Contingency 2019

Where to begin? There's some history behind this event, but also the geography and literature are pretty important too; I'll do my best to describe how I spent my week by the seaside, but it is likely to meander a bit and you may need a British person to help you with some of the more obscure jokes. Strap in, everyone.

Norfolk & Chance

Several years ago, there were a couple of rather excellent conventions at a holiday village on the south coast of England: Conception was the larger and embraced all RPGs, while Indiecon was the little brother that gave priority to independent games. They took place a couple of months apart, in the winter, when the holiday village was available to book cheaply. Both of these were residential conventions, so attendees rented a lodge, chalet or caravan from the holiday village for the week they were there and the games were largely played in the clubhouse, which provided a bar, restaurant, social areas and so on.

Then the holiday village was bought by some new owners and, what with one thing leading to another, the two conventions could no longer be held there. (I'm leaving a third convention out of this, because I never took part in that one and it has its own story) Of course, the minor obstacle of not having a place to hold the convention was not enough to stop role-players, so a replacement was found and for two years (2017 and 2018) this Contingency (you see what they did there?) filled the hole in the RPG convention schedule.

This year, Contingency moved to Norfolk, a county on the East coast of England, and we were made to feel most welcome at Searles Leisure Resort in Hunstanton. After basically taking over a year out from life, this was my first time attending a residential convention since Conception & Indiecon came to an end.

It's early and there's a bird, you see?

The Early Bird

The official dates for Contingency were January 23rd to 27th, with checkout anytime up to the 28th at 10am... however, what with people obviously wanting to arrive before the first gaming slot on the Wednesday morning, accommodation was open from the Monday, the 21st, at noon. Being the good Scottish stereotype that I am, I decided to get the most out of my money and set off on Monday morning, aiming to arrive at the venue by mid-afternoon... which I did. I know, I'm breaking the 'epic journey to the convention with comic misadventures' trope here, but it was actually a very smooth, uneventful journey. The only noteworthy moments were:

1. Seeing two young men in the seats in front of me on the train open up their D&D rule-book and start looking at their character sheets... only they had nothing to do with Contingency and knew nothing about it.
2. During the time between getting off my train and getting on the bus to the resort, I browsed in a book shop and found the fifth part of a series that I had been trying to get for about three years.

I arrived at Searles just before 3pm, checked in and shook hands with a few friends & acquaintances from RPG circles. Once we'd unpacked and settled in, we made the most of the facilities (the bar) and caught up with each other, so we were also first into the restaurant when it opened at 5pm. The clubhouse at Searles features a full sized bar with attached restaurant and, adjacent to that, a large club hall with its own bar where the games would be played at the 20 or so tables provided.

Tuesday morning came with a fresh breeze and rumours of snow on the way, so I didn't brave it out of the lodge until 7.45am, lured out by the promise of the breakfast buffet in the restaurant from 7am. Even so, I turned out to be the first to arrive, but fortified by it, I located the shortest route to the beach and enjoyed the bracing sea air and surging waves. Point of interest: the whole area is at flood-risk and there are emergency notices everywhere stating this.

Most of the rest of my lodge mates had arrived by Tuesday evening and we got together for dinner in the restaurant: unfortunately, they ordered their food before I joined them, so I wasn't able to warn them about the portion sizes, a phenomena I'd seen first hand the previous night. For example, ordering two baskets of deep fried stuff, the garlic bread with cheese, and chunky chips for one person, was perhaps not wise and some of us were staggering visibly as we tried to get up from our seats.

At Last, the RPGs!

That's all the preamble out of the way, though expect more amble of some type before I'm done; so, before you think this has turned into an extended TripAdvisor review, lets get onto What I Played On My Holidays! I'd left my plans pretty fluid before the convention, so I didn't feel the pressure of committing to something and then letting people down if I had a bad day, but once I was actually there, my confidence level re-surged and I approached the admin desk to ask for some blank sign-up sheets.

Me: Do you have any blank sign-up sheets?

Desk Volunteer: Sure! (Hands me a sign-up sheet)

Me: Err... can I have 8, please?

What with there being over a dozen official gaming slots spread out over the five official days of the convention, 8 games seemed like a reasonable compromise between running the games I wanted and playing in other games or just relaxing and unwinding.

Wednesday

The first slot for each day began at 9am, with a muster taking place between the reception and bar of the clubhouse at 8.45. My first offering was A Penny for My Thoughts but as two of my lodge mates had signed up for this, we decided we might as well play in the lodge itself; the one other player who had signed up was unable to make it due to illness brought about by bad clams. A three player game of Penny isn't always the best, but we spun some fascinating stories using the Cthulhoid documents in the appendix. We had a tale of a farmer fighting an alien menace from outer space, losing his family to the monsters in the process; a wicked gas station attendant learning the secrets of alchemy & witchcraft in order to enslave others and extend his own life; and an innocent bank clerk on the run from a secret society, who ultimately decided that the only way to fight them was to beat them at their own occult game.

Mmmm, chocolates....

My afternoon game was My Life with Master and the players opted for the straightforward, pseudo-Gothic fairytale setting, with a disembodied Master ordering his/her Minions to fetch body parts from the townsfolk to put together into a body for him/her. Since this is a cut down version of the game to fit into a single convention slot, the Minions were beginning their rebellion against the Master by about the 2 hour mark, with much of the remainder of the playing time being about their various preparations for the upcoming confrontation, such as making several lifelike wooden puppets to act as decoy children.

Wednesday evening was crash & sleep.

Thursday

I play-tested Best Quest in the morning slot: this is a simple, parody story-game about a typical fantasy adventuring party that I'm working on, using the player contributions & voting system you would find in Jackbox games like Fibbage, Patently Stupid and so on. Each player has a unique playsheet with prompts for their character class on it, e.g. the Cleric dispels a curse, the Bard relates a tragic tale and so on. Other players then write down an encounter based on that prompt and everyone secretly votes on which encounter they like best; everyone who votes the same way as the player who gave the prompt scores double points and the player with the most points at the end, wins!

My afternoon was spent at a table with a group who were going through There's Somebody at the Door, a sci-fi scenario using the Hot War system: I phrase it that way because, even though I was nominally the GM, the scenario is one of those that gives the PCs ample opportunity and motive for PvP interactions. There were periods of up to 30 minutes where I didn't have to push the story at all, as the PCs plotted, connived and schemed with each other. I won't say too much about the scenario itself (spoilers) except that the basic outline involves the only 5 human beings on an uninhabited planet getting a knock on their door...

Thursday evening was one of the first of three slots in which I signed up for someone else's game and I had a thoroughly fabulous time in Savage Worlds: Rippers playing a fire & brimstone Scottish reverend ridding a small American town of the curse that had befallen it. It's always fun to chew the scenery a little and the GM for this game provided a light touch on the rules that allowed all of us players to really get into character and enjoy the story above all.

Friday

The morning slot provided my first chance to try out What Ho, World!, an RPG presented in the form of a card game, with character traits, locations and important plot MacGuffins all printed out in the deck. The overlapping stories of Wodehousian high jinks involved a tortured Bohemian artist just trying to get over her hangover, a respected judge infatuated with an ingenue American chanteuse, the maiden aunt trying to raise the funds to restore her crumbling pile, her butler with a shady Socialist past and her nephew who just wanted to win a golf tournament. It was fabulous and the stories flowed easily from the cards.

Primetime Adventures is one of my go-to games when I have an idea that puts story and character arcs first, but this time I had no pitch for the session other than "HBO needs a show to replace Game of Thrones: go." My players in the afternoon slot came up with something involving time-travellers over-throwing a future fascist state, a series about role-players, corporate boardroom politics and a show retelling the Arthurian myths; we put all that into a blender and came up with "A Company of Knights", a series about the court of King Arthur travelling to the 21st century to save the future by taking over a large technology company. We had so many great moments of drama, comedy and character development in this game that it really deserves an after-play report to do it justice.

Mmmm, breakfast...

The second game I played in was Legends' Walk, a rules-light take on the trope of the children of the Gods living in the modern world and fighting the evil machinations of the Titans and their own kind. I was the son of Loki, a celebrity photographer who crashed a party along with his fellow demi-gods in order to get to the bottom of the mysterious return of a son of Zeus who had long been presumed dead. This was a great story, with some brilliant NPCs for us to bounce off and we even managed to squeeze in some Gimli/Legolas-style taunting in the final battle scene!

Saturday

Best Friends is one of those games that deserves a wider audience, so I break it out whenever I can: it's deliciously simple and clever, with the character creation meshing with the resolution mechanics so seamlessly, it's genius. I pitched this as a Breakfast Club sort of scenario, but we added a pinch of action-movie because there's only so much teenage angst players can be expected to sit through on a Saturday morning. Eventually they blew up an industrial park and spoke to the whole school about their inspirational experiences, with just one of them being hauled off back to jail to answer for their possession of illegal firearms, but overall everyone got a happy ending.

The afternoon game I'd picked was Dead of Night, using my Closure scenario: it's pitched as domestic existential horror, with the very ordinary lives of the very ordinary characters falling apart with the arrival of a troubled relative. Again, this is one of those stories I want to avoid spoiling too much because I will certainly run it again sometime, but I will post the final scores for this session: two PCs chose death, one murdered himself, one ceased to exist in any meaningful way and the last took over his brother's place for at least one more year...

Saturday evening was time for Netflix and chill... I stayed in the lodge to catch up with The Good Place and Star Trek: Discovery, then had an early night.

Sunday

The final day of the convention and I didn't have a game for the morning, until one of my lodge mates offered to fit me into his game of Shadowrun: Anarchy, which began as a simple bug-hunt idea but rapidly turned in Dredd meets Aliens as we descended the floors of a hotel in lock-down, trying to wipe out an insidious infestation while staying one step ahead of the black ops squad that was hot on our feet. Another great fun game, with time for character epilogues for everyone.

Speaking of character epilogues, my afternoon game was The Final Voyage of the Selene, a nice freeformish story game to end the con with; as one of the players was visually impaired, we decided to play with open agendas instead of hidden ones, which also made the game click a lot more. For example, the player next to me was Courier Kerenski, so when I was dealt the 'Thief' agenda, it was obvious for me to say that I was trying to steal her package. There were a lot of elements that clicked nicely this way and the eventual survivors among our group were Juve Mahler, his Spouse who he had been forced to marry and the Courier, who was actually part of the same family as the Spouse. Sadly, Doctor Tsien had lost his memories, so when the ship started to blow up due to some serious maintenance issues, he was in no state to even understand what was going on; Chief Pryce died in his own engine room when a fireball came through a door he opened; and my character, Purser Ehrlich, was shot between the eyes by the Courier as she made it to an escape pod.

The final evening of the con was very informal and quiet, with the vast majority of attendees heading home after the lunchtime charity raffle: with all the efforts of everyone there, the convention raised over £6000 for charity and is now confirmed to be taking place again at that venue next year. Myself and some other stragglers who were planning to check out the following morning stayed in the bar and enjoyed some free drinks for part of the evening! Wa-hey!

There & Back Again

The convention didn't really end there for some of us though: by various means, six of us found ourselves on the train towards London, so we had a final chance to catch up, compare notes and basically shoot the breeze for almost two hours. Also, no-one won the prize on offer for seeing any sign of either water or a beach as we passed through Waterbeach.

So here I am, Wednesday morning, feeling more or less recovered from the travelling, games, sea air, fried food, lack of sleep, etc, but with a revitalised interest in role-playing, which was honestly starting to flag over the Autumn and Winter. Once again, we find ourselves facing the loss of a platform that brought role-players together, with the imminent demise of G+, but there are other options out there and events like Contingency remind me why I do it and what makes it worthwhile.