Over the past couple of years I think we've all become even more aware that the connections between us are tenuous and contingent. In films they talk about the 1" barrier for foreign films, which is the barrier of the audience being bothered to read the subtitles. Covid has been just such a barrier even in the times where it has not particularly ( Read more... )

I've spent the in-between times in the past few days (re)reading my brother in law's blog, which actively chronicled his life for a few years around a decade ago and intermittently/sporadically since then. I don't remember our first meeting; they got together while I was living in the Wairarapa, and it seemed a bit like he came out of the blue and ( Read more... )

KapCon has evolved over the decades into a very efficient machine for doing what it does, which is providing a venue for a splurge of one-session games of 3-hours duration. This year with no pre or post-con drinks, no verbal notices between rounds, the retirement of the nomination and voting systems, and it's truly a lean dicing machine. I've never ( Read more... )

In 2012 I got an e-mail from a friend who was thinking about writing a Cyberpunk game, with some sketchy mechanics based on Apocalypse World. I read the stuff, but I didn't really grok it, and in particular the idea of a mission-based Cyberpunk game seemed like it'd been pretty thoroughly done by Cyberpunk 2020 and others. Defining Cyberpunk is ( Read more... )

Designing a murder mystery is not easy. Figuring out the complex interlocking clues that lead to one unique solution is so hard that even most detective fictions don't actually do it, they chat by allowing bridging facts to be introduced in the denouement. Even novels like Ellory Queen's where the novel explicitly claims at a certain point that the ( Read more... )

Uncharted WorldsI think this may have been the only Space Opera on offer at the con - pretty typically SF is under-represented at KapCon. I've often pondered why it's easier to imagine nameless horrors from beyond space and time organising cultists to summon them than flying through space and meeting intelligent aliens, but there you are. I ( Read more... )

The last few years have been spent honing my presentation of Gumshoe in its various forms, so when I was staring at my big pile of familiar games and deciding what I should run in 2021, it felt like the easy and obvious choice. It also felt like a risky one, because I tend to think that these highly procedural games with a fairly complex ruleset ( Read more... )

When writing my KapCon preamble, I browsed my back-catalogue of KapCon summaries. I was amazed by two things which have completely left my customary approach - I named every player in every game, and I made a lot of really snappy declarative judgments about anything that struck me. How times change.

Round 1 - The Tribute [EPOCH]I think ( Read more... )

Like a lot of people, I started going to KapCon because some friends were going. Like a lot of people, aside from KapCon, I mostly gamed with the same half-dozen people only slightly reconfigured over a couple of different games. Word of mouth was pretty much the only way to learn of KapCon, and hence to attend KapCon. After my first outing, I hard ( Read more... )

I usually save any ruminating on KapCon until after it's all over. The lead-in is generally busy enough with writing and play-testing that I don't tend to think much about the event itself, only the tiny part I plan to play. I did a little browsing today of my previous writings on KapCon, including some e-mails sent to the organisers to share some ( Read more... )