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.
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.
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
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.
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 :
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- 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!
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