Contingency 2026: The Twelve Labours of Groundhoggoth

 It's that time of year again! I've once again been to Contingency, the TTRPG convention on the East Coast of England in the delightful town of Hunstanton, a lovely historic location overlooking the sea. Let's start as tradition demands, with a brief tale about getting to the convention.

Aaaagghh!!!

Actually, maybe let's not dwell on the journey, involving broken down cars, postponed lifts and general background mayhem causing a lot of stress; onto the games!

Yes, I Do Play Games, Actually

After a good meal, watching the Only Connect final and getting the most sleep I would all week, I had Tuesday earmarked for playing games with Graham, Sarah and [Redacted 4th Player - still not sure if I am allowed to name him in public!] This had been arranged well before the convention, with Graham kindly offering to host all day, providing us with a couple of meals and a wonderfully convivial setting to get into the convention mindset in a relaxed way.

We play tested a game that Graham and 4th are working on, a lovely combination of evocative roleplay
and intriguinging puzzle solving, set in a fantastic world of faded grandeur, with magnificent backdrops against which to mark the slow passing of our civilisation, built on the ruins of the past. Thus a merchant, a mechanic, and a robot constructed by a lost & fallen people set out to discover if a breakthrough had been made in translating the language of the ancients and what it could mean for us now.

After lunch and a stimulating conversation deconstructing the aforementioned play test, we continued the linguistic theme with my first face-to-face play of Dialect, a game about languages and how they die. We used the Thieves' Cant background and created a society of criminals based out of an opera house in 19th century London, evolving our own private language for our activities, e.g the HMS Indefatigible was our Moby Dick, an unimaginable hoard of wealth in it's hold that was unobtainable, so the 'HMS' became converted into 'hit & miss' expressing our hopes in an uncertain future. This later became corrupted by a splinter faction who had misgivings about our alliance with another gang who had less exacting modern standards, so they referred to the future as 'sink or swim.' Eventually, sink we did, as our gang became completely subsumed by our rivals-turned-allies and our past was all but forgotten. Dialect is going to be in my regular rotation of 'game-in-a-box' offerings that are easy to learn and play in a single one-shot, as you'll see further into this report.

Wednesday

Session #1: "For the Queen" and "Oh Captain! My Captain!"

Two really awesome deck-based, prompt driven games where you just take turns drawing cards and answering the questions on them to build the story and your character's place in it, until you come to a collective crumch point where all players need to make a decision about the outcome. In For the Queen, our disturbingly immortal queen was stealing parts from her subjects, espcially eyes which she used to spy on us all; in Oh Captain, our dashing captain was concealing a failing memory resulting from a head injury and was thus involved in a very complex love triangle.

Session #2: Dead Talents Society (ft. Best Friends)

Inspired by a viewing of the Taiwanese horror comedy of the same name, I very quickly matched up the content to the Best Friends RPG, to exploit its use of group character creation and a non-random task system that relies on the reasons you are jealous of your friends in the game. Most of the session was taken up with convoluted plans to create a new urban legend around a KFC franchise, so that the dearly departed could live off the fame generated by it. Those dearly departed PCs were:

• Measha as Employee 01/04, a KFC worker who died in a horrific deep fryer accident, which later turned out to be murder committed by their serial killer boss!
• Harry as Jack Jackson, owner/manager of a double glazing firm, who died proving that his windows wouldn't break even if he did a flying kick against one; he was right, it didn't break, even when it hit the ground several floors below, with Jack falling with it.
• Richard as Hunter, a street artist who died in the aftermath of his greatest work, a detailed mural of his tag, meant to show Banksy who was best; unfortunately, using a lot of aerosol paint in a confined space doesn't combine well with a naked flame, so Hunter ended up really putting something of himself into his art.
• Steve as Jason from Survivor, a very minor reality show contestant who died when he was left behind on the island after being forgotten by all the other competitors and the TV crew.
• Tijs as The Annes, an acrobatic troupe of five sisters who died when the circus tent collapsed in the middle of their act, then ended up amalgamated into one grostesque entity that would have made David Cronenberg reach for a sick bag.
• Esther as Rhona, a sweet old lady who was very concerned over the education of the next generation; also, when she died, she was half-eaten by her own cats.

This haunting eventually beat out their arch-rivals, the Sarahs, a troupe of girls who'd all died when their school bus crashed and were dressing the same to create a very powerful urban legend inspired by modern J-horror. The PC's urban legend was franchised, spreading to multiple drive-thru outlets and making them all overnight celebrities in the spirit world!

Session #3: Hazbin Hotel (ft. Blood & Water)

Look, I have to fit at least one of my own game designs into every convention, it's the law, so this year is was my Blood & Water game system pressed into service for a non-canonical episode of the popular animated show about damned souls in Hell seeking the path to redemption. This game flew, taking off under the power of the four players who'd signed up for it: they left me in the dust! There was instant chemistry between our Charlie & Vaggie stand-ins, while issues were created by their Hotel staff members, an eel-like grifter and a voracious appetite monster. We kicked off the day after Heaven's purge, with Virgil, the manager of the hotel, missing and opportunistic music-demon Gershwin arriving to apply pressure to the power vaccuum. Also, it's a musical! When a PC rolled the equivalent of a critical fail in the system, they had to describe a song their PC sung that revealed their true feelings! This was such an awesome game that the next day, I offered to run it as a short campaign for my local club!

Thursday

Session #4: One Last Fight

My first chance to play this, since the Kickstarter fulfullment meant I only just reecived the game exactly one week previously; it's another game-in-a box ttrpg, but it adds a little dice rolling beyond the card-based prompts, so technically you could just play this as an epic fantasy card game if you wanted to. The prompts tie the narrative together beautifully though and you'd be missing out if you didn't create your own story for the adventure you're on. Every card in the game (Hero, Nemesis, Challenge and Loot) has at least one question on it and players either individually or collectively answer these to build up a backstory at the start of play and then explore it further as they progress towards a final confrontation with the Nemesis.

We played it straight out of the box and embarked on a quest to overcome an Angel sent down by God to erase the old world and make way for a new one, triggered by the discovery of a Philosopher's Stone-like material that was transforming everything it touched. It was epic, it was glorious, we faced old allies turned bad and fought monsters corrupted by the transformation, until ultimately, in the very last confrontation, on the very last card of the game... we died and the world ended. This was such a great game and will also be entering my regular rotation of one shots and convention games.

Session #5: Dialect

My first time faciltating Dialect, but with two games under my belt, I was fairly confident I knew what I was doing, and we used The Compound as our background: set in the 1980s, we were a group who had withdrawn from society to become entirely self-sufficient, but the outside world proved it wasn't finished with us yet. Based on our shared belief that wise voices spoke to us, our community banded together in a meteorite crater and added a wall around the rim to further isolate us, but harvest problems eventually lead us to invite agricultural experts in to help; this gradually eroded our grip on the land, starting from when we ceded the 'Abble' to them, a canyon-like feature that naturally focused sound into one point, and it was decreed that the term for bad omens ('Post', derived from the post bringing bad news in the old, pre-compound days) could no longer be spoken. Eventually, a corporation stole our land from under us and many of us ended up working for them as they extracted natural resources and the fertile land witthered.

Session #6: Monsterhearts Gothic

I created this deep reskin of Monsterhearts around two years ago, to relocate the drama from modern American high school to a Victorian English boarding school, with more emphasis on melodrama and chaste intimacy. This session featured:

• The Ageless, a Dorian Gray stand-in who was bored after 300 years of immortality and seeking a fresh new challenge.
• The Vampire, whose family exchanged him for wealth and was thus raised by his sire as a surrogate parent.
• The Invisible, an amateur sorcerer and occult dabbler who had accidentally inflicted this curse upon themself, and
• The Hybrid, whose mother had used him and his sister to advance the cause of science, leaving them both with a hidden animal nature that came out under stress.

As the students crammed for their final exams, the history teacher was found brutally murdered, leading to suspicion being thrown in every direction, but when the Vampire was struck by lighning, they knew theere had to be a more supernatural explanation for events. The Ageless took a bet from the Devil who had taken his soul in exchange for his immortality and had until dawn to corrupt an innocent, while the Invisible and Hybrid had a cute enemies-to-lovers arc, once they got over their suspicions that the other was a cold-blooded murderer. It didn't end well for everyone, but the Devil got his due and was thus sated for the time being.

Friday

Session #7: For the Queen

Another of my 'Double Decker' offerings, but we got so deep into the first game that we ran out of time for a second and just used the remaining time in the session to decompress. This time, our Queen was a cyberpunk princess at the head of a royal space yacht cruising the depths of space looking for a new home after the destruction of Earth long ago. With five players, the story we wove contained a lot of
twists, turns and revelations, such as :

• The queen's double, who took her place in some functions for security reasons, had an implant in her brain that she knew nothing about.
• 
  The last forest, a fragment of Old Earth, was overseen by the Woodcutter, an almost mythical figure who oversaw the transition between reigns by executing the previous monarch!
  
• The queen's head of physical security had arranged an ambush of the royal yacht to persuade the queen of her folly and return to a safer area of the galaxy, away from alien threats.
  
• An alien scholar possessed a secret 'Immersion Pod', a banned piece of technology that provided total VR, and was allowed it because the queen and her double knew about it and sometimes used it.
• The queen's head of digital security was a religious zealot who had persuaded the queen and her entourage to embark on a quest for the mythical Space Whale.

When the inevitable attack came, the digital security expert accidentally took the double to an escape pod, while the personal security saved the real queen, and the alien scholar died because no-one had ever converted the yacht to accomodate his greater height and girth, so he couldn't fit into an escape pod! Thus he took to his grave the secret of the poorly translated name of the royal forest, "Grit-tone-pork!"

Session #8: Rumblebugs (ft. Pico)
Another of the handful of games I've backed on Kickstarter in the last few years, this one is best described as a post-apocalyptic version of A Bug's Life, so it's wholesome bug-sized fun among the detritus of a humanity who have utterly & mysteriosuly vanished. That's not important though, as this is just a fun adventure game, with the pitch in this case that the PCs are a troupe of travelling wrestlers and their manager/promoter, who are headed to the community of Covered Hollow to put on a show.

Pico encourages a 'play to find out' attitude, in particular through using doubles to trigger wildly outrageous events that the table makes up on the spot; at least this time we didn't get a critical fail with a wild coincedence until the second roll of play, creating a brief diversion to a cannibal cockroach cult, but this then 'fed' into later storylines. The troupe finally made it to the right place and staged their show on an old DVD that served as the settlement's central plaza, but at the climax of the performance, a storm that had been playing out in the background triggered a flood in the hollow. The troupe immediately got to work saving the day, though we must take a moment to remember the price paid: their mode of transporation, a Lego version of Bilbo Baggins' home in the Shire with wheels on it, pulled by two slugs, was swept away by the flood, The last we saw of the two slugs alive was one floating on top of the circular green door while the other clung to the edge of it.

The day was saved, at last, with the creche saved from the flooding, along with a congregation of bugs praying to a human child's doll for salvation, while others used the DVD and a lens formed from a drop of water and a fleck of glass to focus light into a beam hot enhough to ignite a trash barrier and divert the flood onto a new path, reminiscent of the end of Tommy Lee Jones vehicle, Volcano. This makes total sense from a bug's understanding of science.

Session #9: A History of Folk Horror (ft. Microscope)

This is arguably the grandparent of all subsequent storygames and its influence can be seen in a wide spectrum of modern games, particulary Dialect, a fresh new favourite of mine. In this session, we played out the history of a site through hundreds or possibly thousands of years, from "The Raising of the First Stone to Utari" in a pseudo-Bronze Age to "Travellers Settle and Camp" many generations later after the wilderness reclaims the land from a fallen modern civilisation.

Microscope gives the players licence to dance up and down the timeline they create with disregard to chronology, so it's hard to give a definitive, sequential narrative, but we did learn that there was Utari, a deity (?) who left the Eight, rendering them the Seven, and it was their influence at this site down through the ages that shaped local, then national, then global events.

• A shepherd who sleeps by the monolith dreams of Utari but rejects being seen as a prophet.
• 
  
  
  
  An early ampitheatre later built on the site stages the first performance of "The Child's Lament', but the lead actor dies on stage, in front of a hauntingly silent audience.
  
• As home to a famnous composer, it becomes the stage for a descent into madness, as the whispers associated with a violin interfere with a great composition.
• Under corporate ownership, the ghost of the actor plays a part in the unexplained death of a CEO; their children seek official goverrnment help in staging an exorcism.
• 
  
  As a commune for the followers of a legendary band, it
  becomes a focal point in a fight for freedom, but not enough to prevent a ban on the performance of music here.
• It ultimately becomes a place of execution for the government, who publicly put an end to 'The Gods', an anti-authoritarian grass roots movement, but this does nothing to lay the ghosts to rest.

I love Microscope, especially the way that Communism seems to be am emergent property of all the games I've ever run using it.

Saturday

Session #10: One Last Fight

Another session of this game-in-a-box, but this time I pitched it as more of a Stranger Things vibe, but we pivoted to It:Chapter 2 and had adults returning to face the horror that had terrified us in our youth. The Nemesis this time was the Hungry House and we settled on the idea that it had once been the local drug den, with one PC's much older brother doing the dealing; my PC was a troubled youth who'd burned the place down and trapped himself with all his friends inside. Completing our quartet were another couple of friends who later became a couple despite their diverging spirituality: one was the local pastor and the other was a New Age witch.

Since we were last there around 20 years previous, the house had been rebuilt and repurposed as the local community centre, and with the pastor's taccit co-operation, it was feeding on the pain & despair of those who sough help and shelter there. Brought back to lay old ghosts to rest, we proceeded cautiously through the building one evening, being haunted by apparitions of all those the house had fed on, including ultimately the drug dealer who had died there all that time ago, along with memories of his gang of cronies. We just barely won the game this time; with three of us dead, the survivor was speed running the last few cards for the final battle and deftly played a '"Win any Key Challenge" card to defeat the Nemesis once and for all! Another great game, expect to see this in many of my future convention appearances.

Session #11: Dialect

My second game of Dialect from the facilitator's chair and the most players in one session for me, but it went very smoothly as we used The Outpost background, a tale set among the first settlers on Mars who have lost contact with Eartth. Living on a knife edge of spreadsheet calculations about oxygen, water and other resources, we clung together under the banner of being the illegal excess of Earth's strictly controlled population, dumped on Mars to either survive or die out. Our language included references to the idea of being the second children in a culture that only allowed one child per family, so to us, being a 'Second' was an honorific and 'hand me downs' encapsulated a feeling of sadness. Ultimately of course, a desperate Earth sent a second wave of settlers that overwhelmed us and our community was lost among the new arrivals who sought only to exploit the red planet, not to colonise it.

Sunday

Session #13: The Premier Ship (ft. Primetime Adventures)

Wait, what happened to Session 12, yoiu might ask; good question; I had a 10 player game up on the board and it got no sign-ups. None. I put it down to con lurgy, tiredness, people going home early and other games on offer; I get one game every couple of conventions that doesn't run, so I just took the evening off and put in a game for the Sunday morning instead. This turned out to be very serendiptious.

With just my basic game kit along, I had to ask myself what coulod I run without the rule book or any character sheets? The answer was quickly Primetime Adventures, which only needs a deck of cards and some poker chips, while characters are defined by a handful of fairly basic, well-defined traits, so no complicated skill calculations or special abilities required. The next question was then, what to pitch? PTA is a televisually inspired story game, using the language of television to present an improvised drama of the groups' own making, taking the roles of writers' room and actors as they play. Since it was such a hot property recently, and I had the first couple of books with me, I went with Heated Rivalry, so my basic pitch outline was drama and romance in professional sports. I got three players signed up for Sunday morning and after a brief outline of the concept, they picked English women's football as

their sport and got on with making characters:

• Ella was Jess, the veteran striker mentoring an upcoming generation of young female players but also dealing with her own closted trans masc nature.
• Ava was Paulao, a Spanish tranfer to the Man City women's team, finding her feet away from home and trying to be authentic to herself.
• Ray was Paige, a new chef in the team's kitchen, under the thumb of a rude head chef and trying to find her own voice and be heard.

This game was brilliant! I think only Ray had played PTA before, but the three of them really understood the assignment and brought maxium drama to every scene;

• We started with Man City vs. Everton for the women's cup final and a dirty tackle taking out the team's striker; the crowd went wild demanding Jess took the penalty and Paulao tried to keep her temper in check so as not to start a scene.
• Later, Jess, presenting male and using the name Jay, met Paige in the team kitchen and had a smoothie pressed onto him, as Paige was oblivious to the idea that she was talking to one of the players on the team!
• Paulao struggled with family matters, under pressure from her mother to come home for the summer after the devastating news that she hadn't been picked for the Spanish team for the World Cup.
• A team building event with the Under 18s went well, with the older and younger players bonding over a practice penalty shoot out (I brought in a Higher or Lower minigame with the cards to decide the result of the practice) and one younger trans fem player noticed the sparks between Jess and Paulao.
• However, a later charity event turned into a disaster, with Paulao's mother complaining about the food served and getting directed to take her complaints to Paige, who was trying to hide from her boss, while the Under 18s were getting out of control on the dance floor with a kickabout! As Paulao tried to rescue Paige, Jess (still not recognised by Paige as Jay) tried to stop one of the Under 18s from crashing into the buffet. Everything went wrong that could go wrong, leading to some very mocking stories in the press about 'Breaking the Glass Ceiling' and a full meeting of all players and staff for Man City the next day.
  
• As the picks were announced live on TV for the England World Cup team, Paulao had to field calls from both Jess and Paige, who had mixed feelings about each other after an awkward moment where the penny finally dropped for Paige that Jay and Jess were the same person. Sacrificing her own chance of happiness for now, Paulao selflessly directed both of them to the same non-sports bar to meet and sort out things for themselves, just as Jess/Jay learned that she had also not been picked for the World Cup!

It was a dramatic cliff hanger that basically left us all wishing we could have another session, or even a full campaign; definitely the best pick-up game I've taken part in for many years! As ever, the whole of Contingency is a joy and even though is is hard work, I've gotten extremely good at maintaining myself through the week, staying well anchored by friends in my lodge who make sure I'm not overdoing it. Also, everyone there is lovely, whether there as players, volunteers, staff or our wonderful Wyrd Sisters. I will be there for 2027, but I am already planning to change things up a bit; we'll see how that works out in a year, See you all next time!

Pico @ Concrete Cow

Boy, stuff happened since my last CC a year ago, I missed out on the one earlier this year due to other arrangements having already been made, but I have been out of one relationship and into a new one since then, as well as realsing I'm neuro-divergent! Who'd have thunk it after all this time? Anyhoo, back to the point of this post, an actual play report after running Pico at Concrete Cow!

Pico is essentially A Bug's Life: the RPG, so if you get that esthetic, you already understand this game and there were lots of cute moments as we described bugs using the leftovers of human society to furnish their homes and adorn themselves. I pitched this taster session as a traveling troupe of professional wrestlers arriving at the town of Covered Hollow (meta: it was a tire track left in the mud by a motorbike, which was like an entire enchanted valley to the bugs.) We got off to a good start as the manager/promotor of the troupe tried to hype them upon arrival and immediately failed their roll, so the welcoming party looked behind them at the huge, flashy carnival that was just arriving and explained that the welcoming committee was for the carnival, not the troupe!

The troupe itself consisted of Bagulus the manager; Legs, the long, crawly bug; Splag, the transparent
protoplasm; Calasnap, a big dependable beetle; and The Mimis, a swarm of glowflies who acted as one individual. They immediately set about sabotaging the carnival, so as not to lose their place in the spotlight. but this exposed a heist caper, with the Ringmaster of the carnival working in conjunction with the Mayor of town to steal the precious gems from the vault!

The sabotage of the carnival was completed by an unwelcome magpie who flew in to complicate matters as a result of a twist on a dice roll and became the next major threat faced; the troupe managed to kill two birds with one stone though and got the magpie to choke on the Ringmaster, neatly neutralising both threats, for the time being at least. The Ringmaster and the magpie would both return to challenge the troupe later!

With the dust settling, the troupe took over the Mayor's home, an old waxed-cardboard Happy Meal box: they were living in a literal McMansion! From here, Bagulus challenged the Mayor for their position, opening up a race to be elected, while Splag trailed the Mayor to a secret tunnel in the industrial part of town that lead to the vault! Meanwhile, the Ringmaster threw their name into the rin to be elected mayor and started a smear campaign, ably fought by The Mimis who could act as a flying, glowing billboard!

Legs used their superior speed and appendages to pass out lots of fliers very quickly, encouraging citizens to vote for Bagulus for Mayor, but as these were hastily drawn on the back of a 10% discount coupon for the local store, a crowd soon formed downtown demanding their bargains. At about this time, Splag returned with a now captive Mayor, at the same time as the dam broke and a flood threatened to drown all the bugs in Covered Hollow!

The last act saw the troupe co-ordinating efforts to save the town, with Calasnap serving as the foundation for a new dam, Bagulus cutting a drainage trench out of the hollow and Legs ferrying stranded children to safety, while Splag and The Mimis faced off against the Ringmaster in a final showdown using a pike (the fish, not the weapon.) Once the town was saved and the mayoral race was decided, with the help of some newly-unionised termites, we skipped forward a few days to the opening of the Covered Hollow Water Park (the residents having decided they liked the new look of the downtown area) and most of the troupe decided to settle down here, with only The Mimis deciding to continue to travel and increase until they were truly omniscient and omnipresent!

This was a great fun game, but a lot of the bulk of the character sheets, focusing on special abilities & powers, barely came into it: each of these was so niche and tangential that even trying to tailor the situations to provide opportunities to use them didn't really work. The basic mechanics were a lot of fun though and the aspects still served to provide narrative bonus dice and health tracks, so they weren't a complete loss. It's definitely a scenario I would offer again and a game I would look into running as more than a one shot, it was just pure enjoyment from start to finish!

Death's Door 3: Deja Voodoo

Thackeray returns to the clinic after a brief but profitable tour of the Sto Plains, but wonders if he is in the right place as he is greeted by some kind of tiki bar with a preserved merfolk in a tank behind the reception desk. Shrugging this off as something that will probably make sense later, he proceeds into his surgery to await the arrival of the rest of the staff, who get dropped off by a group of friendly dwarves moments later. Clarrida Murphy returns in a distraught state, having now been employed at a restaurant to sing for customers' birthdays, a sad fate for a banshee who can't foretell death anymore. She is treated to a "Sea Breeze," a concoction decanted from the tank holding Saphy Mariana and as the fluid level drops, Saphy revives and also seeks further treatment.

Hold on. Didn't we do this before?

Indeed, yes we did, as it is revealed that the clinic staff are caught in a causal loop and if they can't find a way to break free of it, then the universe will swallow itself and reset back to this moment. The staff put their heads together to find a resolution, but only briefly as Thackeray has enjoyed a few too many mushroom-infused Sea Breezes and is seeing purple crocodiles everywhere. He has the drunken inspiration to ask Gudrum Thare, the clinic's offce-manager and tiki bar hostess, where she's getting all the pineapples and coconuts from? She reveals a portal in the storage cupboard that leads directly to a tropical island paradise and now an idea starts to form: what if they get everyone in Ankh-Morpork to go through the portal to somewhere else? Then the city will be empty when its doom befalls it and everyone will be saved! The team swings staggers into action and each take responsibility for a part of this bold plan!

• Toby visits Ponder Stibbons, research wizard, and asks for his help in amplifying the gnomes' ability to open doors to other places with a particular wiggle of their feet. Exploiting his peculiar relationship to causality, he reaches into hs pocket for a piece of paper that has the necessary formulae on it and makes note to write this down tomorrow and put it into his pocket yesterday.
  
• Count Holloway cashes in a barrel of rat checks at the bank and departs with a barrel of gold. What? Yes, people write checks on rats now, it's very mdoern. He also powers up the dancing gnomes who are gathered throughout the city, ready to perform a very tightly choreographed routine.
• Analogue makes sure all the animals of Ankh-Morpork also evacuate the city, just in case, which turns out to be largely redundant as many of them have already made their own far superior arrangements.
• Thackeray gathers a team of labourers with enough wheel-barrows to gather all the private wealth of Ankh-Morpork in the heist of the century, taking advantage of all the rich people being away from their houses as they rush through a portal.
• Celia takes a break.

Finally, after the Patrician issues a proclamation that no citizen of Ankh-Morpork is to go through the portals and endanger the city's economy by bringing back untold riches, the enitre population of the city goes through the portals and is saved. Analogue takes the children to her animal sanctuary, where they enjoy the scorpion petting zoo; Thackeray and his merry band start a new socialist state based on equally sharing the vast wealth they have stolen; Count Holloway returns to Uberwald triumphant, able to afford a properly dank & crumbling castle of his own at last, with spiders and everything; while Toby meets Death, for the last time, but also the first time. DO YOU BELIEVE IN PREINCARNATION? Death asks him and sends him back in time to be born once again!

Death's Door 2: Apocalypse How?

Thackeray returns to the clinic after a brief but profitable tour of the Sto Plains, but wonders if he is in the right place as he is greeted by some kind of tiki bar with a preserved merfolk in a tank behind the reception desk. Shrugging this off as something that will probably make sense later, he proceeds into his surgery to await the arrival of the rest of the staff, who get dropped off by a group of friendly dwarves moments later. Clarrida Murphy returns in a distraught state, having now been employed at a restaurant to sing for customers' birthdays, a sad fate for a banshee who can't foretell death anymore. She is treated to a "Sea Breeze," a concoction decanted from the tank holding Saphy Mariana and as the fluid level drops, Saphy revives and also seeks further treatment.

With all staff now aware of the imminent apocalypse, Toby dies, again, seeking further counsel with Death and the God of Causality, so the burden of actually dealing with the impending doom falls to the other staff.

• Thackeray makes a deal with Saphy, who was in AM to strike a deal with the newly reopened Post Office; Thackeray promises to go and speak to the Post Master, while Saphy uses their fishy smell to attract an army of cats to battle the rats who have slowly been annexing parts of the clinic site.
• Count Holloway upgrades the glass tank Saphy currently resides in, adding metal plates to strengthen the glass, wheels so it can move about, and a battering ram on the front to clear obstacles. This upgraded "tank" smashes it's way out of the building, driven by a delighted Saphy, and gives the rats ideas on how to escalate their war with the cats.
• Celia and Analogue head to the offices of the clacks company, surmising that perhaps they are behind the thick smog that seems a likely cuplrit in the whole "everyone is going to die" situation, but when she Borrows her rat, Mossy, she gets drawn into a skirmish in the rat/cat war instead.
• Across the square, Thackeray calls upon the Post Master, who immediately recognises him as a fellow conman and they strike a deal where each thinks they have scammed the other; he leaves secure in his financial arrangements, for now.
• Earlier, Count Holloway had tried to construct a crude breathing apparatus for the now alcohol-dependent Saphy Mariana, consisting of two beer bottles glued to a hat, but fell victim to his own experments. Waking some time later in an unknown dwarf bar, he is chased from the premises when he inadvertently exposes the dwarven singing troop as frauds with high-pitched, squeaky voices.

The staff collide, literally, in the square between the clacks offices and the Post Office; regrouping, they decide they need more information about the apocalypse and an answer to the involvement of the smog hanging over the city. A visit to the Unseen University produces a brief discussion with Ponder Stibbons, an exchange of information with Hex, the thinking engine, and a walk to the top of the 888 foot tall Tower of Art to get a view of the whole city. Sizzle, the demon bound to annoy & harrass Thackeray. arrives to do just that and eats the contract he had signed with the Post Master; attempts to retrieve it go badly and he returns to the clinic with Celia, both of them in need of a shower. In the meantime, Analogue and Count Holloway have devised a fool-proof, simple technique of clearing up respiratory problems by punching patients on the nose, but medically. They go off to cure AM's dwarven population of the epidemic of high-pitched, squeaky voices, resulting in a whole choir of baritone dwarves whose singing causes the entire city to shake to its foundations.

It's time to get serious though: their investigations have revealed the existence of an interdimensional portal in the Unreal Estate behind the University, a result of dumping magical waste there. With the help of Count Holloway's recently acquired super-intelligence, they concoct a plan to throw the waste into the portal, closing the loop and saving the city, despite the super-intelligent knowledge that doing so will create a paradox that will tear reality apart. They take sensible precautions, propping the still dead Toby on a clacks tower outside the city, wearing a shirt that says "Will Be There, Will Do That" and attached to a delayed resurrection device that will revive him if everything goes wrong.

Everything goes wrong: reality folds in on itself as the last of the magical waste is swallowed by the portal, which then swallows itself, taking the universe with it. Nothing remains, not even a void, but into this nothingness steps three Auditors of Reality, congratulating themselves on their plan to get rid of this whole, inconvenient existence. Their smugness is spoiled as one of them turns around to sees a familar figure with them and asks their companions, "Does anyone know him?" Yes, Toby has survived!

Next Session: Deja Voodoo

Death's Door 1: Why Does Everyone Die?

With the first book in "The Clinic" sub-series of Discworld stories complete, the campaign moves onto the next book, Death's Door. Like all Discworld series, such as "The Guards," "The Wicthes" and so on, this features the same cast of characters but in a new story. This story begins a few months after the events of Alternative Medicine, with Ankh-Morpork now under a literal cloud, as the smoke of progress meets the fogs of Autumn and plunges the city into a week-long dark smog.

• Analogue Cockaday now shares lodgings with her nephew Cosine, in newly built affordable housing in Dragon's Landing; she receives a disturbing legal document and needs Celia Woodruff's help to decipher it as a request for a dissolution of marriage form her husband Obediah, who is still managing the animal sanctuary back in Lancre!
• At the clinic, Toby Determined examines new patient Clarrida Murphy, a banshee who no longer wails outside the homes where a death is going to occur, but finds herself compelled to wail at children's birthday parties, to the consternation of all. Toby determines to ask Death about this the next time he sees him, and with Toby's special relationship to causality, the intent is the same is the action, so he considers the job done.
• Another patient is seen by Count Holloway Harris, when a highly inebriated merfolk stumbles through the door and collapses, their condition growing worse when Celia throws water over them. This is Saphy Mariana, who is suffering from the unusual ailment that they can't breathe water, only alcohol! Count Holloway decides to pickle them for the time being, but this goes a little too well and kills the patient, but the Count is confident he can revive them later!
• Thackeray Ambrosius is away from Ankh-Morpork at this time: something to do with finances, again.

Celia encourages Analogue to get on the coach to Lancre to confront her husband, so of course Count Holloway and Toby come too, leaving the clinic under the care of Epidermis Foxglove, the reanimated skin puppet version of Analogue. On the way, they have some narrow encounters with Death, who seems to have something he wants to say to them, and also aid Langran Bilth, a dwarf emissary returning from Ankh-Morpork with a high, squeaky voice. A tap on the head from Analogue's hammer resets him to "Antonio Banderas" mode, which still isn't right, but Langran seems quite happy with the results, so takes them the rest of the way in his personal coach, so they complete the trip in luxurious but very cramped style.

A confrontation with Obediah, Analogue's husband, leads to more confusion as he knows nothing of the divorce papers, but suggests it looks like somethng that might have been drawn up by Mr. Kipling, a travelling lawyer who was in Lancre recently. Beside making rather disappointing, soggy individual apple pies, the lawyer explains that he didn't write the document yet; rather, it looks like something he may write, in the near future, when Analogue is missing, presumed dead. Meanwhile, Count Holloway and Toby take turns dying and resurrecting each other, enabling a more complete convesrsation with Death, who wants to know why everyone dies, a philosophical conundrum they have no answer for.

A consultation with the Queen of Lancre, and occasional witch, Magrat Garlick, only shows that the letter uses retrograde ink, that is, ink that travels backwards in time. Some near future event is so huge, so important, and so intimately woven into the lives of the clinic staff, that is has produced echoes in the past before it happens.

The staff get back on the coach with seven other dwarves, following the lead of Langran Bilth in the hope of getting sexy voices of their own, so they stop at the same dwarven long hall they enjoyed hospitality at on the way out. Toby goes to relieve himself on a convenient tree but a very inconvenient door opens and he stumbles into Death's domain again. The reaper is busy at his work, picking hourglasses from the shelves and arranging them on his desk, and asks the question again: "WHY DOES EVERYONE DIE?" The only consolation Toby can offer is that it's just their time, but Death shows Toby the huge collection of hourglasses on the table, thousands of them, with the names of everyone in Ankh-Morpork and clarifies his question.

"WHY DOES EVERYONE DIE... IN TWO WEEKS?"

Next Episode: Apocalypse How?

Alternative Medicine 4: It's All Just Me, Me, Me, Isn't It?

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming for the end of the first story arc of the game, starting where we left off as panic spreads at a dinner party about the collapse of the Bank of Ankh-Morpork, while Celia investigates the alchemical factory of Dr. Frank Winkie. She discovers a goblin workforce producing shampoo made from the runoff of Dragon's Landing, but also gets chased by Todd Candiman, a disgruntled toymaker with a very realistic dragon cosplay.

Things break-up back at the dinner party and the team regroup at the clinic to discuss strategies for the following day, as the city descends into more rioting that lasts much of the night. The next day, the team returns to Dragon's Landing for a closer look for the source of the magical energy spilling out there and discover a crack in reality; they'll need a wizard to check this out. Also, at last night's party, Gail Lambshead, founder of the clinic, suggested that rather than pay Dr. Frank Winkie AM$10,000 a month for the dubious pleasure of being a member of the Guild of Medical Practitioners, she could write a cheque for AM$50,000 to put a price on his head with the Assassin's Guild! Thackeray takes the cheque and immeditaely tries to change the Payee bit, ruining it in the process, so it's left to Analogue to take it along to the assassin's guild.

After a visit or two to Unseen University, the team recruit the services of Ponder Stibbons, research wizard, and Kinrich Hardaw, who has had a very disturbing idea, that ideas themselves can come alive and become like plagues. He postulates to them that ideas behave selfishly in order to propogate & survive, with a "Me! Me! Me!" attitude, hence he has dubbed these living ideas mememes. While Ponder helps to measure and explain the crack in reality at Dragon's Landing, Lago Balmedie and his MAMMA group have begun a rally at the site, where he announces that he will return the property to it's original owners, on the understanding that they will build new housing here, and announces his intent to replace the Patrician! They also start to spread rumours about the "Vermillion Virulence," a plague that makes you turn red, then drop dead.

Speaking of the Vermillion Virulence, Lord Vetinari shows up at the clinic with some apparent victims, who are examined by Count Holloway, who discovers that it is real and now he has it too! The city is in uproar and it seems likely that the Patrician will have to step down and let someone else take the job; already, as a result of a meeting between Kinrich Hardaw and Mandan Barr, the power of mememes has grown exponentially, resulting in a wave of Communism gripping the city, causing the Assassin's guild to slash their prices to AM$50 per inhumation!

The power of mememes comes to the rescue, however, as Count Holloway discovers placebos and walks the streets, healing those infected with the Vermillion Virulence by speaking like an absolute authority on the cure for it and dispensing said cure, which were really peanuts rescued from a pub ashtray. The clinic makes an attempt to stand in the way of Lago Balmedie's plans, but popular support has given his campaign too much momentum, even after they neutralise his dragon & plague plans. They do, however, manage to repair the fracture... well, move it might be more accurate, as Analogue and Thackeray use the former's retrophrenology to relocate the crack into the latter! Almost as an afterthought, Thackeray persuades his personal torment demon Sizzle to tear up the contract with Lago Balmedie, because it technically only promised him the position of Patrician for life, so he and Dr. Winkie end up getting inhumed by Casey Crawford.

Just for Fun

I worked out a number of NPCs I wanted to use in this campaign in advance, to fill various roles in the story and the roster of employees/patients needed for the clinic. Some of these names were just made up to sound "Discworldy," but others had their origins in word play. Here's a few notable ones who we probably won't see again.

• Lago Balmedie: You've no doubt all heard of "Maralago" but did you know the owner of that resort also owns a golf course at Balemedie in Scotland?
  
• Dr. Frank Winkie: So, the Winkies are a race of people in the magical Land of Oz, hence effectively 'Dr. Oz'; I just threw in the 'Frank' as a trtibute to another Oz.
• Todd Candiman: tribute to Tony Todd, the original Candyman, another boogeyman haunting the streets of an urban ghetto.
• Dydon Harlyn: the clinic's first patient, whose name breaks down into the same elements as 'Lyndon Hardy,' author of a book that has a lot of sympathetic magic in it.
• Kinrich Hardaw: same principle as the above; who else was I going to name the inventor of mememes after than Richard Dawkins?
• Mandan Barr: the God (?) of Rumour's (?) secret idenity derives from mangling the phrase "I heard it from the man down the pub," but 'Mandan Pub' would have been a bit too obvious.
• Justin Enterica: sufferer of the peripatetic boil, whose name... actually, I'll save this one, his full story is yet to be told!

Next Episode: Death's Door

Alternative Medicine #3: Blind Dates

 A new patient calls in at the clinic, or more properly is dragged there by his wife Donica Grace, who complains that her banker husband Caldon Grace is giving away their possessions to charity, in the form of donations to the convent of the Sightless Sisters of Sek! Count Holloway consults with Caldon in Uberwaldean so his wife won't understand them and learns that he is trying to impress a pretty new nun he has a crush on. This simple revelation has repercussions for all the staff members for the rest of the day.

• Thackeray persuades Caldon that he needs to make a much larger donation to the convent to impress his sweetheart, and so they set off to the bank to take a large amount of gold from it and give it to Sister Bennitta Qulp.
• Count Holloway and Analogue decide that Donica needs to feel more appreciated and should just make her husband jealous of the attention she gets from others, so they set out a convoluted plan to find her a lover.
• Celia senses that Caldon is also tied into the strange form of magic she has sensed around their previous patients, Dydon Harlyn and Lago Balmedie, but their wigs were the cause of their ailments and Caldon doesn't wear a wig.
• Toby has an appointment with Justin Enterica, who has a peripatetic boil: it comes and goes, appearing in a different place every night and vanishing by morning, but always exactly the same boil. Toby's attempt to examine Justin leads to acquiring the boil himself, but it becomes entangled with his unique relationship to causality, causing temporal copies of the boil to appear all over his body!

Much ado follows, with many diversions and distractions from what might loosely be thought of as a plot, including such highlights as:

• Count Holloway enlists Analogue's help in resurrecting a dead rat: this is a success, but it also resurrects Analogue's dead skin cells, when she leaves her hand in the electric eel tank. This results in the creation of a floppy, skin-puppet copy of Analogue, henceforth known as Epidermia Foxglove, who becomes the new caterer for the clinic.
• Thackeray goes to the bank with Caldon and Analogue and acquires the gold; they then team up with Celia to take this to the convent, which currently has a lot of construction work taking place. They meet Sister Bennitta, a novice who joined the order last month and now wears the Holy Blindfold, but they also learn that the nuns donate their hair to make wigs! A little further digging reveals that Sister Bonnitta's shampoo is the source of the unknown magic, but there are still questions to be answered.
• Count Holloway and Toby put their plan into action, which involves taking iconograph pictures of corpses in the morgue so that they can present these to Donica Grace and get her to choose the one she is most attracted to, so that they can resurrect that one to send him on a date with her! This simple, flawless plan inexpicably encounters a few hiccups: first, the pair find prior patient Dydon Harlyn dead in the mrogue and second, they also find currently alive clinic employee Toby Determined dead in the morgue! Putting these troubling discoveries aside, they take their pictures and leave, headed for a social gathering hosted by Donica Grace, where they take her to one side and show her the images of dead men.
• Toby and Count Holloway contemplate how to get out of jail (no text missing here, that's how the session went as we played) and hit upon a genius plan! If Count Holloway temporarily kills Toby, the guards will take him out of the cell, where he can be resurrected and then come back to rescue the Count! This plan works better than they could have expected, as Toby wakes up in a drawer in the morgue which is then pulled open as himself and Count Holloway take pictures of the corpses! Toby plays dead so as to not break causality, then returns to the jail and terrifes the guard into releasing Count Holloway.
• The gang finally make it to the dinner party of Gail Lambshead, the patron whom they have never met, where they mingle with luminaries of Ankh-Morpork society, including the Graces, Lago Balmedie and Dr. Frank Winkie, creator of the shampoo that has caused so much trouble. Celia sneaks out of the party, while Toby flirts with Donica Grace (and also his boils are cured remotely when Justin Enterica applies a mushroom poultice to himself at this time.)

Two last twists occur at the end of this narrative, with the shocking announcement that there's been a run on the bank, causing panic at the dinner party, and Celia discovering a gutter carrying the runoff from Dragon's Landing leading right into the alchemical laboratory of Dr. Frank Winkie, but nothing leaves from the other side.

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