When we last left our intrepid heroes, their Gen Con had taken a turn for the not so great. Whether it was the games, the scenarios, or the GMs, the last three games were never going to make a best of list and it made the one game which had been cancelled preconvention the second-best game thus far.

To say they needed their luck to turn around is an understatement.

Day 2 Continued

Curseborne

The last game of the day was Curseborne from Onyx Path. This is a World of Darkness style game, using the same d10 system you’re familiar with if you’ve ever played any of those games.

The only bad thing about this game was when we originally looked at the schedule, we thought we’d have to hustle from the JW Marriot to the Stadium with no time between the games. However, ending the previous game early did have the side effect of allotting us ample time to make this game (and disaster was averted). That said, our fourth player (Holly) was about ten minutes late for the same reason. Lucky that she made it, as Holly immediately made an impact on things by speaking in a sort of Eastern European accent.

I must admit that at first, I thought it might be her real accent (not crazy since in the 70,000 attendees, it is likely to get people from all over the world). Not to be outdone, I was playing a Ghost possessing the body of a bartender. This was a guy who lived it up in his original life and so…

A quick aside… during the weekend Egg, Lee, and I pretty much are trying to make each other laugh constantly. For this year the crazy/silly talk settled on the Marvel Comics character Dr. Druid. It’s ok if you’ve never heard of him. He was an Avenger for a hot minute (and betrayed the team) before mostly only appearing in those huge scenes where the artist has to draw 50 characters who have something to do with the plot.

Anyway, during our discussions about this sad sack of a character, I decided that Toad was his buddy and spoke with what can only be described as David Lee Roth’s voice.

End aside…

So that’s the voice I went with during this two-hour session.

Every time I get to play an Onyx Path game (or a White Wolf one), it just seems to deliver. We had a great table of PCs, and our GM was a breath of fresh air as he was very knowledgeable in the system, but also gave us plenty of room to interact with each other and the NPCs within the game.

It took until the last game of the night, but we finally got another good one!

Day 3

This was going to be another full day with only a random hour here or there to fit anything in really. If we were going to make the Dealers’ Room, it would be in short bursts on our way to another game.

Blade Runner

Egg had really wanted to play Blade Runner for a while, so I was happy I could grab us a slot. It leaned very heavily on the investigation aspect of things as our four Blade Runners were investigating the shooting of an anti-replicant journalist. Our task was complicated by a time deadline we needed to hit… find an answer to who was responsible by 5PM or potentially the city would erupt from the news.

One of the interesting ideas was that you could “zoom in” on a crime scene. Trying to evoke a cinematic element to things is a good thing. The problem is that the GM mentioned it once in the rules, and then it wasn’t until one of us (Egg) remembered that we could do it that we managed to get the final piece of the puzzle to lead us to our next potential assassin.

The other “problem” was picking up on cues from the GM. In a lot of games, you can often determine if you should continue down a path by judging the GM’s reaction to your questions. Sometimes they are very direct (“yeah, that’s a dead end”) and other times they can just lead you to believe that something isn’t a true path. We ended up hitting the second of those and without meaning to, the GM basically told us the guy we were going to interrogate wasn’t the bad guy.

This wasn’t a fake out on his part, it was more that we interpreted something one way and then when it turned out this was the Big Bad, it meant the deaths of our characters. Which is fine in a convention game, but later we asked if anyone else had ever figured it out and in the 8-10 sessions he’d run the game only 1 group had managed to not get slaughtered…

Maybe it wasn’t entirely our fault then?

I would have also liked to have seen how the combat actually worked, but we were cut down in a narrative fashion to end the game… so even though that might have been a great opportunity to do so. We still had about 40 minutes left in the session, so it wasn’t a timing issue.

Our Brilliant Ruin

I’m going to go ahead and spoil this… this was by far and away the best session we played this year and likely would go in the top 5 sessions of any of our Gen Con/Origins/Dragon Con gaming.

That said, I’m not sure how much of that was from the game system itself and how much it was due to our GM (I think it probably was 95% the GM), so weirdly I wouldn’t mind playing the system again with someone else just to see how it might hold up.

I wish I could remember the exact description of the game (Downton Abbey meets something with a dash of steampunk thrown in). Regardless, the game really wants the players to embrace their roles (ranging from the Butler to the Aristocrat to the Scholars). The ability to roleplay is by far the most important aspect of the game, with everyone being able to shine.

The GM not only loved the idea of “cool things” but he embraced those moments and tried to make them even bigger. By the end of the adventure, we were leading a procession of villagers against the local aristocrat with a band and doves and an old cannon to prove a point. And while no shots were fired, we made our point to oust the current “ruler” and replace him with one of our own… executing him just as the story faded to black.

Just amazing fun all around.

Planet of the Apes

Another game Egg had requested, though we weren’t exactly sure how it would go. Obviously if you follow the original movies, the idea of either being a human in an ape world didn’t sound very appetizing. Luckily, we not only were playing the apes, but we were on a Human Hunt (the most dangerous game indeed). Using a version of the old West End Games Star Wars system, it was like a old pair of shoes (though the last time I played the system was in the mid-90s).

Again, we were blessed with a good GM, a good mix of players, and one player who must have been waiting for this specific game because he just leaned into his “Lawbringer” character. With such lines as “You know what they say – human see, human do”, he found every great moment to really hit it all home.

My character was the reporter coming along for the hunt, hoping to find corruption among the elites. And that’s how I started playing it, but as I made notes of what pictures she had taken, I started to see something else. Even when we encountered the humans, we never really had to deal much with the idea they could talk (keeping them gagged helped with that). When we reached the end of the session, I had a chance to give my findings (what kind of article did I write) and I went with one that celebrated the hunt and those who participated. It celebrated our leadership along with those poor NPCs who lost their lives to the obvious “radiation sick” humans (RAD Human).

I’m curious how a campaign would work in the world, though I suspect you could really lean into the exploration of the Forbidden Zones or reclaiming some of the irradiated areas.

Day 4

With Sunday arriving, we made one last quick trip to the Dealers’ Room and then it was time to make our way back to Atlanta. I did end up buying a couple of Button Shy games as well as finally taking a chance on the Final Girl series of solo games (though at the time of this blog, I haven’t had a chance to take it for a spin).

Next year I’ll be skipping Gen Con as the family is going on a cruise that week, but it is very possible that Origins might be the replacement for the guys’ trip. We’ll see as the date gets closer.