Hot Character Sheet Action

Having played Hot War / Delta Green cross over at IndieCon and getting the right vibes from my character sheets from the assembled masses, it only seems right to pimp them on the blog a bit. Here’s thumbnails of the front and each of the alternate backs. I’ve blurred out the text in case I need to use them again.

Paintshop Pro is the weapon of choice, dropping an image into the back ground of Excel for the stats and using formulas and conditional formatting to get the agendas made easy for future use.

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Evilgaz First Time Virgin IndieCon Report

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…

Evilgaz Furnace Report

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.

Mwar Custom Character Sheets

Its definitely a Good Thing to add your own customer character sheets to a game, it can make all the difference. For starters, they look better generally, they can have all the information on you need and none of it that you don’t… flavour text, bits of rules, things specific to each character, images, the list goes on.

Ennie More For Any More

The Ennies are up for voting now, so get yours in.  I can probably write down on a piece of paper who’ll win what and then post it up here when the results are out, but I shan’t.  All I will say is that if you’re wondering what to vote for in the (9.) Best Setting category then you could do a lot worse than going for The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor, by Arc Dream Publishing.  If you don’t believe me, run off and buy it now, and then read it and you’ll convince yourself to vote for it.  Its halfway between trad and hippie, superbly written and immense fun.  Have I ever let you down before?

Creating Con Characters

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:

Tentacles Omega Con Report

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…

Secret Squirrel

I’m back from an inaugural meeting of a convention committee, as one of the nascent organisers.  Early days yet, but a one-day Con is set up for spring next year, with a household (to the con going public anyway) name attached to it.  I think it’s got the making of something awesome, a fun, game-filled event for all the family.  Can’t give any details away yet, but give it a month or so and there’ll be some comms going out like a rash over the UK forums.  Stay tuned.

LemurCon: Legend of the Five Rings

Gaz ran Legend of the Five Rings for us at LemurCon this weekend. Here’s my comments, and for the purposes of this ‘blog, my thoughts on using Lo5R for one shots and Con games generally.

I’ve played Lo5R a few times now. Once at a Con actually, and I don’t remember much about it, but what I do remember wasn’t particularly noteworty. Gaz and Lemur are long-term fans, and I’ve always kept my ear to the ground about the game’s fortunes over the years. I actually bought 3rd edn last year just to try to get in on the action. Never really got much further than a decent skim of the text. I managed to snap up a copy of 1st edn on the lads’ recommendation recently (30p off ebay!) and I really liked what I saw. The art was great, the text accessible, a great example of a complete core book. I have to admit I’ve struggled with the setting before, my knowledge of feudal Japan is restricted to watching Shogun on TV years ago and reading the novel a while back. I’m more of a western fantasy kind of gamer to be honest.

All the above makes me what I’d consider to be a typical Con customer. Most players I’ve encountered tend to be interested, but not immersed in the game on offer. The real experts are in the minority and if anything, come from the GM’s home game and are there for moral support as much as anything else. How does the game fare then? I’m going to look at three aspects: the system, the setting, and finally the scenario, all from a one shot perspective.