Gypsycon 8
Gypsycon 2006 was the eighth annual face-to-face meetup of the Dreamlyrics community, held at the teeming metropolis of Pidley, Cambridgshire, where just over a dozen people met up for four solid days of gaming. Although we only meet up once a year now, it's the nearest thing I have to a regular gaming group. The format is to run day-long one-shots, typically running for up to ten hours in length. Usually there are two or three different games taking place each day.
Neil Marsden and the Chaos Spiky Bits
Friday's game was a Neil Marsden's Warhammer 40K game, the first time I've played in one of his Gypsycon games, although I'd heard very good reports of his games of previous years. The system wasn't based on any GW mechanics, instead Neil adapted the very simple d6-based Powergame system.
While my mind has associated Warhammer 40K with the adolescent-targetted marketing of Games Workshop, which seemed to emphasise munchkinism, grossness and Chaos Spiky Bits, Neil managed to turn it into a more grown-up setting, with PCs as regular soldiers rather than Imperial Space Marines. It started out as a straightforward military SF game, but we eventually ran into genestealers, and finally chaos entities. We defeated the chaos monster with the help of the noble sacrifice of one PC, who jumped sword-first down the things throat saying "I know I'm going to die, but I'm going to take this thing with me!".
Neil makes the players care about NPCs. A nice touch was when one of the NPC grunts died in a firefight, and he had another NPC grunt retrieve his last letter to his mother before we left his body.
Stonehenge! Where the Demons Dwell!
Saturday was an Ars Magica freeform, run by Andy Montgomery with a little help from Mark "L'Ange" Baker. This took the same general format as last year's freeform, set around the seven-yearly Stonehenge Tribunal, but this time Andy had created his own scenario. Plot threads involved a murdered Jewish sorcerer, multiple disputed sources of Vis, questions about a missing mage from Anglesea who may or may not have been done away with by the covenant leader, the fate of some covenants that had fallen out of contact, and disturbing dreams about tortured faeries.
There were three phases of the game. First there were several hours of freeform information gathering, conspiring and deal-making. At the very end, my Covenant head collared me, most pissed off about me concealing my membership of an organisation called "The Seekers", despite my protestations that I would have freely told him if only he had been bothered to ask!.
Then came the formal banquet, an in-character meal (Someone who shall be nameless commented that potatoes were anachronistic, to which I responded with 'Just pretend it's a turnip'). Finally we had the formal part of the tribunal, with votes on more than a dozen issues.
After the game, we had a debriefing, where HH revealed that he'd managed to conceal the fact that it was he who'd been torturing faeries with cold iron.
But I don't have that many d6!
Sunday's game was D&D, and reminded me why I generally don't play DnD any more. When I roll 36d6 of damage, and my reaction is not "hey, kewl", but "Oh bollocks, I've got to add up all those bloody numbers to find out whether or not I've managed to kill the thing", then you can tell DnD isn't the game for nowadays. Still, the other players seemed to enjoy it well enough; I think I've just grown out of number-heavy systems as a player.
Attack of the Unholy Moonbats
Monday was a modern-day conspiracy game run by Steve "Abbadon" Morley, a playtest of Steve's own system, intended as a rules-lite system for realistic and deadly modern-day combat. The PCs were a group of British covert agents working for MI6. Our first mission was to eliminate an Al-Queda training camp in Pakistan; the premise behind this one was that Al-Queda had formed an unholy alliance with moonbat neo-Anarchists and was training the sort of idiots that fill out the ranks of the Animal Liberation Front as terrorists. Our heroic PCs slaughtered the whole lot of them. Then we were thrust immediately into another mission; a hostage situation at a pub in Newcastle. This time things didn't quite go to plan. We did managed to rescue most of the hostages, and took some of the terrorists alive. Unfortunately we failed to spot that the terrorists had set up several webcams around the pub, and were webcasting the entire thing.
While our mission itself did go rather pear-shaped, we still managed to give Steve a lot of useful playtesting feedback!
The only trouble with Gypsycon is that we have to wait a whole year for the next one. Hopefully I'll be running something next time.
Posted by TimHall at April 19, 2006 10:46 PM | TrackBack36d6! Were you playing D&D or Champions?
IIRC the d6 is used for Fireball (and variants) thereof) so that is a 36th level MU...
Hm, Prof Haarkon's campaign stopped with him 17,000 xp short of 18th.
Still, you remind me just how long it is since I last played Advanced Civilisation. Perhaps a game could be organised...
Then again, I'm not in a position to offer that much in the way of over-night accomodation.
Posted by: Michael Orton on April 22, 2006 12:38 PMThe 36d6 was actually the combined total of three melee attacks (The parties MU had cast some damage-boosting spell on me)
Civ doesn't really appeal to me; I find I don't really enjoy boardgames that last more than three or four hours.
Posted by: Tim Hall on April 22, 2006 01:41 PMI am aware the number of people who like playing 7 hour board games is very small, but I found some at a Gypsycon.
It is now some time since the parties I was in were staging contests for speed vampire slaying. The objective was quite simple - how many vampires could you slay (merely turning didn't count) in one round. Well, actually it was less than one round because you had to assume their morale would fail during the pre-initiative phase and they would flee on their initiative rather than attack. The fighters never had any targets during the post-initiative phase.
The final result: you have to trick them into attcking the party as the number you can kill is limited only by the number of vampires you can get in one place.
The method: close packed concentric walls of fire. It is not obvious from outside how many the attacking vampires have to cross to reach the party. It works best if you can do it in a corridor as then you don't have to worry about the roof, but if you have to you enchant half your team of casters so they can cast their walls lying down thus creating horizontal tubes which then intersect the vertical set.
Remember to have a Prayer and Chant running - not that you will get any extra damage out of them, but as you want them to attack you must assume they will have them running on their side.
Oh, and buy in some extra beer for the fighters. This is high level stuff: the spell casters are not going to let anything dangerous get close enough to get into hand to hand combat if they can help it. If something does get close then MUs have a buch better AC (bracers, prot ring, displacer cloak, flying, blured, improved invis) than a figher in +5 armour and +5 shield, and with a Tenser's Transformation they do more damage.
(Yes, I do think the D&D system breaks down at high levels!)
Posted by: Michael Orton on April 24, 2006 01:19 PM(1) Come to Stabcon in Manchester at the end of July - there are loads of epic-length boardgame fans there.
(2) Your inner munchkin is quite clearly still alive and well....
Posted by: Tim Hall on April 24, 2006 01:36 PM1) There are too many calls on my time to consider a convention.
2) I was playing the redundant fighter. Hey, at least the fighter is useful until the MUs can get their Fireshield and Tenser's up and running. The thieves are redundant once the Clerics can Find Traps and the MU casts knock.
Posted by: Michael Orton on April 25, 2006 01:12 PM