One of my fellow convention organisers - our Tsarina of Games, Elaine - has compiled a master file of all the games that have run at the convention since 2008. This means that there are only two years missing (2006 and 2007). Hopefully someone will have details, but these are mostly pre-smartphones as we currently know them being a thing.
You can find the spreadsheet here on Google Sheets.
I'm going to take a nostalgia trip now, and look at what I ran. It's interesting that until recent years, I've mainly offered games with six player spots. These days I'd more commonly offer four or five.
I've linked after-action reports when I have them, but many are lost to the ether as they were posted on earlier versions of the Gaming Tavern or UK Gamers boards and not to my blog. I've also linked off reviews other to more details about a game if I think it's worthwhile.
The sad part of this is looking at the list of names of people who don't or can't attend any more. Some of them are no longer with us. RIP.
So, now on to the forty-three games I've run over this set of records. There's probably enough to make the half-century if we could find the records of the missing two years. There's even more games played to add to that. Lots of fun with great people.
2008 - III
- They Came From Beyond Space, Savage Worlds
- A Patent Inspector Calls, Sufficiently Advanced
- The Fall of House Atreides, Conspiracy of Shadows
This was around the time that I first encountered Savage Worlds; I ended up running a SF B-Movie game as a filler in Slot 1. I think the first time I'd played the system was in the 2004 Continuum when EvilGaz and the Smart Party ran a complicated and fun game that involved table swapping.
The Sufficiently Advanced game was very epic, as it ended with the players triggering the detonation of multiple stars in novas to avoid a hegemonic alien swarm consuming the galaxy. I can also remember feeling very advanced in this game because I had my notes on my iPad 1 with an external keyboard which felt very Star Trek. Sufficiently Advanced gave me a lot of insight on how to a handle a high technology game but not get bogged down by the system; this started a move away from harder simulationist games for me, and the earlier Wordplay playlists also influenced this.
The Fall of House Atreides is a game that uses the Conspiracy of Shadows engine in Blood Opera mode to set the players against each other as parts of House Atreides as they are crushed by the Harkonnens. The traitor's identity is random (everyone gets an envelope with details if they are or aren't), so Paul or Jessica can be the traitor. I've always had fun with this kind of character-vs-character(*) game and this has come back periodically.
(*) I prefer 'character-vs-character' because it should never be 'player-vs-player'.
2009 - IV
- Singularities: Sandbox, Wordplay
- Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors
- Broken Dreams, Savage Worlds:Runepunk
Wilderness of Mirrors is a spy based game written by John Wick (not the Baba-Yaga guy with the pencil and dog) which I ran as a Sunday morning game. It's very much a storygame, with a lot of co-creation. I can remember it feeling quite challenging to run and I had to work hard to draw it all together.
Broken Dreams, for Runepunk was a fantastically fun game. I seem to recall that we played through the whole investigation without a single combat roll; the players were mostly Call of Cthulhu hands who didn't want to get into a fight (quite sensibly). The key thing I learnt was that Savage Worlds works really well without a fight, and that the steampunk science-fantasy style of Runepunk is a fantastic space to play in.
The other thing of note that I remember from 2009 was the fantastic Beat to Quarters game that Neil Gow ran on Saturday night. I have never laughed so hard in a game, but I think we traumatised Neil and nearly broke him as we went completely off the rails of the serious Napoleonics vibe that he was aiming at. Fantastic game, a happy memory for me and the folks it but probably less so for Neil.
2010 - V
The other thing of note that I remember from 2009 was the fantastic Beat to Quarters game that Neil Gow ran on Saturday night. I have never laughed so hard in a game, but I think we traumatised Neil and nearly broke him as we went completely off the rails of the serious Napoleonics vibe that he was aiming at. Fantastic game, a happy memory for me and the folks it but probably less so for Neil.
2010 - V
- Down to Earth, Traveller
- Singularities: Turing Test, Wordplay
- A Taste for Murder
- Reunion, River of Heaven (OpenQuest)
A four game year.
'Down to Earth' was a Traveller game which I'd previously re-run at TravCon earlier in the year. The concept is that the players wake up on a beach (a bit like Lost) with very little memory of what has happened before. They know they were on a ship and that they had to abandon it. The scenario was very much a sandbox with beats, and along the way people's memories would recover. This was using Mongoose Traveller. I've always advocated for reusing scenarios you write for conventions as many times as you can. This is especially true if you plan to publish them.
'Turing Test' was the second scenario developed for Singularities; this was very much another playtest of the game. Again, it worked well but I cannot remember the outcome.
'A Taste for Murder' is an Agatha Christie British Country House style mystery storygame. I've run this several times, and each time the players have veered it towards the raunchy end of the genre (so I think they'd fit in well with Bridgerton). What's fun is that you develop the reason and motives as you go along.
'Reunion' was a scenario for John Ossoway's excellent River of Heaven hard-SF game. I think that this was using one of his early scenarios and I gave some feedback afterwards. I'm no longer a huge fan of d100% based games, but this one just works nicely and fades to the background.
2011 - VI
- Singularities: Turing Test, Wordplay
- Utopia: In a Strange Land, Wordplay
- Smoke and Lies, Wilderness of Mirrors
- Singularities: Houllier's Heroes, Wordplay
Four games again, with two new scenarios.
I added a new Singularities scenario (Houllier's Heroes) this year, which very much explored the experience of mercenaries who had their brain cored and made transferable to an armoured chassis. While they were on a mission, their own bodies were on ice, hibernating.
I also added a scenario for Utopia, an expanded world setting in Singularities where a colony had become a dystopia. Again, another project I've not got to print.
Wilderness of Mirrors was pretty much the same as the run two years earlier; obviously it didn't put me off enough.
- Utopia: In a Strange Land, Wordplay
- Singularities: Sandbox, Wordplay
- The Fall of House Atreides, Conspiracy of Shadows
- Singularities: Against the World, Wordplay
Four games and what looks like a very lazy amount of preparation, probably informed by the fact that I had a one-year old and a five-year old to handle! I reused three scenarios but did add a fourth scenario for Singularities. The Singularities scenario was the one I'd pitched (I'd only planned to do one game) but I ended up running four because people dropped out from running and playing. The Utopia scenario was a challenge as one of the players went a bit off-piste and I had to intervene as a referee and organiser as the behaviour wasn't acceptable.
2013 - VIII
- Singularities: Landgrabbers of Gliese 581, Kingdom
- Durance
- Singularities: Sandbox, Wordplay
Only three games, and only one re-tread. Sandbox got a run out again!
Durance is a game set on a prison colony in space and always really interesting. It's based on the Australian colonies that Britain established to some degree. I do recommend the supporting card sets. I've run it a couple of times and it's always been satisfying.
'Landgrabbers of Gliese 581' puts the players in charge of a slower than light ship that decelerates into system after many years of travel through space to find that the world that they aimed at has already been settled by colonists from Earth (because technology has advanced and they got there faster). They're on a nuclear pulse engined Daedalus drive ship, and the players get to be the command crew. There is a sub-optimal world they could use in system, or they could move on, or they could try and find a resolution. Somehow, the end game was the takeover of the existing colony and the establishment of a religious dictatorship. I used Kingdom, as this is the kind of thing it excels at. I could have used Wordplay, but I wanted to experiment.
2014 - IX
- The Last Garrison, Dead of Night (Cancelled)
- The Song of Loeul, Stormbringer hacked into Wordplay.
I committed to two games this year but ended up running one as I developed a migraine on Saturday and was still feeling the after effects on Sunday morning.
I never ran the Last Garrison and never returned to it. A shame in some ways, as it was a self-referential game of what happened when the apocalypse comes at a gaming convention in Sheffield in October of a year. I've subsequently lost the notes. I felt so bad cancelling it, but I wouldn't have been in a good state to deal with it.
'The Song of Loeul' was a cracking adventure set in Michael Moorcock's Young Kingdoms that I'd run several times using the Stormbringer rules, but I ported it to Wordplay (what else?). It ran brilliantly well, although I did almost feel a let down as the players came up with schemes that thoroughly trounced their operation. But they seemed to love it, which was the most important thing! This led to a very ambitious three-parter the year after.
2015 - X
- Heart of Dust, A Hand of Death (Madcap Laughs 1), Wordplay (Young Kingdoms)
- Ruins in Madness (Madcap Laughs 2), Wordplay (Young Kingdoms)
- Empress on the Emerald Shore (Madcap Laughs 3), Wordplay (Young Kingdoms)
Unlike later years, when multi-slot games became common, we ran each part as a distinct and independent session. This made things a little easier because we had a reset point for each scenario. It also makes it easier for the Games Tsar, as it doesn't lock down spaces and options quite as hard as dedicated single group of player multi-slots do. Of course, we ended up with a core of players who played the entire mini-campaign, so we did have some continuity between episodes.
Overall, this was fantastic fun and convinced me that a lighter, more narrative engine was the best way forward for this kind of game. I also loved the co-GMing approach as it lightened the load for both of us. A fittingly epic approach to the tenth anniversary of the convention.
- Wolves at the Door, Mongoose Traveller
- Barbarians at the Gates, Uncharted Worlds (PbtA)
This year I stuck at the two game limit, and both were Traveller related, being set in the game universe. Both had been developed for TravCon and BITS previously, so this was the second run through.
The first game had the players as a mix of children and grandparents on a small agritech colony outside the Third Imperium, a place that is growing bio-engineered crops for drugs. A large Vargr warship arrives in time for the harvest festival and the party have to understand and address their intent. It's one of my favourite recent Traveller scenarios.
The Uncharted Worlds game used a modular SF PbtA engine to have a game set when the Terrans first encountered the Vilani First Imperium. The party were free traders cross over into hostile space. It is very much a sandbox with beats again, as there is a timeline for a growing threat, but how it manifests will depend upon how the players attack the scenario. I do want to go back to explore this era, most likely with the Traveller or Cepheus rules.
- Ice Cold in Arrendale, Heroic Fantasy (Black Hack based OSR)
- They Came Back Haunted, Coriolis
I'd really discovered the OSR over the last few years and loved what the Black Hack had done, so I was delighted to do some play testing and feedback with Graham's Heroic Fantasy game (in its first edition form). I melded it with an idea that was born from watching Frozen to many times with my youngster. At its heart, like many fairy tales, Frozen is pretty nasty. I decided to do an 'alt-history' take on it, imaging that Ana had accidentally been killed in the final stages of the story, and Elsa brought Fimbulwinter down upon the world in her anger and despair. The players are a party sent by their monarch to try to find out what has happened and if anything can be done about it. This was a fun game.
'They Came Back Haunted' was written when the Coriolis campaign books hadn't been released, and deals with a foreshadowing that the lost colony ship, the Nadir, may be closer than people thought and pose a threat. There were echoes of a Blakes 7 episode in this, and I enjoyed running it. I wanted to run the Coriolis Mercy of the Icons campaign after this, but one of my fellow regular players pitched it first and unfortunately it fizzled out.
2018 - XIII
- The End of Laughter and Soft Lies, SCUP (PbtA)
- A Cthulhu City Story: Weeping for the Memory of Lives Gone, The Cthulhu Hack
Two games again this year. The first was a full on blood bath of character-vs-character factionalism. I ran The Sword, the Crown and the Unspeakable Power, which is an epic fantasy game designed for players who are happy to push hard. The pitch was pretty simple - the players are part of the court and they've just found out that their armies have been shattered by the advanced hordes across the plains. Will they stay and fight, embrace the jihad or flee? I wrote this up in detail here.
'Weeping for the Memories of Lives Gone' was a swerve ball as I took a Trail of Cthulhu campaign which intrigued me and then went and ran it with Paul Baldowski's 'The Cthulhu Hack'. I've already posted about this during #RPGaDay this year, so will point you at the more detailed write up here. For the record, I've subsequently picked up the book again, so may explore it some more.
- Here Comes the Rain Again, A Town Called Malice
- Det kan ingen tena tvo herrar, Cold Shadows
The first game I ran was the Scandi-Noir story game, A Town Called Malice, where the players were movers and shakers in a town threatened by a rising river and a hundred year storm. It escalated nicely.
The second game drew on the unsolved Isdalen Woman murder in Norway during the height of the Cold War. The characters were sent from Oslo to Bergen to investigate what had happened and uncovered a story of espionage. I remember that I enjoyed the game but found the system didn't quite work. I had loads of plots and handouts which made it fun.
There's more details on the games linked above on the year entry.
- A Wicked Secret, Vaesen
- Utopia: reEnlightenment, Tripod (Wordplay 2e) - cancelled
This was our second online Garricon (North Star went first) and I found preparation hard as my head wasn't in a good place because my mother had just died the month before. I ended up not running the Utopia game, because I needed to take my father back home (he'd moved in with us after the funeral) and Graham kindly ran Scheherazade instead. The Vaesen game used the scenario that had kept out at me from the adventures book, and it worked well. It did run on past midnight though!
- The Treasure Hunt, Through Sunken Lands
- Operation Horatio, Delta Green
This was the smallest Furnace ever, with only 40 or so people attending, partly limited by social distancing reducing the numbers of table but partly limited by the nervousness people had at returning to a social space.
I ran the playbook led Through Sunken Lands on Saturday night and it was very much a fun game where everyone just embraced the swords and sorcery genre. We laughed a lot, and I still chuckle at the gods Nin'tendo, Ga Me'Boy and the dread rites of Wii when I look back at this. I really need to run this again at a con.
Operation Horatio was a bit ambitious; it took the timeline of the first Stranger Things series and turned it into a Delta Green operation. I enjoyed this, and learned a lot about the game system and how it differs from Call of Cthulhu. I much prefer it.
- The Slow Knife
- Trouble in Paradise, Blue Planet: Recontact
- Time to Pay the Piper, Blue Planet: Recontact
The Slow Knife is a character-vs-character story-game where the players reconstruct the revenge of a young person on the conspirators who had ruined their life. It was a bit arts and crafts at times as we built the board of relationships and connections, but it was great fun. I definitely will run this again!
I then spent Sunday running two Blue Planet games back to back. The first was the Quickstart, and then I ran a sequel to it. I had a continuity of players for the game, which was nice. The new version of the game ran nicely, and the scenarios seemed to work out fine. I've never had a player playing a dolphin before in a game, and it was a blast.
- And Also The Trees, A Town Called Malice
- Expedition XIV, The Zone
- Murder Most Foul, Swords of the Serpentine
The first game I ran was a return to the Nordic Noir I'd last run in 2019. Overall, it worked well but was marred by the noise levels from the adjacent table.
The Zone was brilliant Annihilation / Roadside Stalker fun, which everyone getting into our tale of disaster.
I had my first experience of running a Gumshoe game, a scenario that Pelgrane Press kindly sent me for Swords of the Serpentine. I had a lot of fun as we explored this fantasy take on Venice, which characters up to no good!
- Expedition XV, The Zone
- Revolt
- Welcome to the Hotel Grand Perdusz, The Dying Earth Revivification Folio
I ran the Zone as an extra game, as we struggled to fill the game timetable. This time I had the proper game, not just the print and play, and it went down just as well as the year before. One of the players came back too!
Revolt was an interesting story game about a rebellion. Lots of world building fun.
The Dying Earth was a game that I'd long wanted to play or run, so I decided to grab the opportunity with both hands and run it at the convention. It was nerve-wracking but it definitely caught a really Vancian vibe. I may well try this again, especially as there's a sequel scenario to the one I used!
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27 October 2024
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