GaryCon XII, Virtually
This is my recap on Gary Con XII. This year Gary Con in Lake Geneva was cancelled but they moved it to a pure virtual stage. I didn't feel like I was going to be able to move my regular games into a digital platform easily and I didn't feel comfortable trying to do them without being able to see everybody at the table.
I still wanted to run games and participate in Gary Con, so I decided to run: Amnesiacs Unite!, a new Swords & Wizardry: White Box adventure by me, No Small Crimes in Lankhmar by Michael Curtis, Citadel of Ice by David Pulver and In Search of the Unknown by Mike Carr. I ran everything in Roll20 and used Zoom for audio/video.
This was only the second time I tried using Into the Odd for Amnesiacs, and though it went well, there was essentially nothing to do with Into the Odd excluding the starting equipment. One of the players suggested Cypher as a possible alternative system. I'm not sure if anything is just plain better than roll 3d6 and make the rest up...
No Small Crimes went well. I was probably too kind to them and shouldn't have lit the bed on fire with no repercussions.
A Fist Full of Gold was created in less than a week. It essentially was a fun house dungeon, complete with magical paintings and creepy statues. I spent no time explaining the history of the Lady and the Necromancer, but just poking around the house, the players came away with a pretty comprehensive understanding of his life and motivations. I used World Anvil to help annotate the maps and link between characters. I feel it sped up my ability to populate the dungeon rather than using only a notebook, like I normally do. I was able to focus on the parts that I felt inspired to write about and put off other places until I could think of something. Then during play, it was really helpful to be able to call up a location on the map, and all the linked characters and monsters were easy to find without flipping through sheets or forgetting important details. I'm going to be making extensive use of World Anvil in the future.
Citadel of Ice is a Fantasy Trip adventure by David Pulver and published by Ballistic Games. I was a little worried how this was going to go when I was prepping. I already had a print copy, but I ended getting the PDF too. The PDF was very helpful, it was easy to pull the maps and tokens out and import them into Roll20. Douglas Cole was kind enough to send me color copies of the tokens to use, too. If I didn't start with a quick combat tutorial, I think we would have had enough time to finish the adventure. Unfortunately, we were tight on time at the end, and we had to skip the final battle. The Fantasy Trip ran a lot smoother than I thought it would, but it is much more of a skirmish game than most old school games.
I capped my Gary Con off with one of the most old school adventures I could think of, In Search of the Unknown. I asked the participants if they wanted to use Holmes or Moldvay basic, and they opted for Moldvay. I went with non-variable damage, so all weapons and monsters did 1d6 damage. I used Dyson's remake of the maps of Quasqueton, because they work better to reveal with fog of war on Roll20. The original maps would have revealed too much information if I used them without modification (like where all the secret doors are). The players were real veterans. They were spreading flour on in the intersections to tell if anyone was behind them. They made sure to have marbles at the ready in case of sloping halls or quick setup for combat tricks. At one point, they were facing four bandits. They thought of them as large threats, but really they were pushovers that were talking big. So the party came up with a big plan, the wizard would use Phantasmal Force, and the thief would use a sip of their invisibility potion to get a backstab on the leftovers. Their plan went off without a hitch. Afterwards, they were surprised by how easy it was, and I told them they were only 1 HD baddies. I was then complimented on my poker face during their planning. My only regret while running this is they didn't wrestle the orcs.
The only game I played in was Fortress of the North with Victor Raymond. That was the first time I actually got to play Empire of the Petal Throne. It was fun, and it is the closest I'll ever get to playing with M. A. R. Barker. This was meant to be Raymond's refresh on the classic Fresh Off the Boat scenario meant to introduce players to Tekumel. Instead of starting in the great port in the south, we started in the great fort in the north. I continue to remain intrigued by the world building skills of Barker, and look forward to any chance I can get to play with Victor Raymond again.
I'm glad that I still ran games for Gary Con, and I think I'll expand my repertoire beyond GURPS at cons. Though my con games are real wacky, so I won't be eliminating GURPS entirely. I will definitely be adding more White Box or Basic to my games, and of course I'll be making my own adventures primarily.
I still wanted to run games and participate in Gary Con, so I decided to run: Amnesiacs Unite!, a new Swords & Wizardry: White Box adventure by me, No Small Crimes in Lankhmar by Michael Curtis, Citadel of Ice by David Pulver and In Search of the Unknown by Mike Carr. I ran everything in Roll20 and used Zoom for audio/video.
This was only the second time I tried using Into the Odd for Amnesiacs, and though it went well, there was essentially nothing to do with Into the Odd excluding the starting equipment. One of the players suggested Cypher as a possible alternative system. I'm not sure if anything is just plain better than roll 3d6 and make the rest up...
No Small Crimes went well. I was probably too kind to them and shouldn't have lit the bed on fire with no repercussions.
A Fist Full of Gold was created in less than a week. It essentially was a fun house dungeon, complete with magical paintings and creepy statues. I spent no time explaining the history of the Lady and the Necromancer, but just poking around the house, the players came away with a pretty comprehensive understanding of his life and motivations. I used World Anvil to help annotate the maps and link between characters. I feel it sped up my ability to populate the dungeon rather than using only a notebook, like I normally do. I was able to focus on the parts that I felt inspired to write about and put off other places until I could think of something. Then during play, it was really helpful to be able to call up a location on the map, and all the linked characters and monsters were easy to find without flipping through sheets or forgetting important details. I'm going to be making extensive use of World Anvil in the future.
Citadel of Ice is a Fantasy Trip adventure by David Pulver and published by Ballistic Games. I was a little worried how this was going to go when I was prepping. I already had a print copy, but I ended getting the PDF too. The PDF was very helpful, it was easy to pull the maps and tokens out and import them into Roll20. Douglas Cole was kind enough to send me color copies of the tokens to use, too. If I didn't start with a quick combat tutorial, I think we would have had enough time to finish the adventure. Unfortunately, we were tight on time at the end, and we had to skip the final battle. The Fantasy Trip ran a lot smoother than I thought it would, but it is much more of a skirmish game than most old school games.
I capped my Gary Con off with one of the most old school adventures I could think of, In Search of the Unknown. I asked the participants if they wanted to use Holmes or Moldvay basic, and they opted for Moldvay. I went with non-variable damage, so all weapons and monsters did 1d6 damage. I used Dyson's remake of the maps of Quasqueton, because they work better to reveal with fog of war on Roll20. The original maps would have revealed too much information if I used them without modification (like where all the secret doors are). The players were real veterans. They were spreading flour on in the intersections to tell if anyone was behind them. They made sure to have marbles at the ready in case of sloping halls or quick setup for combat tricks. At one point, they were facing four bandits. They thought of them as large threats, but really they were pushovers that were talking big. So the party came up with a big plan, the wizard would use Phantasmal Force, and the thief would use a sip of their invisibility potion to get a backstab on the leftovers. Their plan went off without a hitch. Afterwards, they were surprised by how easy it was, and I told them they were only 1 HD baddies. I was then complimented on my poker face during their planning. My only regret while running this is they didn't wrestle the orcs.
The only game I played in was Fortress of the North with Victor Raymond. That was the first time I actually got to play Empire of the Petal Throne. It was fun, and it is the closest I'll ever get to playing with M. A. R. Barker. This was meant to be Raymond's refresh on the classic Fresh Off the Boat scenario meant to introduce players to Tekumel. Instead of starting in the great port in the south, we started in the great fort in the north. I continue to remain intrigued by the world building skills of Barker, and look forward to any chance I can get to play with Victor Raymond again.
I'm glad that I still ran games for Gary Con, and I think I'll expand my repertoire beyond GURPS at cons. Though my con games are real wacky, so I won't be eliminating GURPS entirely. I will definitely be adding more White Box or Basic to my games, and of course I'll be making my own adventures primarily.
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