Conjuration

Reason the blog's been silent all weekend is that I've been to another gaming convention, Conjuration, held in Cambridge. It's the first time I've been to this convention, and it's well worth the four-hour trip to get there.

It's a smallish convention, with less than a hundred attendees. It's a quite different atmosphere to something like Gencon; it's small enough you can actually speak to most of the people there. It also boasted a real ale bar, which lasted until about 2.30pm on Sunday when the beer finally ran out.

A great many games in a great variety of systems took place. Someone even ran a game of Skyrealms of Jorune (anyone else remember that one?). One game conspicuous by it's absence was d20 in all it's forms. So much for D&D taking over the universe. Somebody suggested this may be because of the age range; the average age of attendees was closer to 40 than 30.

The first game I played in was the Dying Earth LARP, a systemless freeform game with sixteen players, in which we were the apprentices of sixteen magicians who had vanished, and were charged with the task of appointing a leader, otherwise the sun would go out, and the world would end. The rules of the election were held in a document called "The Monstrament", of which three of us had copies. Unfortunately not only were the three copies different, but all were in Dingbats, which we couldn't read. Much fun was had by all, although I got injured by failing to keep a straight face during a Dark Ritual.

As well as LARPS, there were plenty of more conventional RPGs; I played in games of Call of Cthulhu, Hero Quest (the new name for what is really the second editon of Hero Wars) and GURPS, the latter set in the very wierd "Madness Dossier" universe created by the convention's guest of honour, Ken Hite, in which all history before the year 535 is completely made up. Best moment was the CoC game when those of us that failed one SAN roll too many were transformed into invisible cats the size of double decker buses, to rampage through central London. It's a pity I couldn't think of a good in-game excuse to climb the Post Office Tower. The GM accused us of having far too much fun playing the giant cats that we lost interest in actually trying to solve the mystery! I think she was probably right.