How is she FOURTEEN?!

Made it back from the con, although there was a lot more walking than I expected. Transit is not the greatest on Sunday evening. (Okay, transit around here is never the greatest, we should tax Google and eBay and all those suckweasels however much they’re spending on their own busses.)

CON REPORT!

Thursday was just opening ceremonies (which I missed most of because my credit union wanted to protect me from sketchy weirdos using my card to pay for hotel rooms in Burlingame) and such. The fashion show was delightful, because it was normal people in whatever strange outfits and everybody got straight 10s from the judges. I had stupid feelings about some of the femme-presenting people in the fashion show being attractive, but they were just as stupid as the feelings about none of the gamers I know being interested in BBC. There was some kind of dance party, but I went to bed at a reasonable time so I could game all weekend.

Read: Serwa Boateng’s Guide to Vampire Hunting (Roseanne A Brown): The daughter of a Ghanaian-American vampire hunting family gets stuck in middle school while her parents are off doing important stuff, and has to cobble together a completely illegitimate vampire-hunting team from the kids she’s stuck in racist detention with, whether the gods want to help or not. Ghanaian vampires have a firefly theme instead of a bat theme, but are not any less horrible.

Friday, I had three games scheduled and they all went off according to (somebody’s) plan.

Played: Invisible Sun. I played Crystal, a Stalwart Ardent of the Order of Makers who Writhes and Squirms. The player to my left played literally three raccoons in a trenchcoat, and the one to my right played someone who wanted to become a bodyless miasma, and we met an NPC who had a star for a head, so having no bones was comparatively normal. The GM warned us this game is not ideal for one-shots, because it’s lore-heavy and is supposed to have lots of collaborative worldbuilding and some of the classes (like the Makers) are heavily reliant on downtime actions, but we had fun anyway. As recent returnees from the false world of Earth, we got sucked into a lucrative but crazed heist that involved going into the Noösphere to recover a secret that had been known only by someone now dead. Instead of deciding what my magical glass weapon was, I used the one spell I had available for immediate use to vanish from everyone’s perceptions and my minor ability to have sticky tentacles instead of arms to yoink the physical embodiment of the secret while everybody else faffed about with the guardian memory-construct.

Played: Dreamland. I played Bazun, barmaid (Servant) to the traveling Wineseller. We also had a Ratcatcher who pretty much stole the show, and halfway through, the last player joined and played an Industrialist. Feeling in need of money, we set out for the House of the Gnoles deep in the Enchanted Wood, past even the zoogs. Along the way, we caused a British Cultural Appropriation Orientalist’s palace of decontextualized exotica to disintegrate, and then got caught up in a plot where the queen of Dream London was trying to steal her adopted daughter’s skin to create a map of new Dream territories to conquer. Surely the bridge troll falling in love with Bazun (who turned out to be a middle-aged male cult leader in central Asia in the waking world) would not go on to cause any problems whatsoever.

Played: Dungeon Crawl Classics. Okay, this one was pretty much D&D, but I figured I would check it out since it uses d5s and d7s and other potentially cursed random number generators. I played Enzo, a level 2 Warrior. Since it was a two-hour slot, the cleric got a vision to go to a location and recover a relic to save the world and we skipped right to it. It was the kind of dungeon where a room is just filled with living terrain that knows you aren’t worthy, don’t ask why your cleric can’t make that, very old-school. The stained glass constructs that shot at us were a pain, but really we got through the dungeon without much combat except the wizard sniping them from range. Spellcasters can be powerful, but the effect of a spell, from bare minimum to ridiculous, depends on how well they roll on their spellcasting check, and they have a chance of failing and possibly losing the spell, so I don’t know whether they’re actually more powerful than fighters. Too small a sample size. Anyway, we saved the world and I went to bed at a reasonable time again.

Saturday I hadn’t been able to get into anything I wanted for the morning slot, so I went to Games on Demand.

Played: Slugblaster Turbo X. I played Riya, who had Grit and a Robot Companion. This is the streamlined version of Slugblaster for two-hour one-shots at cons and the like. The GM was the creator of Slugblaster, so that was great. We went to a party in another dimension, got chased by a mutant dinosaur, almost caused a giant mecha rampage, got my robot Ziggy smashed up more than once, and made a connection with another crew. Also I got to talk to the cool girl running the music at the party, although I did not actually save her from the hand missiles.

Played: Plant Girl Game. I played Veria the Echeveria plant-girl. This is possibly the coziest game ever written. You are all plant-kids (“You don’t have to be a girl, but you do have to be a plant.”), maybe your mom is a witch, you must save your town from some kind of ecological disaster. In our case it was an infestation of ground squirrels due to the drought, and we put so much work into getting the town to relocate the squirrels instead of killing them. Fortunately we had the help of the awesome old punk librarian. There was an interesting two-dimensional age thing (social/developmental age vs how long since you came out of the ground) that didn’t get explored much because we only had four hours.

Played: Confluence: the Living Archive. I played Whispering Gallery, the fallen god of stage secrets, because this was not actually about Space Library, but non-European secondary-world fantasy. I think there were technically humans, but nobody played one, we had salamander-people and shark-rabbit people and mouse-people and people made out of living colors and whatnot. Also there was a barter/reputation economy, gravity magic, decentralized-to-nonexistent government, and skywhales. We got drafted by the social welfare org to help recover a botanist’s experimental samples stolen by a notorious villain, despite being kind of sketchy. Best line of the con: “From above, you hear a mousy gasp of gay panic!” That was when Whispering Gallery was swooning into the villainous axolotl-lady’s arms to distract her while the big bruisers surrounded her.

I had something planned for Sunday morning but it got cancelled because the GM caught a cold, so I was back to Games on Demand.

Played: Slugblaster (full-fat version). I played Octa, the Heart with Riftninja Sneakers. This wasn’t run by the creator of the game, but by some people from the company doing the new edition, and we had time to go through the whole process of choosing playbooks and signature gear and rolling up our gear and faction relationships and making a map of what dimensions we knew portals to. The map almost made a loop, so our adventure was trying to find portals to complete it. The Chill made friends with a giant eel, the Smarts took pictures of the custom board-maker’s tools, the Grit exploded a giant robot worm from the inside, and we all just tried to make it through the dimension of squabbling giants and their slug-pope. I got a lot more Style than in the last game, but also more Trouble.

Played: Heart. I played Tenacity, gnoll priestess of the Moon Beneath. Heart is set in the eldritch subway that was built for Spire but immediately went feral and started digging for Hell, and the other horrifying realms it pierced along the way, and it is absolutely a horror game. We started out investigating a rat problem for a tavern so they’d owe us a favor, and ended up facing an agglomeration of undead rats animated by the crown of an ancient god. The weaselly magic-eating vivisectionist swore fealty to the Rat King because he was fine with things growing in his brain, but then I figured out about the crown and started a fight by speaking the secret name of the Goddess. It was horrible and awesome and I did in fact gain a dozen times ultimate power, which was probably not consistent with remaining a person as the word is commonly understood, so the win and loss condition were the same. It was great. Second-best line of the con: “So you just squish your face into the mass of undead rats?” “Once I have the power of a god, I can make a new face.” I did make one mistake along the way, though, since I would have gotten an advance for not leaving the rival priest to be eaten alive by dimension-gnawing rats.

The End!

Things I did better this year than last year:

• Eating in my room instead of in the loud expensive hotel restaurant full of virus-spewing face holes, so I had time to decompress and play my pad games between scheduled events.
• Bringing my own food. I only came up with this idea at the last minute, so I didn’t have a lot of variety and ended up getting takeout from the restaurant several times, but if nothing else, it made the morning faster which let me sleep in longer.
• All mostly lesbians all most of the time (Enzo was a guy, but maybe he was gay, it never came up). Why? Because I want to and nobody can stop me.
• Spoke up more. Even though I’m a mediocre white guy, I can safely talk more than I did last year, and have more outgoing and active characters. Or maybe people were just humoring me, but nobody kicked me under the table or anything. Whispering Gallery was practically flamboyant!

Things I should do better next year:

• Hydrate! Hydrate! OK!
• More masks. There wasn’t a lot of breathing, so it was probably okay, but ideally I would have changed to a new mask halfway through each day.
• New shoulderbag. The one I have isn’t quite large enough to hold my dice bag along with everything else. Or maybe that means I need a smaller dice bag? No, that’s obviously nonsense!
• Notebook. If I had had to read any of the notes I chicken-scratched into the margins of my character sheets, it would not have gone well.
• Contribute to the con. Running a scheduled game didn’t work well last year but maybe I could do Games on Demand or general volunteering.

Written: VACATION.