Winter Stabcon, 2005

This is the first time I've managed to make it to the Winter Stabcon; usually the date clashes with the Maidenhead and Marlow Model Railway clubs annual show. While the summer event is still held in the traditional venue of Woolton Hall, the winter convention now takes place at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport.

Because it's quite close to my current home, I decided it would be a cheaper option to travel in each day, since the taxi fare home late at night worked out rather less than cost of a hotel room. Unfortunately the hassle of getting there in the morning, especially when trains run late or the Sunday rail replacement buses turn out to be at inconvenient times made me wonder if I'd really made the right choice.

It's always advertised as a 'small friendly convention', which probably explains why I did very little actual gaming on the Friday night, spending the time chatting and drinking beer. Unlike the summer event, we didn't manage to drink the bar dry by the end of the con, although we did finish off all the bottled real ale by the end of Saturday! As is usual for events like this, I met up with a few old friends such as Sasha, L'Ange and Toni.

Stabcon is really a boardgame convention with a minority of roleplayers; of the 150 or so attendees, the majority spent the weekend playing complicated boardgames with thousands of pieces that lasted for 14 hours.

In the end I only played two RPGS. On the Saturday I played in Kev's Call of Cthulhu game set on Mars during the early days of colonisation. On Sunday I played in the GURPS Discworld epic GMed by Phil Masters, in which the beer tasted of herring, and I played the axe-wielding barbarian Volf Volfssonssonsson, and no cliché was left unturned. I'll avoid spoilers just in case anyone encounters either scenario at future cons, but I will mention Volf's drunken Viking sea shanties, and his attempts at fishing for freshwater herring.

The third game I'd signed up for sadly failed to attract a sufficient number of players, so I ended up joining a game of Munchkin Bites instead, the latest of Steve Jackson Games Munchkin games. This one mercilessly parodies both White Wolf Games and Goth subculture in general. The game ended as a three-way tie with three players all at ninth level, because it was getting late and most of the players wanted to go to bed. I also played in a game of Credo, the game based on the Great Council of Nicea, in which the players represent different factions of the early church attempting to hammer out a Creed. Ours started with "We believe in many gods, including...", although it went mostly orthodox after that. There were quite a few shorter games, most bizarre of which had to be the Mornington Cresent-like game played of Friday night with assorted dice, empty beer glasses, pencils, bits of paper and empty milk containers.

I've already signed up for the Summer Stabcon, on 8th to 10th of July at the traditional summer venue at Woolton Hall in Manchester.