Tag: big bad con

More importantly, it’s National Black Cat Day in the UK, but neither I nor Nightvale is there.

Between fan noise and two nights of games ending early, I was much more alive this morning than at this point last year, which is good because I had to pack up and then run a game in the first slot of the day.

Ran: Perils and Princesses. In a turn of events that was only surprising because I did not know he came to BBC, one of my players was the designer of Princess World, but fortunately I am not prone to fangirling. He played Clik-Clok the daughter of the Tin Woodsman, so that was cute. This time I got things moving along well enough, but somehow the antagonists were not creepy enough, and the princesses almost let them get away with it, but someone remembered they had a dodgy mushroom in their inventory and used it to contact their fairy godmother who only appears in dreams and visions and ask for better instructions. The day was saved! They used the same solution as the second test group, so that was reassuring in some way.

Played: A magical girl search of terrible things to fight in Wandering Crows. Along with a half-merperson deathly afraid of water and a necromancer who could only bear to raise animals, she wandered a world recovering from fifty years of war and deprivation. We were hired to escort a box of paprika to a partially-underwater city than had been deprived for two generations, which involved keeping loud-mouthed cops from starting a paprika riot and fighting through gangsters (our merperson Squid literally barfed a lizard gangster to death), but turned out to be only half the job. The priest of the temple we were delivering to needed the paprika for a specific ritual in a specific, dangerous place to save the city, and we had the choice of going through paprika thieves or necromancers to get there. We chose necromancers, which our necromancer defeated by laying their zombies to rest instead of having a massive undead battle. As a reward for maintaining the life-support system of the city, we got information about our personal quests, a huge favor from the important temple, etc, but most importantly, the ancient dinosaur priest threw off his robe and flexed for us. (No, really, rainbow feathers!) Wandering Crows is a card-based that’s intended to be simple and portable, but it’s also a little abstract for me. I would prefer what you write on your character sheet to be more than flavor text. I should send a comment to the designer.

And that was it for Big Bad Con 2024! I did not play all lesbians all the time this year, but close enough, and I only played games I’d never played before. The games I ran went much better than last time I ran two years ago, because I was ruthless about railroading. Will I run Perils and Princesses again next year? Maybe! But maybe something I like more will come along.

I managed to resist buying any dice in the dealer’s room, despite the many beautiful colors on offer, because I do not need more dice. I did buy a bunch of games in hardcopy (Ryuutama, which I might already own but couldn’t find at home; Follow, ditto; For the Queen; CBR+PNK; The Lost and the Jammed; Sapphic Space Pirates, Rebels of the Outlaw Waste because the PDF doesn’t have the stickers for character advancement; Cloud Empress and some adventures) and a small plush squid with eldritch sigils (their name is Devil Squid and they are Baby Lizard’s friend).

Criminal Cat Onion’s human was allegedly at the con, but I did not manage to meet her.

I just made the train home, and my cats were there and I fell over dead.

Written: VACATION

Played: A pseudo-Islamic knight with a giant chicken (actually a Southeast Asian jungle fowl) in Gubat Banwa. A rich king hired us to pillage and/or kill the idealist king who was stealing his excessive wealth to fund an artistic community, but when we found out from a captured minion that they used to be close until the falling out, we had to drag him back and force them to repair their relationship. Gubat Banwa is very board-game-grid in the manner of D&D4e, but the part between battles seems cooler, and also you don’t want to kill random spuds because it’s better to have them beholden to you. Hurray non-European fantasy!

Ran: Perils and Princesses. Somehow, despite forgetting character sheets, of all things. Fortunately, there was a printer in the hotel and I still had the files on a thumb drive. Once we got past that, it went okay. I failed to deliver all the important information in a timely manner, and the princesses were so entertaining that I forgot to move the plot along and we had to resolve it in a rush right before our time was up, but it did get resolved, and people appeared to have fun, so I’m willing to count it as a partial success. The laminated handouts were handy for character creation, although I think there may have been too many of them. If I did this again, I’d probably move some things from random generation to pregen or player choice, although I don’t know what.

Played: A horrible little wrecking ball of a goblin in Wicked Ones in Gaming on Demand. I did okay at biting legs off and overcharging generators, and the fire demon and kobold ninja were also good, but the mad scientist slime demon totally stole the show and also won by getting lasers for our dungeon to fend off the forces of light when they came to complain about the human blood we used to wash off our curses.

I had a burger that was more satisfying than any recent burger, although it was real cow meat, so I probably shouldn’t have.

Written: VACATION

Funny how getting up early to do things I like is more appealing than getting up early to make rich fuckwads richer.

Played: A blue devil sorceress composed of 47% noodles by volume in Broken Worlds. The other 53% was unsupported assertions, but her plan to deal with the giant rolling sphere of hate and gold coming to destroy her neighborhood was in fact perfect, or at least very successful. Also implicated: a mendicant monk, a gang boss, an insufficiently-renegade angel, and an acupuncturist abandoned by her divine mother.

Played: A merchant hurrying out of town after an embarrassing mishap in Ryuutama. There could have been fighting, but instead we were very reasonable and helped the homesick witch with her cafe on the sky island of dragons. It was very Kiki’s Delivery Service. The GM provided tea and cookies, which I had not expected at an all-masking con but was very nice.

Played: Follow is more of a story game than a role-playing game, but I was responsible for the grizzled cybered-up old space dog and the AU space pirate captain. We didn’t make a very good SF story, but we did somehow make it onto the treasure asteroid and not get eaten or enslaved by the slime princess who formed from the slime tribbles, despite the loss of the captain and other characters. There were only three people out of four slots, so we ended early and that was okay. Sleep is good.

I tried eating chicken tenders and fries, because that sounded warm and filling and also celebrated Greasy Food Day, but no, I really don’t like regular chicken tenders any more.

Written: VACATION

I did eat some food. I also worried a lot and packed some. I didn’t make a list, I’ve done this often enough that I can remember everything I need before getting on the train.

Got to the hotel and realized I had forgotten all the office supplies like index cards and blank paper and pens, but that’s not a big deal, I can scrounge substitutes.

Spontaneously interacted with some nice enbies from Boston, ate something called a quesabirria, applauded the opening ceremonies, admired how much of Big Bad Con is dedicated to giving opportunities to people not like me, half-listened to a game show thing run by people from the Internet while reading up on games I am soon going to play, went to bed.

After however many years of failing to sleep in unnaturally quiet hotel rooms and being disappointed in white noise apps, I finally realized that all I had to do was type “fan noise” into YouTube.

Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 8-9 (Ryoko Kui): Bizarre transformations! Elf shenanigans! Chilchuk backstory! Giant mushrooms! Laios using his brain! Marcille backstory (and disturbing psychological insight)! Buddy dungoneers! Succubus attack! Mystic visions! Elf backstory! Dungeon backstory!

Read: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 10: Horrifying demon backstory to explain why this conflict is happening.

Written: VACATION.

Or National Feral Cat Day, and Sage and Nightvale are rescues, so they count! But they are sweeties now.

Went to the office which was excessively full of people, ate some tacos, did a customer call and some other work.

Marith has made some samples of laminated handouts for the con games, which look like they will do nicely. If I were actually competent, I would do graphics stuff to fit them on fewer pages and stuff, but I’m not.

Read: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 9 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Characters from the mage test are already recurring, as are enemies from Frieren’s past. And doom.

Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 3 (Ryoko Kui): Deeper into the dungeon means more monsters to eat and more fellow adventurers to regard with caution and drama.

Written: 213. I didn’t finish any books like Kit and other pocket fronds, but I did make my MC suffer.

Most curious event: three people signed up for each of my sessions at Big Bad Con, so I guess we’re doing this.

Went to the office, ate a cold burger and cold fries because I never learn, did a work, made my escape early so that I could be at my real computer at 18:00 for the second wave of signups. Successfully signed up for Gubat Banwa (non-European fantasy!) and In the City of Glass (never heard of it before), so all was well.

Read: Tiger, Tiger vol 1 (Petra Erika Nordlund): Marith tried to get me to read this as a webcomic, but my ever-decreasing ability to read webcomics foiled her. I was able to read it on paper, though, and it’s pretty swell. A noble lady steals her brother’s identity and ship to set off looking for the theological implications of sea sponges. Hilarity, creation myths, monstrous stowaways, and gay longings ensue, and they’re barely past the first port.

Written: 287. Kit wrote EIGHT THOUSAND.

I made some PDFs for handouts for Big Bad Con, on the assumption that my games will happen even though I only have one signup for each session so far. (One is the creator of Princess World, which is kind of alarming but still only counts as one signup.) Marith says she can laminate them, which probably looks nice than just making a bunch of raw printouts.

Read: Lonely Castle in the Mirror vol 3 (Mizuki Tsujimura, Tomo Taketomi): They do the obvious thing after the big revelation at the end of last volume, but it somehow doesn’t work, which is quite a plot twist. They’re getting close to the deadline, too, so I don’t think there can be more than a couple more volumes to explain what’s going on. Unless it’s never explained, of course, which is always a possibility.

Written: 170.

Cephalopod is aware of you!

Also World Teacher’s Day and World Storytelling Day.

Today was first signups for Big Bad Con events. The first two signups for everybody allegedly went live at noon, so I slept in instead of trying to rush to do shopping and get home. I was ready at noon, but as seems to happen every year, the database would not work for several hours, and I didn’t get to go shopping until late afternoon. I did eventually get signed up for a session of Ryuutama and a session of the Kill 6 Billion Demons RPG, and then made it to the store and back in time to go to anime. Barely. It was not my preferred way to spend an afternoon, even if I did get a bunch of crafting done in Shop Titans.

Watched: Bungo Stray Dogs 18-21: More three-sided conflict among Port Mafia, Obnoxious Americans, and the heroes.

Read: ShipCore 3.0 (Erios909): The protagonist and her best friend make it to civilization, not entirely in one piece, and it becomes a lot more apparent why people don’t like AIs to run around doing their own thing. Even the AIs that are part of the power structure are kind of awful, although possibly redeemable with the power of smooches.

Written: 217.

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.

Everybody is usually pretty zombified by the third day of a con, and we had a bonus Fire Alarm Incident at 1am, so today was not a bright or energetic day. I got into a Slugblaster game in Games on Demand, which is something that I’ve wanted to play for a while since it looks like the new generation’s TFOS. There were only two players and the GM was kind of out of it, but we did get to stream us doing skateboard tricks in another dimension while a giant robot launched from a silo, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

The afternoon game was a playtest and apparently the previous run of it showed too many problems, so it got switched to a different in-development game, Gallant. This put off some of the players so again it was only two of us and a GM, but we buckled the swashes and retrieved the stolen documents from the vile Comte. This game’s mechanical gimmick is that you need to decide on three things you want to accomplish each turn, and then once you’ve rolled your pile of d8s, you have to assign them to the three goals, so you may get any combination of success, mixed success, and failure. When it comes out, I will probably buy it for Jeremy, because he is all about swashbuckling in fake France. No idea when that might be, though.

And that was it! I trundled back home and was very blargh.

Read: Gahi-chan! vol 1 (Tirotata): Tentacled yōkai that eat human art to take the shape of the characters therein could be interesting even if lewd, but here it’s just lewd.

Read: Hot Reset (Elliott Kay): Extremely male-fantasy space opera about a down-on-his-luck guy who uses the power of not being a complete dick to get a harem of hot, bi, poly girls and a sweet spaceship, and also blow up the bad guys and save the day.

Written: FAIL.

Oddly, getting up at 7 isn’t any better the second time. It probably doesn’t help that DDP is one of the things I forgot to bring.

This session’s players were less energetic, and I was not up to making up for that, so less fun was had today than yesterday. I did not manage to keep everyone engaged, and also did not learn anything from yesterday’s experience. Plus I forgot how random DW combat is, so the wooden boar running roughshod over the party yesterday was no indicator of future performance. It was still better than not gaming, but not by as much as anyone would like.

Since my evening game started at 18:00, I decided to skip the 14-18 slot in favor of napping. This left me time to get dinner, but I ended up not bothering. I also perused the dealer’s corner, but I mostly don’t want physical books any more. Sorry, publishers of indie games!

The evening slot was Leverage, with the twist that we were helping people who had been screwed over by a corrupt superhero. Because right was on our side, we made pretty much every roll for the whole game, even against the security guard who had a d10 gut telling him something was hinky and the d12 superhero. I was playing the tiny thief, so I got to sneak into the bank data center through the HVAC ducts that no one could possibly fit through, and then later into the museum to get an old costume for the grifter to impersonate the superhero in front of his coconspirators. It was obviously not as smooth as real Leverage caper, but we had to do it in one pass with no revisions, so I think it turned out pretty well all things considered.

Despite my nap, I didn’t mind ending before the scheduled time of midnight.

I set my alarm for 7 and that turned out to be a good move because I was so slow-moving that I would not have made my 9:00 game if I had slept much later.

As usual, I did a terrible job of GMing, with bonus failure in the context of a 4-hour slot, but people had fun anyway, probably because it was the first gaming slot of the con and everyone was still hyped up and full of sleep. They gave me backstory hooks that I could weave in, too. Everyone seemed happy with One Shot World over regular Dungeon World, so I think I’ll stick with it next year if nothing better comes along. I would still prefer something FitD, but it’s not like that would make up for my deficiencies.

After lunch, I played an in-development game called In Her Footsteps (PbtA, but there are only four moves so we just had a rating in each of them instead of separate stats) with a bunch of nice and very gay ladies. We started by making a magical world, which ended up being a river delta that was a crossroads to many worlds of varying levels of magic, then made witches to inhabit that world, and finally had to deal with refugees from one of those worlds bringing us a horrible hungry curse. We got everything sorted, though, and the overworked chairwitch got a hot date with the witch we revivified. (Not my character, I was a giant beaver of lurking comfortably in mist and darkness.)

Evening game was Hello, World, criminal shenanigans in a mysterious virtual universe FitD. It seems to have a lot of lore, most of which we skipped over, but we ended up being catspaws in a three-way conflict among criminal factions, luring one into a trap while they were doing crimes during a surveillance outage and then betraying them. However, while setting up clocks, the GM mentioned all the terrible things previous groups had done to the opposing bruiser, and our bruiser decided we should defeat her with smooches. The climactic showdown ended up being “let’s you and him step outside and fight” while the PCs tried to keep things under control and arrange the collapse of the partially-restored-from-backup building to trap the two bruisers together. It all worked out in the end!

Will buy Hello, World when I get back to my computer, and In Her Footsteps when it comes out (and not just because the GM so kindly shared her It’s-Its with us).