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Eye-Con and Easter Show
Mar. 28th, 2008 07:11 amI had the busiest weekend I've had in a loooong time, visiting the Easter Show with a couple of friends on Friday then spending Saturday-Monday at a roleplaying con. Oh, and working in the morning for half those days. As a result I'm very behind on emails and suchlike.
Easter Show was about what I expected. Part of both its charm and it's bore comes from the fact that it doesn't change from year to year. So we went and gawked at all the livestock, bought a showbag each and then caught the train home, where we took turns reading aloud all the dating/sex stuff from the girly magazine one of us got from a showbag.
Eye-Con was bloody awesome. I went with Matt and discovered once we got there that Thomas, the guy in my Linguistics classes who also roleplays had coincidentally signed himself and his friend up to most of the same sessions as us. The games were as follows:
Exterminatus: Warhammer 40k roleplay system. The GM for this was unfantastic thanks to his highlighting of all the stuff he wrote in and de-highlighting of everything else. It resulted in being made to felt quite railroaded. The system is kind of fun though. There's tables for EVERYTHING but the descriptions in said tables are fun. At one point an enemy's head exploded like an overripe melon and we had to make saves to avoid being blinded by flying gore.
Black Mountain: Iron Kingdoms D&D. Just your regular D&D adventure really. The GM was decent but not nothing too amazing. High point was our sniper critting the big bad mage guy with a headshot, killing him before he could do all manner of nasty stuff to us.
Soap Opera: Freeform. Oh man, this was so chaotic. The basic premise was that you have 20-30 or so characters who are stereotypes from those terrible melodramatic soap operas, all with a bunch of objectives, and new plots get handed out of a bucket. So we all deliberately acted really silly and over-the-top. After the first hour and a half I learnt the folly of trying to put on a silly high-pitched voice for my character, as I started losing my voice. I won't go into the high points because really it was all too silly for words, but I will say that the end of the game saw the pope sacrificing a baby called Elvis to Cthulhu, the Four Horsemen were involved somehow, and my character hadn't had any idea that supernatural stuff was happening until this point, being too wrapped up in her motorcycle-granny-who-manages-rock-bands-on-the-side thing.
Primogen Council: Vampire the Requiem background but more of a freeform system. This game easily made the entire con worth it. The premise was that we were the members of the Prince's council of advisors, brought in to come up with possible solutions to the Prince's problems and then vote on them. We all had a bunch of private objectives and secrets, and it was possible to find out other players' secrets by abstaining from voting. There was debate. There was note-passing. There was whispering in dark corners, wherein we blackmailed each other and brokered secrets. There were vote shenanigans. There was an overarching plot, which depended strongly on the final vote, where Matt (who tends to dominate anything that involves persuasion) was convinced we had to vote against it and I was equally convinced we needed to vote for it but lacked the clear proof I would have needed to persuade others, so we ended up getting the bad ending. We ended up spending the entire ride home discussing and dissecting the awesomeness that was this game. And it turned out that we weren't the only ones who did so.
The next day we were scheduled to play in another freeform, but it was cancelled, so instead we ended up sitting around and playing card games (the kind with custom cards and rules, not the poker bridge kind). After the awards were handed out (our entire session of 4 got the award for Exterminatus, I'm still not sure why), we headed over to the afterparty at the local pub. We spent the entire evening chatting with Thomas and the GM from Primogen council, who is a very cool lady.
Lessons learnt from this con: Get a good nights sleep. On both Monday and Tuesday I ended up fairly sleep deprived and got to experience the wonders of being tired and cranky and trying desperately to act friendly and getting stressed out easily. Related to this lesson was the one where getting stressed can be alleviated by taking myself outside and just being alone for a while. Much better than staying inside and getting more and more stressed and cranky, at any rate. I'm also learning that most con games are not amazing. They range from slightly boring to a fun way to spend a few hours, with really great games like Primogen Council being few and far between.
Easter Show was about what I expected. Part of both its charm and it's bore comes from the fact that it doesn't change from year to year. So we went and gawked at all the livestock, bought a showbag each and then caught the train home, where we took turns reading aloud all the dating/sex stuff from the girly magazine one of us got from a showbag.
Eye-Con was bloody awesome. I went with Matt and discovered once we got there that Thomas, the guy in my Linguistics classes who also roleplays had coincidentally signed himself and his friend up to most of the same sessions as us. The games were as follows:
Exterminatus: Warhammer 40k roleplay system. The GM for this was unfantastic thanks to his highlighting of all the stuff he wrote in and de-highlighting of everything else. It resulted in being made to felt quite railroaded. The system is kind of fun though. There's tables for EVERYTHING but the descriptions in said tables are fun. At one point an enemy's head exploded like an overripe melon and we had to make saves to avoid being blinded by flying gore.
Black Mountain: Iron Kingdoms D&D. Just your regular D&D adventure really. The GM was decent but not nothing too amazing. High point was our sniper critting the big bad mage guy with a headshot, killing him before he could do all manner of nasty stuff to us.
Soap Opera: Freeform. Oh man, this was so chaotic. The basic premise was that you have 20-30 or so characters who are stereotypes from those terrible melodramatic soap operas, all with a bunch of objectives, and new plots get handed out of a bucket. So we all deliberately acted really silly and over-the-top. After the first hour and a half I learnt the folly of trying to put on a silly high-pitched voice for my character, as I started losing my voice. I won't go into the high points because really it was all too silly for words, but I will say that the end of the game saw the pope sacrificing a baby called Elvis to Cthulhu, the Four Horsemen were involved somehow, and my character hadn't had any idea that supernatural stuff was happening until this point, being too wrapped up in her motorcycle-granny-who-manages-rock-bands-on-the-side thing.
Primogen Council: Vampire the Requiem background but more of a freeform system. This game easily made the entire con worth it. The premise was that we were the members of the Prince's council of advisors, brought in to come up with possible solutions to the Prince's problems and then vote on them. We all had a bunch of private objectives and secrets, and it was possible to find out other players' secrets by abstaining from voting. There was debate. There was note-passing. There was whispering in dark corners, wherein we blackmailed each other and brokered secrets. There were vote shenanigans. There was an overarching plot, which depended strongly on the final vote, where Matt (who tends to dominate anything that involves persuasion) was convinced we had to vote against it and I was equally convinced we needed to vote for it but lacked the clear proof I would have needed to persuade others, so we ended up getting the bad ending. We ended up spending the entire ride home discussing and dissecting the awesomeness that was this game. And it turned out that we weren't the only ones who did so.
The next day we were scheduled to play in another freeform, but it was cancelled, so instead we ended up sitting around and playing card games (the kind with custom cards and rules, not the poker bridge kind). After the awards were handed out (our entire session of 4 got the award for Exterminatus, I'm still not sure why), we headed over to the afterparty at the local pub. We spent the entire evening chatting with Thomas and the GM from Primogen council, who is a very cool lady.
Lessons learnt from this con: Get a good nights sleep. On both Monday and Tuesday I ended up fairly sleep deprived and got to experience the wonders of being tired and cranky and trying desperately to act friendly and getting stressed out easily. Related to this lesson was the one where getting stressed can be alleviated by taking myself outside and just being alone for a while. Much better than staying inside and getting more and more stressed and cranky, at any rate. I'm also learning that most con games are not amazing. They range from slightly boring to a fun way to spend a few hours, with really great games like Primogen Council being few and far between.
