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?

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: Blind Dates

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?