Contingency 2025

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

Getting There is Half the Journey

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

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

Hunstanton: Closed on Tuesdays

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

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

Wednesday [Slots 1 to 3]

Foretold: In Its Shadow

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

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

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

Monsterhearts Gothic

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

Gentle & Extraordinary

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

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

Thursday [Slots 4 to 6]

Foretold: Mile's End

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

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

Tithe Barn

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

Fiasco

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

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

Friday [Slots 7 to 9]

Foretold: From Earth

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

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

Fellow Travellers

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

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

What Ho, World!

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

Saturday [Slots 10 to 12]

Foretold: The Mayor of Elphame

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

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

Down the Witches' Road

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

"Where's the tablet?"

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

    "Don't know."

"Well, we're effed then."

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

Wizards Aren't Gentlemen

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

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

It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

It's over.

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

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

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

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

Same time again next year?

Contingency 2024

Remember when I used to do con reports? Yeah, I'd forgotten all about that too, but what with the whole world sitting at home for a year or two, it's hardly any wonder that face-to-face gaming conventions seem like a thing of the past. Guess what though, baby? Conventions are back! In fact they have been for a while and I'm just late to the party; putting all that aside then, here's what I did on my not-a-holiday at Hunstanton this year.

For Those of You Just Joining Us

I wrote a short history of Contingency five years ago, in this post here, but the short version is that it's a face-to-face table-top role-playing convention that takes place on the East coast of England in January each year. The all-female organising committee have described it as a games convention run by your mum and it embraces a warm, friendly, caring atmosphere to make everyone feel welcome. The team behind Contingency also manage a couple of smaller conventions in the form of ConDucked and Condensed; the whole duck motif has come about due to the site for Contingeny being home to many families of ducks who aren't shy about entering people's accomodations looking for food. They have since achieved legendary status and you can now buy a lot of duck-themed merchandise at the convention.

I have returned to Contingency since the lifting of the global pandemic restrictions, and indeed been at other conventions like the above mentioned Condensed and the ever reliable Concrete Cow, but don't worry about scouring my blog for the reports on those because, er, I didn't write any. Sorry. Anyway, my visit to Contingency this year got off to a good start when my sister mentioned she had some work in that direction, so she gave me a lift all the way to the resort where the convention is held! Practically door-to-door and I can't thank her enough.

Readers with long memories will know that I like to get to Contingency on the Monday, two days before the convention proper starts, just to relax, enjoy the seaside and prepare myself for the onslaught to come. This was particularly important this year, as I had a plan to run 12 games in succession; this would have filled up my available time from Wednesday to Saturday, leaving me just enough time between sessions to eat and get ready for the next game. This plan almost worked as intended, but everything came out alright in the end, as you'll see.

Wednesday

In retrospect, one of the games I ran later should have been run today, it would have been so apt... anyway, this was the start of my scheme to run three games a day for four days. I'd prepared my own sign-up sheets and handed them in at the desk, after requestion a table for all 12 slots a couple of months before, so I felt well prepared for this year. Reader, I was not. I really hope I pay off all this foreshadowing later. Anyway, here are the games I ran on Wednesday; I even remembered to take pictures of all of these, as I had promised a friend I would.

For the Queen

This is a card-driven narrative game that I've rather fallen in love with; it runs on a handful of rules that are all to do with reading prompts from cards that you draw from a custom deck. You create the characters and their situation from these prompts, your repsonses to them and the questins you get asked by other players seeking clarification or making suggestions. It can also, but not always, play quite quickly and we managed to fit in two games with a table reshuffle between runs to prevent the player order from stagnating. Our second run was the antithesis of many games I've taken part in before, with the Queen explictily depicted as a monstrous demon and her retinue also being demonic beings from the Pits of Hell, so of course this game had an almost wholesome ending.

Blood & Water

My own game inspired by the TV series Being Human, this session featured a zombie, a ghoul (don't mix them up), a ghost and a sweet little old lady who had sold her soul to the Devil and then forgotten about it, sharing a nice suburban bungalow together. This was the set-up for more bloody & foul murder in one sesssin than I've seen in any game ever, even the previous one about the Demon Queen and her army. The PCs solved almost all their problems by killing people and then eating the evidence and it ended with all of them in Hell living their best lives together for all eternity.

Women Are Werewolves

The first of a couple of games of this exploration of family, gender and the supernatural that I ran at the
convention, it's another card-driven narrative, with some beautifully designed cards asking leading questions of the players. All the player characters in the game don't conform to the standard gender norms, within a family where only the women transform into werewolves on the full moon. I played a trans-male teen who rebelled against his own flesh once a month and you can see how the metaphors just write themselves here without having to explain any further, right? It's a very serious game that isn't afraid to cut deep into the issues it handles and bring hidden things up into the light to be studied. Powerful stuff that really benefits from a debrief at the end of the game to make sure that everyone is alright afterwards.

Thursday

Everything with the plan was still on track after the first day of gaming; I'd had enough to eat, gotten enough sleep and wasn't suffering from Con Crud, that ubiquitous disease that dogs the footsteps of all convention-goers. This was also my most thematic day of the con, as I'm lazy and couldn't be bothered to space out a couple of games with similar titles. Just go with it.

Gentle & Extraordinary

Another game of my own creation, this is a Lasers & Feelings hack for a Gothic horror advetnure-style game, in the mold of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Character creation is very quick and easily done at the table, so we soon had a thief, hunter, detective and scientist ready to tackle the forces of Darkness. I used a straightforward, in media res plot seed, with the thief being caught wiht their hand in the valuables of a nouveau riche lord after a debauched party. This escalated bit-by-bit into a struggle against the forces of Imperialism itself, with the goal being to liberate a powerful spirit of propserity stolen from the ancient world with other treasures when the British were plundering tombs & temples. The heroes liberated the trapped spirit, causing the beginning of the end for the British Empire, but they paid a high price for their heroism and all either died or disappeared by the end. There is a coda to this session which we'll get to on Friday...

League of Extraordinary Gen X

A more up-to-date take on the LXG concept, but not that up-to-date, as it takes place in 197X and

features among its cast Professor Spencer Quist (Doom Watch), "John" (The Tomorrow People), Jeff Randall (Randall & Hopkirk, Deceased) and Catweazle (um... Catweazle.) This whole game was a shameless nostalgie fest, revelling in all the pop culture of 1970s British telefantasy, with references to The Avengers, The Goodies, Sapphire & Steel and many, many others. It's very silly and very much designed to appeal to people of my generation, but also it gave me a chance to try out the Shiver RPG after buying it at the previous year's convention.

Rest in Pieces

One of my favourite compact games, it's easy to run this at short notice and it plays super fast, ending at the first player character death, which is guaranteed to happen within an hour or so. As such, we ended up playing this twice in succession, with increasingly wild & surreal plots, which fits the pitch of deadbeat housemates sharing a rundown basement apartment with their landlord, the Grim Reaper. It all comes lovingly packaged in one box, complete with Jenga tower, character trait cards and wipe clean character sheets so you can start over quickly when your character dies.

Friday

This is the day when it all changed... well, there were a couple of setbacks anway, but rest assured gentle reader, I was not harmed in any way. I'm pretty sure everyone else was probably alright as well.

Escape from Dino Island

The slight glitch I experienced with this game was realising that, while I had printed out all the play

sheets required, I hadn't printed out the rules, which contain a lot of support mateials. Never mind, I thought, I'll just bring my laptop to the table with me and read directly from the pdf when I need to. So of course the keyboard played up, but I had a spare with me, because that's a known issue with this keyboard, and I dashed back to my lodge to fetch it... which then also played up, so I had to wing it based on what I remembered and what I'd printed out, which fortunately included all the essential mechanics of the game.

        This is a brillinatly compact game inspired by the Jurassic Park franchise and using the basic Powered by the Apocalypse system, laser focused on the premise of a group trying to escape from an island full of dinosaurs. Designed to run for only one or two sessions, it has a simple mechanic for tracking harm to the player characters: if you get injured whilst already injured, then your character is out of the story and you have the choice of dying a heroic death or just getting dragged along by the others to the end.  You're not out of the game though, as you just pick up any spare playbook and introduce your new character at the earliest opportunity. I am sorely tempted to hack or reksin this game for other stories & settings, but I am also cautious of disturbing the alchemy that makes it work so well.

Women Are Werewolves

Another run through with some different players, unfolding another story about families and how to survive them. I went another direction with my character for this game and played a non-gender conforming male who had been forced into marriage in order to bring some rebllious outsiders into the fold. This ended with me taking my daughter away from her controllong mother so that she could explore what it means to be a werewolf on her own terms, away from the prying eyes and controlling hands of my family.

Fiasco Drinking in the Bar

The other hiccup of the day was that my game of Fiasco didn't have any takers, so I was exiled to the bar with Brian who also had no players for his game, and there we met up with Lisa, Mike, Symon, Pamela and some other friends who I only get to see at conventions. This is also where we find the follow-up to the Gentle & Extraordinary game, as Lisa & Mike, who both played in it, started to tell the others all about it. A couple of sentences in though, Lisa stopped, looked at me and said, "Oh, I'd better not spoil it though" The following short exchange then took place.

        Me: "What do you mean?"

        Lisa: "You might want to run that scenario again."
        Me: "... I made it all up as we played."
        Lisa: "WHAT?!"

This did lead into an interesting conversation about improvised storytelling and other gaming techniques though, all well lubricated by plenty of drinks.

Saturday

This should have been my final day of gaming, but I was determined to make that Golden Twelve, so I very nicely asked the admin team at the convention desk if they could print out some game materials for me, which they did easily! The whole thing runs so smoothly largely because of the volunteers who give up their time so that everyone else can just get on with playing games and they deserve all the thanks & praise I can possibly heap upon them.

Nevermore

OK, obviously, it would have made more sense to run this game on Wednesday, since it's based on the
Netflix series of that name, but my advance planning is rarely that organised. Anyway, this is a game that I ran several times last year, both face-to-face and online, and it always delivers a unique experience; there are several plot seeds I like to use and this time I kicked things off with the school being under investigation for academic cheating, with some very unfriendly government inspectors looming over everything. After lots of twists & turns, one of the PCs took over from Charon and ferried the souls of the dead to the unwerworld after school each day, while the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe possessed an android and became the school's new teacher of literature & history.

Thrilling Tails

One of the most wholesome games around, in which everyone plays adorable dogs saving the day for the hoomans. I gave the players the choice of which story they wanted to play: action adventure, spoopy Halloween special or magical fairytale and they went for spoopy! A little girl went missing while Trick or Treating and the dogs had to investigate the creepy old house on the hill to rescue her from being turned into a doll by a wicked faerie being. All was well in the end, with the girl and other victims saved and returned to their families, while the dogs gained a new friend when they persuaded the faerie to try life as a dog with them!

Rest in Pieces

Another round of this easy to pick up & play game, only this time we played it three times in a row, with Death being played by a different actor each time (depending on who I felt like attempting an impersonation of.) The pictures say more than any words can about this game.

Sunday?

I didn't plan on running a game on Sunday this year, but to reach my Golden Twelve goal, I added one in to make up for missing one on Thursday night. There was also the usual end-of-convention goodbyes and closing events as well.

Holy Orders

This game was inpsired by the second series of Good Omens, using the My Life with Master RPG, where the PCs are minions of an evil master, carrying out their twisted & immoral orders before they finally grow enough of a spine to stand up to the bully and overthrow them. In my mind, this seemed like a natural fit for angels carrying out God's will on Earth and we spun a tale of God wanting to turn the whole world into England after he lost a bet with the Devil about the division of human souls. The PCs were ably supported by a full cast of dogs, baristas, bureaucratic police officers, Scotland and Rishi Sunak's off-screen whimpers.

We'll Meet Again...

The convention officially ends in the afternoon, as the admin desk closes to allow for a huge charity raffle draw and presentations for the Best Character Death and of course thanks to all the organisers, staff, GMs, players, merchandisers and others who come together to make it such a brilliant week. The last 'event' of the week was the Sunday carvery, a much-needed boost for those of us staying until Monday morning and despite Lloyd's sterling efforts to find me a bubble bath, I was too tired to even manage that. After getting into bed early, I set off by 8.30am the next day, aided by a lift to the station from Nick, then some train services that were actually on time and connected for a change, so I was back home a little after 1pm. I'm ready to do it all again next year, how about you?

Contingency 2020

It's that time of year again, where I tear myself away from my desk and emerge, blinking, in the sunshine (metaphorically, what with it being January) to do battle with the public transport network in order to arrive at my goal... Norfolk, the home of the best residential games convention I attend. OK, also the only residential games convention I currently attend, shut up.

Rather than go through the convention day-by-day, I'm just going to list the game sessions I played or ran, in chronological order. It has to be said though, all of these games were awesome, though the awesomeness of some of them may have been too much for my weak mortal frame.

Slot #-1: Fiasco

Using the '80s Cops playset, I got to play a 'legitimate businessman' with a loyal hit-man, a chief of police who was like a sister to me and a beat cop who was vying with my hit-man for the attentions of my daughter. The main MacGuffins were my plans to knock down a slum district in downtown Miami in order to build a leisure complex there, plus some missing money that had been skimmed from the project and was lost in transfer between the chief of police and the beat cop.

It all ended with my daughter running off with the money and the chief of police to start a new life together far from my influence, my hit-man going to jail for his involvement in the death of a local politician, following a Rorschach-like standoff with the police and my character renouncing his life of crime to take holy orders and become the priest for the church he had not been able to demolish to clear the way for his new enterprise. Pretty typical Fiasco territory, but this was very enjoyable and played out entertainingly by all players.

Slot #0: Vox Populi

The game available on this blog, with a Barbarian, Druid, Wizard, Sorcerer, Thief and Cleric trying to steer the fate of the newly liberated nation, with the help of a Spirit of Neutrality to act as chair through the proceedings, portrayed by me as previous experience with the game had shown that this helped the flow of play a great deal.

After looking at the 'final score', the Committee of Heroes voted against: appointing the Wizard as ruler of the nation; adopting Communism; letting Sorcerers handle the paperwork; instituting a culture of fighting pits for entertainment and taxation purposes; and stealing masonry and lumber from neighbouring nations in order to rebuild. The sole proposition that was passed was putting the Thieves' Guild in charge of tax collection, despite having no tax laws and no-one to decide what the money should be spent on; the thieves will just hang onto the money they collect in the meantime...

Slot #2: Party Games

This numbering gets confusing when I take a slot off, doesn't it? After relaxing for the first official morning of the convention, I ran a game of Best Friends using the hacks I previously posted here to create a fantasy setting. After giving the players the opportunity to create their own stats for this adventure, it turned out that Leeches! Can Cure Anything in this world and that Fabulousness helped you look great while saving the day, whilst being a Social Butterfly was an essential skill for the noble classes.

After slaying the Necromancer in the first scene, the party discovered that there was really a Necromancerer pulling the strings from the shadows, but an accidental prophecy meant that the wizard was now fated to marry the knight (who was also prince to the kingdom) and then tragically die a week later. They concocted a plan to draw out the Necromancerer, who knew of the prophecy, with a fake wedding using the half-orc bard to impersonate the wizard, little knowing that the Necromancerer was a future version of the party's rogue! After that, it got complicated.

Slot #3: Black Code

Since I shared a lodge with the designer, it only seemed fair and diplomatic to play his game, so I took on the role of a smooth-talking chancer in this transhumanist cyberpunk setting. We had a good introductory adventure, the hunt for a missing/stolen military-grade cyber-frame, touring various locations and encountering the locals (then killing them brutally) until we had the big showdown at a flesh-vs-machine fight club, after which there were the usual betrayals and reversals with our employers.

I like the system here, where you always roll four dice and then pick a number of the highest or lowest results depending on your stat, but the rich setting would definitely benefit from campaign play as there's a lot of detail to explore and the factions we ran into could each be the basis of an entire series of missions.

Slot #4: Afterlife

A reskin of  Blood & Water that I suggested in the back of the book, after a short time spent world-burning we settled on Tokyo in the aftermath of massive solar activity that had fried the world's electronics, with our group of survivors based out of a karaoke bar owned by an alchemist witch. Taking shelter there were a weredragon nurse and one of her elderly charges, an inadvertent genie, a juvenile werewolf seeking a pack and a disinherited fae princeling.

Due to some badly timed outbursts in front of the genie, the karaoke bar got teleported to the basement of the museum of antiquities, which itself was endangered by a volcanic rupture that had appeared outside and had attracted a cult of fire worshippers who were sacrificing the useless home appliances to the fissure, but who graduated to human sacrifice when the werewolf accidentally knocked someone into it. The day was finally saved by the fae's dad promising to protect the museum and the dragon nurse discovering that her charge owned an electronics company that had plans for returning the power.

Slot #5: Continuity

This was my convention highlight, based on my pitch to use Microscope to tell the story of a Marvel-

like comic books company from beginning to end, in an alt-history that we would create through play. The big theme that emerged through play: Communism! We had a period of communist purges on the table almost from the fist round of play, but this quickly echoed back and forth through the timeline, from anarchists and socialists founding the company as a producer of Penny Dreadfuls in the 1800s, to the future World Communist Collective that oversaw the felling of the last tree in cyberspace as a symbolic representation of the end of print media. The most remarkable thing about this game though has to be that, after 11 or so years of knowing Duncan, we finally got into the same game together! And the second one would follow that same evening!!

It was good to have a game with parallel continuities, as we dipped into the heroes & villains of the comic book line and the stories they were significant in, then coming out into the 'real' world to see how it mirrored the art. This meant the gonzo element was largely confined to the comic book events on the table, resulting in some much more serious and grounded 'real world' events and scenes. It was awesome and left me feeling like I could play an entire convention of Microscope if all the sessions could be like that. (If I look like I'm having a miserable time in that photo, it's only because I was trying to strike a brooding hero pose!)

Slot #6: Sisters of Mercy

Another of my rare instances of playing rather than running or facilitating, the fabulous Brenda ran one of her popular Dead of Night scenarios, featuring a reality TV film crew turning up to produce an episode about an ex-sanitarium with a haunted reputation. Cue lots of horrifying apparitions, vanishing crew members and ghostly nurses to terrify us.

Something special we achieved, quite inadvertently, was to get this game past the Bechdel test: two of us played female characters, who had a scene together without any male characters present and had a conversation that wasn't about men! (It was about freeing the tormented spirit of someone's Great Aunt and then burning the site to the ground)

Slot #7: A Penny for My Thoughts

This is always a bit of a gamble at a convention and I was worried I wasn't going to get enough players to make it worthwhile, so it was very satisfying to see three names on the sign-up sheet by Friday morning. It can also produce a game that is too intense and personal, with much triggering of the X-Card, or too gonzo and weird, producing unsatisfactory stories, but this really seemed to hit the sweet spot.

We had four individual stories, lightly connected by some NPCs, covering everything from the actions of an embittered CEO getting revenge on his rivals, to the complex family relationship of a man marrying his ex-teacher and being hounded by his demanding and irascible mother. In the end, the only one who chose to forget their memories was my character, a fallen charity director who had seen everything he made be taken away as a result of his own addictions and poor anger management.

Slot #8: Space Force

A hack-at-the-table version of InSpectres, with the pitch being "Let's portray Donald Trump's 'Space Force' as 'Team America: World Police' and see how long it takes the break the GM!' That last bit wasn't explicitly in the pitch, but for the record: 2 hours and 14 minutes. The stats chosen by the players to represent this mission were:

• Plastology: since plastic was the only 'natural' resource remaining in the distant future year of 2020, it was used for making everything.
• Muscle, Armaments, Guns & Ammo: the combat skill, shortened to 'MAGA.'
• Patriotism: the test of true Americans, the greatest, most diplomatic people on Earth and anyone who says otherwise is a Mexican Commie Liberal!
• Success!: for literally everything else, because we'll have so many successes, we'll get bored at succeeding!

The 'plot', if I can use that word, involved 2.3 million metric tons of Michael Bolton CDs on a collision course with Florida, which the team confused with Italy for a brief time... in fact, it's fair to say that most of us were confused for a brief time and the game ended before the end of the slot because we had made every joke. EVERY. JOKE.

Slot #9 & #10: Sorcerer

I was fortunate to be invited to a mini-campaign of Sorcerer that run over three sessions at the convention; in these first two, we selected LA as our setting, gave demons some flavour as 'wounds with things in them' for some Croenenberg style and defined 'humanity' as 'kindness' to track when we might be losing it. My character was the queer son of an LA televangelist who had been disinherited for his sexuality and the schism between the two sides of his life had driven him into a kind of delusional obsession that made him perfect for summoning a demon, even if he didn't really know what he was doing.

There was one other player-character, an aspiring actress who had joined a coven of occultists and been the only one who successfully summoned a demon, which she wore as a second skin, changing her appearance somewhat and leading to her being cast as the lead in a major new horror film. The kickers we began with involved the actress being blackmailed over her hidden past just as filming began on her new project, and my character's father being arrested on murder charges relating to a teenage girl in his flock whom he had allegedly attempted an exorcism on.

Slot #11: Shercula?

The pitch for this Primetime Adventures game, of Moffat & Gatiss adapting another public domain work to be a major new BBC TV series, resulted in a story combining the confidence trick/heist based drama of 'Hustle' with the pseudo-Victorian setting of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' to produce 'Bustle'. This starred Emma Watson as Lydia Bennett, Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Mrs. Bigglesworth, Sacha Dhawan as Mowgli, Simon Pegg as The Artful Dodger and an actor in a mocap suit that would be digitally replaced by a virtual recreation of Elvis playing Tintin. I don't think the BBC are going to a series with this one...

Slot #12: Sorcerer

We finished our short campaign with the actress going on to be an industry success, albeit a somewhat toxic one as the demon bound to her insisted she make the people around her miserable so it could feed on their tears. The preacher's son went on to have a breakdown on the witness stand at his father's trial, leading to his aphasia: after some months of rehabilitation, he returned to the care of his male lover and restarted his street ministry offering perfectly secure confessions, since it was impossible for him to tell anyone else what he had heard.

Slot 14: [Nameless Game]

After taking Saturday night and Sunday morning off, I ran my last game of the convention and offered up something totally new in which the players were invited to create the most snowflake, Mary-Sue, edgelord characters they could imagine. We settled on a superhero setting with Everyone, the superhero who is everyone in the world's digital presence; Sparkle & Bruce, her invisible pink unicorn; an evil criminal mastermind, since there's always someone in the group who wants to be a villain; Nyte Blade, not to be confused with his mentor Blade Lord, or anyone else with the name 'Blade', of whom there were many; Dr. Dr. Incel, who wanted you to know exactly how many doctorates he had; and the Encyclopaedia, a sexy librarian because reasons.

So, thanks to all the people there: the convention organisers who greased the wheels; the site staff who were friendly and helpful; the GMs who gave us stuff to do; the stall holders who brought the shinies; the gamers, who raised over £7,000 for charity; and finally, and most importantly, the ducks, to whom I would like to say "Quack."

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.

Spaghetti and Ice-Cream

The title above isn't the name of my newest short game (though it is evocative; a no-prize to whoever comes up with the best suggestion!) but a reference to my Saturday, most of which I spent at Spaghetti ConJunction, the one-day RPG convention my name has somehow ended up attached to, along with the far-more actively involved Pookie and Simon Burley, who do most of the work (and must therefore take most of the blame.)

A Life of Games

It's been some time since my last post, again, so this is more of a catch up than anything else: there's some good stuff, some bad stuff and some very personal stuff, so skip this if you just want new game things (though there are some new game things mentioned haphazardly.)

So, all the way back at the end of March, when I last posted, I'd recently started a series of posts under the banner title of Rerolled (and there are still more of those to come: one is about one-third complete at the moment of writing and I have ideas for at least two more after that) and Concrete Cow was a pleasant memory... well, kind of pleasant. The day itself was as wonderful as ever, marred only by Neil Smith's announcement that, after 10 years, he was stepping down as organiser and handing over the reins of authority (the moment had been prepared for) but in myself, I was not happy. In the three months preceding this day, I'd lost my father to a sudden acceleration in his long-term illness and also the children's centre where I had worked for a dozen years had closed its doors for good, so two big tent-poles in my life were abruptly jerked away. I suspect other people noticed on the day my lack of energy or enthusiasm, which affected my morning & afternoon games, both play-tests of systems I'd loved creating but was finding it hard to remember why.