Contingency 2024

Remember when I used to do con reports? Yeah, I'd forgotten all about that too, but what with the whole world sitting at home for a year or two, it's hardly any wonder that face-to-face gaming conventions seem like a thing of the past. Guess what though, baby? Conventions are back! In fact they have been for a while and I'm just late to the party; putting all that aside then, here's what I did on my not-a-holiday at Hunstanton this year.

For Those of You Just Joining Us

I wrote a short history of Contingency five years ago, in this post here, but the short version is that it's a face-to-face table-top role-playing convention that takes place on the East coast of England in January each year. The all-female organising committee have described it as a games convention run by your mum and it embraces a warm, friendly, caring atmosphere to make everyone feel welcome. The team behind Contingency also manage a couple of smaller conventions in the form of ConDucked and Condensed; the whole duck motif has come about due to the site for Contingeny being home to many families of ducks who aren't shy about entering people's accomodations looking for food. They have since achieved legendary status and you can now buy a lot of duck-themed merchandise at the convention.

I have returned to Contingency since the lifting of the global pandemic restrictions, and indeed been at other conventions like the above mentioned Condensed and the ever reliable Concrete Cow, but don't worry about scouring my blog for the reports on those because, er, I didn't write any. Sorry. Anyway, my visit to Contingency this year got off to a good start when my sister mentioned she had some work in that direction, so she gave me a lift all the way to the resort where the convention is held! Practically door-to-door and I can't thank her enough.

Readers with long memories will know that I like to get to Contingency on the Monday, two days before the convention proper starts, just to relax, enjoy the seaside and prepare myself for the onslaught to come. This was particularly important this year, as I had a plan to run 12 games in succession; this would have filled up my available time from Wednesday to Saturday, leaving me just enough time between sessions to eat and get ready for the next game. This plan almost worked as intended, but everything came out alright in the end, as you'll see.

Wednesday

In retrospect, one of the games I ran later should have been run today, it would have been so apt... anyway, this was the start of my scheme to run three games a day for four days. I'd prepared my own sign-up sheets and handed them in at the desk, after requestion a table for all 12 slots a couple of months before, so I felt well prepared for this year. Reader, I was not. I really hope I pay off all this foreshadowing later. Anyway, here are the games I ran on Wednesday; I even remembered to take pictures of all of these, as I had promised a friend I would.

For the Queen

This is a card-driven narrative game that I've rather fallen in love with; it runs on a handful of rules that are all to do with reading prompts from cards that you draw from a custom deck. You create the characters and their situation from these prompts, your repsonses to them and the questins you get asked by other players seeking clarification or making suggestions. It can also, but not always, play quite quickly and we managed to fit in two games with a table reshuffle between runs to prevent the player order from stagnating. Our second run was the antithesis of many games I've taken part in before, with the Queen explictily depicted as a monstrous demon and her retinue also being demonic beings from the Pits of Hell, so of course this game had an almost wholesome ending.

Blood & Water

My own game inspired by the TV series Being Human, this session featured a zombie, a ghoul (don't mix them up), a ghost and a sweet little old lady who had sold her soul to the Devil and then forgotten about it, sharing a nice suburban bungalow together. This was the set-up for more bloody & foul murder in one sesssin than I've seen in any game ever, even the previous one about the Demon Queen and her army. The PCs solved almost all their problems by killing people and then eating the evidence and it ended with all of them in Hell living their best lives together for all eternity.

Women Are Werewolves

The first of a couple of games of this exploration of family, gender and the supernatural that I ran at the
convention, it's another card-driven narrative, with some beautifully designed cards asking leading questions of the players. All the player characters in the game don't conform to the standard gender norms, within a family where only the women transform into werewolves on the full moon. I played a trans-male teen who rebelled against his own flesh once a month and you can see how the metaphors just write themselves here without having to explain any further, right? It's a very serious game that isn't afraid to cut deep into the issues it handles and bring hidden things up into the light to be studied. Powerful stuff that really benefits from a debrief at the end of the game to make sure that everyone is alright afterwards.

Thursday

Everything with the plan was still on track after the first day of gaming; I'd had enough to eat, gotten enough sleep and wasn't suffering from Con Crud, that ubiquitous disease that dogs the footsteps of all convention-goers. This was also my most thematic day of the con, as I'm lazy and couldn't be bothered to space out a couple of games with similar titles. Just go with it.

Gentle & Extraordinary

Another game of my own creation, this is a Lasers & Feelings hack for a Gothic horror advetnure-style game, in the mold of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Character creation is very quick and easily done at the table, so we soon had a thief, hunter, detective and scientist ready to tackle the forces of Darkness. I used a straightforward, in media res plot seed, with the thief being caught wiht their hand in the valuables of a nouveau riche lord after a debauched party. This escalated bit-by-bit into a struggle against the forces of Imperialism itself, with the goal being to liberate a powerful spirit of propserity stolen from the ancient world with other treasures when the British were plundering tombs & temples. The heroes liberated the trapped spirit, causing the beginning of the end for the British Empire, but they paid a high price for their heroism and all either died or disappeared by the end. There is a coda to this session which we'll get to on Friday...

League of Extraordinary Gen X

A more up-to-date take on the LXG concept, but not that up-to-date, as it takes place in 197X and

features among its cast Professor Spencer Quist (Doom Watch), "John" (The Tomorrow People), Jeff Randall (Randall & Hopkirk, Deceased) and Catweazle (um... Catweazle.) This whole game was a shameless nostalgie fest, revelling in all the pop culture of 1970s British telefantasy, with references to The Avengers, The Goodies, Sapphire & Steel and many, many others. It's very silly and very much designed to appeal to people of my generation, but also it gave me a chance to try out the Shiver RPG after buying it at the previous year's convention.

Rest in Pieces

One of my favourite compact games, it's easy to run this at short notice and it plays super fast, ending at the first player character death, which is guaranteed to happen within an hour or so. As such, we ended up playing this twice in succession, with increasingly wild & surreal plots, which fits the pitch of deadbeat housemates sharing a rundown basement apartment with their landlord, the Grim Reaper. It all comes lovingly packaged in one box, complete with Jenga tower, character trait cards and wipe clean character sheets so you can start over quickly when your character dies.

Friday

This is the day when it all changed... well, there were a couple of setbacks anway, but rest assured gentle reader, I was not harmed in any way. I'm pretty sure everyone else was probably alright as well.

Escape from Dino Island

The slight glitch I experienced with this game was realising that, while I had printed out all the play

sheets required, I hadn't printed out the rules, which contain a lot of support mateials. Never mind, I thought, I'll just bring my laptop to the table with me and read directly from the pdf when I need to. So of course the keyboard played up, but I had a spare with me, because that's a known issue with this keyboard, and I dashed back to my lodge to fetch it... which then also played up, so I had to wing it based on what I remembered and what I'd printed out, which fortunately included all the essential mechanics of the game.

        This is a brillinatly compact game inspired by the Jurassic Park franchise and using the basic Powered by the Apocalypse system, laser focused on the premise of a group trying to escape from an island full of dinosaurs. Designed to run for only one or two sessions, it has a simple mechanic for tracking harm to the player characters: if you get injured whilst already injured, then your character is out of the story and you have the choice of dying a heroic death or just getting dragged along by the others to the end.  You're not out of the game though, as you just pick up any spare playbook and introduce your new character at the earliest opportunity. I am sorely tempted to hack or reksin this game for other stories & settings, but I am also cautious of disturbing the alchemy that makes it work so well.

Women Are Werewolves

Another run through with some different players, unfolding another story about families and how to survive them. I went another direction with my character for this game and played a non-gender conforming male who had been forced into marriage in order to bring some rebllious outsiders into the fold. This ended with me taking my daughter away from her controllong mother so that she could explore what it means to be a werewolf on her own terms, away from the prying eyes and controlling hands of my family.

Fiasco Drinking in the Bar

The other hiccup of the day was that my game of Fiasco didn't have any takers, so I was exiled to the bar with Brian who also had no players for his game, and there we met up with Lisa, Mike, Symon, Pamela and some other friends who I only get to see at conventions. This is also where we find the follow-up to the Gentle & Extraordinary game, as Lisa & Mike, who both played in it, started to tell the others all about it. A couple of sentences in though, Lisa stopped, looked at me and said, "Oh, I'd better not spoil it though" The following short exchange then took place.

        Me: "What do you mean?"

        Lisa: "You might want to run that scenario again."
        Me: "... I made it all up as we played."
        Lisa: "WHAT?!"

This did lead into an interesting conversation about improvised storytelling and other gaming techniques though, all well lubricated by plenty of drinks.

Saturday

This should have been my final day of gaming, but I was determined to make that Golden Twelve, so I very nicely asked the admin team at the convention desk if they could print out some game materials for me, which they did easily! The whole thing runs so smoothly largely because of the volunteers who give up their time so that everyone else can just get on with playing games and they deserve all the thanks & praise I can possibly heap upon them.

Nevermore

OK, obviously, it would have made more sense to run this game on Wednesday, since it's based on the
Netflix series of that name, but my advance planning is rarely that organised. Anyway, this is a game that I ran several times last year, both face-to-face and online, and it always delivers a unique experience; there are several plot seeds I like to use and this time I kicked things off with the school being under investigation for academic cheating, with some very unfriendly government inspectors looming over everything. After lots of twists & turns, one of the PCs took over from Charon and ferried the souls of the dead to the unwerworld after school each day, while the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe possessed an android and became the school's new teacher of literature & history.

Thrilling Tails

One of the most wholesome games around, in which everyone plays adorable dogs saving the day for the hoomans. I gave the players the choice of which story they wanted to play: action adventure, spoopy Halloween special or magical fairytale and they went for spoopy! A little girl went missing while Trick or Treating and the dogs had to investigate the creepy old house on the hill to rescue her from being turned into a doll by a wicked faerie being. All was well in the end, with the girl and other victims saved and returned to their families, while the dogs gained a new friend when they persuaded the faerie to try life as a dog with them!

Rest in Pieces

Another round of this easy to pick up & play game, only this time we played it three times in a row, with Death being played by a different actor each time (depending on who I felt like attempting an impersonation of.) The pictures say more than any words can about this game.

Sunday?

I didn't plan on running a game on Sunday this year, but to reach my Golden Twelve goal, I added one in to make up for missing one on Thursday night. There was also the usual end-of-convention goodbyes and closing events as well.

Holy Orders

This game was inpsired by the second series of Good Omens, using the My Life with Master RPG, where the PCs are minions of an evil master, carrying out their twisted & immoral orders before they finally grow enough of a spine to stand up to the bully and overthrow them. In my mind, this seemed like a natural fit for angels carrying out God's will on Earth and we spun a tale of God wanting to turn the whole world into England after he lost a bet with the Devil about the division of human souls. The PCs were ably supported by a full cast of dogs, baristas, bureaucratic police officers, Scotland and Rishi Sunak's off-screen whimpers.

We'll Meet Again...

The convention officially ends in the afternoon, as the admin desk closes to allow for a huge charity raffle draw and presentations for the Best Character Death and of course thanks to all the organisers, staff, GMs, players, merchandisers and others who come together to make it such a brilliant week. The last 'event' of the week was the Sunday carvery, a much-needed boost for those of us staying until Monday morning and despite Lloyd's sterling efforts to find me a bubble bath, I was too tired to even manage that. After getting into bed early, I set off by 8.30am the next day, aided by a lift to the station from Nick, then some train services that were actually on time and connected for a change, so I was back home a little after 1pm. I'm ready to do it all again next year, how about you?