Hey everyone, it seems that I survived the ninth incarnation of my comfy little local con NURD (Nurembergs Ultimate Roleplaying Disaster) - and it was a blast. Approximately 120-150 eager roleplayers (the list on which the attendees are counted _always_ gets lost on sunday) flocked to the con location and played like it was their last chance before the apocalypse (insert random clam joke here). The weather was great, and so lots of'em played in our big park outside the house, even at night by torchlight. About 50 people played the whole night, too.

I saw a lot of cool games being played, like Everway, Teenagers from Outer Space, Tales From the Floating Vagabond, a Fudge Fantasy multi-group game with two groups and two GMs (and exploding dwarves from what I heard), Feng Shui and HöL, to name a few I remember of the top of my head. Norbert Franz, co-author of Cartoon Action Hour, was there and offered several demo games. I heard about one home-brewed system named "ERoS - Easy Roleplaying System", but I didn't get a chance to talk to the author (and ask him about the title, of course).

Besides organization, I found the time to participate in two games:

Firstly, Little Fears, as a player. At the side of the small park I mentioned before was a playground, which I suggested to the GM as our playing area when he asked me about an unusual place to play. We scheduled the chargen to begin at dusk, so that we could start playing in the dark. We brought some torches and found a little table in the playground to roll some dice on.

Needless to say, the atmosphere and moot in the playground at night were absolutely fantastic. We were a little kids gang on a camping tour with our school: I played a six year old kinda underdog who was primarily in the gang because the other boys wanted my older sister, who was ordered to babysit me (played by another player), to be in the gang, too. On the last night, we sneaked away from the camping place to explore an old playground, of which people whispered that it was haunted by the ghosts of the children who lived in an orphanage nearby that burned to the ground. It was scary, but after a while we found out that the ghost of a kid there was trying to rescue us from the ghost of a grown-up who tried to catch us. In the end we mananged to destroy this minion of Closetland and broke the curse of the last remaining orphan ghost, who became a friend and member of our gang during the game.

What I liked about this game:
- Of course, playing the game in a playground at night - absolutely recommended.
- The GM making scary noises. His face was also quite scary in the torchlight.
- On the way to the playground (in game), one of the characters began to talk about how we went to the playground a few days before during the day. We began to talk about all the cool stuff we had fun with there... a wooden tower, a mini cable railway, a rope brigde etc. The GM modelled the playground after our descriptions - nice.
- The GM wanted us to read our LF charsheets in the voice of the child to introduce us to our friends - a great way to get into character. Everyone involved stayed in character after that.

Secondly, Unknown Armies, as GM, sunday afternoon.
Actually we were two GMs - I teamed up with the Little Fears GM (which I didn't know before the con, but we agreed to team up for this a couple of days before the con via email - he's the co-author of the German indy game DeGenesis, btw). We ran Greg Stolze's scenario "Jailbreak" from the "One Shots" UA supplement.

The scenario is about four criminals who escape from jail, take three hostages (including a prison officer) and end up trapped in the house of an old mechanomancer and his wife for one night (who also become hostages, of course) during a thunderstorm. We had nine players - four jailbreakers and five hostages (most of the characters had absolutely no occult knowledge). It is a pure character driven adventure: throw nine totally different personalities in one place, add strange occurances (mechanomancy constructs) and watch the conflict unfold.

We chose to run this scenario with as many LARP elements as possible. The only weapons in the game were one gun and a taser stick and we had a squirt gun and a plastic stick for the characters who were carrying them at any given time. The other GM brought some stickers which showed gun wounds/blood on them (these are included in an old Underground supplement, btw) - we used them to mark wounded players. We had a seperate, darkened room in which we set up the living room, complete with table and a sofa (great: not enough places for all players to sit, which helped to get actions going on) and also a dining room. Another small darkened room was there for whenever someone was leaving the ground floor to explore the house. It was a huge success, the players enjoyed it tremendously.

What I liked about this game:
- The half-LARP set-up. I think with just sitting around a table and rolling some dice, this particular scenario has no chance to get as intense as it did. Splitting up the players when the characters split up was also useful for creating paranoia ("He is away for a pretty long time now...") The players had their character sheets and rolled the dice wherever they were, but the fact that most of them didn't sit down most of the time helped to keep them doing something.
- The character sheets had a half-page summary of the who the character is - a definitive plus. The UA system has very few numbers and a lot of descriptors which tell you exactly how to play your character in different situations and it worked great. Every player really got into their character. Once the action started and the first conflicts began to arise between characters, the scenario was unstoppable.
- During one scene, one of the characters explored the cellar (where the mechanomancer built all his clockworks), alone. We went to the small darkened room, which had lots of bookshelfs with board games on them. While his character was stumbling through the dark looking for a light switch, and I whispered that something seemed to be moving just out of his sight, I accidentally bumped into a bookshelf, which caused a very heavy board game to drop onto the floor with a loud bang. The player jumped and let out a cry and was really shocked for a moment (so was I). I couldn't have planned it better.
- The criminals had very different personalities which made it hard for them to cooperate. Nice chance for the hostages to gain an advantage.
- A nice scene, late in the game, occured when the most brutal of the criminals ran into the living room in rage, bearing a big axe and covered in blood, and heading straight for the already wounded prison warden. Everyone was surprised and scared and thought that this would be the last breath of the warden. The criminal stopped, handed the axe over to the warden and hid in some dark corner. Then, the out-of-control killer clockwork robot entered the room, apparently chasing the criminal.

To make a long post short: I had a very, very fun weekend.

Just goes to prove once again that Jailbreak rocks, as does the whole idea of PC v PC action in Con games.

Mike

The first photos from NURD 9 have hit the web, courtesy of Andreas "Ozzy" Beck:
http://www.elysiumgrounds.com/ozzy/misc/n9/01.htm

Be warned: lots of strange roleplayers inside ;)