Ambercon NW 2021 report
So this was another con we got to attend electronically, which is just as well - given how uncertain the COVID situation is, even if we'd been willing to travel, I don't think we could have guaranteed being able to travel to the US months in advance. It did mean that we missed out on seeing various of our favourite people in person for another year, but we got to play with some of them at least.
Slot 1 - Further Information Is Not Available Here (GMing)
People who have read my previous reports may remember that we ran another game called this in 2013. It's set in the same universe, and we did use some of the background fluff that we came up with for that game, but it was with completely different characters and about a different situation. As before, it's about time travelling universe hoppers who have about 6000 years to play with. The plot this time was focussed around two things that came up in character creation - I told one player that you couldn't create clones with time travel powers, even in the high tech end of time, then another player wanted to play a shapeshifting clone timetraveler, the only survivor from his batch.
Aha, we thought. This sounds like a plot to us.
It ended up being part of a plot from a group from beyond the End of History, beyond the point which time travelers can't travel back from, where apparently reality and history is coming apart. Naturally, the people who've managed to survive in this half existence want out, and the existence of the shapeshifting time traveler was basically the most successful part of an organic probe they sent back.
Despite a few opportunities, there wasn't any combat - the players ended up just talking with everyone and making nice, including helping a science team from the future adjust to the current conditions so they can survive without tearing a hole in reality.
It was enough fun we might have to run another game in this universe at some point.
Slots 2 and 3 - Snakes and Ladders
This was a pair of short adventures that were in the same universe and had the same characters. The first game was us, as recognised members of the royal family the King could easily bully into doing his bidding, being sent to investigate why an Amber embassy to a nearby country has disappeared. It turned out the king was sacrificing people with any blood connection to the royal family of Amber in a nasty magical ritual. (Which, given they're not a celibate lot and have been around for hundreds of years, is a surprising amount.)
My character was Gwen, a shapeshifter of surpassing skill, who had been doing her best to push the bounds of shapeshifting as basically a postdoc aiming at becoming the equivalent of a professor. Unfortunately, the particular bound she had been pushing was the large form problem - basically when you change into something too large, your reactions necessarily slow because of the time it takes for signals to tarvel down nerves. She'd come up with a system where a network of sub-brains could approximate what she'd do, more or less, at least until her actual consciousness could make decisions. She went off to an out of the way world, and spread herself out over a few square miles. Unfortunately, despite being fairly out of the way, some of the locals attacked part of her, leading to a defensive reaction. Basically, the local part of her swallowed them and used their biomass to spread a bit further. Which led to escalation, more swallowing, more growth - which also contributed to it taking longer and longer for her consciousness to be able to come to a decision, and eventually led to her swallowing the world.
Basically, she accidentally Annihilationed a world. Whoops.
Eventually, she managed to sort herself out to the extent of budding a human body off with her consciousness, more or less. The problem is that various memories from the people she'd absorbed were mixed up in there, despite her best efforts, and caused something akin to a mental breakdown. So she abandoned her academic career and headed off home to Amber, to try and piece herself together. (And incidentally causing a lot of pain to the people she's closest to, like her mother, since she's got a lot of memories that aren't quite right.)
Anyway, she had some skills that were useful in the investigation, but mostly she was still fairly subdued, despite it being a year since she got back. There was a part when a magical effect temporarily influenced her, altering her thinking, and after that was quickly broken she had a brief panic attack, because not thinking like herself is one of her things. On the bright side, she managed to help the queen, who had been magically compelled by the king so many times that her mind fell apart when the enchantments were removed, because rebuilding minds is something she has a lot of experience with now!
Also, apparently the princess recognised my character, despite the fact that as far as my character remembered, she'd never been to the country before. Which was more than a little worrying. She never did get to the bottom of that.
The second adventure was investigating dreams all of the player characters had started getting. We eventually managed to track down the source, an amazingly powerful cousin who had seen her grandfather kill her father in front of her when she was five, had subsequently been locked in a prison, and certainly at the moment was kind of stuck in the mindset of a five year old, despite being amazingly powerful. She'd been used by some people, including the now deceased king from the first adventure, and she'd reached out to us in dreams, because she felt like we were 'safe' relatives. Luckily, all of our reactions were to help her, which is just as well because Gwen became instantaneously immensely protective of her and an enraged super skilled shapeshifting who can excrete anaesthetic gas is never a good thing, especially in enclosed quarters.
The game ended with the cousin being rescued and Gwen is currently planning on taking her on a tour of worlds well away from anyone else who might want to use her - and specifically her family, because her cousin is immensely powerful and very vulnerable to manipulation from the vipers nest her family can often be. (Sometimes, they're even worse than academics!) She's helping her cousin put herself back together again - again with the relevant experience - but also she feels like a person again. Maybe not the same person, but not just a sad ghost of someone anymore.
Slots 4 and 5 - The Kids from Powers Street
Most of the first slot was spent making up our characters, who were all kids at high school in 90s small town Oregon. Amusingly everyone who played a girl decided that their character was a lesbian, and in particular my character was the younger sister of another PC who was bitterly resentful that everyone assumed that she was a lesbian just because her big sister was one of the two out lesbians at the school. (She was, which just made it even worse.) She was also a jock and a little way into the game gained the power to dematerialise like a ghost. She was also the most reckless of the PCs and tended to dive into everything first.
Apparently the first time the GM ran this game, the PCs got very caught up in prom drama, but in this game we focused more on the alien probe that had landed nearby and had taken over a couple of students to get them to send a message back that Earth was open for invasion. Which we stopped. Yay!
Post game head-canon for this game was that at some point my character would pin Louisa's - an annoyingly perky, nice and understanding goth - against a locker and kiss her then stomp off, which Louisa's character wouldn't see coming despite the fact that she got telepathy. Amusingly, relatively few of my characters tend to end up being attracted to Louisa's unless it's something we've decided ahead of time, but apparently this was an exception.
This game was a lot of fun, run by someone we've run games for before (including slot 1 this year). She's an amazing player, and we're always glad to see on our list, but apparently she was a little intimidated about having us as players. (Whereas, honestly, we were fairly confident that we'd have a good time.)
Slots 6 and 7 - Nova Mundi: Impact!
Here we played people in the modern world who were all top tier players in Nova Mundi, a MMORPG. A hotly awaited update is released and we all wake up in the world, in our main characters' bodies, along with seemingly everyone else who plays the game. There was a little bit of a learning curve as we had to figure out how to use our abilities - not to mention even once we'd found out, remembering which set of gestures activates a spell is difficult when you're being attacked in real life by a monster - and exploring the world, and how the MMORPG rules interact with the world. Which was definitely not perfectly!
For instance, computer controlled characters now had free will and at least one person from Earth very quickly started dating one. (Not a PC, but a person from Earth nonetheless.) On the down side, all bought food didn't have taste implemented, though we did manage to figure out a workaround - if you took the raw ingredients and cooked them properly, they did actually have a taste. So some players with burger flipping skills from the real world suddenly found themselves in demand.
As top tier players, especially once we'd practiced our skills in our new bodies, we also got involved in the plot - a trail of clues which led to a dungeon raid that if we beat it would give us a key to either go home or access more worlds. There was also a subplot of a monster invasion, and players who defected to the monster faction either in hope that was the way home, or because they were griefers. We finished the raid, then defeated the monster invasion and had the choice about whether to return home or unlock more worlds.
My character was never going home - she was a closeted trans-woman working a dead end retail job who in no way had the money to transition. So finding herself in a female body that actually felt right? Yeah, not going back from that. In the end, after the epic battles, only one person did end up returning - a cis-guy stuck in the opposite situation, a female main that gave him dysphoria.
This was a fun popcorn game, a nice low energy way to finish off the con, and gave me many World of Warcraft feels, even though I've never been a serious MMORPG player.
Slot 1 - Further Information Is Not Available Here (GMing)
People who have read my previous reports may remember that we ran another game called this in 2013. It's set in the same universe, and we did use some of the background fluff that we came up with for that game, but it was with completely different characters and about a different situation. As before, it's about time travelling universe hoppers who have about 6000 years to play with. The plot this time was focussed around two things that came up in character creation - I told one player that you couldn't create clones with time travel powers, even in the high tech end of time, then another player wanted to play a shapeshifting clone timetraveler, the only survivor from his batch.
Aha, we thought. This sounds like a plot to us.
It ended up being part of a plot from a group from beyond the End of History, beyond the point which time travelers can't travel back from, where apparently reality and history is coming apart. Naturally, the people who've managed to survive in this half existence want out, and the existence of the shapeshifting time traveler was basically the most successful part of an organic probe they sent back.
Despite a few opportunities, there wasn't any combat - the players ended up just talking with everyone and making nice, including helping a science team from the future adjust to the current conditions so they can survive without tearing a hole in reality.
It was enough fun we might have to run another game in this universe at some point.
Slots 2 and 3 - Snakes and Ladders
This was a pair of short adventures that were in the same universe and had the same characters. The first game was us, as recognised members of the royal family the King could easily bully into doing his bidding, being sent to investigate why an Amber embassy to a nearby country has disappeared. It turned out the king was sacrificing people with any blood connection to the royal family of Amber in a nasty magical ritual. (Which, given they're not a celibate lot and have been around for hundreds of years, is a surprising amount.)
My character was Gwen, a shapeshifter of surpassing skill, who had been doing her best to push the bounds of shapeshifting as basically a postdoc aiming at becoming the equivalent of a professor. Unfortunately, the particular bound she had been pushing was the large form problem - basically when you change into something too large, your reactions necessarily slow because of the time it takes for signals to tarvel down nerves. She'd come up with a system where a network of sub-brains could approximate what she'd do, more or less, at least until her actual consciousness could make decisions. She went off to an out of the way world, and spread herself out over a few square miles. Unfortunately, despite being fairly out of the way, some of the locals attacked part of her, leading to a defensive reaction. Basically, the local part of her swallowed them and used their biomass to spread a bit further. Which led to escalation, more swallowing, more growth - which also contributed to it taking longer and longer for her consciousness to be able to come to a decision, and eventually led to her swallowing the world.
Basically, she accidentally Annihilationed a world. Whoops.
Eventually, she managed to sort herself out to the extent of budding a human body off with her consciousness, more or less. The problem is that various memories from the people she'd absorbed were mixed up in there, despite her best efforts, and caused something akin to a mental breakdown. So she abandoned her academic career and headed off home to Amber, to try and piece herself together. (And incidentally causing a lot of pain to the people she's closest to, like her mother, since she's got a lot of memories that aren't quite right.)
Anyway, she had some skills that were useful in the investigation, but mostly she was still fairly subdued, despite it being a year since she got back. There was a part when a magical effect temporarily influenced her, altering her thinking, and after that was quickly broken she had a brief panic attack, because not thinking like herself is one of her things. On the bright side, she managed to help the queen, who had been magically compelled by the king so many times that her mind fell apart when the enchantments were removed, because rebuilding minds is something she has a lot of experience with now!
Also, apparently the princess recognised my character, despite the fact that as far as my character remembered, she'd never been to the country before. Which was more than a little worrying. She never did get to the bottom of that.
The second adventure was investigating dreams all of the player characters had started getting. We eventually managed to track down the source, an amazingly powerful cousin who had seen her grandfather kill her father in front of her when she was five, had subsequently been locked in a prison, and certainly at the moment was kind of stuck in the mindset of a five year old, despite being amazingly powerful. She'd been used by some people, including the now deceased king from the first adventure, and she'd reached out to us in dreams, because she felt like we were 'safe' relatives. Luckily, all of our reactions were to help her, which is just as well because Gwen became instantaneously immensely protective of her and an enraged super skilled shapeshifting who can excrete anaesthetic gas is never a good thing, especially in enclosed quarters.
The game ended with the cousin being rescued and Gwen is currently planning on taking her on a tour of worlds well away from anyone else who might want to use her - and specifically her family, because her cousin is immensely powerful and very vulnerable to manipulation from the vipers nest her family can often be. (Sometimes, they're even worse than academics!) She's helping her cousin put herself back together again - again with the relevant experience - but also she feels like a person again. Maybe not the same person, but not just a sad ghost of someone anymore.
Slots 4 and 5 - The Kids from Powers Street
Most of the first slot was spent making up our characters, who were all kids at high school in 90s small town Oregon. Amusingly everyone who played a girl decided that their character was a lesbian, and in particular my character was the younger sister of another PC who was bitterly resentful that everyone assumed that she was a lesbian just because her big sister was one of the two out lesbians at the school. (She was, which just made it even worse.) She was also a jock and a little way into the game gained the power to dematerialise like a ghost. She was also the most reckless of the PCs and tended to dive into everything first.
Apparently the first time the GM ran this game, the PCs got very caught up in prom drama, but in this game we focused more on the alien probe that had landed nearby and had taken over a couple of students to get them to send a message back that Earth was open for invasion. Which we stopped. Yay!
Post game head-canon for this game was that at some point my character would pin Louisa's - an annoyingly perky, nice and understanding goth - against a locker and kiss her then stomp off, which Louisa's character wouldn't see coming despite the fact that she got telepathy. Amusingly, relatively few of my characters tend to end up being attracted to Louisa's unless it's something we've decided ahead of time, but apparently this was an exception.
This game was a lot of fun, run by someone we've run games for before (including slot 1 this year). She's an amazing player, and we're always glad to see on our list, but apparently she was a little intimidated about having us as players. (Whereas, honestly, we were fairly confident that we'd have a good time.)
Slots 6 and 7 - Nova Mundi: Impact!
Here we played people in the modern world who were all top tier players in Nova Mundi, a MMORPG. A hotly awaited update is released and we all wake up in the world, in our main characters' bodies, along with seemingly everyone else who plays the game. There was a little bit of a learning curve as we had to figure out how to use our abilities - not to mention even once we'd found out, remembering which set of gestures activates a spell is difficult when you're being attacked in real life by a monster - and exploring the world, and how the MMORPG rules interact with the world. Which was definitely not perfectly!
For instance, computer controlled characters now had free will and at least one person from Earth very quickly started dating one. (Not a PC, but a person from Earth nonetheless.) On the down side, all bought food didn't have taste implemented, though we did manage to figure out a workaround - if you took the raw ingredients and cooked them properly, they did actually have a taste. So some players with burger flipping skills from the real world suddenly found themselves in demand.
As top tier players, especially once we'd practiced our skills in our new bodies, we also got involved in the plot - a trail of clues which led to a dungeon raid that if we beat it would give us a key to either go home or access more worlds. There was also a subplot of a monster invasion, and players who defected to the monster faction either in hope that was the way home, or because they were griefers. We finished the raid, then defeated the monster invasion and had the choice about whether to return home or unlock more worlds.
My character was never going home - she was a closeted trans-woman working a dead end retail job who in no way had the money to transition. So finding herself in a female body that actually felt right? Yeah, not going back from that. In the end, after the epic battles, only one person did end up returning - a cis-guy stuck in the opposite situation, a female main that gave him dysphoria.
This was a fun popcorn game, a nice low energy way to finish off the con, and gave me many World of Warcraft feels, even though I've never been a serious MMORPG player.