Alternative Medicine #2: Mamma Told Me Not to Come

Continuing my short campaign of Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, the staff of the Lambshead Clinic for Indistinct Medicine were having their morning meeting to catch each other up on yesterday's shenanigans, when a new patient demanded to be seen immediately. This was Lago Balmedie, an entrpreneur afflicted with [BEEP] verbal censorship. Celia got to work on diagnosing his condition, making a connection between his wig and the Voodoo Wig of Harlyn Dydon from the previous session, while Analogue administered treatment, i.e. she tapped him on the head with a hammer.

Meanwhile, Toby found a golden envelope on his deck, containing a card with a set of numbers printed on it; decoding this lead him to the Assassin's Guild and one Casey Crawford working the desk. Checking the ledger for the day, Casey found that Toby had a site visit booked, to case the joint and provide an estimate. The site in question proved to be the cemetry though, specifically a gravestone with Toby's name on it! Casey thoughtfully distracted Toby and then whacked him on the back of the head with a cosh: Toby awoke a little while later in the afterlife, apparently, with the God of Causality looking down on him and demanding to know why he was here early! The God offered to adjust the celestial calendar and move the date of his death to 'Today', but Toby politely refused and instead walked through the door the God indicated would take him back to the land of the living. Walking through the door, Toby entered his surprise birthday party, with all his colleagues from the Clinic there! Naturally, this was the suprise party Toby will/had organised for himself.

In another meanwhile, Thackeray went to negotiate the bill with Harlyn Dydon but arrived at the architect's office to find it boycotted by Cosine Cockaday and others, protesting the way their property had been taken out from under them. Thackeray took a moment out of his schedule to stitch up the scratches across Cosine's face, noticing in the process that they resembled the marks left by a dragon's claw. After that interlude, he went into the office and pushed Harlyn for a payment, subtly suggesting that the truth about Harlyn's wig might get out if he didn't pay up; Harlyn was in no position to argue, literally, as he collapsed to the floor, choking, so Thackeray helped himself to some golden ornaments on the desk and left. In actual fact, these trinkets were intended as a bribe for Sizzle, a demonic entity that had been contracted to beleaguer him but instead took the bribe and pointed Thackeray towards Mandan Barr, the God (Maybe?) of Rumours (Possibly?)

Back with the mainish plot, Analogue and Celia thought it would be a good wheeze to follow Lago Balmedie to his meeting with the consortium that had bought out Dragon's Landing for redevelopment, as they had left him with some post-treatment total honesty. It turned out the consortium was a political rally of some sort, united by their desire to Make Ankh-Morpork Magnificent Again, known as MAMMA for short. Unfortunately, Lago's brutal frankness had the crowd on his side, cheering him on and begging for the opportunity to give him their money. Even Celia and Analogue got caught up in this, finding themselves back outside 5 minutes later wearing MAMMA badges. Celia had gotten another whiff of strange magic about the proceedings, suggesting something larger was going on.

Further investigation by the clinic team... well, it didn't exactly go the way they wanted. A swift revisit to the Dragon's Landing site lead to Cosine Cockaday's revelation that he had been attacked by a dragon! This rumour began to spread like widlfire around the city, along with one about the River Ankh rising, but most people ignored this and decided to panic about the return of the dragon instead.

• Thackeray met with the God (maybe?) of Rumours (possibly?) in a bar that mostly sold erotic peanuts and found favour in the divine presence of a shadowy figure in the furthest corner, who told him that something more powerful than magic was at work in the city and their troubles were being driven by an idea. The God pointed him towards Kinrich Hardaw, a wizard who had committed himself to a sanatorium and refused to speak to anyone.
• Celia, Analogue and Toby went to see Lady Sybil Ramkin at the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons, to seek her opinion on the dragon rumors flying about the city. She poo-pooed the idea while allowing them to pet Floofy, an adorable swamp dragon who only caused burns they could easily treat. Not only did Lady Sybil direct them towards the university for answers, she also promised to get them an invite to dinner with Gail Lambshead, their mysterious patron who was behind the founding of the clinic.

With the city in panic over the rumoured return of the dragon, a large crowd had gathered around the walls of Unseen University, demanding that the wizards do something, or blaming them for the whole thing. The clinic team decided to enter through the simple ruse of hijacking a sedan chair belonging to one of the high class citizens here to consult directly with the wizards about the whole situation. Naturally, this turned out to belong to Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, who calmly stepped out of his chair to introduce his abductors to Mustrum Ridcully, Arch-Chancellor of Unseen University. Of course, the Patrician had known what was happening all along and had arranged for the clinic team to meet the wizards for his own inscrutable reasons.

The team now have a purpose: find out what in the Nine Hells is going on in the city and put a stop to it, or face the Patrician's attention! Gulp! He might... talk to them!!

Next Episode: It's All Me, Me, Me, Isn't It?

Alternative Medicine #1: Keep Your Hair On

I've started running a game of Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork at my local ttrpg club, the Milton Keynes Roleplaying Group, after successfully pitching to enough players who wanted to take part. Here's the pitch that got them hooked:

Existing in a previously unknown back street of infamous Ankh-Morpork, The Lambshead Clinic for Indistinct Medicine offers hope to those whose ailments respond to neither traditional nor modern methods. The staff* here will do whatever it takes to treat your condition, whether that's praying to the Small Gods for an intercession on your behalf or replacing the inefficient organs of your body with exciting new versions of their own design! Bring us your tired, your sick, your broken, but above all, bring us your money.

Alternative Medicine is a game set in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, using the quickstart version of the rules for Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork from Modiphius. This is a fully trait based system, with characters defined entirely by short, descriptive phrases about their backgrounds, skills, interests and baggage: there are no numbers involved at all! There are still dice though, with players rolling a d4, d6, d10 or d12 against the GM, who always rolls, um, you know, the other dice.

PCs will be practitioners or consultants in unorthodox areas of biology & medicine, such as these suggested starting points:

• A Witch or other practitioner of headology
• An Igor, skilled at all kinds of organ transplants
• A Priest capable of praying illness away
• An Undead, with experience of the other side
• An Assassin, consultant on poisons and "accidents"
• A Troll, providing a very different perspective

All is not well in Ankh-Morpork, which is business as usual for the city and a great opportunity for you, but the forces of destiny and coincidence are weaving their threads, and the Clinic is caught right in the middle of the closing web. You all have your parts to play, along with a guild of snake-oil salespeople, a wizard with a strange idea about ideas, an embittered toymaker and rumours of the Patrician's imminent retirement.

*Legal advice from the Guild of Lawyers requires the Clinic to inform all prospective clients that our staff have not earned the titles of 'Doctor', 'Nurse', 'Medic', 'Paramedic', 'First Aider', 'Coroner', 'Responsible Adult' or 'Gravedigger'

Last night saw the first session of the game take place, which consisted of a chunk of character creation and then a lot of absurd running around after patients of the clinic. The breakdown of the player-characters is:

• Celia Woodruff, a mycelial witch who believes that mushrooms are the answer to most of life's problems, ignoring the fact that they also create many of those problems. Celia is her own guinea pig for testing new treatments and she is very diligent about trying out the mushrooms on herself. When she is in contact with reality, she takes care of her pet rat Mossy, who acquired a magnificent green coat when he fell into the River Ankh and bounced.
• Count Holloway Harris, an irritatingly sane scientist from Uberwald, who just has no luck with the typical accoutrements of his profession. Like most Uberwaldean scientists, he just makes it all up as he goes along, but always attracts the wrong type of weather for his experiments: he needs a nice fresh storm, he gets a lovely day for a picnic in the park.
• Analogue Cockaday, a rural domestic goddess (not literally) whose life was changed forever when she was kicked in the head by one of her pigs and her whole outlook was changed overnight. Converting her farm & family to new vegan principles has not been easy for her, but she has come to Ankh-Morpork to share her passion for retrophrenology* with a wider audience.
• Thackeray Ambrosius, self-proclaimed opulentologist, he takes money from the rich, thus relieving them of the terrible burden of having more money than him. He might get around to sharing the wealth with the poor someday. We also learned that one of his ex-clients almost put a price on his head with the Assassin's Guild, but dire finances limited this to a price on his foot.
• Toby Determined, born nine months prior to a night of passion between a couple of reannual crop farmers, most of his life is lived in the wrong order as he feels the effects of things before their causes. As a medical practicioner, he finds conditions that match the symptoms his patients report, exposes them to the cause of the condition and then cures them of that.

*Analogue hits people on the head with variously sized hammers in order to give them those personality-defining lumps & bumps that contribute to the melting pot of Ankh-Morpork!

The focus of the first episode was Dydon Harlyn, a successful architect with the contract to redevelop the Dragon's Landing site, who was plagued with mysterious physical injuries, such as his arm suddenly twisting and breaking in front of witnesses at the clinic. A lackadaisical investigation eventually revealed that his teenage daughter had made dolls using her father's old wig and given them out to her school chums, inadvertently creating a whole set of voodoo dolls! The team gathered all the dolls and safely neutralised them, but some danglng plot threads remain, that will be revisited over the course of the campaign:

• Celia, an experienced witch, observed that the accidental creation of voodoo dolls isn't how witchcraft works, leaving her perplexed over how this happened.
• Toby paid off Dr. Frank Winkie, a representative of the newly founded Guild of Licensed Medical Practitioners, but the clinic is now expected to pay another AM$50,000 every month or face closure!
• Finally, Cosine Cockaday, a relative of Analogue who she had met that day at a protest over the Dragon's Landing redevelopment project, was seen late at night, drinking while brooding over the wasteland where his home once stood. His fire was blown out by a mysterious gust of wind and the last we saw of him was as he was engulfed in the shadow of a dragon's wing!

Next Episode: Mamma Told Me Not to Come!

Contingency 2025

 Here's another of my... good lord, are these annual now?! I have got to get out more; anyway, yes, it's that time of year once again when I have just returned from the Contingency table top role-playing game convention (there must be a way to shorten all that...) and I'm ready to reflect on my experiences. Well, you lucky readers now get to share those reflections! Unless you're a vampire, in which case I assume you won't share reflections here, but enough filling up the first paragraph to make it look like I know how to write, let's get on with it.

Getting There is Half the Journey

Don't question the headers, just roll with it; my friends Dave and Lora drove up from Milton Keynes in Dave's car on Monday afteroon, enjoying a brisk if slightly damp 2+ hour drive, taking in the magnificent flatness of the Norfolk Fens on the way. Checking in at Searles was a breeze and we were unpacking in our lodge (after a brief life or death struggle over who got the room with ensuite) within 10 minutes of arrival.

Mondays are the quiet days of the con, when it begins and ends, so we didn't have much planned and that's exactly what we did: not much. Basically, we said hello to a few people, my hug counter started heading towards infinity and we ended the day with dinner at Smokey Jo's, then back to the lodge to relax and touch base with the outside world before the delirium consumed us all.

Hunstanton: Closed on Tuesdays

Hunstanton is closed on Tuesdays, something we need to keep in mind for next year, because as we walked into Hunstanton with some loyalists from my prior Contingency group, we did indeed discover a tremendous amount not much being open. We did manage to find some warm clothes for Lora who, despite repeated warnings from us about the weather on the East Coast of England in January, still arrived with the idea that if she just put on an undershirt with her dress and brought a raincoat with her, she'd be fine. Readers, she was not fine. Anyway, the YMCA shops came to the rescue, and suitably warmed, we all then decamped to one of the fine cafes for an excellent brunch, before returning along the promenade and then cutting back across the road for essential supplies from Tescos. I tried to pick up a week's worth of groceries in 5 minutes, which explains why I still had a little food to take back with me at the end of the week.

Tuesday afternoon was occupied with tea time, with various friends dropping in to say hello and enjoy a cold collation of cured meats, creamy chesses, oregano crackers and endless tea & coffee. I must make this a more formally organised thing next year, because it was so nice to see everyone socially, rather than as part of a game, which is pretty much how I spent the rest of the convention seeing people. After some thought about accomodation and the increasing demand for tables in the main gaming area, I'd decided to run all my games at my lodge for this year, which undoubtedly lead to some friends thinking I was absent for this con. Note to self for next year: get out more.

Wednesday [Slots 1 to 3]

Foretold: In Its Shadow

So,  a couple of notes about this game and the slot it ran in, which applies to all my morning game slots on all the main days of the convention:

1. At the end of the con last year, I got talking to Alyssa Griffiths about gaming, as one does, and she said something so profoundly enlightnening that I went on to write, playtest and publish four narrative games once I got home. I would love to share her words of wisdom with you all here, but I can't for the life of me remember what she said. It was good, though!
2. Since I was running all my games in my lodge this year, I thought it was only fair and prudent to give my lodge-mates a chance for a lie-in when required, instead of foisting a group of total strangers upon them at 9am every day. Hence my 10am start time for all my morning games, giving not only my lodge-mates a chance to ready themselves for the day ahead, but also the players who signed up for the games. This proved to be such an attractive strategy that I plan to repeat it next year!

All the Foretold games use an 'oracle' system, a list of prompts tied to a deck of ordinary playing cards; on your turn, you draw a card, read the prompt, repsond to it, then the other players can ask you to expand further if they want. In Its Shadow is a story of a group of Hunters in pursuit of The Beast, which in this case amounted to a team of corporate troubleshooters dropped onto a colony world to roust out the alien leader of a rebellion against their occupation. We were totally the bad guys in this, and while we mostly got what we deserved in the end, the collaterel included all other organic life on the planet, excluding the CEO who was safely inside an environment suit, so she ended up stranded and alone on a dead world.

Monsterhearts Gothic

Have you played Monsterhearts? I have, a lot, enough to be burned out on American high school student dramas and had a hankering for a different tone, so I hacked this together last summer. It's a version of the game set in a 19th Century European boarding school, with a Gothic angle, all scandalous intimacies, dark brooding and unrequited passions. The Beloved's boyfriend, a bestial Hybrid, kept trying to scare the Risen away, afraid of what might be going on behind his back, and the Risen could not have given less of a fig about the whole thing. This left the Ageless time to attempt a little corruption of the Beloved, which they were not completely averse to, but then matters came to a head as the Risen learned that the school librarian was the one who had returned them from the grave. This lead to a confrontation with the now undead librarian, who had brought the cold of the grave back from the dead with them, and the jolly school chums burned all evidence of the horrifically awful mudrer they committed.

Gentle & Extraordinary

A Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen inspired hack of Lasers & Feelings, this saw a trio of brave

adventurers trying to overcome a cult utilizing zombies for their own nefarious reasons. Things did not go smoothly for the League however, as the sudden disappearance of their leader had lead to infighing over who should take control of the organisation, or indeed if anyone should. In between bouts of accusations, they managed to set up another cult as a fall guy for their plan to steal a zombie for themselves and found the bolt hole of their erstwhile leader. In the end, they thwarted the Prime Minister's plans to use a Thames Regatta as cover for a purge of the homeless and poor from the City of London, and completely forgot about the approach of an unknown planet between the orbits of Earth and Mars: it's easy to let little details like that slip your mind when your consciousness has been spread out over a few dozen undead host bodies.

Thursday [Slots 4 to 6]

Foretold: Mile's End

Inspired loosely by The World's End, this is a pub crawl game in which a group of old friends come

back to the town they grew up in 10 or 20 years later and relive old glories, whilst also stirring up memories that are perhaps better left forgotten. It turned out we'd all had good lives, after a shaky start in our youths, and the change in fortune had something to do with the night where one character had been arrested for dealing in psychedelics, which another of the characters had tripped out on that night. A few more stops, and many drinks & a curry later, we started to suspect that all was not right within our group; in fact, we came to suspect that one of us was not who they said they were, but the more we tried to push at those memories, the more migraines and nose bleeds we suffered from. Ultimately, one of us returned to wherever they came from, after failing to fully integrate into human society, using the camouflage of a stolen identity, and the rest of us never saw 'them' again.

Tithe Barn

One of the two creepy games I ran at this convention (well, deliberately creepy at least), this scenario uses Dead of Night to mash-up ideas from the Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter and the recent TV series Teacup. Six residents of a farm barely keeping itself solvent had to welcome a wedding party to their home and weather the storm of complaints and blundering about until night fell, at which point the monsters came out to torment them all. The PCs barely survived the ensuing onslaught, and there were a couple of times it seemed like the wedding party had died horribly, but as the sun rose, it became clear there had been only one fatality, and it hadn't been at the hands of the monsters. There were some rather more pressing revelations to be dealt with that morning however, including one that would change the PCs' lives forever, but I won't spoil all that here, as I definitely want to run this one again.

Fiasco

A nice quiet game to end the day with would have been a good idea, but I'd offered the chaos of Fiasco

instead and I was committed to it, as were some of the players as well I think. We picked the Home Invasion playset, but With Added Goose, so we wove together a tale of goose-like aliens attempting to create goose/human hybrids with limited success. Have you ever seen Mother Goose? We have and we deeply wish we'd been spared the sight. Anyway, after much shenanigans with genetic deficiencies, a lot of bodies buried under the lawn and the alien captain's very uncomfortable nest communicator (you don't want to know about the aerial) the aliens finally found the solution they were looking for and the single human PC took the fall for pretty much all the laws they'd broken, particularly all the murders.

Friday [Slots 7 to 9]

Foretold: From Earth

A game in three acts, which begins when the people of Earth (some of them, at least) receive a message from space and determine to build a spaceship to seek out the source.

• Act 1: we assembled a crew through some tense international alliances and funded construction of the vessel with some shady investors. One character already had such divided loyalties at this point that even she didn't know if she was a double agent or not.
• At the interval, our rivals got the drop on us and take off early in a hastily converted submarine!
• Act 2: the voyage began and tensions rose as the crew fought among themselves and plotted against each other, leading to a mutiny in which the privileged investor who came along for the ride was evicted from their luxurious private cabin, while other crew members became addicted to the hallucingenic effects of the engine emissions.
• Just before arriving at our destination, we received new orders, so now instead of exploiting the new world for resources, we had to implore the aliens to aid us against the invasion of a neighbouring country back on Earth.
• Act 3: all was not as it seems on this planet, with time istelf ebbing & flowing, causing years to pass by in moments and vice versa. With two of the crew totally compromised and metamorphosed into alien forms, the sole technician remaining sent a message back to Earth seeking to confirm that the data we had was complete. Due to the unstable nature of time on this world however, this ended up being the very message that drew us here in the first place!

Fellow Travellers

The second and some would say even creepier game I had planned for this con, it ended up being a lot

more disturbing than even I had in mind when it began! This game uses a ghost story-style PbtA game I've been playtesting and refining for the last few years on my personal Discord server, with a focus on the divides between us: gender, class, generation and even those gifted with the Sight and those without it. As six travellers shared a coach through the unseasonably cold woods, some saw that there were more than just six travellers aboard; as the apparitions made themselves known, a rash decision to encourage the coach to go faster resulted in a broken wheel and an altercation with a pagan cult who could steal the warmth from those they embraced. After narrowly escaping this, the coach had to stop at an inn overnight, so that the coachman could effect repairs; this was the cue for a lot of secrets to come out and confessions to be made, culiminating in a struggle over who would continue to their destination and who would go back to where they came from. While some were glad to reboard the coach and rest in the warmth at last, it came down to a battle of words between the preacher and the highwayman to see who would occupy the last seat.

What Ho, World!

This is a very silly card-based RPG in the vein of a Jeeves & Wooster misadventure, as a foppish Gadabout had her heart set on winning a golf tournament with the help of a particularly ugly copy of the Mona Lisa. Her aunt somewhat disapproved of the whole thing and was rather more invested in interfering in the engagement of a noted artist to the son of a wealthy family, whle the aunt's capable maid became inveigled in the machinations of a high court judge who only wanted what was best for his Great Aunt Ermintrude. Ultimately, after several chaotic golf contests, the artist was married off to the judge, the latter promptly passing away in a portrait accident on their wedding day, leaving the artist free to have the marriage she'd wanted all long.

Saturday [Slots 10 to 12]

Foretold: The Mayor of Elphame

Perhaps this wasn't the best time to run a politically charged story game about prejudice against the

Other, but when, these days, is it a good time for a game like that? We did get a lot of perverse enjoyment from it though, as we found ways to integrate Fae society with 1920s New York, whilst also largely retaining our own traditions and identity. In the end, despite the efforts of the embodiment of Temperance to mediate between old tradionalists and forward looking oracles, it was the embodiment of Blood Sacrifice who proved to be the popular, centrist candidate for Mayor who could bridge the divide between us. It might have been their policy of butchering human criminals and selling them back to mortal society as a savoury meat delicacy that swung the vote.

Down the Witches' Road

This is a playset for my Blood & Water RPG, inspired by the TV series Agatha All Along; four witches form a circle for mutual aid, though the baggage they each bring with them may be what tears them all apart. It started small, with a group of incompetent Satanists and a forgotten alarm call, but soon escalated to an apocalypse that could only be averted by placing a tablet upon an altar.

"Where's the tablet?"

    "Don't know."
"OK, where's the altar?"

    "Don't know."

"Well, we're effed then."

Luckily, they did find the tablet, hidden under a tattoo on the ex-apprentice of one witch, who had grown jealous and wiped her mentor's memory, but at least they all managed to avert the end of the world. However, the Blood Witch had entered into a vow to kill her ex and her ex's new partner once the world was saved, but opted to spare her ex by making the new partner's death take as long as possible.

Wizards Aren't Gentlemen

By this point in the convention, I was barely aware that games even have rules, but that was a fine way

to wrap up, as we crashed our way through a convoluted tale of wizardly scheming. Our wheelings, dealings and back-stabbings were accompanied by a chorus of comical bandits, oversharing inanimate objects and a Philosophical Raven whose major contribution to the annals of reflective thought was that there were't enough eyeballs. I think we finally arrived at some kind of ending, possibly by stealing another wizard's apprentice away from them through a marriage proposal? It was the kind of game where it's hard to keep track of why things are happening even when the players aren't frazzled and running on fumes, but it certainly contained lots of big laughs, which is all you want from your final con game.

It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

It's over.

Sunday morning was the last day at the con for myself, Lora and Dave, but we started as we ended, by having a bunch of friends come over to our lodge, though for brunch instead of tea. It was nice to just socialise at last, after almost four solid days of running games, sleeping and eating meals. It was also just lovely to share thoughts & feelings with old friends and new ones, with much thanks to Alyssa, Sarah, Lizzie, Andrew and of course Becca, who we could have made some serious coin off if we'd charged her rent for all the times she came over! 

I'm back at home now, feeling those Post Con Blues a little bit, but at least I have a game to look forward to tonight, which will help a lot. I'm already considering what to do next year, not just in terms of games I run, but also how I schedule my time: for me, it's a tough balance between all the games I

want to share and all the people I want to hang out with, and in each slot you really only get to choose to do one or the other: everything else is just as the Fates' decree.

It's been a blast again and I will sign off as usual by thanking our fantastic Wyrd Sisters and their army of volunteers, the amazing staff at Searles, all the GMs and players, the traders and everyone who supports the convention and also supports us, enabling us to take this week out of our regular lives to be fantastic with friends.

Same time again next year?

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?

Let's Talk About Crits, Baby

Once again, I've been noodling about with a bunch of game designs, tackling different ideas and trying to express them through the medium of a TTRPG. A particular theme or style keeps popping up for me, a small interest I've found in anime, especially the wholesome, wacky comedy kind. I've been running an ongoing campaign using Fabula Ultima for some friends on my Discord server, which takes on the anime style from a perspective that mixes trad & indie design philosophies: it's reasonably crunchy, with lots of levelling-up, but it gives the players plenty of narrative authority and they literally draw the map for themselves as they pursue their quests.

My preference is still for very rules-light games though; I'm not a fan of bean counting, min-maxing and tactical combat rounds, so even the lighter version of those presented by Fabula Ultima doesn't quite hit the spot for me. A number of ideas have been stewing about in the back of my head for quite a while and now something is starting to emerge, a simple anime-inspired fantasy game taking notes from KonoSuba, Handyman Saitou in Another World and other tales of misfit adventuring parties. The game I want to make allows the PCs to be screw-ups and oddballs who don't quite fit the mould for a standard fantasy hero: wizards who forget their spells, warriors who enjoy getting hurt a little too much and of course a hero summoned from another world and dropped into this whole mess with no idea of what's going on.

Kono Suba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World

It's that disparity between the situations the PCs find themselves in and their ability to deal with it that
is the difficult part of the design, because there needs to be a balance between the game mechanics and the comedic story. The lead characters in the sub-genre of 'misfit adventuring party' aren't massively incompetent; in fact, they are often immensely powerful and it's only their personality flaws that hold them back from being the type of heroes that legends are written about. In order to emulate that gulf between reality & expectation, the system has to allow the PCs to make exceptionally powerful moves sometimes whilst also encouraging the players to embrace catastrophic failures.

I latched onto using critical hits & misses for this, something to parallel the regular action checks that could twist the narrative in strange directions at unexpected moments, so let's finally get to the business alluded to in the title of this post and talk about crits.

A Critique of Crits

There are a couple of very popular methods for determining when a roll is a crit, whether hit or miss, either scaled results or dice readings. Scaled results just include crits as the extreme ends of your dice roll, e.g. a 1 on the dice is a critical failure, while a 20 is a critical hit. That means that no matter what your level of skill is, crits are equally likely to turn up for everyone in every roll; Quest is a good modern example of this, where all results exist on a 1-20 scale and everyone has the same chance for every result on every roll.

The other option is to use some kind of dice reading, essentially treating the dice as a kind of oracle to determine whether a crit occurs, independently of what the actual outcome of the roll is. This type of system usually requires at least 2 dice, since the most popular implementation is to look for doubles on your roll; doubles on a failure turns it into a critical miss, while doubles on a success turns it into a critical hit. Both Fabula Ultima and Ironsworn are modern examples of this approach, invoking extra effects that work for or against the player-characters whenever they roll doubles on their dice.

I started my design by thinking of a scale, with every possible outcome assigned to a different range of results on the dice, using a dice pool instead of a single roll to create more of a curve to the results rather than a linear progression from failure to success. Here's what struck me after a playing around with different ways of implementing that idea though: any kind of scale is predictable and it pushes PCs towards certain kinds of behaviour. I was setting the top of the scale to be an overkill-type result, where the PC's abilities got out of hand and they did more than they had intended to, so it had elements of a critical hit & critical miss at the same time. The issue I was having was that it locked the intended & unintended results together, so it was a little too predictable for the wild, often gonzo comedy feel I wanted to capture. A result of 1 was a critical failure, so not only did you not succeed at your roll, but you also suffered some unintended consequences as well. The only way around that was to create a long chain of outcomes, mixing and matching levels of success with unintended consequences along the way, but that still made it predictable and set some results on the scale beyond the reach of some PCs. If you can only roll three six-sided dice on your roll, then you know you aren't getting above 18 and though that can be finessed with skills bonuses, for example, that just has the opposite effect of putting the lowest results off limits.

Feeling Lucky

The other option then was to use the dice as an oracle, finding some other way to read them that's not tied to the result of the roll; given the dice pool mechanic was prefect for the "doubles are crits" rule, this seemed like a no-brainer. That took me right back to the issue with the scaled results though, where it's still the action dice that determine the nature of the unintended consequences: if you fail, the consequences make it worse and if you succeed, the consequences make it better.

Handyman Saitou in Another World

This is the point where I decided to break away from easy, off-the-peg solutions and really ask myself: what do I want this system to do? What kind of results do I want the PCs to get? In order to get that unpredictable, comedy-action style baked in, the players had to be able to get any kind of unintended consequence with any kind of roll. Incompetent characters should still be able to stumble into a serendipitous result, while overpowered heroes ought to be over-reaching themselves with their displays of might and landing the whole party in trouble.

This is where I had an inspiration: if the results and consequences have to be separate, then so do the dice, I was trying to make one set of dice do too many things. By separating results and consequences into two separate rolls, I could have them match up in any way possible, but also, I could make this 'luck' a variable, independent of attributes or skills. This way, a character could have a really powerful ability, balanced out by the fact that it could also cause all kinds of chaotic problems for themselves and their allies. With skill & luck being ranked side by side, players had the choice of playing a character who relied on their proficiency & experience, or one who just got by on dumb luck coming to their rescue. At last, the perfect blend of competence and comedy I was looking for!

This game is still in the very early stages, but now with that basic framework for handing the crits in place, it suggests a lot more ideas for where I want to take it next. The current working title is No-One Wanted to Adventure With Us So We Formed Our Own Party, with a simple character creation system mostly in place, where players can match up their party role (wizard, fighter, etc) with a background template (isekai, fairy, outcast and so on.) I may post more on the development of this or some other half-baked projects, or maybe even some broader TTRPG theories and observations that I want to share.

Cut Out & Keep

Wow... the stuff you find when you start clearing out your hard drive. I apparently wrote this game for a contest and then promptly forgot about it, but as I read back through it for the first time in four years, I realised it would make a good game to play online with a minimum number of players. This is a tweaked version of the original draft to support quarantine play (is that a new genre?) and is as unashamedly queer as the original.

Group Activity

When I was young, I kept a secret stash of pictures I had cut out of newspapers and magazines which showed images of men I liked; this was before the internet, of course. The images were photos from medical articles in the newspaper, handsome bare-chested men from comic strips and really anything which used the context to show a bit of beefcake and muscle; not purely erotic, just enough 'plausible deniability' to get semi-nude images into the mainstream press. This game is a tribute to that experience.

Before play, create a shared folder or document and fill it with googled images of people; they may be photos or artworks, but avoid anything blatantly pornographic. You will want to talk about appropriate sites and images to use before you play, to keep everyone on the same page about what to expect. You can also do this as a live activity if you happen to all be in the same place, like so:

• Get a stack of newspapers and magazines, then divide them up between all the players: everyone should now go through their stack looking for pictures of people of the same gender as some other player around the table (don’t choose pictures that match your gender, unless everyone around the table is of the same gender.)
• When you find a picture, whether it is a photograph or cartoon, from a news story, magazine feature or advertisement, carefully cut or tear it out: to tear out a picture, tear out the page first, then make sharp folds along the edges of the picture you want and rip quickly along those lines.
• When everyone is done, spread all the pictures in the centre of the table, so that they are visible and accessible to all players; you are now ready to begin.

Getting Into Role

For the duration of the game, all the players must imagine that they are a young, queer person, who is either drawn to members of the same gender, has been assigned the wrong gender or both. The exact ages of the characters, and other details about them, will come out through play, no-one needs to determine an entire history for their character at the start of the game.

The pictures in the shared folder or spread across the table represent pictures that each character may have cut out & kept hidden away during the early part of their life, as a way of holding onto to that part of themselves which isn’t fully defined yet and which they fear may be ridiculed or worse. During the game, players will collect pictures, with each one representing some threshold in their character’s life.

Question & Answer

The game is played in turns; on each player’s turn, they nominate someone else who chooses a picture from the shared collection and passes it to the current player. The current player then says whether this is a picture of someone they were attracted to or wanted to be like: after this statement, every other player around the table may ask the current player one question about that picture and the circumstances around it.

A question may be direct or indirect, open or leading, but they must always relate to the picture itself: a question may not be about the character or family of the current character, but it may be open to answers about them. Therefore, a player may not ask “Where did you live?” but they could ask “Where in your house did you hide this picture?” and get an answer that also encompasses details about the character’s home situation.

• Open Questions provide the current player with few cues, so they are free to answer it how they like, as long as they are consistent with their previous answers, e.g. “How old were you when you collected this picture?” or “Where did you put this picture?” give the current player a lot of margin to answer.
• Leading Questions suggest or establish aspects of the character’s life at around the time they collected this picture, e.g. “How did your best friend react when you showed them this picture?” or “Who stole the school book you had stuck this picture to the cover of?” Leading questions can be used for some very hard framing, establishing facts about the current character’s life and getting the current player to respond: use the character’s family, friends and events in their life to push them for harder answers, e.g. “Where did your family send you when they discovered these pictures?” or “How did this picture cause the break-up you had with your first love?”

Rounds of Play

A turn ends when every other player has asked one question of the current player, but there should always be at least 3 questions per picture, so with fewer players, some will get to ask more than one question. A round ends when each player has had one turn at answering questions about the picture they have been given. Each subsequent round should represent a later stage in the lives of the same characters, but while this might be only a week later for one, it might be five years later for another, as long as all character unveil their stories going forward, not in flashbacks to an earlier part of their life.

Let each character’s story develop organically, don’t try to push them to a predetermined conclusion: on each player’s turn, they should confine themselves to only answering the questions they are asked. The answer should focus on the question and not be used to bring in masses of extraneous data about the current character. The more supplemental data that is given, the more it shuts down future questions that the other players might want to ask.

Ending the Game

The game should be played over three rounds, or five if there are very few players, so that each player ends with the same number of pictures in front of them: to close the game, each player explains what happened to each of their pictures, with each player taking it in turn to describe the fate of one picture before passing to the next player. Continue in this fashion until each player has detailed the fate of each of their pictures.

When describing the fate of a picture, any type of answer is allowable, from “I don’t know, I lost it,” to “I found & purchased the original; now it hangs over my bed.” A picture that was important to you in your youth might have lost its significance to you as you grew up and explored your identity; on the other hand, it might have become the defining image of your life, an ideal you have chased and conquered, making it who you are. There are no wrong or right answers here and this final round is intended to reflect what each character might or might not have learned from the pictures they cut out & kept as a youth.

Lorelei & The Rider

This is a special bonus game designed for two players, dealing with themes of romance, power relationships and being an outsider. It probably isn't to everyone's taste.

Upon This Rock

There are only two players in this game and no GM; it tells a tale of the passionate connection between two strangers who are both, in their own way, outcasts from the society around them. These two characters are:

Lorelei: a woman considered a pariah by her townsfolk, for her beliefs, actions or nature; some townsfolk believe her to be a witch or a supernatural creature and do not welcome her among them. As a result, she lives a simple life outside town, by the river, making her home on a rock which the waters flow around. If you are playing Lorelei, describe to the Rider how they first see you.

The Rider: a foreigner travelling through these lands for his own purposes; upon hearing the tale of the Woman of the Rocks, he decides to see for himself and becomes enthralled by her... or vice versa. If you are playing the Rider, describe your reaction to seeing Lorelei for the first time, then describe yourself to her.

Fell free to change the genders of these characters as you wish, the only constant must be that they feel an affinity and attraction to each other, with Lorelei enchanting the Rider but the Rider also fascinating Lorelei. They are both outsiders to the culture they find themselves in, for different reasons, and their relationship may be seen as transgressive or taboo by others.

In order to play, you need an ordinary deck of cards; if you're playing online, this tool may be helpful. The deck is used to ask questions, make demands and respond to each other during play, using the guidance that follows.

Will You, Won't You?

The game always begins with the Rider taking the role of provocateur: players will take turns in this role, pushing the other player for a response to an overture dictated by the cards. The Rider starts the first round of the game by drawing a card from the deck and placing it face up in front of them.

If the card in front of you is Red: ask a question about the other character's life, culture, background, dreams, fears, etc. You want to learn more about them and why they are here, in this place at this time, but your questions should be tightly framed to limit the other player's response. Don't ask "How do you feel?" but do ask "Why are you crying?" Don't ask "How did you come to be here?" but do ask "Where did you get that scar on your cheek?"

If the card in front of you is Black: make a request or demand if you are the Rider; make an offer or suggestion if you are Lorelei. Both characters are negotiating their feelings for each other and finding a type of attraction that is sometimes considered transgressive; the Rider is dominant and possessive, but also affectionate; Lorelei is submissive and sensual, but also strong-willed. Start with simple requests and offers, such as food, shelter, meeting again at a later date or time, and so on, but as the game progresses, go as far as you both feel comfortable with.

After a player asks their question or makes their demand/offer, the other player draws a card from the deck and places it face up in front of them, on top of any other cards they have. Their response is dictated by the rank of the card drawn:

If the card drawn is higher than the card face up in front of the other player: respond positively to their question or demand/offer, answering them, doing as they say or accepting what they offer you. Thank them, be grateful and explain yourself as necessary; this should draw you closer and create further understanding between you as you share something intimate.

If the card drawn is lower than the card face up in front of the other player: explain why you cannot do as they ask, cannot accept what they offer or why that question is difficult to answer. Apologise, be contrite and beg them to forgive you for not being straightforward or open with them; this should create an issue to be resolved and result in a sympathetic bond between you as you both acknowledge your limitations.

If the card drawn matches the rank of the card face up in front of the other player: you may ignore the question, demand or offer and act directly, expressing yourself with action rather than words. This may involve touching each other, kissing, undressing, taking food from the other's hand, pointing towards the answer or even grabbing the other forcefully but not painfully. This is a moment where your passion for each other breaks through.

The Turn of the Cards

After taking your turn as provocateur, pass that role to the other player; their overture is dictated by the card currently face up in front of them, they don't draw another. After the Rider's first turn, overtures are always suggested by the colour of the card you drew last; you only draw another card when you are responding to the other player's overture.

As Lorelei and the Rider learn more about each other, and their relationship progresses from conversation to physical intimacy, they will also seek ways to deal with the issues that arise between them when the card drawn is lower in rank than the provocateur's card. This forms the backbone of the game, with the provocateur using their turn to request or offer a solution to an issue that has been raised previously.

End the game when it feels right to do so; this will most likely occur in one of two ways:

• You may end the game on a match, if the action taken is suitable to the level of passion or intimacy already established between the characters. In this case, we can assume that the Rider ends their journey here to remain with Lorelei.
• You may end the game by resolving an issue that stands between you, if it was of sufficient substance to keep you apart. In this case, we can assume that Lorelei leaves her home for good in order to travel with the Rider.

 - Dedicated to the real life Lorelei; I command you to enjoy it!