GADCon 2014 Report

It’s time to write a Con Report! This weekend was the second annual GADCon, a small gaming convention based in White Marsh, Maryland. Lots of fun was had!

The convention opened Friday night. Per tradition, I gathered with my co-hosts of Bone Throwers Theater to play a game of Fiasco. It’s a game we play often, and in general, it’s informed a lot of our role-play. Last year, we played the playset “Home Invasion” at the very first GADCon and had a blast (you can listen to that session here). This time, we chose “Heroes of Pinnacle City.” My character was a constantly intoxicated frat boy named Bryce who thought he had superpowers to turn into any animal he thought. This, of course, led to some fantastically horrible roleplaying moments where I thought I was a walrus, a mouse, and a bunny rabbit. Other characters included the following:

The BTT Crew Striking their "heroic" poses

• My clone who would play rock-paper-scissors with people (the loser automatically getting drunk) 
• My scientist father who nearly caused a meteor to hit the planet 
• A young man who had been given the ability to jump between different dimensions
• A used car salesman whose strength increased whenever his body chemistry changed
• A mechanic whose body began secreting deadly poison that could kill on contact

Needless to say, it was a blast. I’m not going to say too much more about it because we recorded it. Keep an eye on the podcast website for the release of the actual play episodes!

After a few hours of sleep, I was back at the Con, joined by my buddy, +Jeremy Ephraim. We decided to focus on card games for the afternoon. There was a copy of Gloom there. If you haven’t tried out Gloom, and your sense of humor tends to be darker, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It’s a card game where you have a family of characters in front of you. The goal is to play negative events on your own family to drive the score down into the negative, while playing positive events on the other players’ family members. It’s really fun to weave mini-stories around the events, too. I find working in a lot of alliteration also enhances the experience.  At least for me.

Playing Gloom with Jeremy

The next game we played was a new one for me. It was a cooperative card game called Sentinels of the Multiverse. The players were superheroes fighting against a villain at a suitable location. Since it was a demo game, we picked a fairly easy villain and began to punch the living daylights out of him. Overall, the game was fun — the mechanics were fairly intuitive, and the character decks gave you a good amount of options… once you could understand the cards. The descriptions of the powers were vaguely worded, at least on the deck I was playing. So, I had to keep asking the other players a bunch of questions. Jeremy seemed to pick the game up a bit faster than I did, and he seemed to have a great time.

Sentinels of the Multiverse

After a quick dinner break, it was time to run my first GMing experience of the convention. My first game was Inspectres. If you haven't heard of it, Inspectres is a RPG that combines supernatural investigations with reality TV show aesthetics. Think Ghostbusters meets COPS. It has a great dice-pool mechanic where the player takes the highest result. There are varying responses based on what the highest number of the die is. If the player rolls well, they get to choose what the result is. If they roll poorly, the GM decides. It can lead to a lot of really funny moments.

For this game, Jeremy sat in. He's played Inspectres with me before, and really enjoys it. Also, the convention organizer, +Gregory Frost, snagged a seat. The game was rounded out when a teenager joined in. They wanted to have their base in a warehouse in Colorado. To kick off the game, I had the PCs receive an envelope receiving latitude longitude coordinates and then let the players roll to tell me where the location was. It was located in the middle of an isolated part of the Rockies. I originally thought the game was going to be a haunted cabin in the woods scenario, but it shifted in tone. Instead, they were dealing with a river spirit angered by a dam being built and the ghosts of a recently murdered park ranger and a 19th century girl from a frontier family. It was a really topsy-turvy session, as I had the characters crossing over into the spirit world and back. I tried to work in the story of the Donner Party, but ran out of time.

Inspectre-ing

The tone of the party was really good. Everyone really got into their characters and the story, and everything went really smoothly. It wrapped up just at midnight. When the teen's dad came to pick him up, I got the highest compliment possible: he said that the Inspectres session was his favorite game of the day! It was a great way to end the Saturday, and was a real sense of validation.

It takes a lot of soda to GM a game at 3AM!

Starting at 2AM Sunday morning, I sat in on a new game called Busty Barbarian Bimbos. A parody game, it was aimed at the RPG industry's fascination with fantasy cheesecake. One of my friends, +Rebecca Dawson, was GMing the session. She had asked me to sit in on the game because it was her first time GMing anything. She did a great job with that, and it was a lot of fun. We were all laughing pretty much until the sun came up. A confidentiality agreement was quickly reached, though, so that none would be completely embarrassed later on. I will say that my bimbo was rather shameless... and looked so much better after that boob job.


After that 2AM to 7AM game, I felt I needed a bit of a breather. So I took the 8AM-1PM slot off. Instead, I got breakfast and napped for a bit. Also, I worked on the notes for my final game of the day: a Fate Accelerated Edition one-shot. More on that in a minute; I want to share a really cool story first.

A young lady sat down at my table at around 9 in the morning, while I was writing in my notebook. She had come with a friend of mine so he could play a few board games in the morning. She had a copy of Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch. If you're not familiar with Lynch's work, this is the third volume in the Gentlemen Bastards series. I had recently read it, so I asked how she enjoyed the first two volumes of the series.

"You mean this is the THIRD one?"

The Registration table had lots of complimentary water

Apparently, she thought Republic of Thieves was a stand-alone novel. So I told her about the first book in the series, The Lies of Locke Lamora. She was crestfallen, and I felt bad for ruining her experience. I loaned her my Kindle so she could start the series properly. We spent the rest of the morning chatting about the story, what was interesting, the funny parts of it, and such. By the time my friend came back, her and I had developed a quick friendship. She returned the Kindle to me and told her boyfriend that they were going to the nearest bookstore before they continued on with their day.  As they left, we swapped contact info and promises hang out again in the future.

Sunday's Schedule

Not to get sappy, but that kind of experience really makes going to a con worth it.  Sure gaming is fun, but sometimes in the rush to play games, we forget that were playing with other people. We're thinking about our experiences. Taking the time to do something nice for someone else really felt great.

So, the Fate Accelerated game. Truthfully, I was a bit nervous for this one. I was the only one running Fate at the convention. Outside of what I've mentioned, most of the other games were Pathfinder with some Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun thrown in. So I wasn't sure how much demand there would be. 

My bigger fear, though, was that I hadn't written an adventure which was going to entertain. The one shot was titled "Salvaging Scientists from Cygnus Station, Baby" (remember what I said about alliteration?). I had loosely based the idea of the adventure on a new TV obsession of mine, Space Dandy. It's a fairly irreverent Raygun Gothic Space Opera series with a certain Hawaiian obsessed rockabilly aesthetic. 

Another element I wanted to work into the story was the idea that the astronomical anomaly was causing odd "visitations," similar to what happened in the 1972 classic movie, Solaris.  To  keep consistent with the Japanese anime theme, I grabbed my copy of Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide and selected four: the Futakuchi Onna (Woman with two mouths), the Akaname (Filth Licker),  the Te-no-me (Eyes for Hands), and Rokuro Kubi (snake-necked woman), with the intention that as soon as the characters encounter and attack them, they'd just dissolve.

Me talking with friends

I sketched up the adventure using the Fate Adventure Fractal method first developed by Ryan M. Danks and expanded upon by Sophie Lagacé, and felt like it fit together really well. Here's the final adventure, complete with the pre-gens. 

My first worry eased, though, when people started seeking me out to tell me they'd signed up for the game. I had three different people come up. One was my friend Crystal, who's played Fate Core with me before. Having someone who knew the system at the table was great for me. It provided a sense of security, knowing I had one person who knew how to jump into the game without too much prompting. Another was my friend, Jason. He was familiar with roleplaying from MUDs, but hadn't done a lot of tabletop RPGs. He had re-designed the Con logo for the second year, and had seen that I was GMing this. The third person was someone I didn't know previously. She hadn't done any RPGs for a few decades, so this was something completely new for her.

I wound up with a table of six, though! One of the game offerings was Lady Blackbird, which I would have totally played in if I hadn't been running FAE at the same time. Unfortunately, not enough people jumped in to play that, so the GM and the two people signed up for that asked if they could join the Fate game. The more the merrier!

Gamers in their natural habitat

After letting people look over the pre-gens and  explaining the rules, we began the adventure. I had intended to have a skill contest to get through the asteroid field, followed by some investigation as the party looked for the scientists, and then combat as the space pirates loomed above. All went according to plan. The players seemed sufficiently creeped out by the phantasms, and the pirates were enough of an obstacle to make the game interesting while allowing the PCs awesome. 

One thing I didn't count on, though, was the treachery of the pilot, Kieran Aldo, and the robot, R0CK0. The pirate battle had spilled out from the interior of the space station to the exterior surface. They were the first to reach Vida Namida, which had several pirates on board as well. Rather than go back to pick up the rest of the PCs, they decided to just flat-out leave. As they were pushing off, though, the rest of the party came up to the ship and saw what happened. Crystal, playing Sasha Vandana, shot the ship with her space harpoon, and used it to pull herself, and the rest of the crew to the ship. It was a fun, creative way to end the game.

That brought us to the end of GADCon! Overall, I was really pleased with my experience this year. I hadn't ever GM'd convention games, so having done two, with good results, made me very excited for future Convention game opportunities. Also, the Fate Accelerated game was a great experience because it helped me (normally a seat-of-the-pants GM) get the feel of how to design an adventure for this kind of experience. The best way to learn, I guess, is by doing. Anyway about it, I'm really looking forward to next year's edition of GADCon. It's going to be exciting!

The GADCon Staff at the end of the con