Gypsycon 2006 was the eighth annual face-to-face meetup of the Dreamlyrics community, held at the teeming metropolis of Pidley, Cambridgshire, where just over a dozen people met up for four solid days of gaming. Although we only meet up once a year now, it’s the nearest thing I have to a regular gaming group. The format is to run day-long one-shots, typically running for up to ten hours in length. Usually there are two or three different games taking place each day.
Neil Marsden and the Chaos Spiky Bits
Friday’s game was a Neil Marsden’s Warhammer 40K game, the first time I’ve played in one of his Gypsycon games, although I’d heard very good reports of his games of previous years. The system wasn’t based on any GW mechanics, instead Neil adapted the very simple d6-based Powergame system.
While my mind has associated Warhammer 40K with the adolescent-targetted marketing of Games Workshop, which seemed to emphasise munchkinism, grossness and Chaos Spiky Bits, Neil managed to turn it into a more grown-up setting, with PCs as regular soldiers rather than Imperial Space Marines. It started out as a straightforward military SF game, but we eventually ran into genestealers, and finally chaos entities. We defeated the chaos monster with the help of the noble sacrifice of one PC, who jumped sword-first down the things throat saying “I know I’m going to die, but I’m going to take this thing with me!”.
Neil makes the players care about NPCs. A nice touch was when one of the NPC grunts died in a firefight, and he had another NPC grunt retrieve his last letter to his mother before we left his body.
Stonehenge! Where the Demons Dwell!
Saturday was an Ars Magica freeform, run by Andy Montgomery with a little help from Mark “L’Ange” Baker. This took the same general format as last year’s freeform, set around the seven-yearly Stonehenge Tribunal, but this time Andy had created his own scenario. Plot threads involved a murdered Jewish sorcerer, multiple disputed sources of Vis, questions about a missing mage from Anglesea who may or may not have been done away with by the covenant leader, the fate of some covenants that had fallen out of contact, and disturbing dreams about tortured faeries.
There were three phases of the game. First there were several hours of freeform information gathering, conspiring and deal-making. At the very end, my Covenant head collared me, most pissed off about me concealing my membership of an organisation called “The Seekers”, despite my protestations that I would have freely told him if only he had been bothered to ask!.
Then came the formal banquet, an in-character meal (Someone who shall be nameless commented that potatoes were anachronistic, to which I responded with ‘Just pretend it’s a turnip’). Finally we had the formal part of the tribunal, with votes on more than a dozen issues.
After the game, we had a debriefing, where HH revealed that he’d managed to conceal the fact that it was he who’d been torturing faeries with cold iron.
But I don’t have that many d6!
Sunday’s game was D&D, and reminded me why I generally don’t play DnD any more. When I roll 36d6 of damage, and my reaction is not “hey, kewl”, but “Oh bollocks, I’ve got to add up all those bloody numbers to find out whether or not I’ve managed to kill the thing”, then you can tell DnD isn’t the game for nowadays. Still, the other players seemed to enjoy it well enough; I think I’ve just grown out of number-heavy systems as a player.
Attack of the Unholy Moonbats
Monday was a modern-day conspiracy game run by Steve “Abbadon” Morley, a playtest of Steve’s own system, intended as a rules-lite system for realistic and deadly modern-day combat. The PCs were a group of British covert agents working for MI6. Our first mission was to eliminate an Al-Queda training camp in Pakistan; the premise behind this one was that Al-Queda had formed an unholy alliance with moonbat neo-Anarchists and was training the sort of idiots that fill out the ranks of the Animal Liberation Front as terrorists. Our heroic PCs slaughtered the whole lot of them. Then we were thrust immediately into another mission; a hostage situation at a pub in Newcastle. This time things didn’t quite go to plan. We did managed to rescue most of the hostages, and took some of the terrorists alive. Unfortunately we failed to spot that the terrorists had set up several webcams around the pub, and were webcasting the entire thing.
While our mission itself did go rather pear-shaped, we still managed to give Steve a lot of useful playtesting feedback!
The only trouble with Gypsycon is that we have to wait a whole year for the next one. Hopefully I’ll be running something next time.
“. Some great material, and a lot rocker than other more recent releases, but why does new vocalist Steve Auguri only sing half the songs?
, the only music of theirs I’ve heard is their fantastic cover of Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls”, which appeared on a recent cover disk of Classic Rock magazine, and completely blew away everything else on that CD. Anyone recommend which is their best album?
