7PM – 1AM
Game System: Call of Cthulhu (d20)
Scenario Title: MAD Men
GM: Jim Mathews
Power Level: Realistic (4^th level characters)
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description: The cold war may be over, but the shadows still linger, as your START team heads off into the dark, cold, northern reaches of Russia to inspect a decommissioned missile complex.

START Team:
Patrick I. (American #1, Team Lead)
Jack Y. (American #2, Nuclear Dude)
Gil T. (Russian #1, Guy in Charge)
Ben H. (Russian #2, Bureaucrat)
Tom I. (Russian #3, Security Officer)
Morgan H. (Russian #4, Driver)

Because of the title, and the descriptive words, "cold war," I thought the game was going to be set in the 1950's.  Now that I've re-read the game description carefully, it is clear that was going to be set in the modern day because "the cold war is over."  I was actually looking forward to some 1950's spy-fu.

In any case, when I saw the list of players, I knew we were going to have a lot of fun.  We randomly pulled characters and we wound up with 2 Americans and 4 Russians.  Our job was to accompany the Americans to three random decommissioned silos, so they can verify that Russia is in compliance with the START treaty.

We really got into our Russian accents and misconceptions about what America was like.  The back-and-forth was a lot of fun.  My character drove a piece-of-sh*t truck that was held together with spit and discarded pieces of wire.  I think we spent at least an hour f*ing around and having a good time in character before we even started on the road trip.

Then we got into the weirdness and being in character, we were wigged out and had to weigh completing our mission or leaving for better equipment and maybe never returning.  I think this is where things went wrong.  I knew the players and trusted them and I'm not sure our GM, Jim, did.  At the hint of us abandoning the scenario, Jim hit the GM panic button and launched the end game.  So, we went into full-on end game and we finished 2 hours early -- even with our 1 hour of f*ing around.

I had a lot of fun, but I would have liked to have more of a middle game and wished that Jim trusted us a bit more.  The game felt truncated as we went from slight creepiness to an adrenaline rush end game.

The highlight of the game was Gil's performance during the end game.  Details in the spoiler section.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We were in the Russian Urals in the middle of winter to inspect 3 decommissioned nuclear missile silos.  For various GM reasons, we had to go back to a small backwoods village between each trip.  We couldn't go from silo to silo.

The Russians thought all this was a bullsh*t mission and would have preferred the Americans to declare everything was ok and then we could hangout in Moscow or somewhere comfortable until it was time to return home.  Our team and the American team seemed to be a bunch of misfits on a bullsh*t mission.  We were deliberately under-equipped and setup for failure, so we made the best of a bad situation.  I couldn't even requisition extra fuel or vodka, outrageous!

My truck kept on stalling and breaking down, so it wasn't reliable.  It also didn't help that I rolled two 1's during repairs.  For CoC d20, 1 = fumble.

The first creepy thing that happened was our vehicle got rammed by some mysterious creature that left blood and slime on the truck.  (I think some characters found out it was a slime covered bear, but I never found out how they knew.  The room was very noisy and I think I must of missed that).

We also kept on getting traveling radiation readings on our vehicle and skittering noises around the vehicle.

The village had a creepy old woman who warned us and an over-the-top-religious headman.

At the first silo, we found a dead area around the silo grounds and giant insect nests inside the silo, but a mostly decommissioned silo.  Computer equipment and generators were still present.  So, the Americans did declare that the first silo was not in violation of the treaty.  We had an option of staying overnight in the silo or leaving, after a discussion, we decided to leave.  What we didn't know was the silo was completely abandoned by the giant insects and we could have explored it more and gotten some clues.  Considering the circumstances, I don't think we would have done that.  None of our characters were heroic in nature.

We returned to the village and this is where the GM hit the panic button.  We had discussed returning to our starting point and getting a new truck.  I think the GM thought that we were abandoning the scenario.  At this point, we found the gas station attendant was killed in a horrible and inexplicable manner.  After this, we decided to flee.  Then the sh*t hit the fan and we all basically got overwhelmed by an army of mutant bugs and died.

Jim told us afterwards that we were supposed to inspect the 2nd silo where the bugs were nesting.  But the bugs at the village was a backup plan.

Things that could have been done to extend the game:
1.  We could have returned to get a new truck and Moscow could have ordered us to finish the mission. We would have done so.  I don't think any of us wanted to be shot for not doing our duty.
2.  If the dead body didn't show up or seemed more natural, we would have continued to the 2nd silo.  Considering how hard it was to get equipment, we would have just soldiered on.
3.  Add a deadline to inspecting the silos.  e.g. tell us that if the silos don't get inspected in time, we're all in big trouble.

One issue I had was that our deaths were pretty much cookie cutter.  3 characters were bitten and eaten by mutant spider bugs.  2 characters were shot.  In teen slasher movies, the deaths are strange and unique.  If we were going to die, we should all die in various strange and creative ways.

If we gave out a best RPGer award for this game, Gil would have gotten it.  When we found out there was no escape, Gil phoned the American Embassy and told them he was al-Qaeda and holding the Americans hostage and that he would torture and execute them unless they come and stop him.  At first, Patrick played along and made "I'm being tortured" noises.  When that didn't seem to work, Gil asked for a shotgun from one of the other players, and blew Patrick's foot off.  After some fleeing, the helicopters with the snipers came and shot both Gil's and Tom's characters and rescued Patrick's.   Afterwards, Patrick asked Gil why he shot him, and why not in the arm vs the leg.  Gil listed various reasons and then concluded with, "It would have been funny."  It was.

When we heard the helicopters coming, we thought it would have been funnier if it were giant wasps coming.  And if a character was on a roof waving, it would have been hilarious if a giant wasp swooped down and carried him off instead of being rescued.

At one point of the game, the crazed old gypsy woman told my character to mix my blood with an ointment and to spread it on my face (actually, she said my whole body, but I didn't hear that in the noisy room).  I did that and the bugs avoided my face, but ate the rest of my body.  In a bug nest somewhere there's just the face of my character.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Sunday, December 9, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Cthulhu by Gaslight (1850)
Scenario Title: The Golden Rule
GM: Leon C Glover III
Power Level: Moderate – some prior SAN losses, a few “odd” experiences
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description:  Eureka! The gold rush is on in California!  Brought together by fortune and Wells Fargo, the gold country will test your fortitude and your ideals. Power and greed aren’t the only things that can corrupt a man’s soul.  Remember the Golden Rule – he who owns the gold makes the rules!

You are jumping off at the boom town, San Francisco, on your way to Hangtown/Placerville.  The “locals” will be very grateful to help you with anything you might need.

Would-be Rulers:
June G. (Mormon)
Josh C. (Franciscan Friar)
Frank F. (Madame)
Badger M. (Enforcer/Body Guard)
Basil B. (Calvary)
Morgan H. (East Coast City Guy)

We all started on a stage coach from San Francisco to Placerville.  Leon did a great job of invoking the setting.  I felt like I was in the TV show, Deadwood.

Unfortunately, we spent 4 hours building up our fortunes in Placerville.  I hate the Sims and I felt like I was playing the Sims and going through the motion of collecting gold.  Things didn't really happen until the last 2 hours.  It felt like we were just doing our own thing with no real danger or tension.  There weren't enough character motivation or interaction or weirdness or threat to make us want to figure out what was going on.

I think the game needed more interlocking character motivations and more events in town to make us act sooner.  4 hours of collecting gold was just too slow a pace for me.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

When we arrived at Hangtown, the first thing that happened was a hanging.  My character was a sociopath (on the character sheet), so he didn't really care.  He actually bet on the hanging and won a substantial amount of money.

Later, Badger found out that every week or so, various people would be round up and thrown in jail and then they would confess and would be hung.  This only happened after the 4th hour which set off the end game.  By that time, my character was making distilled spirits and started a plan to knock off the Assayer's office with the help of the local Chinese.  He had no real connection with the other characters, so there was no reason he would help them.  Also he wasn't told about the trumped up hangings, though he probably didn't care due to his mental condition.  I did help the other characters in minor ways, but under the threat of bodily harm.

I think if there were more character back story that connected us together, the game would have been better.  That would also explain why we would be traveling together vs six strangers in a stage coach.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Sunday, December 9, 7PM – 1AM - The Killer Session
Game System: Call of Cthulhu V6
Scenario Title: The Day the Whole World Went Away
GM: Gil Trevizo
Power Level: Average People
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description: You wake up to the taste of ashes and the smell of dead flesh, surrounded by the freshly ruined landscape that was modern civilization not so long ago. You don’t know who you are or how this came to be, your dwindling cache of memory suppression drugs having kept your sanity intact in the face of the madness that has swallowed the rest of humanity. Now, as the stars come right and all men kill and revel in joy amidst a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom, even stranger things rise from dark depths to end the time of mankind. A number scrawled on your skin – “1121221121″ – and fragmented memories of impossible things will lead you through this day, when all of your world goes away.

1121221121:
Frank F. (Army Sniper)
Morgan H. (Jet Pilot)
Shannon M. (Psychologist?)
Michael G. (Geologist?)
June G. (Pharmacist?)

For me, this game was the highlight of DoW.  Gil showed us character portraits and we picked characters based solely on the pictures.  We then got blank character sheets to reflect our amnesia.  When we tried to figure out something, if we made our roll, Gil would tell us our real score.  A few years ago, Jeff Y. did the same thing, but used an invisible ink for your stats and you can wipe a marker over the invisible ink to reveal your stats.

The game was actually various scenes stitched together, with each scene having a time gap.  When we started a new scene, Gil would hand out new character sheets with additional information on them, then we would have to transfer what we learned from the previous character sheet.  I liked Jeff Y's method better; it was more efficient and had less down time.

The game worked very well because we went from scene to scene without any dead spots.  The scene shifts were also integral to the overall plot line.  Some scenes were cut short as Gil tried to finish before our 1am deadline.  Little did we know that the other late games ran over time, and we could have played longer.

Gil said he's not going to run this game again since he thinks the game teetered on disaster and the excellent quality of the players brought awesomeness to the game.  Gil knew us all and had trusted our ability as players.

My only small minor nit was the time spent on switching character sheets and us trying to figure out our skills.  There was some Metagaming as we tried various skills (sometimes for no reason at all) in order to figure out what we were good at.  One scene (with Mike) got cut short and I actually wanted the whole scene to play out and see how Mike's character would deal with the horror he had wrought.

Again, an excellent game and excellent players.

Just in case Gil changes his mind and runs this game again, I'm going to put spoilers in the spoiler section.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game started with us waking up in a crater with amnesia.  Most of us had weapons and some of us had blood on us.  Between us was a duffel bag with drugs in it -- drugs that wiped out our memory.

As we tried to figure out what was going on, we would roll dice and if we succeeded, we would find out our skill levels.  Most of us had high numbers in several specialties.  Once comfortable, we climbed out of the crater and found that we were in the Oakland hills.  A giant tidal wave, like that Japanese painting, The Great Wave off Kanagwa, was frozen behind a damaged Golden Gate bridge and most of the Bay Area was underwater and frozen solid.

My character wore a jet pilot's high-G suit.  At one point, I wanted to makeup a story about being abducted by aliens, but events progressed so that I didn't get to do that.  (In reality, I was wearing a Weyland Industries T-shirt, a reference to the Alien movie franchise).

We discovered that the Mayan end of the world had happened on 12/2012.  That the magnetic poles had shifted and that roving bands of infected humans were making pyramids of human heads.  Nice, huh?  An NPC had a satellite phone that rang and it told us to get to the Edwards Air Force Base and it told us to RUN -- a band of infected humans were heading our way -- the voice on the phone could see us and them on his spy satellite.

We ran.

In the next scene, we wound up outside a small town and Frank's character sneaked in and got a newspaper from a newspaper stand.  We found that the paper was dated Saturday, Dec 22, 2012, the day after the Mayan Apocalypse.  Apparently the world survived the 21st, but a strange virus was unleashed throughout the world that made people go mad.  We were able to scavenge some needed materials for our overland trek.

We then found a cave to spend the night in.  During that time, we had disturbing dreams and flashes of memory helped us remember things.  (New character sheets).  In the morning, a school bus drove up to a marsh and a priest starts dragging out children to sledge hammer them.  Mike's character rushes down there to save the children and kills the priest.  At this point, Gil cut the scene.  This is where I wanted to scene to continue.  It was apparent to some of the other characters that the children were chanting in unison to Cthulhu.  The priest and nun were giving them last rites and killing them.  I suspect, that Mike would have had to kill the nun and then he would slowly realize that what the priest and nun were doing was right.  I wanted to know what Mike would have done at that point.  Would he kill the children?  Let them go?  Kill herself?  (Mike was playing a female character).

More dreams/flashbacks and new character sheets.

I learned that I was abducted by aliens and an alien creature had been imbedded in my body (OMG, this is really funny, I wonder what Gil would have done if I told my alien abduction story several scenes earlier?  Also I was wearing that Weyland T-shirt, a reference to the movie Alien).  I didn't tell the other characters about my alien impregnation because I was afraid they'd kill me.  Other characters went through various horrors.  Out of character, we learned of each horror, but in character we were clueless.

Next scene.

We're in a helicopter heading towards Edwards Air Force Base.  A missile is getting ready to launch and we're supposed to get a NPC into the missile.  I'm piloting the copter and the other characters are in the back.  A fight breaks out in the helicopter and various NPCs are killed and thrown out of the copter.   I see Cthulhu rise from the waves and lose 52 sanity points.  At this point most of the players have exited the copter.  I fly the copter towards Cthulhu and pull out my pistol, switch it to full automatic, point it at the thing rising out of my belly and fill it and myself full of bullets.

Next scene, new character sheets.

We wake up in virtual reality chambers as test subjects.  We're tied down.  A mad scientist is monologuing about limits of reality, adjusting people's perception and their inner nature, etc.  A number of us breakout of our bonds and kill him.  One of the tied down NPCs is clearly affecting our reality and bringing to life Cthulhu.  I go and kill him as 3 of the players run for safety as Cthulhuesque creatures enter our chamber.  Frank's character quietly waits for the next simulation.  My character gets gang raped and impregnated by Cthulhuesque creatures as the the PCs try to kill each other after they escape the facility and windup in unknown waters in some unknown ocean.

The camera pans back as the three primates do their primate thing.

The End.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

Morgan's BigBadCon 2012 Adventures

BigBadCon is one of the best RPG conventions in the Bay Area.  Last year, the RPG rooms had four tables each, partitioned by thick heavy curtains that went a bit too high and blocked the air flow.  This year, the partitions were better configured and there were private gaming rooms.  Sean Nittner has done an incredible job, recruiting and getting the best GMs to run games at BigBadCon.  He and his staff has also implemented an amazing slew of innovative ideas for an RPG convention:  Big Bad GM; specific rooms show casing and dedicated to Evil Hat, Burning Wheel, and Carl Rigney; RPG games on demand.  Not only that, BigBadCon raises money for charity.

BBC also lets you pre-register for games.  Before I showed up, I had my whole schedule.

I had a great time and put BigBadCon as the top RPG convention this year.

The theme of this write up is:  Saying, "Yes."

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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The Seige of Peking
Date/Time -  Oct 5, 7:00 PM - 1:00 AM
GM: Janyce Hill
System: Call of Cthulhu
Power Level: Moderate - emphasis on role playing
Maturity Rating: Adult
Number of Players: 6
Game Length: 6
Characters: Provided

Like a horrific clockwork mechanism that can be neither altered or stopped the events of June 1900 have unwound themselves in bloodshed and death. Telegraph lines have been cut, all mail and communication with the world outside the walls of Peking have been halted. The Japanese Chancellor and the German Foreign Minister both murdered in the streets by members of the Boxer Rebellion.

A group of diverse personalities have been caught up in this moment of chaos and violence. The Chinese people revolting against the unfettered influences of Europe.

Or — amongst the smoke of burning buildings and the cries of the dieing — is there something more unnaturally evil at work?

I signed up for this game because Shannon told me that Janyce was one of the authors of "Beyond the Mountain of Madness."  A Google search seemed to confirm what Shannon said.  But it is not guaranteed that a good game designer is a good GM.  Jaynce showed up a bit late from SFO, having just flown back to the Bay Area, and she didn't have with her the pre-generated character sheets, maps, or her notes.

As players, we didn't have a problem with that.

We proceeded by creating character concepts and she noted a few things about each character and then she started describing the city and history surrounding the Boxer Rebellion in Peking.  For sanity rolls, she gave us a choice of either just taking the sanity loss or rolling dice and then deciding.  Since the PCs had no stats, we actually decided what was appropriate even though some of us did go through the motions of rolling dice.  The depth of detail she recalled from memory was amazing.  It makes me think that there would be a CoC supplement with this background material someday.

At one point, the characters went off the reservation and Janyce went with it and we still had a satisfying game.  Her level of description and ability to run a game where other GMs would have failed made her a top GM in my book.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We started with Peking under siege and we were tasked to scout out the rail lines so that a refugee train could take people out before the rebellion arrived.

Then weird things started happening.

I wanted to stay in Peking resolve the escalating horror, but the other characters decided to proceed with our mission and leave.

Well, we were actually supposed to stay in Peking, so we had actually left the scenario. But Jaynce was unperturbed and we continued without any knowledge that we had left the beaten track.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

We as players said, "Yes," to what could have been a disastrous game, trusting in the GM.  And the GM said, "Yes" to use doing unexpected things and we had a satisfying game, nonetheless.

---

Little Trouble in Big China
Date/Time -  Oct 6, 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Format: RPG
GM: Morgan Hua
System: Feng Shui
Power Level: Jackie Chan/Chow Yun-Fat
Maturity Rating: Blood, Violence, Cannibalism, Sex if you're Lucky
Number of Players: 6
Game Length: 6
Characters: Provided

You are all Triad members in modern day Hong Kong. This game will be a mix of John Woo over the top action with Jackie Chan stunts, Big Trouble in Little China oddness, tests of loyalty and betrayal, Yakuza, other competing Triads, and sometimes the PTU (Police Tactical Unit) will show up at the most inopportune time.

The Dragon Head, the master of your Triad, has sent you on a job. You better not F this one up like last time. Very few people get a second chance, those who disappoint him windup inside the Steamed Pork Dumplings on Food Street. Sounds like a simple job, so why are there so many of us involved? That Dragon Head is one tricky fellow, there’s something big going on and he’s not telling.

I had a great group of players.  When I first envisioned this game, I was thinking of "Infernal Affairs" which was remade as "The Departed."  I also wanted John Woo action and Jackie Chan stunts.  But I had no system to run this game with.  Sean Nittner gave me a few suggestions and I wound up using Feng Shui.  It was the perfect system for this game.  I actually ran part of my Scooby-Doo game with this and did some of the rules wrong, so I re-read rules in question and ran a play test of this game with my gaming group.  During the play test and Scooby-Doo game, only two players actually got the feel of embellishing stunts and one player tried really hard.  One player was a Wushu Kung Fu movie fan and wasn't able to come up with cool stunts.  Somehow it was beyond him to come up with or copy martial arts moves he'd seen in the movies he loved.  So, I was worried that Feng Shui might become a stumbling block.  Part of the fun is embellishing the stunts.

To help people understand the Hong Kong setting and the John Woo stunts, I made an 8 minute video of movie clips showcasing several characters.  Since I couldn't make clips of all the characters (I had technical issues with ripping scenes from some movies), I only took clips for 3 characters and followed it with slide shows of the other characters in various clothing and poses and also a progressive slide show of the Hong Kong skyline and streets.  If I was able to rip video from other movies, I think the video would have been too long, so some difficulties helped me make a good decision.

I also let the players to pick jobs in the Triad, pick a Chinese Chess token to represent themselves (unknown to them, I would later randomly draw tokens to see who would get phone calls), and handed random secrets to each player.  I then asked them to tell everyone a story of how they F*ed-up.

I also explained how they can make phone calls or get phone calls and they can say whatever they wanted.  When they hang up, they can hand me a note with what they really said.  I gave them "dollar bills" as paper.

Mike G. embraced his inner John Woo.  He played "Baby Face" (Chow Yun-Fat) and he entered a book store by crashing his motorcycle through the window and firing Uzi's with both hands using his Gun-Fu.  We had injury by Greeting Cards, a Cat thrown and baseball-batted out of the store, Flaming Book-Fu, 50 Shades of Grey as a Weapon-Fu, a player grabbed another player's hand to slap the head of a Hopping Vampire, some Player vs Player-Fu, and an extended fight scene in the women's bathroom.   I also loved how Mike said he wasn't going to shoot anybody and then went ahead and did it at the Gala. It reminded me of the story where a Scorpion hitches a ride on a Frog across a river and promises not to sting the Frog and does so anyway.  The Frog asked, "Why?" as they both drown and the Scorpion said, "It's my nature."

There was a incredibly tension filled player vs player show down between Mike and Adam D.  I could feel the air thicken.  Wow.

Adam also executed the most incredible subterfuge I've ever seen.  Nice Job.

It was an awesome game.  The ending needs some adjustment though since a number of players got left out of the final big boss battle.  But I think I've figured out a fix for that.  I originally thought the big boss battle was short enough that I didn't need to fix it.  At my play test, we ran out of time and just talked through it quickly, so I didn't think it was a major problem.  I now stand corrected.

Here's a "Yes" for more character involvement and listening to feedback.

---

The CompleX Men
Date/Time -  Oct 6, 4:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Format: RPG
GM: Ezra Denney
System: Paranoia (1st Edition)
Variations: not available at your security clearance
Power Level: not nearly enough
Maturity Rating: not nearly enough
Number of Players: 6
Game Length: 8
Characters: Provided

You are the Computers secret weapon. Turning our greatest weakness into our greatest strength. You are a team of registered mutants, sworn to protect Alpha Complex from all commie mutant traitors. Can you live up to the awesome pressure of proving that not all mutants are traitors? Can you prove that homo superior is really superior? Join, the CompleX Men!

I had a lot of fun in Ezra's game.  It was a laugh a minute. He does an amazing Funbot-4000.  Ezra runs a kinder and gentler Paranoia.  There's lots of computer mess-ups and foul-ups, but he doesn't kill you in a mean, petty way.  I finished the game with my 3rd clone.

It was a great game.  But after the game, at one point Ezra said, "I'm disappointed in myself.  I wanted to say yes to everything.  I should have said, 'Yes,' to Felipe."  Felipe M. wanted to find a doorway to the outside and Ezra didn't give it to him.  It wouldn't have changed the game and Ezra realized too late that it may have decreased Felipe's enjoyment of the game.

So just say, "Yes."

---

Midnight Tribunal
Date/Time -  Oct 6, 12 Midnight - 2:00 AM
Format: LARP
GM: Jason Morningstar
System: Tribunal
Variations: Midnight game
Maturity Rating: Mature
Number of Players: 12
Game Length: 2
Characters: Provided

Two soldiers from your unit have been charged with the crime of stealing bread. If found guilty, they will be shot. The problem is that they are innocent.

The Tribunal is a short, intense participatory scenario about the mechanics of oppression, inspired by Orwell, Krylov, and Büchner. The scenario takes place in a space of waiting, just before the first one of you is called in to testify in front of the military tribunal. Each of you will face the judges alone, not knowing what the others will say. So if you want to make a difference, or be sure you survive, you need to discuss and deal now. The Tribunal has been played all over the world and won the 2010 Larpwrtiter’s Challenge award and is an approachable point of entry for learning about Nordic larp.

This game was very interesting.  It was like "Twelve Angry Men" except we were deciding our own fate. We were mainly in a small room and we discussed what we wanted to testify about.  At the end, we individually testified without knowing what the others said or would say.  A fascinating character study.  There were a few LARPers who overacted in the room, but it was interesting nonetheless.

There was one guy who played an incredible "Mouse."  I was a steadfast and loyal "Dog.

Below in the spoiler is the results of the Tribunal.  If you plan on playing this game, don't read the spoiler.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

At the end, we found out that we all hung tough except for Karen T. as "Peacock" who lied and confessed to the crime. We all stuck to our story and all of us lived except for Karen T. -- she was executed.

Jason Morningstar told us that he has run this 4 times and all the other times, the soldiers broke into different factions and gave conflicting stories and all of them were executed.

We were the first group to hang tough by telling the truth.

During the game I gave two key arguments.

1. If we blamed Pig for the theft, we had no proof. Also our argument was that we were with the two accused soldiers, so what would happen if we find out that Pig was with other officers during the theft, then we would be all executed. So, the best tact was to tell the truth, that we were with the two accused and we did not steal the bread and we did not know who stole the bread.

2. I offered that if we must blame someone, one of us could confess and we could all agree to say that one person stole the bread. At that point only Karen T. offered to sacrifice herself. But after more discussion, we decided she wasn't serious and returned to our original plan.

Other key events that took us to our decision were:

Shannon M. as "Wolf" tried to bully us into one decision. He said we should all make a decision and stick with it. His heavy handedness pissed everyone off and no one wanted anything to do with his Alpha-maleness.

A guy (I didn't get his name) played "Mouse" and kept on trying to make us pick "Pig" and then "Fox" as possible scapegoats. He did an excellent job as "Mouse." But his nervousness and blame everybody approach showed us what not to do.

A redheaded gal (I didn't get her name) played "Raven" and after we decided to tell the truth, she ran us through a group building exercise, where we talked about what we liked about each other, which kept our minds off of what was happening and got us into a good mood until it was time to give our testimony. I think the timing of this was key. Done earlier and it would have worn off and we would have started new arguments as to what to do.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Improv for Gamers Workshop
Date/Time -  Oct 7, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM
Format: Workshop
GM: Mia Blankensop, Karen Twelves, and Matthew Klein
System: Improv Workshop
Number of Players: 21
Game Length: 4

Improv theater teaches many skills that can make your game rock: collaboration, embracing failure, and generally feeling comfortable looking stupid. Yet, there is a divide to cross to get the gamer onto the stage. So Big Bad Con has brought the mountain to Mohammed. Come to the workshop and you’re going to explore dynamic characters, collaborative scene-building, and the success/complication model as it applies to role-playing games.

The workshop will be led by local improv instructor Mia Blankensop with co-organizers Karen Twelves and Matthew Klein.

I was on my High School's Speech and Debate team.  I specialized in Improv.  They gave you and your opponent a topic and you only had a few minutes before we did our opening arguments and counter arguments.  So, I thought I already knew about improv and was hesitant about attending, but Shannon went to the Improv Workshop at End Game and told me it was great.  Well, this workshop is actually about improv acting and improv comedy, a totally different kettle of fish.

This was a very fun and incredible workshop.  We had a large number of exercises to help us say, "Yes."  How to embrace what other people bring in and build on it and to not say, "No," or to contradict anything that was brought in earlier.  There were exercises for building scenes and situations in very short order. I think every RPG player and GM should attend this workshop.  It'll improve your game and outlook in so many ways.

I also found out that some people were very quick on their feet and some not.  There were people I would want in my gaming group and others I would not touch with a ten foot pole.  I think I might steal some of these exercises in order to test if someone was a good player or not.

---

Horror at the Large Hadron Collider
Date/Time -  Oct 7, 3:00 PM - 9:00 PM
GM: Craig Vilbig
System: Dread
Maturity Rating: There will be blood. Not a game for the squeamish
Number of Players: 5
Game Length: 6
Characters: Created in session

The top scientists in the world released a press statement regarding the Higgs-Boson particle.  All the news stations sent their top reporters to the Large Hadron Collider.  But then: nothing.  Interpol has sent your team to investigate.

I was supposed to play in "The Last Voyage of Skergi Frosthammer" but the GM was sick.  Sean N. asked me and Jack Y. whether we wanted to run a substitute game.  I said, "Sure," but since this was late on Sunday, only three people showed up for this game and one left when he found out it wasn't Conan.  With only two players, we decided to find other games to play in.  Next door was Gil T. and Will R. and an open seat in their game.  I gladly joined them.

The game went from bad to really bad to so incredibly bad that it was great.  The 6 hour game finished in 2 hours.  Gil called this our gaming Vietnam -- we'll talk about this for a whole generation.  I think we (not the characters, we the players) lost so many sanity points during that game that we went insane and started to like it.  We laughed hysterically at what was going on.  There were two other players in our game and they were hysterically funny, playing two brothers: one German, one French.  One guy was in my Improv Workshop, Chris O. (German).  The other player was Alex T. (French).  If Matt G. and Mike M. of Infrno had long lost cousins, these two people were them.  They didn't look like Matt or Mike, but they acted like them.

Gil, Will, and I went to the bar afterwards and talked about the game for four hours -- well, we did talk about other gaming things too.  Bryan H. showed up and we chatted with him.  By then, Gil had already told the story of our Vietnam several times.  Gil had gotten down the GM's voice and manner to a T.  Gil would draw this clockwise circle with his finger saying, "It started out bad, then worse," as his finger descended.  "Then it circled around and became awesome," as his finger rounded the bottom and came back to the top.  "My mind is blown.  I can't play anything anymore."

At one point, during a lull in our conversation about something else, I told Gil, "We're thinking about the same thing."  Gil said, "No, I was thinking about the game."  I said, "That's what I was thinking about too."

The GM did have a lot of props and prepared a lot of things, so Will thinks this guy, if he got his act together would be a good GM one day.  This was the guy's first time as a GM at a convention and he had run a few games for his friends.  The GM did have good enough instincts to end the game after 2 hours -- it turned out perfect.

Will said that this game was so bad it knocked two of his worst games out of his memory and this is on the top of his list of bad games, not because it was bad, but because it was so awesome.

We talked about how we could try to recreate this experience somehow, whether we could make a meta game where we could capture the awfulness of this and make it just as funny.

At one point, Gil said he thought of leaving the game, but felt guilty about abandoning both Will and me to THE GAME.  Both Will and I confessed that we had the same thoughts too.

Well, we stayed and said, "Yes," to the game and we had a once in a lifetime experience.  We had our Vietnam of gaming.

We talked until Duane was ready to run "Goblin Ninjas Flipping Out And Killing Like A Hundred Guys."  I called Travis S. and Shannon M. to join us in the Goblin Ninja game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

No spoilers about what had happened in game. I'll fill this in later after we all get to tell the full story in person. If you run into us, just ask and we'll tell you the story. I doubt we'll forget what had happened and the story over time will just grow into something more epic -- like the "Eye of Argon."

Updated: 9/26/2013.  It's been about a year, so I'll write this down before I forget.

The game started with the GM giving us a stack of handouts.  One was a bad xerox copy of the Dread rule book -- you know, a copy where the toner is running out and you get this barely readable grey text that fades in and out.  One was a copy of a LARP the GM had created, but has nothing to do with the game.  A feedback sheet about the game.  And finally, a multiple page character questionnaire for the Dread game.

Gil's character was a British scientist who's brother was at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Will's character was a Russian demolitions expert.
Chris's character was a German nihilist gun expert.
Daman's character was a French Catholic fencing (sword) expert.
My character was a American search and rescue expert with a body sniffing dog.
The German and French characters were brothers raised in the same house, but the mother was German and the father French.  Each insisted that a son must be raised with their respective culture, thus the two nationalities.  Their house sat on the French German border and one half of the house was exclusively French and the other German.  You were only allowed to speak French on the French side of the house and German on the German side.

We get called to the Interpol headquarters and are briefed.  We are told that it went dark, some cops were sent to investigate, and they never reported back.  We were to go and find out what's happened.
Also the LHC is guarded by machine guns.  WTF?

Gil asks where the Interpol HQ is.  I quip: "Interpoland."  And the GM says, "Interpoland."  Sorry Gil, you should blame me for that one.  :-)

Gil: What's the name of the guy briefing us?
GM: The Guy
Gil:  What?
Chris: Le Guy (Le Gui with French accent)
Gil: What's the name plate on his desk?
GM: The Guy.  Spelled G. U. Y.

Morgan: If the LHC is guarded by automatic machine guns, since we're Interpol, we can get a helicopter and we can land on the roof.
GM:  Sorry, due to budget cuts, you can't have a helicopter, but you have a bus.
Morgan:  What?
GM:  It's a chartered bus.
Morgan: Can we have a cooler of beer on the bus then?
GM:  No.  You're on duty.

Ok, so the bus stops at the LHC.  We're miles from anywhere.  The closest house is 10 miles away. After we get off the bus, IT DRIVES OFF.  What?  Is Interpol so poor, it has to sub-lease the bus to pick up school children for a field trip?

We see an electrified chain link fence.  I call Interpol with my cell phone to get the keypad combination to unlock the gate.  They give me the number.  I type it in and nothing happens.  It appears there's no power at the LHC.  The German body-checks me into the fence to see if it's electrified -- there seems to be some anti-American sentiment in the EC.  I survive.  The German pulls on the gate and it opens.  He calmly walks into the compound and machine guns fire at him and he dodges into the nearest building which appears to be housing for LHC scientists.

In the building, he finds a big red button.  He hits it and it supposedly disables the machine gun.  To test it he asks his brother to send the American, "it's safe."  I walk to the building and nothing happens.
"I guess that button really does turn off the machine guns."  Don't ask me how the machine guns work without power.  We must have missed the strings attached to their triggers.  The red button must activate a pair of scissors or something.

Once we go to where the red button is, we finally notice that someone must have thrown one of the scientists through a glass plate window and into the wall behind it.  A bloody body outline indented the cinder block wall.  At the base of the wall was the dead scientist.  Gee, I'm so glad we focused on finding the red button, otherwise we would have seen this when we entered the room instead.

We then search the rest of the scientist barracks.  We find a dead scientist in each room and some clues.  I mention that the creature must be incredibly fast because it looks like no one reacted as it looked like each scientist was surprised in their own rooms.  From the clues, we find a description of a demon that is immune to normal weapons, etc., etc.  It was almost written as if it came from a Monster Manual.  I then quip that this must have been a D&D game that went bad.  Little did we know.  The next thing we find is a copy of Deities and Demigods.  We also find a few letters that explained that one of the scientists summoned a demon and made a deal with it.  He traded extra-human knowledge for his soul.

Gil searches the body of one of the scientists and gets his car keys.  We go to the parking lot.  The tires to the car the keys go to are slashed.  Gil gets the keys from the other dead scientists. The tires of those cars are slashed.
Gil:  Are all the tires of all the cars slashed?
GM:  No, only the ones you have the keys to.
All:  (Stunned silence)

We also find the abandoned police car.  Its tires are slashed too.

Gil tries to call Interpol.  His cell phone doesn't work.
Morgan: What carrier do you have?
Gil:  AT&T
Morgan:  Mine's Verizon.  You must be out of your cell phone range.  My phone worked at the gate.
Gil goes back to the gate, his phone still doesn't work.  Mine doesn't work either.
(It would have been really funny if it was just a cell phone carrier difference.)

I grab the entrance/exist roster list from the guard shack, so I can keep track of who might be missing.

We proceed into the LHC building.  There are bodies everywhere.  I start looking at employee badges and name tags and start marking people off my list.  I also start body bagging and labeling people.  Gil is also helping as he searches for his brother.

We look for a facilities map in the stairwell and we find it (I joked later at the pub with Gil and Will that it should have been slashed).  We go to the security office.  The monitors have been slashed.  Gil repairs the security camera system and we can see into the whole facility except for two locations. 

In the LHC corridors are 3 Segways, only one works.  Gil repairs them and we double up to ride it down the corridors toward the dark areas.

We find a section of the corridor that has been breached.  A dirt tunnel stretches into the darkness.  We explore the tunnel and find a chamber that is filled with bodies.  I help Gil look for his brother and we find the body.  I run out of body bags.  Chris and his brother continue to explore the dirt tunnel and run into the creature.  Chris opens fire with his guns.

I hand the Monster description to Gil and point at the line that says, "Immune to Normal Weapons."  We run back to the Segways and ride out of there.

Chris and his brother double up on the remaining Segway and are very slow.

Chris: Can I run faster than the Segway?
GM: Yes.
Chris: We run past the other two guys (Gil and Morgan).
Morgan:  How far are we from the exit?
GM:  1/4 mile
Morgan:  What?  We get off the Segways and run for it too.

Once outside, Chris flips through the Deities and Demigods and can't find the entry for the demon.
Chris: What good is this?
Will:  You see.  (with a Russian accent).  When you get too powerful and normal monsters aren't a challenge anymore, you use this book.
All:  (Laughter).
GM:  (Gives Will a bonus point for the joke.)

Gil:  I run down the street.
GM: The nearest house is 10 miles away.
Gil:  So what.  I run down the street.
Morgan:  I'm running too.
Will tries to break into the cop car.  But GM gives him a hard time.  Will then throws down the bonus point and says:  I tear the car door off.
He then progresses to rig the car with explosives.

GM:  You don't have tires.
Will:  There are still rims.  I don't need to drive it far.
GM:  Creature is coming out of the LHC.
Will:  I drive the car into it and blow us both up.  (He knocks down the Jenga tower for a heroic death).
All:  (Stunned silence.  We then rebuild the tower.)

GM: (to Gil and Morgan)  What do you do?
Gil and Morgan:  We keep on running.
GM: The cloud of dust and debris from the explosion finally clears.  You see that the creatures is dead.    The end. (with a dead pan delivery).
Chris:  (Laughing uproariously) This is the best game ever.
All:  (Uncontrollable laughter. I wipe tears from my eyes.)

GM:  Please fill out your comment sheets.
Will:  (Fills it out seriously and diligently.)
Gil:  (Writes: "Potato, Alligator, Yay." as one-word answers for his questions and turns it in.)

Months later, I pulled out the LARP rule set and Travis S. and Jack Y. took turns reading it out loud.  It was unintentionally funny too.  I gave it to Travis on the condition that he would run it for us.  Hey, Travis.  I'm still waiting for the Ghost Wolf Alien Abduction Hot Babe Fantasy in Caves with Theme Songs World Apocalypse Game.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

---

Goblin Ninjas Flipping Out And Killing Like A Hundred Guys
Sunday 9 PM - 2 AM (Unofficial Game)
GM: Duane O'Brien (A Terrible Idea)
Players: 6
Power Level: You're Freaking Goblin Ninjas!

One of the funniest games around.  Again Duane proves why he is one of the top GMs around.  Ninjas are one thing, but Goblin Ninjas are even more awesome.  Bryan H. had such a great time playing this game at Celesticon, he wanted to play it again.  The good thing was this was a sequel to the game that was run at Celesticon, so it wasn't a re-run for Bryan.

The highlights were:  Shannon's character using Breast-Fu and his two humping rats in a cage; my character scooping fish out of an aquarium and throwing them as weapons; Travis's Iron Chef Fight-off, Will's steady walk and setting everything on fire; Brian's Lightning-Fu; and Jason's combat in the restroom stall.

Gil was tired, but he did drop by before we started to say hello and told our Vietnam story once more before he left.

Gil, you missed a really good game.  You should have said, "Yes."

Morgan's Celesticon 2012 Adventures

Again, a new trend in gaming conventions: pre-registering for games before you show up.  I was able to pre-register for all the games I was interested in and I got into them all. Woo-hoo!  I didn't even use my GM priority slip.

The selection of RPG games at Celesticon seemed a bit slim, very few seemed interesting. This year Shannon opted to play multiple games of the Battlestar Galactica board game and only played in one RPG and ran his King Arthur Pendragon (RPG) game.

There were lots of board games and on a large table, someone was setting up Rick’s Scenics Presents Jurassic Park – The Game. A real kick-ass layout of Jurassic Park. The attention to detail was amazing.  They were even putting down tall grass for people and dinosaurs to hide in.

A project 65 million years in the making: Rick Schuldt presents his 28mm Jurassic Park miniatures game with all the spectacular terrain players have come to expect. Can you survive Chaos Theory and escape from an 18-foot table representing Isla Nublar alive? Hiding in the restroom is not going to work … and it’s also a good idea to avoid the Velociraptor paddock. Be very careful if you see torn down fences with red blinking lights. Are those big foot prints and why is the ground shaking? Did I mention that Spinosaurus eats just about anything? Terrain will include the helipad and interiors of the park control center, DNA embryo lab, maintenance garage, and power plant. Plus you’ll see special vehicles and lots of Rick’s dangerous jungle!

Wow, I would have loved to play in that game.  Run from the dinosaurs.  Hide in the restrooms.  Cool.

Celesticon is one of the few gaming conventions where you can get into almost any RPG game you want to play in. I always hear complaints about KublaCon and DundraCon and the enigmatic shuffler.

The downside is that games that should be full wind up less-than-full and some games are cancelled due to lack of players.

At the closing of the con, they have a raffle and they hand out lots of prizes.  I won 1989: Dawn of Freedom, a new 2012 boardgame. Retails for $65.  I also got won GURPS: Banestorm from Nathan Hanner's game.  Retails for $35.

This time I saw a pattern in the games I played in, so I'm going to focus on GM mistakes.

Minimum spoilers below about the games I was in.

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

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Sat 9am, Tom Vallejos's These Are The Voyages... (GURPS) 8 players.

Space travel in the Napoleonic Era! Join the crew of the USS ENTERPRISE, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations... To boldly go into that newly acquired Interstellar Region known as the Louisiana Sector! Beginners Welcome! Knowledge of Early American History and the Napoleonic Era is NOT required, but it will help you understand in-jokes, ad-libs and other surprises. Prizes by Steve Jackson Games!

You know, I think this game is the inspiration for the Celesticon cover.  It's sort of 2-for-2 for me.  Last year, I played in the game that was the inspiration for that year's Celesticon program cover too.

We only had 5 players.  One was the GM's wife.  The conceit was interesting.  We were the Louis and Clark expedition, but instead of looking for the Northwest Passage in a canoe, we were in a Steampunk Spaceship looking for the Spinward Passage.  Instead of villages, we visited planets.  Since our Steampunk Spaceship was more like Space 1889 than the Enterprise we had to stop to resupply as we explored.

What made the game a lot of fun were the players. We did a lot of Star Trek jokes and White Men "discovering" and taking credit for whatever the natives had already known about.

In this instance, it was the players that made the game a lot of fun.

There were some GM mistakes that made this less than a stellar experience.  The GM mistake was what I call "It's so cool, I gotta railroad you to the cool bits."  Details in the spoiler section.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
At one point, we find an NPC had cloned himself with alien technology. He needed our help to stabilize the clones, otherwise they die in 100 days. One complicating factor was that we belonged to the US and he was French. Not only that, he was building an army that would be used to invade the US, so we had to stop him.

My solution was to clone ourselves so we would out number the NPC clones and then overwhelm the clones on the surface.

Well, the GM didn't like that and suddenly, there wasn't any goop to make clones with anymore, they had run out. And the NPC didn't have the formula for the goop.

If that was the case, then we didn't have a problem anymore. We just had to hole up for 100 days and leave the planet.

And if we had shown up 100 days later, there wouldn't have been a clone army at all. This all seemed so stupid and contrived.

Anyway, the whole reason there wasn't any goop left over was that the GM wanted us to explore the alien complex which we were in the basement of -- because it was so cool, I had to make you go up into the rest of the building, no matter what and not in a very subtle fashion.

Other issues I had was that the GM mumbled and disseminated a bit. I prefer GMs that speak loudly and clearly.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Sat 4pm, Nathan Hanner's Wild Weird West: End of the line. (GURPS) 7 players.

The Wild West investigators have been accused of attempted assassination. Can your team of mad scientists, gun slingers, and monsters clear their names before the real assassin finishes the job?

I had a really good time in this game.  I played a Voodoo King who was the party's healer and nobody messed with me.  The game was mostly action and reaction.  There wasn't much of an investigation.  At the end, most of New Orleans was destroyed and we think the Bad Guy died, but who knows?

You know, we never did get accused of the the attempted assassination.  That plot point never really happened.  We actually caught the assassination in progress and stopped it.

The only minor GM mistake is what I call "I gotta make it exciting, so the impossible is going to happen.  So, ignore the man behind the curtain."  Details in the spoiler section.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
At the end, we were in the process of shooting down a blimp and though unpiloted (we had killed the pilot), it spiraled down onto our stationary train. This is pretty much impossible. But the GM wanted to make it exciting and wanted us to continue to shoot at the blimp.

We finally got our train moving and the flaming, exploding blimp crashed only on part of the train we sacrificed.

In another instance, one character was attacked repeatedly by shadow creatures. She survived long enough for us to arrive and save her, but I could tell the GM was holding back. I would have preferred that the creatures either killed her or knocked her unconscious, then the tension level would have been even higher.

What complicated the issue was that each round was a second or two and the GM didn't let us to get to her -- we were rushing up three flights of stairs, so her combat dragged on. But he wanted a daring rescue, so he should have just let us get to her in a round or two. It would have worked out better, but what happened was the GM let the rules get in the way and then he had to fudge his dice rolling so she would survive.

Look, if you're the GM and you're going to cheat in order to make it more exciting, cheat in places where people won't notice.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Sun 10am, Richard Taylor's Bad Times at Dunwich High. (Monsterhearts) 4 players.

Players will take on the roles of the messed up teenagers of Dunwich. This game is pretty much a standard Monsterhearts game, just with a slight Lovecraftian twist as they learn the truth about their town and their history.

Characters will be created at the game.

Only 2 players showed up (which includes me)  -- a surprise because Rich said that at the first session had too many players and he had to turn some people away.  For a Player interaction game, having only two players really sucked.  Also Rich showed up late because his car had broken down and his promised ride bailed on him, so he had to arrange for another ride.  Anyway,  Rich dropped onto the table 9 "skins" or character templates and let me and the other player pick one character.  I was surprised by the variety of templates.  Once we picked a template, the other templates were taken off the table.

I picked "The (Hive) Queen" who's interaction is that she distrusts and fears another player.  Well, with 2 players, it has to be the other player.  The other player picked a "Hollow" which is a Frankenstein character who's socially inept.  Well, that kills a lot of character interaction.  We actually had to work to get the two PCs to interact.

One issue is that I wanted to interact with the other "skins."  Well, they were taken off the table and it was just the two PCs and various NPCs who didn't fit the templates.

I'm surprised that Monsterhearts only takes 2 to 4 players with one GM.  If I had a choice, it should be 8 players, all populating the High School.  Or at least the unpicked templates should hang around for us to interact with.

For some reason, I have problems with both Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts.  I've had pretty bad game experiences with both systems.  The sex moves seem like a gimmick and there's something wrong about playing high school kids who have underage sex.

I also had a stress-free high school, so playing high school angst just didn't do it for me.

GM mistake:  Not showing up on time (though not really his fault) and not removing the templates that reduced interactions between PCs.

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Sun 9pm-3am.  Morgan Hua's Carnival Magic - A Haunted Cruise Ship. (Dread). 6 players.

The 130,000-ton Carnival Magic featured 1,845 staterooms plus 746 crew staterooms making her capacity at 6,000 passengers including crew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_ Magic
http://www.carnival.com/cms/fun/ships/carnival_magic/default.aspx

The Magic vanished on November 2011 on route to the first season's Caribbean Voyage with all its passengers and crew. The area it disappeared in is known as the Bermuda Triangle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle

After a week of frantic air and satellite searches, the Magic re-appeared during a tropical storm. Generally storms in the Caribbean run from June to November and peak in mid-September. The Magic emerged with a mayday broadcast at Midnight local time. The storm is preventing any type of coordinated rescue effort.

The Mayday message contained some information kept from the public, but the circumstances of the Magic's disappearance raised enough of a concern that your elite investigative team will be helicoptered in. It was determined that though it is dangerous -- the whole team could be lost en-route during the storm which is turning into an unseasonal hurricane -- it is a necessary risk. The team was given necessary papers and briefed en-route to the Magic. You've been told that the standard communication equipment for contacting HQ may be unreliable in the storm. The helicopter will not return to it's point of origin having only enough fuel to get out of the raging storm and be ditched into the sea. The pilot will be picked up by a rescue ship.

Good luck and safe journey.

I was worried because my game ran from 9pm to 3am.  I made the mistake of not specifying any preferences.  I would have never guessed that games ran to 3am (or 4am for Bryan Hitchcock's game).  Holy smokes.  With the games not filling up, I was worried about not getting enough players.

After the Monsterhearts game, I had lots of hours to burn before my game.  I dropped by Matt Steele's A Murder of Crows and found that he only had 1 player.  I volunteered to play, but I would have had to leave at 9pm to run my game.  We chatted for an hour and no new players showed up.  2 players were too few for his scenario, so he cancelled the game.

The bright side was that Matt's game room had a wide-screen display and my game room, next door, didn't.  I was able to move my game into Matt's game room.  Matt with nothing to do, got on the waiting list for my game.  He was automatically in because Frank Figoni had pre-registered for my game and he had an auto accident and was unable to attend the convention.  I was actually going to play in Frank's game, Calling All Stations, This is Attu!, and was surprised that it was cancelled when I showed up Sat morning.  I had ran into Shannon later and he told me about Frank's accident.  Matt also gave me a heads up that he couldn't stay to the end but would have to leave at 2am.

I checked out the audio visual and found out that when I tried HDMI (I brought a HDMI cable), the display didn't work properly (display artifacts) and I couldn't pipe in sound to the TV.  The provided PC cable worked though, so I adjusted the sound volume on my laptop.

I set up at one end of the table, didn't like the setup, and then moved to the other end.  I double checked my notes and then waited to see if I got enough players.

To my relief, at 9pm, eleven people showed up for my game including all 5 pre-registered players (actually 4, the 5th showed up about 9:12pm).  One pre-registered man thought his wife was queued on a "waiting list."  They both wanted to play, but I had no extra openings, so he gave up his spot and we sent them next door to Bryan Hitchcock's game which was short of players.  A number of non-players asked if they could watch and there were no objections.  Two of the non-players (watchers) actually got to play -- but I'll get to that later.

Picture by Matt Steele

An hour and 45 minutes into the game the tower fell the first time.  The game ran the full 6 hours and we ended the game at 3:07am.  There were 3 instances of player vs player.  4 characters died.  We took minimal breaks, only long enough to rebuild the tower.  My main problem was that the last time I ran this game, we finished early.  This time, it went perfectly.  Even the ending was amazing.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
At the end, one of the characters, Steven Seagal, went crazy and started attacking Newt (from Aliens). Newt hit a radio detonator to blow a shaped charge that the party had planted earlier in the ship's stern.

Newt survived long enough for the rest of the party to arrive.

As the ship started to sink, Gary Oldman (hand gun) went after Steven Seagal (commando knife). After many draws, the tower was really unstable and the two characters called a truce and stopped pulling. The party rushed to the top of the ship and I made each player do a final pull to reach safety.

Everybody made it out except for Steven Seagal. He was the last to pull from the tower and the tower collapsed with his pull. So, he was trapped on the ship as it sunk.

A rescue helicopter came by and picked up the surviving team members. And that was how the game ended -- with one final tower collapse. Cool.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

After a "good" death, one of the players let one of his watching friends play.  His quote was, "It started with Horror, then it got Awesome." and he wanted to share the awesomeness with his buddy.

When another character died, the other watcher got swapped in too.

After Matt Steele had left at 2am, one of the swapped out players took over Matt Steele's Uma and wound up saving Newt at the very end.

One of the players told me, "This game made the whole Convention for me."

The next day, I ran into two of the players (separately), one was one of the watchers who only got to play part of the game, but he kept on thanking me and shaking my hand.  The other player also gushed over the game in front of the Celesticon staff.  Hey, maybe I can get the room with the big wide-screen display next time?  And can I have an end time at midnight?  It's been two days since the convention and I'm still suffering from the sleep deprivation.  (Yes, Matt, I really understand your 2am bedtime, but you missed the climatic ending. :-)

Matt inspired me; he said he would continue running his Cthulhuporn game until interest in it wavered.  He has run that game at DundraCon for several years and people still queue up to get into that game.  I was going to retire this game after Celesticon, but now I feel I should continue running it.

My GM mistakes:
1. One of the players started shinning a laser pointer at the blocks to distract another player.  I was wondering what was going on and didn't do anything about it.  Later, that same player started waving his hands in front of the other player, trying to distract him and making him collapse the tower.  What the heck?  I then called him on it and he stopped.  I should have stopped it earlier.  I actually thought they knew each other -- because he didn't do this to any of the other players.  Well, I spoke with the guy the next day and he told me he didn't know any of the other players.  Um, that's pretty immature.

2. I should always ask for a midnight ending time and access to a wide-screen TV (if available).

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Sun 10am Michael Garcia's The Monday Edition.  (Don't Rest Your Head).  4 players.

You have spent this entire con fighting back sleep, not knowing what dangers lurk just beyond your half-lidded gaze. In the mirror the Eyeless Mother smiles at you. Her gaze is empty and black. Blink and she disappears, but she's never truly is gone.

At the bar, a dapper gentlemen calling himself Mr. Lived buys you a drink and seduces with fame, glory, and power. You are not sure what his game is, but you are so tempted to play.

These and many more are the denizens of the Mad City. They have come calling, hungry for your imagination, craving your dreams like a meth-head craves crank. If you falter they will have you and you will know a fate worse than death. However, if you press on, the world is yours to do with as you please.

Come and play a game where your exhaustion is a virtue, insomnia is empowerment, and your imagination gives you godlike power.

Mike runs two of the best Don't Rest Your Head games:  White Chapel Fiend and The Tower.

Seeing Mike run a Don't Rest Your Head game au naturale was going to be interesting.  From my experience Wilson Zorn is an expert at running Don't Rest Your Head au naturale.  I've played in other Don't Rest Your Head games and they tend to be Looney Tunes on acid without much depth.

Only 3 players showed up, but we were able to get a 4th player who showed up just after we created our characters.  We played created some stereotypical gamers:  CCG power gamer, LARP goddess, Newbie RPGer girlfriend, and a way overweight miniatures wargamer.  What was funny was that most of our characters were some sort of loser.  After we created our characters, Mike needed 30 minutes to come up with story arcs for all our characters, so we took a break.

Everybody's characters was pretty interesting and we all got our introductory scenes.

The game went pretty well, but the pacing was slow in some spots and I felt the game went a bit long.  At the end, we were just rolling handfuls of dice to beat the Big Badie.  That just lacked impact.

GM mistake:  "Everybody should resolve all their story arcs.  And I, as GM, should figure it out and do it all alone.  I am GOD."

I think Mike worked too hard to try to make and complete 4 separate story arcs. I think we could have just started without his 30 minute thinking-break.  We would have discovered the resolution to our own foibles organically.  I've run A Penny for My Thoughts multiple times and no matter what messed up beginnings we start with, we always wind up merging into one coherent story line.  It's natural to go that way.  Also it's an organic growth of collaboration between the Players and the GM.  With Mike trying to figure out the story arcs himself, in a vacuum, it's less organic and more forced.  As GM, he should write down his ideas and only apply them when appropriate.  Have confidence in your players.  You also run into the danger of the Players not cooperating with your grand plan.  Best to have possible destinations, but not a detailed map.  Everybody would be happier that way.