I think this is my sixth Stabcon.
If you haven’t heard of it, Stabcon is small (150-ish people) board game and RPG convention held twice a year in Manchester. While the summer convention normally takes place at Woolton Hall in Manchester, the current winter venue is the Britannia Hotel in Stockport. The convention has now been running for many, many years.
The relaxed atmosphere is a complete contrast to places like Gencon. The relatively small number of people means that once you’ve been to two or three of them you recognise the usual faces, which means you’re no longer gaming with complete strangers.
Unlike student-land in Manchester, the Britannia is out on the suburban fringes, where there’s not much in the way of local eateries. So we depended to the hotel’s catering for sustenance; the food was OK, but not great. Still an order of magnitude better than Gencon 2000 in Manchester, which had me flashing back to school dinners.
With a large contingent of gamers descending upon it, the hotel stocked up on bottles of real ale, as they did last year. Someone also decided on a two-for-the-price-of-one offer on Beamish Stout, and attendees drank three whole barrels of the stuff. Then they complained that they had loads of real ale left over at the end. D’oh!
I spent the first few hours chatting to old friends like Sasha who I hadn’t seen since the last winter Stabcon, and playing beer’n'pretzels card games like Chez Goth and Cthulhu 500 (Lovecraftian motor racing. Yes, it is as silly as it sounds).
RPGing started in earnest on the Saturday, when I’d signed up for two lengthy games. I find that the most popular games tend to fill up on Friday night, which is why it helps to get there early. First up was the third installment of Kev’s Cthulhu on Mars. I’d played in the first two Mars games at the previous two Stabcons, which covered the first two parties of Mars settlers in the year 2100. The third is set a couple of years later, with the population of Mars reaching 100. Naturally, this being a Call of Cthulhu game, Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know were already there, waiting for us. The game ended, in true Cthulhu style, with the PCs vanquishing the eldrich horrors, but at the expense of the own lives.
Second game of the day was GURPS Infinite Earths, run by the esteemed Phil Masters, set on the steampunkish Britannica-6 timeline, where an all-powerful British Empire indulges in vast engineering projects and monumental bad taste combining the worst stylistic bits of the 1870s and the 1970s. The PCs were an I-Cops mission sent to investigate parachronic anomalies on the Channel Bridge currently under construction.
Sunday I played one of the funky Forgite-Narrativist games, Primetime Adventures, where we set out to create the pilot of a TV series. The game starts with a completely blank sheet of paper without as much as a genre defined; the players form a scriptwriting team to brainstorm ideas. To describe what happened during the game really needs a post of it’s own. I’ll just say that the resulting Knights of the Infinite Table left me wanting to play more of this game.
The next Stabcon is in July, held at the Britannia Hotel again because Woolton Hall is being rewired. See you there!
