Gypsycon 2007

Easter weekend is time for Gypsycon, the annual gathering of the UK side of the Dreamlyrics community.

This year’s Gypsycon ran for just two days rather than the entire Easter weekend of previous years. We had an attendance of about twenty people, including three members of the Hat clan who I hadn’t seen for several years.

On Friday I ran the first face-to-faceplaytest for the Kalyr RPG, based on Fudge. Players were Pete Hat, AJ, Bruce Brown and Gary.

Since I really wanted to playtest the psionics system, I chose to run a scenario involved the players travelling into the totalitarian Konaic Empire to extract a human slave who’d developed psionic powers, and would be killed had he not been rescued.

For those not familiar with the Kalyr RPG, I’ve got the following deviations from baseline Fudge

• Keys instead of Faults – Unlike Faults, they give no bonuses at character creation time, but give Fudge points when they come up in the game.
• Abilities instead of Attributes and Skills
• Connections rated using the standard Fudge trait scale, representing the character’s social standing
• A complete psionics system, which needed testing for balance

I had four player characters, one specialised psionic, one optimised combat monster (the only non-psi in the game), and two characters with a mix of psi and mundane skills. The first two seemed to be the most effective characters, which seemed to confirm that specialists tend to trump generalists in most RPGs.

Keys seemed to work well, although I think five rather than the three I gave the pregen characters would be a better number. They did seem to encourage roleplaying. We used glass beads as Fudge tokens, which encouraged players to spend them, so the players had to hit their keys in order to refresh their pool of Fudge points.

The ending of the adventure was a little bit of an anticlimax, probably because I let the main villain go down too quickly. I should have remembered that named villains get Fudge points, which was my major faux pas as a GM.

Saturday was L’Ange’s Mage:Sorceror’s Crusade epic, set in his incredibly detailed Northumberland setting, following on from the cliffhanger ending from two years ago. This one was really a Mage/Wraith/Changeling crossover, since it only featured one actual Mage as a PC, in a party with a Fae princess and the ghost of a knight. Somebody pointed out that we had something looking like a DnD party with a fighter, a magic-user and a cleric, except we didn’t have a thief. My character was the priest with True Faith, which turned out to be a pretty potent power, when the opposition included undead and demons.

Roll on Gypsycon 2008!