HyphenCon I
Every year a band of San Deigo-area gamers hosts a small two-day convention at an office in a northern suburb of the city. This year the bulk of my Thursday night group went down to enjoy the fruits of the Hyph, as we dubbed it, and experience a bit of a road trip en route.
The southern road trip started with Strawberry donuts and fresh Tiger tails at Donut Man and ended with a growler (no, this kind) fill at Stone Brewing Company (2009 Russian Imperial Stout).
HyphenCon runs over two days, the first of which comprises two four-hour sessions of roleplaying, and the second, as many board games as can be played before everyone leaves. In the first session, I played Cthulhu Dark, Graham Walmsley's very light rules for mythos roleplaying. They looked to be a very elegant set of rules and that's how they played out; definitely worth a look if you want a simpler system to handle you sanity-eroding mythos needs. This particular game saw a group of 1950s high school teachers finding groups of bodies dumped around their small New England town and their attempts to aid the local police... It was a great scenario, a great group, and a great game.
In the second session, I played mcellis's FATE implementation of Shadowrun. He based the game on the aesthetic presentation and flavour of the first edition (1989) of the game, including an impressive list of twenty or so aspects on the game and characters based on the original archetypes. It was excellent both as a nostalgic experience and as a game in its own right. I plan to emulate it at some point in the future.
Saturday ended with an unscheduled midnight session, another run through of my Tomb of Horrors Fiasco playset. Everyone was quite tired, so the game didn't flow quite as well as it could have in the first act, but in the second, the characters and setting seemed to gel better and it ended very well. That was especially good because we had an audience from the midnight Gamma World game which had ended shortly before.
Continued in HyphenCon II.
The southern road trip started with Strawberry donuts and fresh Tiger tails at Donut Man and ended with a growler (no, this kind) fill at Stone Brewing Company (2009 Russian Imperial Stout).
HyphenCon runs over two days, the first of which comprises two four-hour sessions of roleplaying, and the second, as many board games as can be played before everyone leaves. In the first session, I played Cthulhu Dark, Graham Walmsley's very light rules for mythos roleplaying. They looked to be a very elegant set of rules and that's how they played out; definitely worth a look if you want a simpler system to handle you sanity-eroding mythos needs. This particular game saw a group of 1950s high school teachers finding groups of bodies dumped around their small New England town and their attempts to aid the local police... It was a great scenario, a great group, and a great game.
In the second session, I played mcellis's FATE implementation of Shadowrun. He based the game on the aesthetic presentation and flavour of the first edition (1989) of the game, including an impressive list of twenty or so aspects on the game and characters based on the original archetypes. It was excellent both as a nostalgic experience and as a game in its own right. I plan to emulate it at some point in the future.
Saturday ended with an unscheduled midnight session, another run through of my Tomb of Horrors Fiasco playset. Everyone was quite tired, so the game didn't flow quite as well as it could have in the first act, but in the second, the characters and setting seemed to gel better and it ended very well. That was especially good because we had an audience from the midnight Gamma World game which had ended shortly before.
Continued in HyphenCon II.