I’ve been going to Stabcon for the best part of the decade now. Advertised by little more than word-of-mouth (it doesn’t even have a website), it’s a friendly board, card and roleplaying game convention, currently held twice a year at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport. With many of the same faces year after year, it had effectively become the nearest thing to my local gaming group. Except now I’ve moved down south, it’s a three-and-a-half hour train journey away.
Still, it’s great to meet up with old friends, play some great games, and of course drink beer. Beer has always been an important part of Stabcon – back in the days when it was held at Woolton Hall we always used to drink the bar dry by the end of the con. Nowadays the hotel stocks up on real ales for the occasion. I usually prefer to spend the Friday night playing boardgames, this year it was a Eurogame whose name I forget, and for which I never really got my head round the rules, and Runebound, which I cruelly and probably unfairly described as “Munchkin without the jokes”.
I really go to Stabcon for the roleplaying games, but some years I’ve spent a good part of Saturday playing board games because there weren’t enough RPGs I fancied playing that both had free slots and didn’t clash with other games. This time it worked well, with all the good the GMs sensibly choosing non-clashing slots, so I managed to get signed up for three games over the course of the day.
We started with a Battlestar Galactica run by Dr. Bob. The player characters were captains of a fleet of abandoned ships without functioning faster-than-light drives, but with a large number of refugees. We started to cobble together some working drives by cannibalising others, so at least some ships would be spaceworthy. After lengthy discussions about which ships to take, we jumped to the next system and found ourselves answering a distress call, where we found the last survivor of a research station where everyone else had been horribly murdered…
The afternoon session was the latest of Phil Masters’ GURPS Diskworld adventures. The PCs were special agents of Sto Lat, sent on a mission “To prevent a Story happening”. To say too much about the nature of the story would be a spoiler for anyone playing the same scenario at another convention, but let’s say that, in the true style of this sort of Diskworld scenario, no cliché was left unturned, and we dispatched the bad guy in the correct manner for the story in question.
The evening session was Kev Dearn’s Call of Cthulhu game, set during World War 2 at an archaeological dig in Alsace-Lorraine. It was the sequel to a game set in Roman times, with the dig being the site of the original game. As was to be expected, we encountered sanity-blasting Things Man Was Not Meant To Know so horrifying that they made the SS (the player characters!) look like the good guys.
Unusually for a Stabcon, there were two games on the Sunday. The first was a Terminator game using the Twilight 2000 2013 system, again run by Dr. Bob. The scenario was not dissimilar to the original Terminator film, except it was an entire team sent back into the past, and our mission was to save the physics professor who had discovered the secret of time travel. Once we heard news reports of “a naked gunman on the rampage” it was clear what the opposition was. We did survive a run-in with Arnie and lived to tell the tale.
The final game of the weekend, run by John Parr just after lunch, was very silly indeed, but extremely entertaining. Trumpton, the RPG is a (presumably) unauthorised fan-written system. What actually happened in the game is best summed-up by this quote: “All the scythe-bots are dealt with. We blew up two of the things in Trumpton town square, Captain Snort’s men dealt with one, one fell in the Chigley canal, and Windy Miller’s smoking a joint with the last one”. The game ended with us discovering which character from a completely different programme was responsible for mining the canal, and my character shooting down his Royal Mail helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade.
And so ended another Stabcon, and hats off to organisers Michelle and Hammy for another great weekend. This time, instead of being home by tea-time, it would be three and a half hours on board an Arriva Cross-Country Voyager before I’d arrive home. At least I had time to read the whole of “Cthulhu Invictus” that I’d bought from Fan Boy Three.
Yay! Name checked on Tim’s blog! There goes my 15 minutes of fame …
I’m glad you liked Trumpton. I forgot to say at the time that you found Mr. Troop tied up in the van along with Miss Lovelace’s marbles. And the gingerbread hitman lives to shoot another day.
Sounds like that was a lot of fun.
It’s now so long since I’ve played an RPG round a table I’ve almost forgoten how it goes. Part of me would like to get back into a real long running campaign, but I don’t have the time any more, and somehow the short single episodes one can fit into a convention don’t give me time to seriously identify with my character.
I also have a very nasty habbit of ignoring the GM’s story line. My character does what I think my character should do, and this might not involve anything the GM had in mind when we sat down at the table. I also expect the same level of plot distortion from my players when I’m the GM, which can confuse players not used to providing their own input to events. However, once one has got used to this style, it becomes dificult to accept the straight-jacket of someone else’s module.
Some games at con’s go on for years with the players returning each time for the next section. There was a Toon series running for several Stabcons and, while each episode was standalone, there was continuity in the characters involved.
Going off plot? It depends how far off you go. I recall a game where one player decided to “go with the character” and sold out everybody else to the opposition, thus bringing the game to a premature conclusion. While they defended it as great roleplaying from their point of view, it was a waste of time for everyone else. Arguably the GM shouldn’t have allowed it to happen – but that is another subject altogether. On the other hand, if going off plot means the player addresses the objectives in a novel fashion then that make sense. But it really ought to be something that everyone else can participate in. It’s awful sitting at a table looking despairingly at a character sheet that just doesn’t have anything useful to contribute to the current circumstances.
In the case of Trumpton, I just plotted a series of events that would happen (unless the player actions prevented them) and decided what leads they would get as a result of each event. Then left them to make of it what they could.
John, yes I think we do have a similar style there. As the GM you have to have a good grasp of the rest of world and how people might react, but then again that is the job of the GM…
As for the player who sold out the rest of the party, sounds to me as though that’s where you advance to the scene where the players are facing certain death with the villain explaining how nothing can possibly stop him now, while stroking a while cat.
Surely everyone knows how that one goes well enough to wing it without too much preparation?
Sorry you couldn’t make the Winter 2012 Stabcon. It was the 21st anniversary of Hammy & Michelle running the con. Consequently, there was cake all roun and everyone had colour coded badges to show how many they had attended. A good turnout and great fun as usual.
I did run another Trumpton game. In “Things that go ‘ooops!’ in the night”, the Muppets turned up in the USS Swinetrek spaceship and the resulting mayhem saw Peter Hazel the postman use his elephant gun to waste Beaker on the steps of Dr. Mopp’s science bunker … ’nuff said.
Do you think you’ll make it for the summer con? I’ll ty and think of something equally silly for then.
Yes, I definitely plan to make it to the summer one. Plan to bring Umläut: The Game of Metal with me too.
OK, I’ll bite the very obvious hook you’ve hung out …
“The Game of Metal? Is that heavy?”
The Game of Metal – An interactive storytelling game (GM-less) about rival metal bands; amass scores in Stagecraft, Technique, Fanbase and Ego. But if Ego gets too big, the band may split!
By the way, you may be interested in this