Furnace XVII - After thoughts

Back at the Garrison

 

This year, Furnace returned back towards its usual size as people seemed to be more confident about coming out. However, the long shadow of COVID continued to cast itself over the organisation. This manifested in people dropping out in the last week with COVID or similar symptoms. As organisers, we'd asked no-one to come if they had symptoms. On a practical side, the big impact on us happens when it's a GM. As we'd been tight on games in a few slots, losing a GM - especially one running in two or three slots - is a challenge.  It made Elaine's life challenging on the run up, and during the convention itself, mainly as we'd decided to stay fully pre-booked like Revelation and North Star. This is one thing we will revisit; we may revert to part pre-booked next year as having physical sign-up sheets helps people self-manage in these situations.

I'd originally planned to take Friday off work to finalise preparations, but things didn't go to plan. I got free of work at 13:30 but fortunately, I was pretty much prepared. I needed to read through Blue Planet and do some more tweaking on the second scenario, but I was lucky that the one of the games that I'd planned (The Slow Knife) was co-created at the table and that the first Blue Planet scenario was straight from the QuickStart (and I'd run it twice before). The curve ball came during badge production. At Furnace, I've a more nebulous role than North Star. I prepare the registration forms, do some of the publicity, handle safeguarding, produce the badges and raffle tickets and anything else needed. Graham does Garrison liaison and acts as front man. Elaine deals with the games organisation. It's a well oiled machine, but badges were my curve ball this year. The eldest child managed to break the guilliotine the weekend before doing a school project, but worse - on Friday - as I assembled the badges I discovered that  the box I thought was full of badges was empty and I was short about 25 for the convention. 

I headed into town, and found the local stationers could only offer visitor style badges at £1.50 a pop, so I declined. Getting home, I went through drawers and finally found enough slightly larger badges to cover the event. I was pretty relieved; next year I'll check the week before.

I saw the family off to the fencing competition that they were going to and then headed down to the Garrison, much to the the disgust of the cats who were not impressed that I was leaving them as well. Arriving earlier than usual, I had this vision of Slot 0 in the bar with friends that I hadn't seen for a while. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be. Graham had sensibly decided to set up the night before as we could get it, so I found myself moving tables and then building up some screens we'd purchased to try and reduce noise between tables in the Armoury and Dungeon areas. I think my engineering background came out to make that a bit easier (Graham had built one when I arrived and looked quite fraught) or maybe it was just the fact that two of us made the job a lot easier.

By the time we reached the bar they'd already called last orders, but we managed to get a pint as residents. Drank that, but didn't stay too late. Went back to the room and read through the Slow Knife again. I had a good night's sleep, albeit a bit warm and was waiting in the queue with Graham and Elaine when breakfast opened at 8am. Had the Mickey taken out of me by Graham when he tried to order my cooked breakfast (two bacon, two poached eggs, a sausage and mushrooms)  because we'd done enough of these to get a good idea what we all liked.

Got up to the venue, put out signs for tables and added X-Cards on them all. Set up my bring-and-buy. Got all the badges out and ready. Quick words with Paul and Fil from All Rolled Up and a welcome to Patriot Games. Said hello to lots of people, and then - as usual - Graham was doing the welcome speech without any warning so I was late with the attempt to video him, enough that it wasn't worth posting to social media.

Blade Runner in full flow.

Slots 1 & 2 saw me playing Remi's Blade Runner game. This used the material from the starter set. Remi had painstakingly assembled the map from printouts which he'd stuck together, and had multiple tablet devices so we could say 'enhance...' and scroll and pan. We had a mixed crew of Replicants and Blade Runners. Our mission was to locate renegade replicants so that the Wallace Corporation could recover them; although we could use deadly force, it wasn't preferred. I had a replicant forensic specialist who was putting the anal into analyst; think of him as a child who is being pushed too much by his parents to achieve, something that came to bite the party later. The drive to be efficient defined him and meant I was pushing rolls if I failed.

The game used the new version of the Year Zero Engine where you roll two dice - one for attribute and one for skill. Base dice are D6 (success on a 6) but they can be as large as a D12. If you roll 6+ it's a success, 10+ two successes. There is a push mechanic which can generate stress. Replicants can push twice. Stress broke my efficiency focused replicant, and then we rolled the "Mother, let me tell you about my Mother" result on the stress table. So my character had a psychotic break and tried to kill the human detective (played by Graham) who had been needling him about how good he was at his job. Fortunately, we managed to find a narratively sensible way to keep the scenario going. I really like this take on YZE; the characters feel more competent and it feels less swingy.

The Crime Board and GM

I loved the way this scenario (which is from the starter set) worked out; it felt like a proper slow burn investigation and the interaction in the scenario and between characters vindicated my belief that the game has more legs than Alien. We ended up pulling out the cork board I'd brought to put the map and clues on rather than cramp the table, and it looked great. Remi ran it brilliantly and it was lovely to play with a mix of friends and people I'd talked to on forums for years but had never met before.

Lunch via Morrisons. Each year it seems that the choice gets worse, but I think Morrisons has been on a slow nose dive for a while. Dinner was the traditional KFC run that Keary, John and I do. We did the usual sharing of book tips and gaming chat.

The conspirators gathered for the Slow Knife.

Slot 3 was The Slow Knife, a conspiracy story game where you tell the tale of a young person (the Knife) whose promising life was cut short by four conspirators who had been jealous in some way. Using card prompts we construct a crime board which tells how how the Life annoyed the conspirators, how they arranged their downfall, the way they prospered and turn towards infighting and rivalry, and finally how the Knife's revenge is worked out. It was a bit arts and crafts as we constructed the connections with string, pins and cards on the cork board, but it was great fun. 

They really didn't like the Knife, Émile.

The set up took over an hour, but once we got going into the four acts of the game itself a strange momentum gathered as we co-created the downfall of the four villains. It was a sprawling mix of ambition, double-dealing and general nastiness. The cards were wonderful; they gave the players permission for their characters to be nasty to each other and build a decades long tale of revenge. I think two of them planned to buy the game after playing it; I guess that shows how well it landed.

By the time we finished Slot 3, it was after 11pm, and although the bar was open, I decided against visiting it because I wanted to get a good night's sleep under my belt before running Blue Planet. I was a bit nervous, which was irrational as I'd run the first scenario a couple of times before and it had been well received.

The final board.

Slot 4 and Slot 5 on Sunday saw me taking the players on a trip to Poseidon, the Blue Planet, in the year 2199. They were all members of Red Sky Charters, a native crewed boating company struggling to survive under crippling debt. The first scenario was the QuickStart one ('Trouble in Paradise') where Red Sky Charters gets drawn into a tangled web with mobsters, incorporates and the native rights movement, the New Gaian Collective. They managed to successfully navigate their way out of trouble, in one case literally feeding a gangster to the fishes. 

I'd had four players sign up for both sessions so there was some continuity; in the end, only three could make it because of illness, but I had five players for each session. This was fun, because I had seven characters available, so it shifted the dynamic between sessions. I have to shout out Neil's portrayal of a dolphin (uplifted cetacean) as one of my highlights of the day. I'm glad he enjoyed it; he's wanted to play the game for a quarter of a century!

Slot 4's crew - I forgot to take a picture in Slot 5 unfortunately.

I'd written the second scenario as a sequel occurring perhaps three to six months after the events of the first. The players managed to control some hot-headed youths and discharge a favour they owed the New Gaian Collective. Of course, more favours were earned in both directions; this would have been fantastic for an extended campaign. I'd deliberately built a set of flashbacks into the scenario tailored for each of the characters to explore their relationship with the friction between incomers and the natives. It seemed to work well. Eventually, they successfully liberated a number of natives from indentured employment for an incorporate whilst avoiding an atrocity or two.

I loved it when Steve's character, who was leaning towards joining the movement against incomers point blank refused to take any action against GEO-SAR, the VTOL search and rescue run by the UN) despite being asked to by the hardline NGC activists. All the way through, Elaine's character Drew, who wasn't a native, was trying to keep Red Sky solvent and at the same time walk the line between natives and incomers.

The Blue Planet game engine works well; it's light and has modern tweaks for relationships. Combat is brutal; you don't want to be shot (which I guess is reflective of real life). One character took a bullet and ended up effectively out of action until they could get proper first aid. It's a simple dice pool system; you get between 1 and 3 D10 depending upon your skill specialisation, and have to roll under a target number derived from your skill number and attribute. 

The game seemed to land well with the players; subsequently, a couple of them have mentioned that they'd like to play a mini-campaign if I run one when the final book is released. I think that suggests that the setting resonates. The new campaign frames will work well if they're all written as well as this one.

All of a sudden, it was all over and time to go home! The dates have just been released for next year, for the convention's coming of age party, but before that we have Revelation and North Star.

12 October 2022