Furnace XIV (2019) - Reflections

The Garrison Hotel, Gaming Capital of the North

My preparation for this Furnace was a little truncated as I was running late on a writing assignment for Lyonesse, which took precedence. I’ve spent a lot of the week running up to the con working up game preparation, and then on admin for the convention itself. Friday saw me reach the happy place were plots and characters were mostly locked.

I rocked in late into Slot 0 on Friday night and said some swift hellos as I headed to the bar for a pint. Lovely chats with my One Ring compatriots (75% of the fellowship was present). The topic of discussion was the X-card and its impact, and the management of children! A very enjoyable evening, but I was a little relieved when they called time as I needed to be up early to set up in the morning.

I had a good night’s sleep but woke with the sinuses from hell. Breakfast with friends helped, and then it was the rush to set up rooms and get everything together. Fortunately, this year the Garrison had pretty much all the tables in the right places, so Graham and I only needed to carry one up from the ground floor to the convention space. Signage went up, the badges went out (and we culled the accidentally duplicated names that would have given a definite advantage in the raffle) and we dropped some of the new business card X-cards on the tables.

Graham tried his usual trick and started the opening speech before I was in a position to video, but I got most of it. This year was a little different, as we covered both the fact that we were promoting the X-card and doing a collection for Tony, the Garrison's manager, who was about to retire.

Slot 1 started up smoothly, and after catching up with Jim from Patriot Games I decided to go back to the room for a short nap (to try to lose the headache) and then prepare for my game in the afternoon. I'd last read A Town Called Malice in detail back in August; fortunately, the notes were clear and I was soon happy that I was in a place to run it. I then dug into my preparation for my Cold Shadows game. The game was called 'Det kan ingen tena tvo herrar', which loosely translates to English as 'No one can serve two Masters', a hint at the treachery at the heart of the scenario. Cold Shadows has been on my shelf since the Kickstarter delivered, and it is a flawed jewel. The game is one of the best attempts that I have seen to try and build a spy roleplaying game that would support play in the style of John le Carre's novels. It suffered from the unfortunate early death of Stewart Wieck and is really lacking a final editing pass. In places, the rules are unclear, complicated or have references back to the game engine that it was developed from. However, there's enough good stuff in it that I wanted to get it to the table.

My challenge was pulling together the plot threads; I'd decided to base the game upon the Isdalen woman, an unsolved death in Norway in 1970 which has many Cold War echoes. As it is a real case, I also had huge amounts of reference material. I feared that I was losing the idea of the plot in handouts and data. By the time Slot 1 finished, I knew what I was going to do as a flow.

A Town Called Malice

After a quick lunch from Morrisons, I went down and set up for my Slot 2 game of Malice. Set in the Canadian north, the town of Malice was threatened by the rising river and hundred-year storm that was approaching. Robin set the tone when his character was interested in the 'historical cannabilism' in town. By the end of the first act, things were accelerating rapidly, and Andy (the Law - Mountie Sergeant) and Pete E (the Official - Town Manager) tried to calm the townsfolk in a public meeting at the tavern. They failed, and the town looked to be potentially doomed by the rising waters and the creature that had murdered one of the teenagers in town. By the time we were in the middle of the second act, I was really no longer needed, just giving the odd nudge. The game climaxed with Jag's little old lady character locking the Town Manager and the YouTube Celeb Journalist (Robin) in an old Cold War fallout shelter to starve to death. Her view was the loss of the Town Manager was an acceptable one it protected the town ('It'd be what he wanted'). It was fun; I will definitely run this out again. Shout out to Pete A and John who formed a burgeoning criminal partnership. I actually had to buy a dice block for this as I foolishly left mine at home!

Annual Trip to see the Colonel

Dinner was a lonely quest to KFC, as the rest of the annual walking club (Keary and Ottomancer) couldn't attend. Nearly a close encounter with some pissed up suit-wearing lads, but I sidestepped it.

Slot 3 brought a game of Traveller with Steve Ellis running and Tom Zunder and I playing. Sadly, we didn't get any more players, but it was great fun. A good GM and a player I get on with and can bounce off. I'd wanted to play this scenario for a while, as I missed it a TravCon. Lots of fun, and after we retired to the bar. I really recommend the scenario as it takes the plot of Beowulf and retells it in an SF setting with lots of twists on top.

In the bar, we met as the full Fellowship from our game of The One Ring and shared reminiscences and toast to absent friends. I went to bed soon after last orders as I wanted to be up early.

Let's get Liminal, Liminal...

Sunday, I had an early start; I got up and finalised the preparation for Cold Shadows in Slot 5. Sitting, listening to the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy soundtrack made the breakthrough for me, putting my head in the right place. My first game was with one of my fellow organisers, Elaine, who was running Paul Mitchener's Liminal. I really enjoyed the game. We played a group of occult investigators who were tasked with finding a lost book, taken from the London Library. The game was lovely; it definitely catches that British urban fantasy feel and the system is refreshingly light, reminding me of Traveller. I will definitely read my copy now and perhaps get it to the table.

Raffle swag including an ace D12 pot!

Lunch was Morrisons again, somewhat rushed as we had the raffle to follow. Before that, we presented Tony (the Garrison's owner-manager) a card and collection that attendees had taken up to say 'thank you' as he headed to retirement. He was a little embarrassed, but I'm glad that we did it, and thanks to Elina for coordinating the collection.

Slot 5 brought my game of Cold Shadows. I had a full house; I'd three pre-signs; Jag, Gary and Paul Baldowski, and then Tom Z and Graham joined me. We started, and immediately I was a bit worried as everyone was a bit tired and it showed. I had decided to leave some of the set up on the Intelligence Agency the team worked for (the Norwegian Secret Police) until the game, and also let the players finish tailoring their characters. No one had played the system before. We worked our way through it, and although the players were interested, there was a palpable lack of energy.

I'd set each of the characters up with a flaw (a Tag) which gave a reason for them to rub up against each other, but not a reason for full-on PVP; examples include stresses in family life, an alcohol problem, skimming the finances, substance abuse and a debauched lifestyle.

We started the game in the director's office, and the characters discovered that they were being sent from Oslo to Bergen just before Christmas (a huge issue for Graham's character, who had the family challenges) to manage a police investigation into a dead woman found in Isdalen; there was a concern that it wasn't being controlled and could cause embarrassment, especially as Norway was hosting military visitors from West Germany and the USA for final trials of the Penguin missile system.

It was fascinating to watch the players become hooked; the maps on the table were followed with crime scene photos, the autopsy report, hotel cards, and other evidence. They were all tired but they so wanted to pull it all together! To their credit, they managed to find their way through the plot, discover the cause of death, the reason for the death and the true killers. That and also manage to get some Soviet illegals deported! The players connected the clues and solved the mystery; it was a near anti-climax in some ways, that feeling you get when the players pull it all off well and it seems so simple.

I like what Gallant Knight tried to do with Cold Shadows, but I think the execution and the game system let it down somewhat. If I ran this again, I would use a tailored version of Wordplay, as I think it would introduce more a sense of jeopardy in the task resolution. That said, it worked well enough.

And with that, the convention was over. Elaine had already left, and Graham had to go at the end of the game. I did a last sweep around the building and left for home, leaving one game playing out its end game.

Furnace will return on 10th and 11th October 2020.

14 October 2019