Phantasm Con. Report

[epweissengruber]

The top floor of Peterboro's old town hall.  A set of risers faced a stage, creating a nicely sheltered area for the players.  A weekend-long Battletech demo occupied the stage.  There were 10 long tables on the floor.  The sequestered nature of the space was not oppressive: the Hall had a lofty ceiling and very tall windows.  It was a very good atmostphere.  The convention floor was packed with gamers -- it's much better to see a medium-sized floor space all filled up than it is for a few sparsely attended tables to be swallowed up by a cavernous ballroom.  The SCA showed up to do some bashing, Coburg Ontario's Ed Greenwood ran some well-received games and gave a good talk about the game and publishing biz.  And I was quite happy with my two sessions.

Sorcerer:
- good response to the session
- a couple of people jotted down the Forge & Adept Press websites for further consultation
- the sorcerors were: a burnt-out script writer with a book-devouring evil tome, a BraZilian Sanzoku, a Psyche-Junky w. a vicious basher dwelling in a syringe, and a player in the F\fetish underground with a sentient necklace
- I ran the training session from the rulebook: it was a combat-oriented game, with some good dark psychological exporation of revenge, the master/slave relationship in sexuality, and some clever tactical deceptions of the house-sized demon and his allies
- the screenwriter has something very nasty planned for Yvonne, the Junkie used very clever roleplay to get the trust of the sorcerer who had killed her friend
- the fetishist arranged a nice reconciliation with his master (and the female player did great justice to the male character), which in turn led to great bonus die when the master was nabbed by wall-crawling demons
- everyone found ways to keep their demons happy AND to deploy their demonic buddies only when needed
- a whiteboard covered with dice maps allowed me to cut between three conflicts simultaneously AND link them together as they became resolved

Hero Quest
- I riffed on the "Rain of Fish" scenario from the main rulebook
- I had a fairly complicated relationship map and a premise (that should have been more clearly stated but was picked up on by 1/2 of the players): a what point do you cancel a debt?
- Eventhough the premise was not clearly stated, Hero Quest's potential for generating character and premise centred play came through
- Highlights: players chastizing a minor godling for forgetting to pay back to the ocean a recompense for all that he had taken (quite the opposite of the pity that the scenario tries to elicit for the forgetten fisher-god); a hunter paying back a poacher by canibalizing him in the same manner in which the poacher ate the head of a sacred stag, and depositing the poacher's "remains" at a woodland shrine, a feisty Vingan flinging a rapist into the pool of a demonic shark, and a Son of the Night sending his trolkin to do some quick looting while the heroes fought the devil fish
- Great use of magic augments, personality augments, non-combat skills, religious rituals
- I laid on the surreal and bizzare too thickly, I think

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

In the Sorcerer game, were there any Humanity checks or Humanity gain rolls? For what, and what happened?

In the HeroQuest game, I really like your observation that the players took responsibility for judging the situation, and most especially, the divine character. I think it's central to that game that a god never considers himself or herself wrong, and that the people in the story literally bring morality into reality.

What was the downside of the surreal elements? I tend to like them a lot in my Glorantha games.

Best,
Ron

[epweissengruber]

Humanity Checks:
- truth be told, the players worked with the humanity of their opponents, but I did not bring challenge their Humanity enough.  They either detected Humanity loss with their Lore, or used Taint to debilitate opponents low on Humanity.  The players were intrigued by a system that incorporated character exploration into its core mechanics but I didn't exploit that angle.


Weirdness in HeroQuest
- Look, even the Star Wars session I played in was a basic dungeon crawl.  I think that dodging pickerel falling from the sky, negotiating with self-pitying godlings, and stroking the egos of self-involved clan chiefs was just too far from what the players were used to.


I was lucky to get some very "funky" players in the Sorcerer game.  It was quite funny to watch the Vampire LARPers play at decadence -- I had players narrate fetishistic burlesque shows and mete out junky justice in a meat lockers.  They were ready for more -- I guess I was the one who was affraid of things going too far.

In terms of social contract: my players were four friends who had gamed and socialized together for many years.  I was a stranger at the con and a stranger to them, playing a strange game.  They were the ones willing to talk about extreme situations -- I pulled them back into a demonic superhero antics.