Contingency 2020

It's that time of year again, where I tear myself away from my desk and emerge, blinking, in the sunshine (metaphorically, what with it being January) to do battle with the public transport network in order to arrive at my goal... Norfolk, the home of the best residential games convention I attend. OK, also the only residential games convention I currently attend, shut up.

Rather than go through the convention day-by-day, I'm just going to list the game sessions I played or ran, in chronological order. It has to be said though, all of these games were awesome, though the awesomeness of some of them may have been too much for my weak mortal frame.

Slot #-1: Fiasco

Using the '80s Cops playset, I got to play a 'legitimate businessman' with a loyal hit-man, a chief of police who was like a sister to me and a beat cop who was vying with my hit-man for the attentions of my daughter. The main MacGuffins were my plans to knock down a slum district in downtown Miami in order to build a leisure complex there, plus some missing money that had been skimmed from the project and was lost in transfer between the chief of police and the beat cop.

It all ended with my daughter running off with the money and the chief of police to start a new life together far from my influence, my hit-man going to jail for his involvement in the death of a local politician, following a Rorschach-like standoff with the police and my character renouncing his life of crime to take holy orders and become the priest for the church he had not been able to demolish to clear the way for his new enterprise. Pretty typical Fiasco territory, but this was very enjoyable and played out entertainingly by all players.

Slot #0: Vox Populi

The game available on this blog, with a Barbarian, Druid, Wizard, Sorcerer, Thief and Cleric trying to steer the fate of the newly liberated nation, with the help of a Spirit of Neutrality to act as chair through the proceedings, portrayed by me as previous experience with the game had shown that this helped the flow of play a great deal.

After looking at the 'final score', the Committee of Heroes voted against: appointing the Wizard as ruler of the nation; adopting Communism; letting Sorcerers handle the paperwork; instituting a culture of fighting pits for entertainment and taxation purposes; and stealing masonry and lumber from neighbouring nations in order to rebuild. The sole proposition that was passed was putting the Thieves' Guild in charge of tax collection, despite having no tax laws and no-one to decide what the money should be spent on; the thieves will just hang onto the money they collect in the meantime...

Slot #2: Party Games

This numbering gets confusing when I take a slot off, doesn't it? After relaxing for the first official morning of the convention, I ran a game of Best Friends using the hacks I previously posted here to create a fantasy setting. After giving the players the opportunity to create their own stats for this adventure, it turned out that Leeches! Can Cure Anything in this world and that Fabulousness helped you look great while saving the day, whilst being a Social Butterfly was an essential skill for the noble classes.

After slaying the Necromancer in the first scene, the party discovered that there was really a Necromancerer pulling the strings from the shadows, but an accidental prophecy meant that the wizard was now fated to marry the knight (who was also prince to the kingdom) and then tragically die a week later. They concocted a plan to draw out the Necromancerer, who knew of the prophecy, with a fake wedding using the half-orc bard to impersonate the wizard, little knowing that the Necromancerer was a future version of the party's rogue! After that, it got complicated.

Slot #3: Black Code

Since I shared a lodge with the designer, it only seemed fair and diplomatic to play his game, so I took on the role of a smooth-talking chancer in this transhumanist cyberpunk setting. We had a good introductory adventure, the hunt for a missing/stolen military-grade cyber-frame, touring various locations and encountering the locals (then killing them brutally) until we had the big showdown at a flesh-vs-machine fight club, after which there were the usual betrayals and reversals with our employers.

I like the system here, where you always roll four dice and then pick a number of the highest or lowest results depending on your stat, but the rich setting would definitely benefit from campaign play as there's a lot of detail to explore and the factions we ran into could each be the basis of an entire series of missions.

Slot #4: Afterlife

A reskin of  Blood & Water that I suggested in the back of the book, after a short time spent world-burning we settled on Tokyo in the aftermath of massive solar activity that had fried the world's electronics, with our group of survivors based out of a karaoke bar owned by an alchemist witch. Taking shelter there were a weredragon nurse and one of her elderly charges, an inadvertent genie, a juvenile werewolf seeking a pack and a disinherited fae princeling.

Due to some badly timed outbursts in front of the genie, the karaoke bar got teleported to the basement of the museum of antiquities, which itself was endangered by a volcanic rupture that had appeared outside and had attracted a cult of fire worshippers who were sacrificing the useless home appliances to the fissure, but who graduated to human sacrifice when the werewolf accidentally knocked someone into it. The day was finally saved by the fae's dad promising to protect the museum and the dragon nurse discovering that her charge owned an electronics company that had plans for returning the power.

Slot #5: Continuity

This was my convention highlight, based on my pitch to use Microscope to tell the story of a Marvel-

like comic books company from beginning to end, in an alt-history that we would create through play. The big theme that emerged through play: Communism! We had a period of communist purges on the table almost from the fist round of play, but this quickly echoed back and forth through the timeline, from anarchists and socialists founding the company as a producer of Penny Dreadfuls in the 1800s, to the future World Communist Collective that oversaw the felling of the last tree in cyberspace as a symbolic representation of the end of print media. The most remarkable thing about this game though has to be that, after 11 or so years of knowing Duncan, we finally got into the same game together! And the second one would follow that same evening!!

It was good to have a game with parallel continuities, as we dipped into the heroes & villains of the comic book line and the stories they were significant in, then coming out into the 'real' world to see how it mirrored the art. This meant the gonzo element was largely confined to the comic book events on the table, resulting in some much more serious and grounded 'real world' events and scenes. It was awesome and left me feeling like I could play an entire convention of Microscope if all the sessions could be like that. (If I look like I'm having a miserable time in that photo, it's only because I was trying to strike a brooding hero pose!)

Slot #6: Sisters of Mercy

Another of my rare instances of playing rather than running or facilitating, the fabulous Brenda ran one of her popular Dead of Night scenarios, featuring a reality TV film crew turning up to produce an episode about an ex-sanitarium with a haunted reputation. Cue lots of horrifying apparitions, vanishing crew members and ghostly nurses to terrify us.

Something special we achieved, quite inadvertently, was to get this game past the Bechdel test: two of us played female characters, who had a scene together without any male characters present and had a conversation that wasn't about men! (It was about freeing the tormented spirit of someone's Great Aunt and then burning the site to the ground)

Slot #7: A Penny for My Thoughts

This is always a bit of a gamble at a convention and I was worried I wasn't going to get enough players to make it worthwhile, so it was very satisfying to see three names on the sign-up sheet by Friday morning. It can also produce a game that is too intense and personal, with much triggering of the X-Card, or too gonzo and weird, producing unsatisfactory stories, but this really seemed to hit the sweet spot.

We had four individual stories, lightly connected by some NPCs, covering everything from the actions of an embittered CEO getting revenge on his rivals, to the complex family relationship of a man marrying his ex-teacher and being hounded by his demanding and irascible mother. In the end, the only one who chose to forget their memories was my character, a fallen charity director who had seen everything he made be taken away as a result of his own addictions and poor anger management.

Slot #8: Space Force

A hack-at-the-table version of InSpectres, with the pitch being "Let's portray Donald Trump's 'Space Force' as 'Team America: World Police' and see how long it takes the break the GM!' That last bit wasn't explicitly in the pitch, but for the record: 2 hours and 14 minutes. The stats chosen by the players to represent this mission were:

• Plastology: since plastic was the only 'natural' resource remaining in the distant future year of 2020, it was used for making everything.
• Muscle, Armaments, Guns & Ammo: the combat skill, shortened to 'MAGA.'
• Patriotism: the test of true Americans, the greatest, most diplomatic people on Earth and anyone who says otherwise is a Mexican Commie Liberal!
• Success!: for literally everything else, because we'll have so many successes, we'll get bored at succeeding!

The 'plot', if I can use that word, involved 2.3 million metric tons of Michael Bolton CDs on a collision course with Florida, which the team confused with Italy for a brief time... in fact, it's fair to say that most of us were confused for a brief time and the game ended before the end of the slot because we had made every joke. EVERY. JOKE.

Slot #9 & #10: Sorcerer

I was fortunate to be invited to a mini-campaign of Sorcerer that run over three sessions at the convention; in these first two, we selected LA as our setting, gave demons some flavour as 'wounds with things in them' for some Croenenberg style and defined 'humanity' as 'kindness' to track when we might be losing it. My character was the queer son of an LA televangelist who had been disinherited for his sexuality and the schism between the two sides of his life had driven him into a kind of delusional obsession that made him perfect for summoning a demon, even if he didn't really know what he was doing.

There was one other player-character, an aspiring actress who had joined a coven of occultists and been the only one who successfully summoned a demon, which she wore as a second skin, changing her appearance somewhat and leading to her being cast as the lead in a major new horror film. The kickers we began with involved the actress being blackmailed over her hidden past just as filming began on her new project, and my character's father being arrested on murder charges relating to a teenage girl in his flock whom he had allegedly attempted an exorcism on.

Slot #11: Shercula?

The pitch for this Primetime Adventures game, of Moffat & Gatiss adapting another public domain work to be a major new BBC TV series, resulted in a story combining the confidence trick/heist based drama of 'Hustle' with the pseudo-Victorian setting of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' to produce 'Bustle'. This starred Emma Watson as Lydia Bennett, Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Mrs. Bigglesworth, Sacha Dhawan as Mowgli, Simon Pegg as The Artful Dodger and an actor in a mocap suit that would be digitally replaced by a virtual recreation of Elvis playing Tintin. I don't think the BBC are going to a series with this one...

Slot #12: Sorcerer

We finished our short campaign with the actress going on to be an industry success, albeit a somewhat toxic one as the demon bound to her insisted she make the people around her miserable so it could feed on their tears. The preacher's son went on to have a breakdown on the witness stand at his father's trial, leading to his aphasia: after some months of rehabilitation, he returned to the care of his male lover and restarted his street ministry offering perfectly secure confessions, since it was impossible for him to tell anyone else what he had heard.

Slot 14: [Nameless Game]

After taking Saturday night and Sunday morning off, I ran my last game of the convention and offered up something totally new in which the players were invited to create the most snowflake, Mary-Sue, edgelord characters they could imagine. We settled on a superhero setting with Everyone, the superhero who is everyone in the world's digital presence; Sparkle & Bruce, her invisible pink unicorn; an evil criminal mastermind, since there's always someone in the group who wants to be a villain; Nyte Blade, not to be confused with his mentor Blade Lord, or anyone else with the name 'Blade', of whom there were many; Dr. Dr. Incel, who wanted you to know exactly how many doctorates he had; and the Encyclopaedia, a sexy librarian because reasons.

So, thanks to all the people there: the convention organisers who greased the wheels; the site staff who were friendly and helpful; the GMs who gave us stuff to do; the stall holders who brought the shinies; the gamers, who raised over £7,000 for charity; and finally, and most importantly, the ducks, to whom I would like to say "Quack."