Con 2013

[lathany]

Thirty-two people, Derbyshire, roleplaying, snow and Bakewell pudding.

The site was large and had lots of cottages of different sizes. Ours (ao_lai, floralaetifica, bateleur and myself) was called "Lathkill".


Inside, the place was rather beautiful. This is the bedroom bateleur and I shared.



And the lounge was quickly adapted in the usual way.



The Con ran for the usual week. I ran one game solo, one jointly with bateleur, played in three and was involved in the Bridge on the last full day.

• Don't Waste Your Life - This was smiorgan's "Don't Rest You Head" game run for kauket, metame, onebyone, triskellian and myself. It involved pre-generated characters randomly allocated (I played "The Basket Case"), a choice of powers called things like "Goblins", "Knife", "Yes" (I chose "Hell" which was rather awesome - teleport, time travel and the possibility of bringing people and objects back from the dead), and graduation (although we all had resits still to do). The background was fascinating (the real world and the other world), the system was interesting (it's one where the GM actively rolls dice to oppose the players) and overall it was fun. Even if I did end up possessed towards the end. I'm not sure I would want to run the system myself, but it's definitely interesting.
• Dark Dungeons - This was davefish's teddies defending their foolish roleplayer owners game. This featured Rufus, my newly acquired rabbit (named after the Shinra President from Final Fantasy VII), Trick (kauket's dinosaur), Celie (telpher's seal) and Fluffy B'stard (belonging to ar_gemlad but matched to ar_boblad for the game). The cuddly toys saw off goblins, dog/rodent-like creatures and, finally the Big Bad - My Little Hell Pony. And Rufus got to wield a nail gun which was awesome.
• The Hunt - This was the game I ran solo (and I have re-run since the Con). My description was "Fantasy / modern day. Player characters start off in cages in the countryside surrounded by... beings. The characters have some suspicions about what their captors could be. The Hunt is about to begin." I drew on stories about the Wild Hunt, some of the mythology about fairies, added five talking mythical creatures, came up with four characters (architect/land owner, school teacher, cartographer, vicar and I added a policeman for the re-run) and set it in Derbyshire. It was fairly simple, ran for about four or five hours and I enjoyed it immensely. The Con players were hearthfire, leathellin, smiorgan and Alistair (and the re-run was bateleur, ao_lai, lanfykins, floralaetifica and shadowjon).
• A Message from God - "It is the early 1700s and a stage musician, a clockmaker and their friends have signs to interpret, messages to decipher and magical and mundane tasks to perform in order to find something before it is too late." This was leathellin's game with players jezzidue, quisalan, lanfykins, TheHattedOne and myself. There was a great deal of beautiful historical detail, a deeply dodgy Sir Christopher Wren and the making of a magical door. This turned out to be linked to hearthfire's Signs and Portents game - we made the door and that party travelled through and determined the outcome of the war in America about a hundred years later.
• Vents - bateleur and I jointly ran this action/horror game and it went OK, but not brilliantly. One of its problems is that I had been short of preparation time because of overload at work. Also, many of the players (ao_lai, floralaetifica, lanfykins, quisalan, chrisvenus, glittertigger and davefish) felt very constrained by the hierarchy (the characters were Chinese and under the control of the political party). That said, it ran fine, the events worked out and the party did successfully escape the underwater complex. Also, I particularly liked reactions to the Workers repairing the glass.

Of course, apart from all the roleplaying, there was Derbyshire. We ate Bakewell Pudding (as well as eating and drinking too much in general) and also pottered around the scenery. I managed two walks during the week. The first was after davefish's game when there were still some deep snow drifts around.



The second was later in the week, on a morning when bateleur and I finally got to see the river our cottage was named after.



I have plenty of other scenery shots (the sheep featured in an earlier entry) - but this post has enough photos already.

Comments

[dracunculus.livejournal.com]

Your game sounds SO FUN.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I enjoyed running it and felt it was nicely self-contained.