DunDraCon 47: One to Remember

Perhaps I’m a little overdue for a blog post, so hopefully this will get me rolling again. Suffice to it say I’ve gamed a lot and had lots of interesting experiences lately; it’s just been harder to find the time to write about them.

Here’s what I got up to on President’s Day Weekend at DunDraCon, one of the Bay Area’s local gaming institutions…

Friday Noon: The Cable (Cthulhu Dark)

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to run my horror scenario The Cable at noon on Friday. I have no idea what I was thinking. It’s tough for me to get in the right frame of mind to run horror during the daytime, and I wanted to try out some LED glow sticks for one of the game’s pivotal scenes. (So WTF past self?) Luckily we had wild weather and gloom all weekend, so it was easy to evoke the brooding North Atlantic atmosphere of the scenario. (The Cable, which I wrote for Cthulhu Dark, finds the doomed characters on an 1858 transatlantic cable laying expedition gone wrong.)

It’s probably the 6th time I’ve run the scenario, and I don’t know if it was my absolute best work, but it went over quite well, and I discovered new ways to expand the material. As long as I keep finding fresh concepts bubbling to the surface, I’ll keep running this! So, maybe the upside of not managing to get The Cable written up and published is that it keeps getting richer and stranger.

(I was really charmed to discover that a number of people have been trying to get in to play The Cable show after show; if it’s got its own little cult following I guess I’d better keep bringing it. A cult following is The Best following.)

Matthew Steele, one of our revered local GMs, came to play and the table was just one strong player after another. Nothing gets me going more than running for awesome people. As it turned out, I’d be seeing more of Matt that night…

Friday Night: Old Gods of Appalachia: Best Leave Them Ghosts Alone (Cypher System)

Thankfully Matt’s game was pitched in a very different key than mine. Apparently I’m the last person in gaming to discover that Old Gods is based on an extremely popular podcast. I was there, in part, because I inherited several Silver John books by author Manly Wade Wellman from my dad. They really turned me on to mid-century Appalachia and its possibilities as an eerie setting for gaming.

Matt’s style is quiet and considered and it really fit the story-forward scenario he was running: one that involved a group of kids, all grown up now, facing the consequences of an old agreement. Cypher System is not my jam, but Matt effortlessly explained the mechanics in a way that previous GMs I’ve had could not. It was another table full of strong players and Friday evening went by in a flash. Matt’s games are so popular I only get into one about every 4 years, so I have my calendar marked for 2028!

Saturday Morning: Adventure Awaits! (Quest RPG)

This game, which I ran in the Kids’ Room, comes out of something new in my work life. For a long time I’ve wanted to run a class for kids where I teach (or attempt to teach!) them how to role-play. I’ve gotten a lot out of gaming, and I’m convinced there aren’t nearly enough on-ramps to the hobby. After jumping through a lot of hoops, I got the course, based around an RPG called Quest, up and running through our local parks district.

Quest is what one of my friends calls a “minimum D&D” game. It has no stats; you play an archetype (Ranger, Fighter, etc.) that has access to a unique set of ability trees. Kids get to select a few abilities they like, and then clip them out for use at the table. Challenges are resolved by rolling an unmodified d20 to find out if you fail, succeed, or succeed with a consequence. The real magic of the game is in the setup. There’s a Madlibs-inspired world creation document, and character creation is done the same way.

My gang at DunDraCon really got into it! They created a trading port called Sea Spray that backed up against a dark and forbidding forest. A purple fog swirled amongst the trees that warped everything it touched. At night or in the darkness wild weird creatures held sway, but they never willingly came into the light.

Since everything was pure improvisation, I decided to keep it simple. An important caravan has gone missing, I told them. I worked with the kids to figure out why they needed to go find it. Our youngest little guy blurted out, “my wife and child were on that caravan!” Now there’s someone with a future in gaming, I thought.

When their energy started to wane we wrapped up the story, and tied everything together with an epilogue for each character. (Epilogues are game table magic, and I love using them for one-shots.) The kids had a knack for these. The last epilogue involved the Paladin bringing back a “warped” bandit to her order for rehabilitation. Wonderful, inventive play.

Saturday Night: Just Hanging Loose

Without anything on my schedule I met up with friends, chatted a bit, and retreated to my room for some quiet time. I did finally crack the problem of how to distill a juicy plot arc from my Tales from the Loop campaign into a Con one-shot. I’ve been chasing that solution for awhile, and I’ve committed myself to bringing that scenario, called The Escapee, to next DunDraCon.

Sunday Morning: One Chance to Escape! (Psi*Run)

At the last BigBadCon I was lucky enough to play Psi*Run with one of its designers, Meguey Baker. (Meg revised the work of co-creators Michael Lingner and Christopher Moore.) Lots of indie games come and go, but a handful become classics. Psi*Run definitely fits that bill, and I was delighted to share it with the excellent gamers at DDC.

The design concept, which involves rolling a dice pool and then placing different results on different prompts to deal with the immediate challenge at hand, still feels fresh. And as a facilitator it’s fascinating to watch the players solve that puzzle each scene.

The setup of Psi*Run is also elegant. Players create characters that are enhanced in some way, but they have no memory of who they are. During character creation players write questions about themselves and their powers that they want to see answered during play. In fact the game can’t end until at least one player answers a set number of their questions. Thanks to the die mechanics mentioned above, players have to balance gaining self-knowledge against getting injured, caught, and having their powers spin completely out of control.

Our game, set in Seattle, started with the characters trapped on a private jet that’s just going down in Lake Washington. Next, they rowed their inflatable liferaft to a dock attached to a fancy restaurant hosting a rehearsal dinner. One of the characters tried to use a psionic power and inadvertently “networked” all of the guests, with predictably chaotic results. After stealing a ride from the valet stand, they realized they needed a phone or a map to get to the Point Defiance Aquarium in Tacoma. (One of the characters had a desperate need to go to “the aquarium.”) Everything went wrong with that seemingly simple task. The character that could duplicate tried to clone a cell phone, and succeeded instead in creating a runaway ball of ever-duplicating phones that destroyed a gas station and rolled down Capitol Hill behind their stolen car. Having escaped that menace, the assembled characters broke into the aquarium and had a showdown with a highly trained operative and his pesky drones and heavily armed dogbots.

While Psi*Run doesn’t always produce adrenaline-fueled play, everyone gets a ton of agency, and the stories always become rich and strange, with surprising little twists at every turn. It was definitely worth our time, and it’s worth yours, too.

Sunday Night: Vaesan (Year Zero Engine)

I’ve wanted to play Vaesen for awhile. Two of my favorite games (Tales from the Loop and Mutant: Year Zero) use the same engine, and I was curious to see how the system supports 19th Century Gothic horror.

Year Zero features speedy character creation, so we got to make characters at the table. I picked a priest, with the wrinkle that he didn’t believe in God anymore. I was considering playing him with my limited slightly cartoonish German accent, when my new buddy John started playing his character with a proper German accent. (It turns out John knows more than a little German!) Still I soldiered on, and after a few hours John’s character Hans started to drift towards sounding like my priest. It won’t be the last time I pull a good player down with me!

My sense is that the tone of Vaesen is supposed to be rather somber, but with Con sleep deprivation setting in things got a little goofy. Gil, a regular at DDC, just killed us with the way he was playing his character, a psychic who seemed more like a self-promoting charlatan than anything else. It was the most hilarious thing I’ve seen at the table in a long time.

Our GM was on the newer side, and I don’t think we were doing her any favors. Also, the pre-written scenario was tough. No spoilers, but it turned out that two warring Vaesen were causing most of the problems. This made our in-game work exponentially harder. The game might have been a bit silly, but I think everyone had a great time. In any case, I hope we haven’t put Kavita off of running at Cons, and that she’s back again next year.

New Directions, New Friends, New Events…

I made several changes this year with how I “did” the Con. I got smart and decided to schedule my Saturday and Sunday games to start at 10am instead of 8am. And I went all in on sleep technology… eyeshade, ear plugs, and night sounds from my meditation app. I still didn’t get tons of sleep, but an extra hour or two of shut-eye at an exciting event is like money in the bank.

On a more personal note, I let go of a friendship at the Con that hasn’t been working for me for awhile, and that seemed to open up space in the universe that brought lovely new people into my orbit. Jesse, Jesse, Jen, and John, I hope to see more of you!

Also, despite the fact that I love game thrifting and bargain hunting, I’ve never been to the Monday morning Game Bazaar. What a mistake! I found some nifty odds and ends and one of my Grail games. (Hunh, maybe it’s good I haven’t been going to the Bazaar; my shelves aren’t getting any bigger.)

Anyway, it was a dang good show for me. I ran 3 games for the first time this year with no ill effects–maybe next year I will try for 4? We’ll see!