Revelation 2022 - After Con Report

Last weekend saw me at Revelation 2022, our Garricon Tabletop Roleplaying Game Convention focussed around games using the Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark engines. We also let Ironsworn slip in there. Numbers were down on normal, with 24 attendees. We'd usually get somewhere between thirty and forty people present, but it's understandable that people are still nervous about attending. Despite the PM's enthusiasm for things to return to normal, we were conscious that over 11,000 people were still in hospital with COVID-19, so we maintained the requirement for double vaccination and a clear Lateral Flow Test within the last 24 hours. We'll almost certainly maintain that for North Star, later in the year.

With numbers down, the budget was tighter, but we still managed to stretch to provide free tea and coffee through the event. It felt very chilled because of the numbers; it was more like having an open house and inviting friend around.

Unlike Furnace, I drive up on the morning of the convention for the smaller cons. This means an earlier start than usual, but I was onsite just after nine o'clock lugging up some games that I was selling. As we had lower numbers, we hadn't asked any traders to attend, but did have an informal bring and buy. A couple of authors had their own books to sell as well. I was pleased because I managed to fund my entire convention and more from the sales.

Be Seeing You - a fun game.

Slot 1 saw me playing Be Seeing You, a game which riffs on the Prisoner and Surveillance society. It was run by the author, Tanya Floaker, and I really enjoyed the game. I'd signed up because I'd backed the Kickstarter, and I wanted to see how it would work (and what better way to do this than by playing with the author themselves). It was great fun; it did perhaps veer towards the surreal, but that reflects the source and the player's creativity. Andy Pandy, robot sheepdogs and crown green bowling balls with cameras in became recurring menaces. I'd play this again at the drop of a hat and I'm looking forward to receiving my copy.

It was Morrisons for lunch, amazing how many people there didn't bother wearing masks so soon after restrictions were lifted, but overall it was fine.

Our heroes face a difficult challenge.

The second gaming slot saw me playing Declan's Galaxies in Peril engined game. He was running over three slots, with mixes of the same characters in a twisted UK which had been taken over by the Unity Party in the early 1980s. Shades of V for Vendetta and more in this. It was great fun; I ended up picking a character loaded with mind powers and we managed to land a small victory. I'm curious how far the game moved away from the core game and setting; it was fun and I did check in to find out how it all ended after Slot 3.

The casino dice came out...

I had dinner at the Garrison, foregoing the usual KFC trip mainly because I'd been to KFC with the kids a couple of days before and I fancied a proper meal before I ran my first game of the convention.

Back in the City of Mist

I was running City of Mist for the fourth time at a convention in Slot 3; once again I was drawing upon one of the published scenarios for the game out of 'Nights of Payne Town'. There's something about this game that I love, and it soon clicked with me. The characters carefully investigated and I did face the party splitting. In the end I dropped one of the possible routes through the scenario (mainly as the players didn't notice it!) and truncated the ending to make sure we wrapped at a reasonable time. We'd just hit 11pm and were about fifteen minutes from the end when the night manager arrived and started a discussion about when we were finishing, which meant we overshot by quite a bit. However, the table was full of laughter and smiles and everyone really got stuck into the game and their characters. 

I had a good discussion with Guy at the end about whether the game system really allowed players to get into trouble. As you build your dice modifiers by selecting appropriate power tags, and as you have at least 12 tags (plus weaknesses), there is a temptation to try and throw in the kitchen sink for maximum effect. You do need to be willing to say no. The characters do come across as competent, but they can be put into peril. Thanks to clever planning and some cool moves, they managed to sidestep around some significant threats. Chalking it up in the 'things they'll never know' list, one of the plans the players discussed in front of my would have probably left one of them turned to stone, so it was a good thing that they changed their minds!

Let me introduce Jonas Jansey

The second day of the convention saw me playing Tribes in the Dark, the new QuickStart for a Tribe-8 reboot using the FitD engine. It was great fun; I'd never played the game or seen the setting, but a combination of great players and a GM who loved the setting meant we had a brilliant game. We almost immediately took the scenario off track and Graham handled it with aplomb. We also benefited from a masterclass in position and effect from Tanya, which cleared up all Graham's worries about how it worked and also made it clearer to me than it had ever been before.

Using position and effect and clocks like a pro.

The final session, Slot 5, saw me running Impulse Drive, an SF game that leans into a lot of tropes. I forgot to take a picture of this one. I'd played the game a couple of years before and wanted to revisit it again, especially as it seemed to work better than Uncharted Worlds. I found the game itself pretty hard going to read as the layout did nothing for me, and if anything it felt like it had had too much time in development. That said, it worked well as an engine. The players did well too; one of them spotted the way the plot was going early on and leaned into social skills to avoid a live fire conflict. It was an investigative game; I'd used the five room structure as a basis, which seemed to work well. However, I was tired by this point so I was struggling to give this as much energy as it deserved. I think I'd rate my GMing as okay in this, but nothing special. It was almost an anticlimax after the game the night before when I'd really got my head in the right space.

All in all, Revelation 2022 was a fun convention, albeit a little quieter than other years, and I'm looking forward to its return in 2023. Hopefully the numbers will be up a bit. Thanks to the attendees, and my co-organisers Graham and Elaine with whom I got to play games with for the first time in a while. We had a committee table in effect for both my games!

5 March 2022