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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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 ===

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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 ===

---

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 ===

---

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.

---

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).

---

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.

Morgan's KublaCon 2012 Adventures

This year I pre-registered for games a couple of weeks early.  This was great because you don't have to stand in line trying to register for games.  Except I forgot what games I signed up for and when I went to see what games I might have signed up for, KublaCon had taken their signup database offline and took it to the Con.  What the heck?  The good news was that the Shuffler Gods were good to me and I didn't have to update my signups and things turned out pretty good.

Minimum spoilers below about the games I was in.

---

Friday 6pm.  Badger McInnes's The Mystery of Flight 101 (Call of Cthulhu).   Scheduled for 6 hours.

August 16th, 1942. The U.S. Naval Blimp L-8, on routine patrol mission off the coast of California, disappears for 3 hours, then is sighted flying over the beaches south of San Francisco. Why was radio contact lost? And what happened to the crew? Your orders are to find out what happened.

An interesting game.  Events were actually based on historical events in the Bay Area.  Spoiler Link Here.    Badger found pictures from the actual incident and people too.  I really enjoyed the game.

I think the players were too smart for our own good.  At one point, we had the opportunity to explore a specific area, but we concluded that it was unnecessary and bypassed a chance for excellent role-playing.  My character was claustrophobic and in two instances was able to avoid entering specific areas.  The other players thought I was just playing it safe -- no I was claustrophobic and didn't want to expose my weakness to my fellow men in uniform unless I had to.  I actually was trying to figure out how I was going to play out my claustrophobia when the party changed their mind and didn't enter the enclosed space.  It was a tremendous relief for my character, but I lost my chance for playing out a dilemma of either following my orders or my fear.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
I was a security officer, actually a marine and my claustrophobia came from being stuck underwater in a bombed out vessel during Pearl Harbor.

The first area I avoided was the crowded gondola of a downed blimp; I hung around outside and looked for clues beneath the collapsed blimp fabric.

The second area was a Japanese submarine. I was at first ordered to enter the conning tower and I was supposed to be the 3rd one in. But after the first person went in and discovered it was pure chaos, we decided not to explore the Japanese sub. I knew my character would have froze with fear when he climbed up into that conning tower and looked down into the submarine because that would have given him horrible flashbacks.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

We triumphantly finished the game 2 hours early, but I think it was because we actually skipped that one area.  Two characters died as heroes and got medals posthumously.

---

Sat 9am.  Sean Jennings's Seppuku is Always An Option (Legend of the Five Rings).  Scheduled for 6 hours.

Doji Norichi and his faithful retainers discover a plot against his father - a daimio in the Crane Clan. Can the second son prove his worth and honor?

I've only played L5R twice before and both times run by Travis Smalley.  I wanted to try out L5R with a different GM and see how it would be run differently.  One key element in L5R is Jade and Taint.  Think of Taint as a corruption that turns you evil, Jade as a magical gemstone that can absorb or battle Taint. This game did not touch on this subject at all.

This game had an interesting structure.  We actually had a big battle in the middle of the game.  There was a big surprise soon after which I really enjoyed.  We started to run late, so the GM sped up some of the final battle scenes and he actually just narrated the last boss battle and we wound up finishing 1 hour early.   Because we had a big battle in the middle of the game, I didn't mind missing the last fight, but skipping things and then finishing an hour early felt wrong.  Though if we did do the combat, we would have run over our allotted time.

One bad thing was that we started with 7 players (the GM let an extra person play) and by the time of the boss battle, 3 players had already left the table to do other things.  One character decided to stay in the village while the rest of the party went to search the hills.  A combination of perceived tight timing and circumstance made it so that one character only arrived after the big battle.  So, he was a spectator with nothing to do for at least an hour -- waiting for his big moment that never came.  That player didn't return after a short break.  I didn't blame him for leaving, but who's fault is it?  The GM's for not giving him something to do in the village or the player for splitting up from the party?  Or the GM for not hinting that the character should stay with the group?

I think flagging energy did the game in.  Throughout the game, people kept on answering their phones -- while in  the room.  Hey, I can hear you when you're 15 feet away talking into your phone -- why don't you go into the hallway instead, you Bozo?  One telling detail was that the GM said that exploring the characters' reaction to the big surprise was what he was really interested in, so once that was resolved, the GM didn't seem that engaged either.  I think a lack of awareness of the players' level of engagement with the game made it a bad experience for the people who left the game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The big battle in the middle was against bandits in the hills. What was unusual was that they uncharacteristically fought to the death.

The big surprise was that at one point we woke up and found that we had swapped bodies with bandits. First, we now had worse bodies. Second, how were we going to convince others that we were who we were? Especially since the magic used was not a normal spell and the social structure of the world worked against us.

The body swap was badly handled. We approached a mound of dirt expecting to fight a large lava golem, but instead, the dirt exploded outwards, showering us with dirt and sand and then we all lost consciousness. I would have preferred that we fought the lava golem and then after beating it, it should have exploded.

After finally figuring out how to break into the castle and confronting one of our real bodies -- we basically ganged up on the guy, held him down since we didn't want to damage our real bodies and removed a magical talisman from the body and destroyed it -- the GM just waved his hand and said that the rest were also easy and that the main bad boss used all his magic to maintain these spells, so he would also be easy to kill. Done. End of Game. What? Huh? I felt ripped off. That was very unsatisfying.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

No characters died, but 3 players disappeared.

---

Sat 5pm.  Morgan Hua's The Carnival Magic — A Mysterious Cruise Ship. (Dread).  Scheduled for 6 hours.

The Carnival Magic, a cruise ship, disappears on its maiden voyage in the midst of the Bermuda Triangle and reappears a week later in the midst of a hurricane. It had broadcast a mayday signal that was kept from the public. Your elite team is sent in to investigate.

I had run this at BigBadCon and it took 6 hours.  This time I remembered a few things I forgot to throw at the players the first time I ran it.  There was even some player vs player combat.  The players actually covered more ground than than at BigBadCon.  But they finished the game in 4-1/2 hours.  What the heck?  How did that happen?

Let's go over the game timeline in order to figure out what happened

I ate dinner at 4pm and started to set up things for the game.  I moved some furniture around and then discovered I had forgotten to bring the insanity and reward tokens, so I started making substitute ones out of paper.

At first I thought about asking people to turn off their phones, but then it was Dread and having a phone ring while someone was drawing would have been great, so I decided not to do the phone speech.  Unfortunately, nobody's phone rang during the game, or at least they were on vibrate. 

By 4:45pm, I had 6 people wait listing my game.  I was told that two people had their names crossed out on the list downstairs, but how do you know it is official?  I did know that Gil was playing in an earlier game that conflicted with mine (one of Dovi's Star Wars games -- if I wasn't GMing, I would be trying to get into that game too), so I had one confirmation.  But I didn't want to be in the situation of dropping someone and then finding out that they were showing up.  By 5pm the 4 confirmed players had already arrived early.  Most games waited 15 minutes to start.  Since I had 6 extra people and only one potential no show, I made a decision to admit the first two on the wait list and if that one person did show up, I would admit that person as an extra.  I didn't want people to hang around 15 minutes for no reason at all. So, I started the game at 5pm sharp.

After the tower fell the first time, I generally have a break for people to get some food.  This happened at about 1-1/2 hours into the game.  Most games take a 1/2 hour break for food.  But nobody wanted to take a break, so we continued with the game.

So, the lack of a 15 minute cut-off and a 30 minute food break might have accounted for the shortened game time.

At the 3-1/2 hour mark, a major part of the game was completed and the tower had just collapsed, so pulling had become easier again.  There was just one major encounter left, but there was no way to build the tension up to where it was at the 3-1/2 hour mark without a giant lull.  It would have been anticlimactic and artificial to just throw things at them to try to unsteady the tower.  I can also feel the tension in the room completely deflate with the newly built tower.  So, I let the game play out naturally.  I also felt tired, maybe due to the sudden cliff from the adrenaline rush from the previous tower collapse.  Maybe I should have called for a short break at this time instead of continuing right after the the tower was rebuilt.  It would have given me time to think about what else to throw at the players.

So, what is better?  A game that fits the allotted time slot, but maybe emotionally unsatisfying or a tightly paced game that ends earlier than scheduled?  The problem is that these games aren't like movies where every game is the same.  So, their nature is not as predictable as we would like.  From my experience, I do like to finish games completely vs having the ending be narrated.

The tower fell 3 times, 4 characters died and 1 player left the game.  A few hours into the game, three characters were drawing on each other before the tower collapsed.  One of the players wanted to leave the game, so he actually collapsed the tower to kill another character before leaving -- which was actually ok since this game was designed for quick character generation and we had more than enough players.

---

Sun 10am.  Sheila Mitchell's An Illegitimate Glitch (Unhallowed Metropolis) Scheduled for 6 hours.

After his entire family was brutally slain in an animate(zombie) attack, Lord Henry Piermont was obsessed with finding any illegitimate children from his family line. The only problem is the child he found has gone missing from the orphanage where he had been placed. Lord Piermont has gathered a team together not knowing where the trail may lead.

Sheila, the GM, was in my Dread game and was also going to play later in Duane and Will's Unknown Armies game.  I love the setting for Unhallowed Metropolis. The game was revised in 2011 and the mechanics are much better.

Unhallowed Metropolis is London shrouded in smog and steampunked up.  Zombies roam the streets and the Deathwatch slaughter those who roam the streets if there's an undead breakout.  The rain is acidic, so characters wear rubber pants and gas masks.

I think I forgot to mention that Sheila played Dread with one arm in a sling.  I was a rat bastard and put the tower in the exact center of a large round table -- to make it harder for everyone to reach, but that made it really difficult for her.  She was a pro and was only one pull short of gaining a Reward token (she did 5 in a row to save party members which was pretty amazing.)  Unfortunately in Dread, one pull short means you didn't make it.

In this game I played a half-human/half-vampire Slayer that was more kick-ass than Blade because this character thought range weapons were for wussies.  Jack was in this game and he played a Doctor with no combat skills.  At one point, Jack said, "I wished I picked your character."  Well, the character's name was Morgan and I was named Morgan and I happened to wear a Dracula T-Shirt that day and I made AWESOME rolls through out the game.  I was so bad-ass that when we ran into a vampire on a pile of bodies looking down on us as fresh meat, I fed him a stake before he blinked.  No Blade for you Jack, maybe next time. But Jack and I both got the Kubla prizes: me for slicing and dicing and Jack for role-playing -- hey what else can you do when you have no combat skills.  :-)

The game ended 1/2 hour early and no characters died and nobody left the table.

---

Sun 6pm. Duane O’Brien and Will Robot's The Island Of Misfortune (Unknown Armies). Scheduled for 6 hours.

You couldn’t have been more excited when you were selected to compete on a reality survival show. Now you’re just praying you can make it out alive. This Unknown Armies game is a horror game for mature audiences.  Characters will die. It’s not going to be pretty. Two GMs to keep the table hopping. Characters will not be mages.

The best game I've played in at KublaCon 2012.  I heard that Duane and Will's Putrescent Seven was a very, very good game, so I was very happy to get into this game even though there was a chance I would be offed before the game ended.

I've never seen duel GMs before.  Duane and Will worked really well together.  One can continue to run the table when another is outside working with characters who have split off from the party.  They can also confer and make balanced decisions when unexpected things happen.  Two heads are definitely better than one.  There were a fair number of breaks when Duane and Will had to confer when we threw them for a loop.

Though the game description sounds like a meat-grinder-fest, The game gave characters very tough moral decisions.  We had an excellent group of players.  I think when the first character died two hours into the game, my role-playing went into high gear because at that time I decided that the criteria for being whacked was the quality of your role-playing.  Play for the cameras or you're off the show.

There were a lot of very good moments and twists and turns, but I don't want to put spoilers here as Duane and Will will run this several more times.  Again, my die rolls were on fire and I made many critical rolls.

In the end all but one character survived (it could have easily been a TPK).  7 characters died, one player left the table.  And the game ran 2-1/2 hours over the scheduled time.  I didn't leave until after 3am.  Thank God for Kubla candy girls -- I needed that extra sugar pick me up after midnight.

---

Mon 9am.   Richard Ashley's The Man in the Ceramsteel Mask (Fading Suns).  Scheduled for 6 hours.

Find the missing noble before it’s too late! A “whodunit” for the Fading Suns world.

Richard was one of the contributors to Fading Suns.   I had arrived early since it took me a while to calm down from Duane and Will's game and I woke early and decide to just get some breakfast before Richard's game and then not finding any, so I just decided to lay down on the couch, try to nap, and wait for the game to start.

The bad news was that only 4 of 6 seats were filled.  At 9:00am I was the only player and Richard arrived 1/2 hour early since he had to check out of his room.  But since Richard was a contributor, I got to ask him many questions about the world and he had answers for all of them and in detail.  He was running the same game twice in order to promote the upcoming v2.5 of Fading Suns.

At first, I was skeptical as he starts telling me about the world and it sounded like a mish-mash of Star Gate, Dune, Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Feudal Societies, Fallen Empires, Hyperion, Blade Runner, etc.  Then he starts telling me how this all works and that was where the magic comes in.  The rationale for all of this really works and they had to create some really interesting stuff to glue it all together.  The world building lets you put together a mish-mash of whatever Sci-Fi world you like into one city.

In this world, one of the major religions decreed that technology was evil, so the poor lived feudal lives while the rich, who can afford to be absolved used high-tech. The rich are nobles and the poor are either serfs, servants, or freemen.  A printed or xeroxed piece of paper carries the taint of evil, so books are hand copied by Monks instead.  Since technology is evil, most of the available weapons are hand-to-hand weapons like swords. The rich carry guns, but each bullet may cost a poor person a year's food.  But personal shields are also available that will stop high-energy and kinetic attacks, but not slow weapons as in Dune.  The shields have limited charges, but can be recharged.  So, in personal combat, a shield can save you from guns, but not a knife.  But armies can still kill you as their rapid gun fire will quickly drain your shield and then kill you.

There are jump gates like Star Gate and Babylon 5, but they are ok to use since the creator of the religion died jumping through one of the gates and blessed all of the gates with particles of his blood and body.

The city we were in had 8 major towers several thousand stories high.  Each tower was several acres in cross-section.  There was one air purifier in each cardinal directions, but only the North air purifier still worked.  Terra-forming increased the oxygen levels so that you can breath at the higher altitudes.  The richest people live at the top of the Northern-most tower.  The poor burn wood and coal in stoves, polluting the air.  There are walkways between buildings and towers and the rich ride in aircars.  At the bottom of the North tower is an artist colony, where the rich go slumming, whereas the real slum where no one wants to go is the bottom of the Southern-most tower where it's full of rusted out cars,  pollution, humidity, and crime -- like parts of the 5th Element.  The city is broken into 9 sections, not just uptown and downtown (a 2D reference), but in a 3D sense.  Upper parts of several towers make Uptown (or High-town).  Mid-town is slices of the middle of several buildings.  And the bottom is the Undertown.   Since technology is evil, new cathedrals, built of stone, are sometimes found on top of a Tower -- picture Notre Dame on top of the World Trade Center.

At 9:10am, I was 1 of  2 players.  I picked a deacon that whose whole body was horribly scarred from a bio-bomb that wiped out his village.  The other player couldn't decide between a dilettante-fop and an easily distracted psychic.  He really thought the fop would be fun to play but useless.  I urged him to play the fop.  He picked the psychic, then proceeded to be useless.  I had to drag his character wherever we went and I had to lie to him in order to get him to go anywhere and I had to repeat what had been told to me repeatedly -- even though his character was in the room -- since he spent most of his time staring at the wallpaper.  I was ready to kill his character after an hour of playing.

During the lunch break, I chatted with the GM about my frustration and when the player returned we were able to convince the player that a high ponder stat meant that he was more like Sherlock Holmes where he sees details and delves into their significance, and not space out like a drugged out flower child.  At that point, it got much better and the story actually started to take off and the GM started to do different voices for various NPCs and there was action, sex, violence, comedy, poetry readings, illegal tech, and we actually found the missing noble and the person who was responsible.

No characters died, no players left the table (though I was close), and we actually finished 1 hour over the scheduled time because we spent probably 3 hours talking about the world.

Morgan's Dead of Winter 2011 Adventures

This is the 3rd Annual Dead of Winter Horror Invitational.  I had gone to the 1st event several years ago.  The idea behind Dead of Winter (DoW) is to focus on horror.  When I had attended the 1st Dead of Winter, I had a blast.  The hotel was a wreck and the trip to the Brookdale Lodge was like the opening to a horror movie (The Shining).  Many things went wrong, I but I had a great time.

Since this convention is focused on horror, I will try to explore what that means.

Minimum spoilers below about the games I was in.

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1. Sat 11am-3pm.  (game ended 2 hrs early) Bryan Hitchcock's Camp Wicakini (Savage Worlds Horror).

The counselors at Camp Wicakini didn’t sign up for pissed-off spirits and zombies, but that’s what’s in store for them in this Slasher/Zombie homage. Got brains?

The game was fun, but the scenario lacked sufficient story.  Basically, we had camp counselor hijinks, horrible things happened, and we all died.  I don't know if there was any solution to our predicament.  The hostile force just chased us and mowed us down.  There was no clue as to how we could defeat the hostile force.  I was actually hoping for an act 3 where we would combat a greater evil once we were all turned -- and we had 2 more hours left to play.  But that wasn't the case.  Bryan had created ID cards for all the camp counselors which were our character sheets, printed a beautiful color map of the camp site, and created magnetized character pogs.  Great props, but I felt like we were in one of those big budget movies where they spent all the money on special effects and forgot to spend a bit more on the script.

So, was this horror?  There were horror tropes such as dead bodies, undefeatable evil,  over-sexed teenagers, misbehaving camp counselors, and indifferent adults.  The shock of "Friday the 13th" comes from the unexpected and gruesome deaths.  This taken to the extreme are the "Final Destination" movies.  But this is shock horror, akin to throwing a cat in your face, a quick adrenaline rush, but quickly forgotten.  So, it does fit in the horror genre, but it was Hollywood teenage slasher horror, not something deeper that mined the psyche.

Once upon a time, I played in a Cthulhu game and we complained that is wasn't scary enough, so the GM took it into his head to start killing characters.  Well, my response is, that isn't horror.  I can kill droves of characters in D&D and it wouldn't be horror either.

The scariest moment for me in the game was when some characters found a blood trail and had to follow it to a refrigerator.  I wished the game proceeded to crank up the spookiness, but instead it headed into action, so all the creepiness switched to action.  I found that certain descriptions and situations create a horror atmosphere.  Having just a dead body laying on the ground isn't very scary, but a blood trail from a body having been dragged around a corner is -- and having to follow it because you cared about that person and wanted to know/not know what had happened to that person.

The game ended with a TPK (total party kill).

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2. Sat 7pm-1pm.  Gil Trevizo's Black Site (Delta Green)

There’s a black spot on the map, a dark corner of a war of shadows. The black site is older than this war, its concrete walls having borne witness to “sharpened interrogations” and “dirty work” long before the CIA arrived with its “Human Resource Exploitation.” Its gates are never opened, and the men in black hoods and orange suits taken out of Gulfstream jets and marched inside never see sunlight again. After tonight, neither will anyone else who remains inside the black site.

Gil's game started off a bit slow.  We had a lot of material to cover.  Gil did a lot of research about rendition sites and interrogation techniques.  Since we worked as interrogators, we had to go over all the material. There were two solo scenes where I got to run one mission by myself and Bryan H. ran another.  That left the other 3 players as spectators.  Eventually, all the characters wound up in the same location and all hell broke loose.  But I felt that the setup with solo adventures just left all the other players out in the cold.  It would have been better if each mission required multiple characters -- that would have kept all the players involved -- or have the players play the NPCs temporarily.

Gil tread the thin line of realism and torture porn and was able to stay on the correct side of the line.  This is where the horror came in.  Do you do what you know to be wrong as a human being?  Would you buck the system and be punished for it?  Would you do bad things for the greater good?  People tell white-lies to smooth situations over.  Does this extend to torturing people to save lives?  What would you do?  What would your character do?

The best two moments for me in the game were:
A. The Mexican standoff between various characters as the situation started to go out of control.
B. Hearing June G. select torture elections like items from a Chinese take out menu:  I'd like a cold room, no lights, white noise, sleep deprivation for 60 hours, shackles, and maybe some light slapping.  And this was for a prisoner that they "knew" was innocent.

The game ended with a TPK.

The horror, the horror...
                          -- from Apocalypse Now

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3. Sun 10am-4pm.  Eric Zimmerman's Strings Attached (Little Fears: Nightmare Edition)

Mumble Monsters, the latest craze sweeping the nation. Robby Winthrope, the kid who has everything was the first to get one. Now everyone is getting one. It’s the only thing on your Christmas list. They’re cute and adorable. And they talk to you at night. The puppets just want love and warmth. And they’ll rip it out of you anyway they can. Hey, does anyone know why Robbie’s been absent?

This is one of those games where the players made the game a wonderful experience.  I thought everyone was Excellent (as in Bill and Ted).  I played a kid obsessed with cowboys and wore a cowboy costume even to school  -- his name was Budd America and he was born on the 4th of July.  June G. had the smartest 6 yr old in the world -- she was able to hack into the Toys R Us inventory and billing system.  She was smarter than all the other characters put together.  Patrick I. was the soccer jock who got into 8 fights in 2 days and sent to the principal's and nurse's office multiple times per day.  Tom I. played the responsible 11 yr old, our voice of reason.  Nik G. played the angry kid who was most likely to grow up to be a drug dealer-- "Wanna buy a Ho-Ho, buy a Ho-Ho for a dollar?"  My favorite was Kris M.'s not-so-bright big/outcast kid  -- the big quiet kid who could beat the crap out of you and threw snowballs loaded with rocks.

The plot was pretty simple.  The kids want the latest expensive toy even though they may be dangerous exactly like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story" who wanted the Red Ryder BB Gun and everybody tells him, "You'll shoot your eye out."

The game was a lot of fun and definitely a G rated movie, appropriate for everyone.  Was this horror?  Was "Bride of Chucky" horror?

The game ended with a ZPK (Zero Party Kill).

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4. Sun 6pm-10:30pm. (game ended 1-1/2 hrs early) Morgan Hua's Dread of Winter Horrible Invitational (Dread)

You are invited to the First Annual Dread of Winter Horrible Invitational located in the Brokedown Lodge — so poor and rundown it can’t afford an “N”.  You arrive at night during a thunder storm.  There are five tables in a log cabin with seven people per table – you sit at the one with the unnatural cold spot.  A roaring fire burns in the gigantic fireplace that sends smoke into your eyes. The power goes out. Despite all of this, you begin to play a game and everything starts to go wrong, horribly and dreadfully wrong, and there is no escape from the Brokedown Lodge.

Modified Brookdale Lodge Sign

At the first Dead of Winter, I thought The Brookdale Lodge would make a great setting for a horror game.  People told me all their horror stories as we traded war stories about broken toilet handles, holes punched into walls, defective wiring, missing urinals, soggy carpets, moth-eaten sheets, mattresses that tried to eat you like in the movie "Nightmare on Elm St."  You can almost see the faded elegance and grandeur that used to entrance Presidents and Movie Stars.   The bar had old photos of these famous guests to remind the riffraff that this place used to be important.

Shannon told me at the 2nd Dead of Winter, the rooms were better and things were fixed up and the kitchen was open and they actually served a decent meal in the Brookroom.  WTF.  So, I wanted to bring back the horror to The Dead of Winter.  It would be wicked fun to run a game about the Dead of Winter at the Dead of Winter.  I wanted to run the game in the last time slot, so people would have a chance to explore the whole place.  I wanted the table at the Cold Spot.  I was going to use all the ghost stories about the place, the rumors, the history, the lies, the truth, and some GM glue to make some sense out of it.

I wanted people to relive the horror of the 1st Dead of Winter and for those who missed it, to experience it for the first time -- in a bad way.  The players will play themselves and the character sheet asks for the First Name only.  I did this just for players that were uncomfortable about playing themselves and wanted to have some distance from really playing themselves.  I didn't ask for the Last Name.  If a player said they were uncomfortable playing himself or herself, I had an out by saying that they're playing someone with the same first name and is very similar to them, but it isn't them.  Also somebody might get really weird-ed out if they died.  But I did put a "Next of Kin" on the character sheet to re-enforce the idea that they might die and to make them think it was them.

Another recent fire at the Brookdale

Unfortunately, the Brookdale Lodge got shut down due to fire code violations (no surprise as various parts of the Brookdale burn down every year), so Dead of Winter got moved elsewhere.  I then had to scramble and generate a map of the Brookdale (couldn't find one online) and looked through my photos and photos online to find pictures of various places in the Brookdale.  One of the reasons I wanted the table over the Cold Spot was because it was part of my plot.  I even had a bit where I would ask the person sitting near the Cold Spot if they wanted to pull from the Jenga tower if they wanted to switch seats with someone else.  I had hoped for some sort of pulling war -- just for a change in seating.  Oh, well.

The Brookdale in a recent fire

Now that Dead of Winter won't happen at the Brookdale anymore, I don't think I'll run this game again.  It probably has the best appeal to those who had gone to the 1st Dead of Winter (If you can get six 1st DoW alumni together who are interested, I could be convinced to run this for you).

I'm going to describe the process I went through in designing the game in detail.  If you plan on playing in it, you should skip the Spoiler Section marked below.

The game went very well, but we ended 1-1/2 hours early.  I could have thrown more obstacles at the players to extend the game, but Gil T. turned into a Jenga pulling monster and I sensed that everyone else had become very much afraid of pulling, as we already reached 25 pulls.  So, if I sent more obstacles, Gil would be the only one pulling and that wouldn't have been fun for anyone else.

In the end, it was another ZPK and everyone got to go home.

I felt honored that both Gil T. and Jack Y. (he play tested since he was running his game opposite of mine at DoW) wanted to beat me up at the end of the game -- for putting them through so much horror.

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Spoiler Section Start

Brookdale Lodge, way back when

I first went online and found all the ghostly stories and histories about the Brookdale Lodge.  The Brookdale is well-known for being haunted, so I highlighted and marked all the spooky occurrences in the Lodge.  Most of the occurrences happen in specific areas of the lodge.  I basically sorted the occurrences by location.

From this, I got a list of locations and ghosts.  Prominent in the stories were room 46, gangster tunnels, and the sad story of Sarah Logan, a little girl who's ghost plays in the Brookroom and appears in the bar, asking strangers if they can find her mother. I wanted to tie these major elements together.

The Brookroom

There were never any gangster ghosts at the Brookdale, but since Al Capone aka "Scarface" used to visit the Brookdale, I thought it would be cool to have gangster ghosts.   What's a gangster tunnel without gangsters?

Alphonse "Al" Capone

There were supposed to be 49 ghosts inhabiting the Brookdale.  So, what could be holding all these ghosts here?  Something unimaginably horrible must have happened to anchor so many spirits here.  Or something powerful must be holding these spirits here against their will.

I then hunted the internet for pictures of period gangsters and period people for the ghosts.  I have these craft scissors that leave a wavy edge when you cut paper, when you use these scissors to cut out pictures, they sort of look like over-sized postage stamps.

I also didn't want the ghosts to be one-dimensional.  If I were a ghost and stuck at the Brookdale, I would want to do as much as I can to escape.  So, I decided some of the ghosts were victims and not necessarily hostile.  Manifestations could be a cry for help or a hint to visitors as to the solution of their escape.

The next step was to figure out all the relationships between the ghosts and the "event."  I decided something horrible had happened and something was holding all the spirits here.  Where this anchor was had to be hard to find and hard to get into.  I decided it had to be in the gangster tunnels and underneath the Cold Spot.  The Cold Spot was a manifestation of the anchor.  People have explored the gangster tunnels before and had sealed it off because it was dangerous.  So, the anchor had to be hidden behind one of the walls in the tunnel, otherwise other people would have found it.  Well, we have Al Capone, and I remembered Geraldo Rivera's hunt for Al Capone's vault all those years ago.  So, it was going to be Al Capone's vault.

Next was to figure out what was in the vault.  Well, we're dealing with ghosts here, so it had to be something horrible that was done to someone.   But who would Al Capone hate so much that he would put in a vault instead of just whacking them?  Someone he loved.  Someone he loved that had betrayed him.  But if Al Capone just put his wife there that would just create a ghost, but not some anchor.  Then I realized, Al could bury both his wife and her lover in concrete (cement overshoes) together, but apart, always inches apart from each other, never able to touch.

I wanted to give a clue to the players, so the lovers were encased in concrete except for their left hands.  The two left hands would work if they were buried facing each other.  One hand had a wedding and engagement ring on it; the other hand was ringless.

This want and desire that was unfulfilled would fuel the ghost anchor.  It would hold all the ghosts here even Al Capone's when he dies.

I then had to tie all the other locations and ghosts to this event.  Why is room 46 and room 45 so haunted?  Well, what if the ghosts are just trying to give a clue to visitors?  Well, the vault has a combination lock.  What if the ghosts were trying to give hints to the safe's combination?

Log Cabin/Game Room

George the Lumberjack

Axe in Log Cabin / Game Room

There's a Lumberjack ghost named George according to the internet and just by pure coincidence, in the Log Cabin where we gamed in there was an axe hanging over the door.  I found some period pictures of lumberjacks and found one with an axe that matched the one over the door, so that was my ghost "George."  He is forever stuck chopping wood until someone breaks him of his ghostly spell.  Once that is done, he could help the players.

In the Mermaid room, a girl was said to have drowned there and because of that, the pool was drained and closed.  Her ghost is supposed to haunt the Mermaid room.  Well, at the 1st DoW, the pool was not drained and it was filled with scummy water.  A window in the Mermaid room looked into the pool and condensation ran down the window and algae grew on it.  Drawings of gangsters, people in cement overshoes, mermaids, men in old fashioned diving suits, and a bad drawing of Humphrey Bogart decorated the mural walls.  The Mermaid room also has an entrance into the Gangster Tunnels, but bricked up and hidden inside a cabinet (for real, I didn't make this up).

Mermaid Room

Drowning Girl re-enacting her death

Drowned Girl

I wanted the Drowned Girl to be one of the innocent victims of Al Capone's ghost.

The bar in the Brookdale was a favorite hangout during DoW.

Lloyd, the bartender from the Shining, would serve drinks unless the players pulled to get the "nice" bartender.  He would also be able to give cryptic hints to the players.  And he always puts their drinks on their "tab" and knows what room they're in without asking.

Also Sarah's ghost is supposed to approach strangers there and ask for her mother.  It's pretty sad, considering that Sarah's mother is buried in the vault. The little girl will never find her mother without the player's help.  I decided that once Sarah is re-united with her mother by touching both her mother's and mother's lover's hands (maybe it's her real father, maybe it's George?), the anchor would be drained, the Coldness would dissipate, a smell of gardenias (which sometimes appears in the Brookroom) will permeate the vault, and all the ghosts can be freed.

The gangster ghosts would be led by Al Capone and he would do anything to keep his vault secret.  Once Al Capone, showed up at the Brokedown, he pulled other gangster ghosts to him and now runs the Brokedown as his little ghost kingdom.  I could use gangster ghosts every once in a while to keep the players on their toes.  I could also use them to threaten the players if they were close to finding the vault.  The solution was to whack Al Capone first.  Once Al was dead, the other gangster ghosts, now outside of Al's influence, may want to be freed, unless another gangster ghost steps up to the plate and takes over.

This is the main plot, so how does that tie in with the players?

I wanted the players to relive their 1st DoW.  I had them travel to the Brokedown Lodge and arrive in chronological order. Those who arrived in the afternoon could explore the Lodge and experience some of the ghosts.  Those who arrived at night had the fog, thunderstorm, and washed out roads to contend with.  Expensive room rates, lousy rooms, uncomfortable beds, etc.  At night, I would get to haunt them and give them a restless night.

In the morning, they would head for their first DoW game.  To be really screwy and meta, they sit down to this DoW game.  I start explaining the rules again, etc.  But this time I tell them that the ghosts will not let them leave the Brokedown Lodge.  They are stuck and if by the end of the game they do not escape, they are stuck here forever with the other 49 ghosts.

To explain why they can't interact with the other people at DoW, I had to phase shift them into a "ghost" plane of existence.

If someone died, I didn't want to totally knock them out of the game, but I didn't want to tell them that explicitly.  If a player died, he/she would become a ghost and can could help or hinder the other players when they drew from the Jenga tower.

To help the players, I gave motivations slips to them which told them when they can earn a "reward" token that allowed them a free pull.  The motivations slips actually gave them hints as to what to look for and as each motivation slip got resolved, the players got a sense of accomplishment and advancement in the plot.

I also wanted to hand out spook points.  As they saw horrible things, I gave them spook points.  Every three must be turned in for a random insanity.

One fun trick was suggested at the play test.  When the players realized that they were in a game, in a game, and the GM disappeared.  Jack Y. asked if the GM notes were available for reading, so they can get out of the Brokedown Lodge.  Of course, I can't give the players the notes, that wouldn't be fun.  But either Jack or someone else asked, "What if it was just pages of 'You're going to die'?"   That was a stroke of genius.  So, in my GM notes, after I explain to the players that they're stuck in the Brokedown Lodge, I put two pages of "YOU ALL DIE" repeated over and over again, inter-spaced with a smattering of "THERE IS NO ESCAPE."  The remaining GM notes, I kept in a different folder.

Spoiler Section End

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