In which Armando Penblade attempts to convey his weekend! Maybe no one gives a shit, but I already wrote this for elsewhere, so what the heck?
Wednesday--Driving and Eating, who gives a shit about this?
Woo! The drive up on Wednesday was crazy long. We stopped a lot, and one of my 3 friends on the trip, Cord (a viking of a man + professional chef) got distracted while we were coming down from the WV mountains and missed the exit into Ohio. . . and then there were no more exits for 20 miles to turn around, so we wound up in KY, which extended our trip by an hour. We were trading off driving–I got us up to WV, he got us into OH, and then another friend, James, did the last stretch of OH and IN, so no one was too dead by the end.
Once there, we met our final friend Josh, who’d flown in after a family vacation, at our hotel, which was about 5-6 miles away near the Indianapolis airport. Damned hotel lottery really kinda screwed us, but whatever. We drove out to the Con itself to collect our badges + tickets, parkingn earby. That was my first view of how huge it must be! The Convention Center is enormous and even then, it was swarming with people as far as the eye could see. Everyone else in my group scooped up a ton of “Generic Tickets” to attend events during their frequent downtime (every event requires a ticket for admission, usually ~$1/hour for basic stuff, while some games are 2-3x that, and most seminars are free; if you don’t have a pre-purchased ticket and an event isn’t full, you can give them Generics instead), but I knew my schedule was jam-packed and that I wouldn’t have any room to breathe. . .
We then walked about 1/2 mile (oh, how this presaged a weekend of walking) to a really good Chicago-style pizza place called Giordano’s and split 2 huge deep dish pies. It was delicious, but overwhelming, and everyone else in my group got a little drunk off their huge pitcher of some beloved local beer. We got back to my car and learned that downtown Indy parking is expensive as fuck, dropping $30 for 3.25 hours! Luckily, we had official GenCon parking passes for the next few days that were still expensive, but way better than that. . .
Thursday - Luchador RPGs, Undead Shenanigans, and a Concert
Thursday - Luchador: Way of the Mask + 13th Age + They Might Be Giants
On Thursday, we got up super early and had our kinda disappointing hotel breakfast (Comfort Suites, step up your fuckin’ game). We got to our assigned parking, only breaking a few traffic laws in the process as I attempted to learn how Indianapolis works, and walked in (which was sadly another super long walk)! James and I had a game together first thing called “Chasing Chupacabras” using the Luchador: Way of the Mask system
Luchador: Way of the Mask
This was HILARIOUS! I played a nun-themed “gimmico” luchador named Mother Mercy, and we saved a goat farm from chupacabras! The system really represented wrestling well, with stats for all sorts of different move-components, that you could string together. If you achieved an extraordinary success on one part of a combo, you could continue straight into the next one, or else you’d have to wait till the next round (giving the opponent time to reverse), unless you traded in some “Heat” to boost your roll, which you could only earn by working the crowd or doing ludicrous shit.
I suggested that my character was the “driver” for our little band of adventuring luchadors, taking us all around in a church van from the local iglesia that sponsored us (The “Warriors of Light,” I wound up suggesting). We got wrapped up in a series of mysterious attacks near the Ruiz Goat Farm just outside of town and found an evil corporate conglomerate was breeding chupacabras, so we wrestled a small army of guards into submission, beat the head honcho unconscious, and blew the whole thing up!
The rest of the day, I was in one more game (a 13th Age session called “Swords Against the Dead”) and a seminar on “Creating a Bulletproof Rulebook,” since I write rulebooks for the hacked-together RPGs I run IRL. The seminar was pretty useful, actually!
13th Age
The session was a little bit of a letdown–a couple of players didn’t show, and it wound up mostly being a combat-run wherein a young wizard’s apprentice had stolen a tome of necromancy and accidentally raised ALL THE DEAD EVAR in an attempt to resurrect his parents. We saved the town, scolded the kid, and murderated an evil dwarf that was there for some reason. I was playing a Tiefling “Hell-Singer,” which I took to be a bard from hell, playing him up as a goth-rock singer with a diva complex, which threw the burly ex circus strongman and the haunted ex-soldier in the party for a bit of a loop :). In the end, “Dravien von Darkbrood” got some great material for his next album, though.
I had just a second for some quick dinner with James and Josh at a nearby foodtruck, and then we ran to a distant venue to see the They Might Be Giants concert, which was long, hilarious, and AWESOME! Seriously, the setlist was close to 30 tracks, including some really weird older numbers like “Song Number Three” and “Fingertips.” Our other buddy, Cord had stayed at the Con, playing another game, and so we had to walk back to collect him before driving back to the hotel well after 11, EXHAUSTED.
Friday - My first session + Savage Worlds + DCC RPG (AKA, the craziest game I have ever played in)
Friday - Fate Core + Savage Worlds: Eldritch Skies + DCC RPG
On Friday, I got up even earlier (before 7!), had more crummy hotel breakfast, and finally went to my first event not in the ICC itself. The ICC is surrounded by 5-6 huge, fancy hotels, all interconnected by tunnels and skywalks, so it’s this MASSIVE complex with 100s of meeting rooms and halls. Honestly, it’s incredibly maze-like, and as someone with a fundamentally broken sense of direction, it was confusing as hell. . . especially since T-Mobile had essentially zero functional data service, making Navigation a bitch to use.
"The Final Performance of the Hellknights of the Underdark (feat. Deathrone Ascendancy)"
I started the day up on the 2nd floor of the Hyatt, hosting my “Final Performance of the Hellknights of the Underdark (feat. Deathrone Ascendancy)” game using the Fate Core system. Some players didn’t come, but the ones who did, including a really nice couple from Canada, had a great time, and I am proud of how it went. The one-shot’s basic premise is that you’re playing a washed-up heavy metal band, The Hellknights of the Underdark, in a weird-out fantasy universe, performing your final tour while your finances crumble and infighting tears you apart. Your opening band is quickly eclipsing you, and the final show, at the legendary Celestial Amphitheater, is your last chance to really pull things back together. Of course, shenanigans are afoot. . . anyway, even with a compacted player base, we got through it in good time, played lots of loud metal music, and wound up impaling a Contract Demon on a steampunk keyboard’s hidden grappling hook.
I had some lunch with my friends (some food truck that just piled food on top of some really tasty fries) and then went to TWO MORE GAMES: “Eldritch Skies,” a futuristic Cthulhu session using the Savage Worlds system and “The Quicksilver Pantograph,” a session using the DCC RPG, which is like oldschool D&D turned up to 11.
"Eldritch Skies"
Yet another game stymied by absences! One of the players was someone involved in the original creation of SW, which was really awesome, and the GM was friends with the author of the setting we were using, “Eldritch Skies,” so lots of expertise and knowledge at the table! The setting is basically “hellish near future scifi where mankind has opened up space travel, only to find Cthulhu is real and lives in hyperspace.” We played a crack team of agents of the Consortium, tracking down the disappearances of several more agents, all of whom were “abs”–abhumans, tainted by Mythos-horror bloodlines. My character, a brilliant but hideous young man (and part time sorcerer) with Deep Ones heritage, was particularly horrified by these goings on, but poorly equipped for the “talking to people” part of the investigation, camping out in a well-humidified van to do research via a computer. We found a secret lab in the jungles near Rio de Janiero experimenting with extracting “ab-essence” to create new monsters and proceeded to machine gun and sorcerously blast our way through some half-shoggoth horrors on the way to victory!
"The Quicksilver Pantograph"
The Quicksilver Pantograph game was utterly fucking insane! The setup stated that 80,000,000 millennia ago, “Sumerian dwarves built a 3-d printer using the corpses of rogue star gods. Now, YOU are the only chance of planetary biological survival. Turn back the tide of darkness and face the ultimate challenge.” The titular Pantograph the dwarves built quickly went insane and consumed the entire galaxy in search of more mercury and blood to fuel its growth, and we were playing ancient mortal souls trapped inside of a Matrix-like simulation inside of it. Over the millennia, we’d learned to create our own realities to keep ourselves from going mad inside the machine, and basically started the game by describing what we were doing on that particular day to stave off boredom.
The first player described himself inhabting the body of a leather-festooned “starcowboy” whose rhinestones charted the stars, riding upon a massive rainbow colored cat with a unicorn horn and butterfly wings that he lovingly called Mr. Purrington, flying to a world mirrored after the candy wonderland from the Willy Wonka, and the tone for the night was basically set. Others spent their time exploring the boundaries of the pantograph, while some coalesced into Space Cowboy’s dimension, including one player taking the form of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, albeit with a katana, and beheaded a passing Oompa Loompa. I described my consciousness as running thousands of god-experiments, crafting worlds from the cosmic ether and following a single “genetic branch” of life from unicellular to human, searching for “a mind brilliant and insane enough to have concocted a scenario like the one I am trapped in, searching for a solution.” Meta as fuck, but so be it.
We eventually all got drawn into a Mad Max-style death race for the heart of the Pantograph, which was dying, called the Quicksilver Cup. We found ourselves inhabiting the bodies of a small army of drugged-addled, hyperviolent future warriors in deathmobiles of their own design, doing laps around an enormous cyberpunk construct at the center of the arena. Space Cowboy’s mount tried to break the speed of light and lagged the simulation; eventually, he glimpsed eternity and his head exploded. The rest of us fought and died again and again, and my twin brothers, Starxy and Hux, eventually met their end at the end of four female ninja’s swords. In fact, I’d argue that “You become four female ninjas” is probably the best line of the night, from the GM to the player who killed “me.”
Grasping luck, I described that my final experiment had lead my genetic branch to a tragically fated Oompa Loompa, who had been beheaded, but of course, we all know that Oompa Loompas can live for 24 hours without a body. Grinning, the GM let this pass and allowed me to drag my OL’s head through the dimensions, whereupon it landed on Space Cowboy’s limp body. We played the rest of the session as a team, with all my dialogue being in the form of foul-mouthed rhymes (e.g., “You stupid ninjas done fucked up! I’m back and I’m gonna find that fucking cup!”). We soared into the contraption (which the GM had built on the table for us!), found the heart, consumed the stargods’ blood inside, and became a dual-godhead entity, remaking the universe in our own image twisted image.
I had a bit of food between the two, and wound up waiting in the hall a long time for my friends to finish a D&D game they were all in together at 1AM! They had gotten into a trio of D&D sessions together over the whole weekend, playing characters loosely based off of the original Ghostbusters squad, but reported that the 2nd and particularly 3rd sessions were sort of a let-down, which is lame.
Saturday - My Second Session (feat: @Vesper) + Seminars + Apocalypse World
Saturday - Fate Core + Apocalypse World + Seminars
On Saturday, there another SUPER early morning so I could make it to the JW Marriott to run my “Minor League Evil” supervillains game using the Fate Core system, which WAS fully attended, including by our very own @Vesper (feat. special appearances by his brother and @SlainteMhath). It was cool to finally meet a non North Carolinian Qt3er in person!
Minor League Evil
MLE is a Fate Core session I wrote wherein third-string supervillains in training at Infamy Incorporated are called up to the big leagues when their bosses in the Council of Hate go missing. The players took on the roles of such cads as “Whiplash II,” the fastest teenager in the world, “The Immovable Object,” a dumb-as-a-post ex-con with a strong disregard for physics, and “Doctor Stretch,” a brilliant madman with a rubber body. They almost immediately engaged in villainy such as attempting to double park and lying to a portly police officer named Porkins. We also quickly learned from Dr. Stretch’s player that his character was, in truth, a complete agoraphobe and germophobe, so we had LOTS of fun tormenting him with dirty doorhandles and snotty children.
The crew managed to steal the Mantzouris Crystal (alas, a fake!), stage a major bank robbery by destroying the heroic “Spirit of '76” and batting an elderly woman into a pillow factory, and deface or destroy every last statue outside of the Hall of Heroics downtown before learning that in fact, the world’s heroes had been replaced by their mirror-universe opposites from Dimension Reverse, who were busy using stolen diamonds to turn the Capital City Observatory into a dimensional transfer ray. They piled into Whiplash II’s dad’s minivan and hightailed it out there, facing an army of cat-phobic rats, the blustering Ultimate Fighter who never fought anyone, and even the copper-hating Uber Girl. Immovable Object broke in by forgetting which way gravity faced and poor Doctor Stretch went down with the observatory, covered in dirty swarming rats, but the day was (inexplicably!) saved!
I also had two seminars that day—“The Role of Randomness in Game Design” (including the designer of the very awesome Gloomhaven boardgame) and “Writer Cage Fight: Self-Pub vs Traditional,” cuz I love that kinda stuff—and had time to have lunch with James and Josh while Cord gamed. Then I played one last session, “The Road of Kings,” a Conan-style game using the Apocalypse World rules, which was incredible and really well-made. It ran till midnight, and everyone waited for ME!
The Road of Kings
The GM of this session was honestly one of the most impressive I’ve ever had; he’d put together an incredible Conan-inspired rules hack of the AW ruleset, made a beautfiul, hand-drawn full-color map printed on canvas, bought brass scales of justice and stone tiles representing the literal balance of power, and made everyone custom cardstock character sheets that we got to customize to our preference at the top of the session. In it, one character’s father, the conquering barbarian king of the land, was murdered by a cruel noble usurper guided by a foreign power’s demon-tainted hand, and the rest of us were old friends and allies of the king who ferried the boy out of the castle at great peril.
We established a secret base of power deep in the bowels of a temple dedicated to a fertility cult, turned the city’s priesthood, criminal underworld, and merchant classes against the usurper king, and began contacting still-loyal legions from outside of the city. Nonetheless, everyone we spoke to was hesitant to be the first to actively oppose the new king, and so my character, an elderly sorcerer who’d sworn off his evil necromancy at the old king’s request, fell back into old habits and worked a terrible ritual to raise all those slain in the uprising to revenge themselves upon the usurper’s forces. With the castle in chaos, our allies stormed the walls and the young heir braved death and fear to take his father’s crown from the crumpled head of the usurper while the demonic priest who’d guided the whole affair escaped as a winged tyrant lizard, to be hunted another day. This was an amazing note to end my con proper on.
I actually found the GM’s WiP documents for the game. Seriously, check this shit out!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_5copIAo-7UTlFlRWtZejRGZVU/view
Sunday - Final purchases and a drive home
Then yesterday we got up late as late as possible, drove to the Con hall one last time, and collected our goodies at the vendor hall (which I had literally not even had time to see yet!). I got a commemorative GenCon d6 die (sadly, the full sets were sold out) and a copy of the hilarious Luchadors game I played with James on Thursday, while he got a LOT of boardgames and stuff, including a very cool vikings-themed one I’m eager to play when we all see each other. We finally left Indianapolis around noon and were all home by 1 AM after lunch at Wendy’s and dinner at Cracker Barrel, where I ate enough to kill a man. Then I passed the fuck out for 10 hours and then wrote this fucking post that no one will ever read :-D
And that, my friends, is how you GenCon!
edit: I will absolutely agree with @SlainteMhath that the diversity of genders and ages at GenCon was pretty inspiring to see. The Con was still overwhelmingly white, but honestly, it had such a friendly, excited, welcoming atmosphere that I think it will only grow more diverse and fascinating in years to come :)