Where Worlds Collide

In my Stabcon review, I promised a full writeup of the Primetime Adventures game run by Micheal Cule on the Sunday of Stabcon.

Primetime Adventures is one of the new breed of ‘indie games’ coming out of The Forge. As the name suggests, the game is supposed to be an imaginary TV series. My previous experiences with Forgite-Narrativist games was limited to one game of Dogs in the Vineyard at Consternation last August, which I felt was decidedly so-so; neither the setting nor the system did a lot for me. I hoped Primetime Adventures would be better. And it was.

A game of Primetime Adventures starts with a completely blank sheet. It starts with the players playing the roles of the team of TV scriptwriters pitching ideas for a new series. Someone suggested a reality show about interdimensional interior decorators, but we eventually ended up with ‘Knights of the Eternal Table’, interdimensional do-gooders formed from the remnants of King Arthur’s Knights, operating from a Camelot outside of space and time.

We then made up the following five characters:

• Sir Kay, cynical and curmudgeonly, the last survivor of the original Knights
• Arthur’s Jester (can’t remember the name), the other surviving knight, with a mystical connection to The Grail
• A Chinese master thief with a serious case of kleptomania
• My character, Rudi von Leibnitz, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot of aristocratic blood shot down in the Battle of Britain, who wants to atone for his guilt of having fought on the wrong side.
• ‘The new guy’, an Olympic athlete and family man.

The system is very bare-bones, no lengthy skill or equipment lists, just a couple of very broad one-line ‘edges’ (abilities) and ‘connections’ (I had “Fighter Pilot” and “Noble Family”). The game mechanics involve both parties in a conflict drawing cards, with your relevant Edges and Connections affecting how many cards you can draw.

The episode we ran was set in 1914, with the Knights sent to Arabia to retrieve a vial of a lethal virus which had been stolen from a German lab by Lawrence of Arabia. To add complications, a German agent sent to recover the vial turned out to be my character’s own father. Since Rudi hadn’t been conceived in 1914, whatever happened could not result in his death!

Most of us were more used to traditional-style games, and had trouble initially with scene framing and setting conflicts. This left us leaning more on the GM than perhaps we should have done. I felt that I needed to play a few more sessions to get the hang of it.

Overall, my impressions were positive, much more so than my earlier experience with “Dogs in the Vineyard”. The initial brainstorming and on-the-fly group character generation proved to be a key part of the game; It probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to make my character German rather than British, for example, but that made him a lot less one-dimensional.

The game left me wanting to play more episodes with the setting and characters, which I think is a good sign.

I’m currently being forced to endure yet another three months of the dreaded Rail Replacement Buses on my daily commute, while Network Rail resignals the line. I hope the trains will returning as promised on March 26th.

I sincerely hope that Northern Rail doesn’t follow the bad example of Northern Ireland’s rail operator, who managed this.

The reopening of the rail line between Larne and Belfast after a multi-million pound upgrade has been delayed.

It had been due to restart next Monday but Translink spokesman Mal McGreevy said “higher than anticipated staff turnover” meant this was not possible.

“We have some crewing issues and don’t have enough staff to cover the full range of services,” he said.

The Belfast to Larne commuter line represents a significant percentage of what’s left of Northern Ireland’s rail network, decimated by the dreadfully anti-rail Stormont government in 1950s and 60s. If they really don’t have enough start to operate both it and the rest of the network at the same time, they’re not just a few staff short.

I think this is my sixth Stabcon.

If you haven’t heard of it, Stabcon is small (150-ish people) board game and RPG convention held twice a year in Manchester. While the summer convention normally takes place at Woolton Hall in Manchester, the current winter venue is the Britannia Hotel in Stockport. The convention has now been running for many, many years.

The relaxed atmosphere is a complete contrast to places like Gencon. The relatively small number of people means that once you’ve been to two or three of them you recognise the usual faces, which means you’re no longer gaming with complete strangers.

Unlike student-land in Manchester, the Britannia is out on the suburban fringes, where there’s not much in the way of local eateries. So we depended to the hotel’s catering for sustenance; the food was OK, but not great. Still an order of magnitude better than Gencon 2000 in Manchester, which had me flashing back to school dinners.

With a large contingent of gamers descending upon it, the hotel stocked up on bottles of real ale, as they did last year. Someone also decided on a two-for-the-price-of-one offer on Beamish Stout, and attendees drank three whole barrels of the stuff. Then they complained that they had loads of real ale left over at the end. D’oh!

I spent the first few hours chatting to old friends like Sasha who I hadn’t seen since the last winter Stabcon, and playing beer’n'pretzels card games like Chez Goth and Cthulhu 500 (Lovecraftian motor racing. Yes, it is as silly as it sounds).

RPGing started in earnest on the Saturday, when I’d signed up for two lengthy games. I find that the most popular games tend to fill up on Friday night, which is why it helps to get there early. First up was the third installment of Kev’s Cthulhu on Mars. I’d played in the first two Mars games at the previous two Stabcons, which covered the first two parties of Mars settlers in the year 2100. The third is set a couple of years later, with the population of Mars reaching 100. Naturally, this being a Call of Cthulhu game, Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know were already there, waiting for us. The game ended, in true Cthulhu style, with the PCs vanquishing the eldrich horrors, but at the expense of the own lives.

Second game of the day was GURPS Infinite Earths, run by the esteemed Phil Masters, set on the steampunkish Britannica-6 timeline, where an all-powerful British Empire indulges in vast engineering projects and monumental bad taste combining the worst stylistic bits of the 1870s and the 1970s. The PCs were an I-Cops mission sent to investigate parachronic anomalies on the Channel Bridge currently under construction.

Sunday I played one of the funky Forgite-Narrativist games, Primetime Adventures, where we set out to create the pilot of a TV series. The game starts with a completely blank sheet of paper without as much as a genre defined; the players form a scriptwriting team to brainstorm ideas. To describe what happened during the game really needs a post of it’s own. I’ll just say that the resulting Knights of the Infinite Table left me wanting to play more of this game.

The next Stabcon is in July, held at the Britannia Hotel again because Woolton Hall is being rewired. See you there!

Jonathan Calder has a new theory to explain the popularity of the Iron Lady.

One of the factors behind Mrs Thatcher’s election victory was her act of abolishing free milk in schools.

Some people hated her for it and dubbed her the “milk snatcher”. But they didn’t have to drink the stuff. The crates were not kept in a refrigerator, so on a hot day it was already halfway to going sour by the time mid-morning break came. The trick then was to avoid drinking the stuff.

Yes, Mrs Thatcher was swept to power by a generation of grateful first-time voters who wanted to thank her for delivering them from the horrors of school milk.

I’m not sure I completely buy this, but it’s an interesting idea.

Jonathan has some more sober thoughts on the sorry Charles Kennedy affair, and I think I agree with him that it’s just about the worst possible outcome. I think Kennedy’s position is now untenable, and he needs to go for the sake of the party.

I wonder, do the writers of the Oracle WTF group blog realise that some of the developers whose code they’re slagging off are reading their blog? I work with some of them, and they’re not the sort of guys you want to mess with
There are reasons why I don’t blog about work. The biggest is that I know that some of my work colleagues read this blog. I got enough stick from them for this post.