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Four old hands from the gaming scene have seen a Midlands shaped hole in the UK gaming calendar. Much like taking your own games to run at cons if other people aren’t providing them, we decided to provide our own convention as no-one else seemed to be putting a show on. What could possibly go wrong?
With all that’s good in gaming and a broad church appeal that will see everything from D&D 4e to Indie publishing, via home brew settings and systems any other flavour you can think of, we aim to have the best in RPGs, board games, card games, miniatures, whatever the gaming public demands – plus a select array of traders.
We’re currently getting the website built, but initial information can be found on UK Roleplayers and we’ve already had game submissions in the first 24 hours. So if you can make it on 10-4-10 (that’s 10th April 2010) to the Derby Assembly Rooms (that’s UK for you colonials) for a full day of sociable, varied gaming, you’d be well advised to come on down and say hello.
My only current worry is not getting to play or run any games myself, I’ll just have to organise. But maybe if I’m sneaky… regardless, we’ll have the other Smart Party members there in force, so come along and jump on in for the big win!
For me DM started with a stopover at Lemur’s house on the Friday, and boy was I disturbed to note the picture of geese in the spare room, worrying that he might be subconsciously brainwashing me into playing Mouseguard the following day. I need not have feared…
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I was asked at a Con recently how I got conflicts into my games – so much happening from three or four statements. Not sure if it’ll translate to text well, without the full demo, but here’s a stab at giving people the first go at getting some intra-party rivalry into their convention games.
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IndieCon is a new and slowly growing little convention right in the south of England, ostensibly catering to small press publishers, but open to anyone and any game really – although the emphasis is on new games, independent concerns and trying different things. Sometimes using Jenga or magnetic fish as a resolution mechanic…
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Furnace starts on a Saturday morning, but unofficially some delegates meet up on the Friday, with one or two organisers for a pint. I’ve done this once before out of the previous three Furnaces, and as some of the Smart Party were joining in this time, we thought we may as well make a proper weekend of it. Friday rush hour traffic being what it is, even finishing at half three with their lazy part-time-teacher hours Lemur and G2 couldn’t get to mine until after seven, but that still left us plenty of time to get up to Sheffield for a few social ones.
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This year I attended my first Furnace, a smallish con held in Sheffield, now in it’s 4th year. The Smart Party were four strong for this outing, and between us we had 8 games to run that covered the gamut of gaming.
The location was really cool, a converted gaolhouse including the original cells to play in. There was a cosy bar that served excellent food. I’d have liked it to stay open a little later but they had beer in vending machines for the desperate, so not so bad after all. The rooms were ‘motel’ like, which means they were fine for getting your head down, but not for much else. That’s all I need from a Con though, and at £25 a night I can’t complain. Breakfast was perfunctory, but appreciated after a long night of game talk.
So, its been quiet round here? Well, yes, the Smart Party have been heavily involved in weekly games and organising campaigns and not so much of the one-shots we’re here to talk about. With summer over however (did it ever really begin?) there’s a convention a month into the new year starting with last weekend’s CONcrete Cow in Milton Keynes. This is a one day con Ideal for one shot adventures, and although I could only go last minute and hence didn’t get much chance to prep games or get involved in advance, I did get chance to play in a game of Spite: the second book of Pandemonium – following on from Dread (the first book, not the game involving Jenga as a resolution mechanic). Ably refereed by the always-reliable Mr Dorward and good fun as it was, it reintroduced me to the world of Playing RPGs With People You Don’t Know and threw up some behaviours I observed around the table; behaviours I think we could all do with trying to avoid… Read the rest of this entry »
When making characters for your convention game, then the first things to bear in mind are :
Make them appropriate to the scenario (not just the setting).
Ensure they’re different enough (in feel and statistics) to give a broad flavour and give everyone their moment to shine
So, with that in mind, here are a few pointers:
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How can you not be tempted by a journey to play games in a castle on the Rhine? I was there for my third year and it was as great as ever.
The journey to Bacharach was as easy as ever, with only a slight delay at the airport on the Deutschland side while the bus turned up, but the sun was shining and a free beer on the journey over was most welcome. Everything about the con was ruthlessly organised as always, with the notable exception of games, for which there seems to be an almost masochistic desire to make it a scrum to sign up for things. I took to my usual method of avoiding troubles by taking lots of games to run. Apparently I now hold the record for most games played at a Tentacles, and as that was the last one… Read the rest of this entry »
So how do you write a scenario for a convention or one-shot? Simply don’t know where to start? Well, if its 4e there’s a ton of things you can buy or download, so just boiler plate one of them and change the baddies round. If its a left field hippy game then you probably make it up with the players along the way. But if you want some on advice on how to knock something together, with some interesting bits on the way then you might find the following useful. Its a method I’ve been using for some time, maybe it’ll help someone else with a place to start at least…
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