Tons o' games at NURD

[Jürgen Mayer]

My roleplaying convention NURD went extremely well last week.  We had about 150 gamers from all over the country (we even had guests from Hamburg - that's on the other side of Germany), and the statistics say that about 40 of them were female.

There was a lot of gaming going on, from WOD (even Wraith) to Shadowrun to Everway to Risus to a lot of homebrew systems, we also had a LARP in which the players were aliens trapped in the greatest prison of the universe - Earth - and tried to build a spaceship to escape (this involved using a lot of Supersoakers as weapons and I think the players really had fun).

In addition we had exceptional media coverage - I was invited for a radio show interview and we were visited by a reporter from the biggest newspaper in town (and best of all she knew about what RPGs were) - the article should appear tomorrow and if I don't forget, I'll bring it with me to GenCon.

I myself played in two games:
I co-GMed a 12+ hours multigroup AEON/Trinity chronicle with 2 other GMs and 12 players in three groups on saturday. We run such a multigroup game every year and it's one of the more popular events at the con. This adventure was about a fledgling A.I. on an undersea research station, with a Abyss-like mood. One group played scientists from the station, the other group was composed of industry spies and my group was a bunch of conspiracy-paranoid hackers (think of those hacker-friends of Mulder and you get the idea). As always with these multigroup adventures, the first meeting of the groups is what decides in what direction the story goes. Our hope that they would eventually work together against a common enemy (F.S.A. military trying to take control of the station to get hold of the (non-evil) A.I.) only worked at times cause the first meeting wasn't that good. Still, most players enjoyed their roles and the plot twists (my group came on board to rescue an individual who was sending help requests/emergency transmissions, only to find out that they came from an AI). At the end, due to the lack of true cooperation, most characters died, just a small group of 3 or 4 managed to survive. I enjoyed it, and some of the players said that they enjoyed it very much, too.

Sunday, I ran a game of InSpectres, with spectacular success. Everbody had so much fun -  the groups at the adjecting tables constantly had to remind us not to laugh that loud =) The game took place in Berlin, during the soccer world cup finals (cause that was the time when we played). The "Berlinspectres" had to investigate strange happenings at a hotel - it turned out that a cult worshipping outer gods tried to complete the final ritual for the destruction of the world. The adventure also included a talking cat from outer space and a hilarious beginning at Berlinspectres headquarters, located at a real-world Berlin location, the "Beirut Express" restaurant, involving lots of Perry Rhodan novels and a backgammon game. The adventure ended with the planet Pluto being devoured by a Planeteater and Germany losing the world cup finals 0:2. Two players expressed the interest to buy the game afterwards.

Oh, we also gave away some awards at the end of the show, most notably, the Coolest Game of Show award (every award winner voted by the attendees) was won by INSIDE, a strange but funny indie RPG where you played things inside of things (I heard about a game beginning inside of a pie). Don't ask me, I don't know more. The Best GM award was won by a guy who also ran a doubleblind adventure of a homebrew background using the storyteller system.

One guy, Ozzy, took a lot of pictures which are published on the web. You can find'em here: http://www.elysiumgrounds.com/ozzy/misc/8/01.htm
The official report and pics should also go online shortly ( http://www.nurd.de ).

Ron, if this is the wrong forum to post this, I apologize. Feel free to move it to Publishing or wherever it belongs...

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jurgen,

Of course this is the right forum!

Congratulations on NURD and its successful homebrew support. That's a good picture of you; if anyone wants to see this German man walking and talking (as opposed to being static on your screen), then come to GenCon.

Is there any way to acquire a copy of INSIDE?

"Berlinspectres" - fantastic. I am beginning to think that InSpectres should be officially recognized as the You're No Longer in Kansas; Didn't Kansas Suck? game. It seems to be one of the most accessible yet mind-awakening RPGs, especially since it is anything but "system-less" or "diceless" or any of those meaningless code-phrases.

A little pack of Soap, InSpectres, Wuthering Heights, and maybe a couple of others could be like a toolkit we should all be bringing to cons.

Best,
Ron

[Jürgen Mayer]

Congratulations on NURD and its successful homebrew support.

Thanx. When first conceived, we tried to establish NURD as a con for "funny" RPGs, like Paranoia, TOONS, TFFV, HöL etc. and in the following years also encouraged people to play some of the not-so-well-known games. This has worked out pretty well. We always have a nice mix of some games where the people can just laugh, some cool lesser known games, always some homebrews and also enough well-known systems.

Is there any way to acquire a copy of INSIDE?

I'll try. The girl who ran it (and designed it, I think) sent me an email for GM registration, so I'll just ask her. I don't know if it is actually available in electronic form. I remember seeing some nifty charsheets, though.

"Berlinspectres" - fantastic. I am beginning to think that InSpectres should be officially recognized as the You're No Longer in Kansas; Didn't Kansas Suck? game. It seems to be one of the most accessible yet mind-awakening RPGs, especially since it is anything but "system-less" or "diceless" or any of those meaningless code-phrases.

Yeah. I began my InSpectres introduction with: "Ok, people, this is no ordinary RPG. We'll be playing Ghostbusters on acid, and it doesn't work like other systems. You will not roll the dice to see if your character succeeds or not, but rather if you or the GM gets to tell what happens. [pause... much "that's cool!"-shouting ensues...] In which city do you wanna play?"
After that you normally have them hooked. Also, everybody seems to love the nifty charsheets.
They chose Berlin, and one of the players dropped the business card of that Beirut Express on the table which was quickly used as HQ.
(At my last InSpectres game, they chose to play in Nuremburg, and set the HQ directly on top of the FLGS =)