Fuller GASPCon report
Over the weekend, I attended Gaspcon, at the behest of Jason Godesky (who we played Polaris with some time ago. I had never done any gaming with GASP previously (though multiple groups of players I knew were involved). So I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Nonetheless I accepted responsibility for running three games at the con and went to see what would happen.
Gaspcon is basically the smallest con I've ever attended. There were a few dozen people there, mostly locals, so you kept seeing the same people in different games. The guy who played in my game then ran a game I played in, and we both played together in another game, along with people I saw or played with in other games. This is a sort of different feel than at larger cons (though it's surprising how you run into the same people over and over at Origins or the like). Everyone was very friendly: the event organizers seemed eager to see that I had a good time, and identified me early on as someone not normally associated with GASP.
I was supposed to run three games over the weekend: Executive Decision, Bloody Forks of the Ohio and Department Nine. Only one of these had enough players show up to play. But in the other two slots I played some other games, and it all worked out.
(It seemed like there were more indie games than there was demand for such at the con, so we often had three GMs at adjacent tables unhappy that their games didn't have enough players, which would then collapse into a single table with enough people.)
The games I played were:
The Fifth World, Jason's game set centuries after the apocalypse. It was very interesting how this game took familiar places and made them strange and wondrous. I liked this game more then I expected to. My cannibal guardsman from the tribe that lived at the point had moral dilemmas, joined the good tribe that worshiped the Incline, fought panthers in Oakland and helped explore the abandoned tunnels below Carnegie Mellon. That's all pretty neat.
Bloody Forks of the Ohio, the sole game I successfully GMed over the weekend. I plan a more in-depth discussion of that later (maybe tomorrow).
Mouse Guard, which was not entirely successful as a game. I still didn't have a handle on the rules by the end of the game, and the story and characters were particularly thin. It did not do anything to sell me on the game.
Don't Rest Your Head, in which I played a doctor throwing himself into his work so hard that he hadn't slept in weeks, and was hearing electronic devices whisper people's secrets. This was probably my favorite game of the con, even if my real-world sleep deprivation meant that my character wound up fairly passive and inconsequential for the last big set piece.
Finally, I played In a Wicked Age, using a homebrewed Oracle (basically a randomized situation/fictional element generator) based off of remaking local native american myths into fodder for swords and sorcery tales. And that worked pretty well, though the local aspect might have been played up more (maybe that was bad card luck). In contrast to Mouse Guard, this made me see why the internet loves the game so much.
Also this weekend, we saw The Men Who Stare at Goats (which I liked more than the average person is likely to) and attended a bonfire in celebration of four or so birthdays that occur in November. So I had a good weekend, basically.
Gaspcon is basically the smallest con I've ever attended. There were a few dozen people there, mostly locals, so you kept seeing the same people in different games. The guy who played in my game then ran a game I played in, and we both played together in another game, along with people I saw or played with in other games. This is a sort of different feel than at larger cons (though it's surprising how you run into the same people over and over at Origins or the like). Everyone was very friendly: the event organizers seemed eager to see that I had a good time, and identified me early on as someone not normally associated with GASP.
I was supposed to run three games over the weekend: Executive Decision, Bloody Forks of the Ohio and Department Nine. Only one of these had enough players show up to play. But in the other two slots I played some other games, and it all worked out.
(It seemed like there were more indie games than there was demand for such at the con, so we often had three GMs at adjacent tables unhappy that their games didn't have enough players, which would then collapse into a single table with enough people.)
The games I played were:
The Fifth World, Jason's game set centuries after the apocalypse. It was very interesting how this game took familiar places and made them strange and wondrous. I liked this game more then I expected to. My cannibal guardsman from the tribe that lived at the point had moral dilemmas, joined the good tribe that worshiped the Incline, fought panthers in Oakland and helped explore the abandoned tunnels below Carnegie Mellon. That's all pretty neat.
Bloody Forks of the Ohio, the sole game I successfully GMed over the weekend. I plan a more in-depth discussion of that later (maybe tomorrow).
Mouse Guard, which was not entirely successful as a game. I still didn't have a handle on the rules by the end of the game, and the story and characters were particularly thin. It did not do anything to sell me on the game.
Don't Rest Your Head, in which I played a doctor throwing himself into his work so hard that he hadn't slept in weeks, and was hearing electronic devices whisper people's secrets. This was probably my favorite game of the con, even if my real-world sleep deprivation meant that my character wound up fairly passive and inconsequential for the last big set piece.
Finally, I played In a Wicked Age, using a homebrewed Oracle (basically a randomized situation/fictional element generator) based off of remaking local native american myths into fodder for swords and sorcery tales. And that worked pretty well, though the local aspect might have been played up more (maybe that was bad card luck). In contrast to Mouse Guard, this made me see why the internet loves the game so much.
Also this weekend, we saw The Men Who Stare at Goats (which I liked more than the average person is likely to) and attended a bonfire in celebration of four or so birthdays that occur in November. So I had a good weekend, basically.