Demon Con I!

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Hey, we did Demon Con! It turned out successfully. I'll run down some of the stuff about it.

THE GOOD PARTS
The room was set up just how we wanted. If you think this seems like a trivial point, believe me, getting and setting up space at a university campus is always a true hassle. I had to use Professor Voice on the phone at least twice during the process.

All the members of the club who could make it were enthusiastic and eager to play games all day. The play never stopped for eight hours, whether scheduled or non-scheduled.

We beat the (admittedly low) goal of 9+ people attending, including some university students who'd heard about it. (That detail is a big plus, actually. The whole idea was to alert campus people that the club exists and that we like doin' what we do.)

Some Forge folks showed up, including Mike Holmes, Ralph Mazza (Valamir), and Tim Koppang (fleetingGlow). Total attendance was about 20 people, which, using CodCon as a model, should expand fairly quickly over a couple of annual repetitions.

I definitely plan on making Demon Con something of a Forgecon from now on.

THE LESS GOOD PARTS
The date turned out to be a disaster. Not only did a bunch of people end up with schedule conflicts (a surprising number of baby showers occurred on June 1, for instance), but it also turned out to be the annual Bookstall Fair in Chicago, meaning that all of the vendors needed to be there instead. Therefore we were a bit lower in attendance than we could have been by about 10 people, and there were no vendors.

I confess with great guilt that I didn't get a chance to play Le Mon Mouri. I am now determined to play this game and will nastily regain Grangou upon anyone who impedes this goal.

One of the club members who was scheduled for a gaming slot didn't show up at all, without notice of any kind, so he is now In Big Trouble. Oh the joys of being a faculty advisor.

OTHER STUFF
I finally managed to design and run a Sorcerer demo that showcases the game's strengths. Until now, most of my demos were combat/sorcery set-pieces, indistinguishable from an Unknown Armies or Over the Edge one-shot. I'm currently writing up guidelines and materials for it, which will probably become available via the website.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

Well worth the 3 hour drive for me.  Although it could have lasted longer.

<in grouchy old man voice> Back in my day game cons didn't end till midnight...and then late night gaming started...we wouldn't get to bed until 3 hours after we'd already gotten up the next morning.   That's the way it was...and we liked it  ;-)

The two hour sessions worked better than I expected.  It does force the GM to move things along more speedily.  Our CoC game didn't really take off until the last half hour of the session.

Played a demo game of Universalis, tried out some new rules that greatly streamlines the whole game that worked very well.

Tried out a new game called CraftMagic that has a great deal of potential.  The demo scenario, unfortuneately, didn't do a very good job of featuring the games strengths, but we could tell there was something interesting there.

I didn't get to play in the Sorcerer demo but what I observed of it seemed like a very strong demo scenario.

Oh, in case any one was wondering.  Don't waste your money on the new WizKids minis game Hero Clix.  I didn't think it would be possible, but the rules for that game are even MORE horrible than Mage Knight.   Mage Knight USED to be the most broken minis game I'd ever seen...but now there's a new winner.  

Hero Clix...the game where flying heroes can't attack or be attacked by heroes on the ground...where you can't run up to someone and punch them on the same turn...and where you can't take two turns in a row without damaging yourself.   If you like to collect malformed, flash laden rubber figures poorly painted by chinese children...then this is the game for you.  Otherwise...skip it entirely.

[xiombarg]

So, we going to see more more detailed Actual Play stuff from Demoncon? I'd like to know how the individual sessions went, especially since I didn't get to attend...

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

I played:

SIN - a homebrew from one of the students at DePaul. It's kind of a cross between Soap and ... um, other stuff. It's probably going to be presented on-line soon, so I won't describe it here, but it's really, really, really fun and wacky. About the best role-playing Gamism in the kind of shared-Director style of Pantheon that I've seen.

THE RIDDLE OF STEEL - a scenario involving a ship. Jake implores me to reveal scenario material about The Riddle of Steel on a ship, as he seems to feel strongly about ships, I guess. I plan to write it up for a TROS-demo download. I like this one because the characters are all together but they are definitely not a "group."

CRAFT MAGIC - another DePaul homebrew, with some very good ideas and mechanics. I agree with Ralph that the scenario didn't prompt using those ideas much during play, although we were all intrigued both by the system/characters and the setting - which was surprisingly eery.

SORCERER - aaaaahhh. This was so fun. I was especially impressed by the extent to which the players wanted to work with and develop their characters' emotions. As I say, I plan to write this up in detail. The scenario? High school reunion. Grosse Pointe Blank meets The Ninth Gate.

Best,
Ron

P.S. If you're getting the idea that I'm polluting the DePaul students with the idea that a game one writes (or that a pal writes) can be just as good as a game one buys, or better, then you're right.

[joshua neff]

Crap! I really wish I could've been there. Dumb moving-to-Milwaukee-on-the-first.

Ron, I'm particularly interested in the Sorcerer one-off, since I've volunteered to demo the game at GenCon (if you still want me to).

[Valamir]

So, we going to see more more detailed Actual Play stuff from Demoncon? I'd like to know how the individual sessions went, especially since I didn't get to attend...

Well, I played Call of Cthulhu where I got crushed to death by a living plant thing which had assumed the form of my wealthy uncle.  Mike, the smarmy weasely journalist, managed to survive.  Pretty standard CoC craziness.

Universalis went very well.  I started us off with a western.  That got quickly modified to "weird" western.  It was set in a mining town infested by zombies.  It also featured one of those odd gaming moments.  I had just finished describing the timbered mine shafts (you know those shafts held up by timber bracing) when one player said "Timber Mine...how the heck do you get timber from a mine".  Somehow that miss hearing transformed into strange metalic trees which absorbed silver from the ground in their roots thus becoming a living "petrified" forest.  This then led to the introduction of Bob the miner who possessed "Betsy" the Steam Powered Silver Tree cutting chain saw.

The plot went like this:  The game started with Dirty Pete the old prospector and the skinny piano player in the local saloon.  Ruby the gambler went to Dirty Pete with news of a new Silver Tree strike that was impossible to get to due to high Zombie infestation.  Dirty Pete went to Ulysseus -- the drunken, preacher, zombie hunter -- whose mission in life was to save the zombies souls before permanently replanting them in the ground with his shot gun and the aid of his trusty zombie sniffing ghost dog.  Bribed with a bottle of whiskey, Ulysseus agreed to help clear out the zombies.

Meanwhile, Zeke, another zombie hunter, and his sidekick Ronnie were trying to muscle in on the arrangement in order to collect the bounty on the zombie heads for themselves.

Also meanwhile, the local sherriff had sent for Dirk, the most famous zombie hunter in the west (whom his daughter had a long distance crush on).  As it turns out, Dirk and Ruby had been married once until Ruby left.  Dirk was now dying of some terminal disease ala Doc Holiday.

After a brief scene in an abandoned church, Ulysseus, Ruby, and Dirty Pete headed out to the new mine where they found huge numbers of zombies mindlessly (even for zombies) heading into the mine shaft for no apparent reason.  Bob (the miner with the steam saw) had been attempting to jump the claim and was now trying to escape from the mine with his ill gotten loot.

Just as the would be zombie slayers were getting ready, Zeke arrived with the sheriff in tow.  The sheriff (at Zeke's prompting) informed Ulysseus that he couldn't continue because he hadn't filed the proper zombie hunting license paperwork.  Zeke figured with Ulysseus out of the way, he could keep all of the bounty for himself.  Ulysseus complied with signing the forms but instead of waiting for them to be properly filed he pulled a propane camp stove out of his pack, burned the forms and as the smoke floated up to the sky announced he'd just filed the paperwork with God, and anyone who had a problem with that should consult with Him.

Seeing the fire, Bob ran towards it for protection.  Unfortuneately the zombies saw it too and it snapped them out of their trance.  They began to surround the characters.

Figuring that further argueing about forms was pointless the heroes girded themselves for battle with the zombie hordes.  Dirty Pete went down in a hurry.  Then it was discovered that Bob the Miner had been bitten while in the mine, and had slowly been transforming into a zombie.  By the time he reached the party he was more interested in brains than protection.  A funny scene commenced where Ruby shot the steam saw out of Bob's hands, Bob picked it back up, it was shot out his hands again and so on.

Zeke meanwhile slunk away leaving his side kick Ronnie to get eaten.

Just as Bob the zombie miner grabbed Ruby and tried to bite her, Dirk the famous zombie hunter arrived on the scene and spattered Bob's brains all over Ruby's now strategically torn dress.  He then rode off towards the mine, lit a stick of dynamite from his cigar and tossed it into the entrance bringing down the mine shaft and trapping many zombies inside.

Dirk then went down (I forget why) and Ruby, sparked by her old flame, ran to him as did Sally, the sheriff's daughter, who has a crush on him.  We then learned that Dirk's fatal disease was actually Zombieism and Dirk was transforming into one there on the ground.  When Ruby saw this and tried to kill him, Sally stopped her.  Dirk, having completed his transformation, then bit out Ruby's throat.  

At that moment the mountain started to rumble and in a lightning laden scene straight out of a mad scientist film, a piano rose out of the bluff being played by none other than the skinny piano player from the opening scene who'd been nothing but a throwaway character up until then.  He in fact, was controling the zombies through his music and had summoned them into the mine.  Apparently scorned long ago by Ruby he set out to become a master of the occult in order to take his revenge.

The game wrapped up because of time constraints at this point but I envision the Sheriff going down trying to save Sally from Zombie Dirk and Zombie Ruby while Ulysseus makes good his escape with the help of the trusty ghost dog...fade to black.

It should be noted, as a plug for the game (which I'm hoping to have the final form finished this week) that all of the above came from zero prep in a spur of the moment game because one of the planned slots didn't happen as planned.  Most of the good stuff came from three other first time players who picked up the now simplified concepts right away and ran with them.

[Mike Holmes]

Ralph! you've violated the Prime Directive, "No breathless 'and then' recounting"!

But I'd also point out how all that story happened in less than two hours including teaching all the rules. :-)

Oh, and the rest was a blast as well. Yes my Smarmy reporter survived the CoC adventure. This despite my best attempts to get him trapped on the roof and killed by animated vines. One of my few failures in CoC to sustain a truely grizzly death. Oh, well, can't win 'em all. The best part for me was getting to misquote people left and right to try and make a newsstory out of the backplot. Little did my character know how unneccessary that would be! Of course after publishing his weird tale, he'll probably never work in publishing again, and have to take up, oh, I dunno, investigation of the paranormal or something.

Craft magic was pretty cool. I liked the characters, and especially Ron's interperetation of a new age tree-hugging pseudo-feminist. Any real feminists watching would have been appalled.

And Hero-Clicks is bad, though, I don't think it's quite as bad as Ralph does. Still, I had fun playing, as I got to use Magneto to fling Wolverine about, and Pyro fried mobs of Hydra agents being led by the Kingpin. Nifty! Still, the system needs work.

The best part, as always, was just getting together with gamers to talk all things gaming. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Mike

[Tim C Koppang]

I had to convince one of my friends to come along, but in the end he was glad that he showed up.  I played in three of the four sessions, those being Sin, Riddle of Steel, and (of course) Sorcerer.  I finally got to play Sorcerer.  Yeah!

I must say that I enjoyed each and every one of the games.  In Riddle I got to play, as Ron put it, the butthead, and scenes in Sorcerer ranged from a group of high school buds smoking a joint behind the bleachers to a very bloody and morally questionable series of bindings.  But what I really want to plug here is this new game Sin.

Without explaining the rules in detail, lets just say that the game involves a shifting GM, a bunch of hell spawns attempting to corrupt a lonely human (another player character), and a whole mess of gremlins.  The game pits all the players in a race to corrupt the human and send him to your own branch of hell before the others get a chance, but things get really interesting when players start to form alliances with each other.  To anyone who has played Diplomacy, you know how quickly these alliances can turn on you.  One players tries to bribe the human with a brand new yacht - I just summon a gremlin to eat the boat.  Great fun.  [Insert Demonic Laugh Here]

Ron,

As a note to you: Mike W. really enjoyed playing in your Sorcerer game.  As you stated in the post game wrap-up, we all had something invested in his poorly dressed, stoner of a character - and the interest rubbed off on him.  As a demo game, you certainly sold him.

[furashgf]

More about CraftMagic!

[Buddha Nature]

Dude!  More about Sin!  URL! URL!

-Shane

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Heh. All these calls for Craft Magic and Sin talk, and I'm going to maunder about Sorcerer instead. Toooo bad! (Seriously, when each becomes available, the URL is going up fast.)

Tim (fleetingGlow), you and Mike were among the better role-players I have ever encountered right off the bat, ie, without hangin' out first, etc. I didn't get a chance to say goodbye and thanks for showing up.

Did the Sorcerer demo communicate the strengths of the game, do you think? (H'm, that question is unanswerable. Let me try again.) What strengths or elements of play did the demo bring forward, for you?

Best,
Ron

[Jürgen Mayer]

It might be interesting to know that one of the oldest regular cons in the Nuremberg area is also called Demon-Con.

Slightly off topic: The coolest con this side of the Mississippi, NURD, organized by yours truly and running in its 8th incarnation at the end of June, has already received GM registrations for some indie games, e.g. Cartoon Action Hour and Risus. Maybe I'll find the time to run an InSpectres, too.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jurgen,

OK then, we are Demon Con USA. That works for me.

Congratulations on the NURD con! It would be incredibly valuable and useful if you were to write up any sort of retrospective or set of guidelines for organizing local conventions. A link to that in the Resources section would be a real asset for the Forge.

Best,
Ron

[Jürgen Mayer]

It would be incredibly valuable and useful if you were to write up any sort of retrospective or set of guidelines for organizing local conventions.

I fear that I don't have enough time at the moment to write a whole organizing conventions article right now, but I'll try to remember doing that when I'm done with that book (for those not in the know, I'm currently working on German TLE) and the con is actually over. Is there something that I should address specifically?

Little bit of background info: NURD (Nurembergs Ultimate Roleplaying Disaster) was founded by me and some friends in 1995. We had backup by the local board gaming club, who gave us the chance to use their house (with huge garden - it's great playing outside in summer and we were lucky with the weather almost any year). The size of the con is about 130-150 gamers (we wouldn't have the place for more, anyway). But it is a pure roleplaying con, no wargames, no trading cards - roleplayer's heaven.

[Tim C Koppang]

Ron said:
"Tim (fleetingGlow), you and Mike were among the better role-players I have ever encountered right off the bat, ie, without hangin' out first, etc. I didn't get a chance to say goodbye and thanks for showing up."

Oh <blush> thanks.  Thanks for having the con, and thanks to everyone who showed up and ran games and played games.  Seriously, if DemonCon II is in the future, I'd love to come.  Thankfully, it sounds as if there will be a repeat.

Ron said:
"Did the Sorcerer demo communicate the strengths of the game, do you think? (H'm, that question is unanswerable. Let me try again.) What strengths or elements of play did the demo bring forward, for you?"

I'm going to list the stengths first and then elaborate.  If you are looking for a weakness, then skip to the end.

1) It made me want to run a longer campaign
2) I felt like my demon belonged to me, instead of it being just some sort of power focus
3) Demon powers were not just superpowers
4) Even though I got the impression that my character was standoffish, there was a feeling of comradery once things got rolling
5) It was mysterious <oooooh> and yet resolved nicely within the two hour limit
6) There wasn't a lot of combat (not a bad thing) and yet I still felt like there was a lot of blood (also not a bad thing)

The character I chose to play was more serious than the previous to games that I played earlier in the day, and so I had a harder time getting into character so to speak.  Plus, I was wrapped up with the stoner who kept making me laugh.  But regardless, by the time I was done with the game I felt like I knew enough weirdness about my character that I wanted to play him in another session.  So the game got me interested in my character.  At the same time I wanted to see everyone else's character appear in later sessions.  Not just the stoner, but everyone had their interestiong points.  This lead nicely into number 4.

Once I got through with my intrigue in the school records office and mingled a bit with the crowds, I was drawn in with the rest of the players.  Even though my character had my secrest to keep, our common background pushed us together.  I didn't feel like I had to group myself with them in the traditional dungeon crawl style, but I also didn't have a problem doing so or that it would violate my character's personality.  But if the group did break up, I was interested enough to sit back and take it all in.

Next, the demons that each character had were customized.  I felt like my demon was my own, or at least a close part of me.  I started with my demon in want, and in some regards I wish that I had explored that a bit more just for the hell of it, but I also felt a need to feed my demon and keep him happy.  I think when you had the thing pop out of my keychain as the snake and ask me for protection from the hidden powers I developed an immediate sense of responsibility for its wellbeing.  Great technique.

Moving along... my demon wansn't a supernatural zap gun full of baddass stopping power and lightning!  Yeah!  Instead he was a seperate being with powers that were mysterious and unpredictable.

I also didn't mind that there really wasn't a standup fight.  We all got a glimpse of just how scary demons can be when the limo driver got his head ripped off in a bloody mess, and we all learned about extreme binding rituals in that last mess of a scene.  Running a game that is both entertaining and combat-free is a good thing in a time when most games still spend the majority of their page count on combat rules.  I know it's possible, but the demo proved it.

Now for a critisism.  I know you spent a lot of time preparing for the game, and it showed.  However, I would have liked to know a bit more about my character's high school past.  You listed a couple of people that I knew back in the day, but I didn't really know how my character would react to these people.  If you wanted me to author these past realationships, then you should have made that point a bit more clear.  Otherwise, I would have liked to know about past girlfriends, who liked me, who despised me?  Did I have a good relationship with Ms Krough, or did I hate her guts?  Who did I hang out with?  Who was my favorite teacher?  What did I do in my freetime?  Etc.  All I had were some personality quirks to go off of.  As a solution you might want to allow players talk about this ahead of time (this may take to long though).  Or inform them that they can create these relationships on the fly.  Or just write a bit more on the character bios that you hand out.  All this talk about relationship maps, and I didn't feel like I had any relationships back in highschool (my character, not me <grin> ).

All in all good.  A thumbs up.