Tag Archives: Game Conventions

I’ve lost count of the number of Stabcons I’ve been to now. I missed the first part of this one due to the charity concert in York, but managed to get there by about lunchtime to find a large room filled with a great many familar faces.

Getting there late meant that many games in which I’d liked to have played were already filled up – I noticed Mike Cule was running Vincent Baker’s “In A Wicked Age” on the Sunday, which would have been fun. Fortunately there was a slot in Mark Baker’s marathon Unknown Armies game running from 5pm until late on Saturday, so I signed up for that.

It turned out to involve time travel; what started as a tube journey early on a Sunday morning turned out as a trudge through the Fleet sewer, in which we emerged in 1829. Out attempts to get back home lead us to various times which increasingly diverged from our own timeline; at various points we killed the vampire Jack the Ripper and encountered Princess Elizabeth as a member of the British Resistance in the abandoned tube tunnels beneath Nazi-occupied London. Eventually we managed to fix the timeline, and get back to what would have been our own time but for some very bad dice rolling; everything was as it should have been except that both our London tube train and the Virgin Pendolinos at Euston appeared to be powered by Stirling Engines.

Sunday’s game was very different – Pete Crowther’s game of Toon. Which was very, very silly indeed. I wrote up a Toon version of Bug, from the Guardians of Dimension games from Gypsycon. Other characters included a 50′ high robot and a squirrel. The plot was probably impossible to summarise, but included live-action Space Invaders, a fight in a tea-room, aeroplanes getting coated in cottage pie, the Welsh village of Llandofmyfathers, and an arch-villains base in the volcanic crater in Mt Snowdon.

Next Stabcon is from the 2nd to 4th January – see you there!

I have now officially lost count of the number of Stabcons I’ve been to, and I’m not totally sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.For those of you that haven’t read my writeups of previous ones, Stabcon is a games convention that meets two weekends a year in Manchester. When I started attending a few years back the venue was Woolton Hall, but the last few have been in the convention rooms at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport.

Stabcon is billed as a small and friendly convention, and more or less does what it says on the tin. Most of the faces are familiar from year to year. The RPG side of things is very informally organised; GMs turn up with games, and decide when and what to run based on whatever other GMs are and aren’t doing; players then sign up on a first come first serve basis, and it all works quite well. It’s settled into a pattern of games sessions running for three to five hours, with one slot Friday night, three on Saturday, and one on the Sunday.

As well as some Games Orkshop Space Marine stuff (Eat hot plasma death, green things!), and an awful lot of Chez Geek, I played three RPGs over the weekend.

The first was GURPS Transhuman Space, run by Phil Masters. I always find the central problem with this 100 years in the future SF setting is that there are so many options, it’s difficult to decide what to actually do with it.  Phil set this one (like all but one of his I’ve played in) on Earth, with the player characters were a team of freelance security ops hired as bodyguards for a Mexican folk singer at a festival in a small South American state. Naturally our problems turned out to be more complicated than fending off groupies.

The second game, on the Saturday night was one of those strange Narrativist games that’s come out of The Forge, InSpecres. As the GM described it, it’s basically Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off, crossed with a bit of parody of Internet start-ups. We played it very strictly for laughs, travelling around in a converted Routemaster bus playing a very bass-heavy version of Jingle Bells with the volume stuck on 11 (One PC tried to turn it down, but failed her roll, and the volume knob fell off) After dealing with usual green slimes and exploding zombies, we ended up on the trail of dyslexic Satanists, which explained why we tried to break into their lair while dressed as elves. Having subsequently purchased the game, yes, it is supposed to be that silly, so we were indeed playing the game exactly the way it’s supposed to be played.

Sunday’s game was GURPS again. This time in the GURPS Infinite Earths setting, on the parallel Britannica-6, a steampunk setting into large scale engineering projects and a culture far more decadent than our own Victorian era. We’d visited this parallel before as dimension-hopping I-Cops agents. I’d remarked to Phil Masters that this setting seemed to combine the worst stylistic excesses of the 1870s and the 1970s. He’d taken that as inspiration for an adventure set entirely on that parallel with the PCs as local cops; “Lyme Regis Vice”. What started as a simple case of arson got a whole lot more complicated once the Zeppelins started appearing. (It’s a parallel world; of course it has Zeppelins, they always do)

Thanks to Michele and Hammy for running yet another excellent convention.  The next one in at the same venue, on the 4th to the 6th of July. See you there.

It’s a week ago, and I haven’t written a report of this. Call myself a blogger?

Stabcon is the bi-annual games convention, focussing on board games and RPGs, currently held at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport. It tends to be a lot of the same people year after year, and it’s small enough that everyone knows everyone else. I to the registration desk to find a roomfull of familiar faces. Like a Breathing Space gig, only even more so! In fact, it didn’t seem like six months since the last con, more like a couple of weeks.

As always, the gaming was of good quality; and since I now know most of the players and GMs it’s more like an infrequent regular gaming group than RPing with a bunch of random strangers. Three of the four games were with GMs I know well from previous Stabcons, Kev, Amanda and Phil Masters.

This year I played not one by two games of Call of Cthulhu, one featuring a sinister magic mirror that wanted us as a sacrifice, the other a sorceror/mad scientist performing the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, with the player characters as the cat.. In both games I failed some SAN rolls and went ‘wibble’ quite a bit. Other games were Stargate SG-13 using the system from Blue Planet, where we visited the Planet of the the Pear-Shaped Women, and GURPS Transhuman Space with a school trip in the year 2100. All were great fun.

Roll on the next one!

Summer Stabcon lived up to its usual expectations; I’ve been going to this small local convention for four years now, and it’s reached the point where I recognise 90% of the faces. Over the weekend I played four RPG sessions and a lengthy session of the boardgame Arkham Horror on Friday night, which we didn’t get to finish because everyone was wilting by midnight.

I haven’t really got time to do a full writeup of this years Stabcon, but here are a few random thoughts:

• The fact that far more people took time out on Saturday to watch the football than watch Doctor Who loses us some geek credibility points. (I was one of those who watched Doctor Who!)
• In military SF games I am now officially typecast as Rocket Launcher Guy Who Can’t Hit A Barn Door. Even though I managed to make enough enemy assets go boom in ways their owners didn’t intend, there were still jokes at my expense at the end when the GM described the heavily cratered lawn in front of the captured enemy HQ
• Apologies to everyone who suffered my gratuitous prog rock reference in Amanda’s Stargate SG:13 game on Saturday. This was after our team returned from the previous mission (which happened off-camera) where we had to babysit an anthropologist studying a primitive culture who were really into interminable and tuneless folk songs about ploughing. When we had a few hours of R&R between missions my character went to the jukebox in the bar and put on some Jethro Tull, to the groans of the other characters.
• Mike Cule’s game of Primetime Adventures on Saturday ran a lot better than the game six months before, when all of us including the GM^h^hExecutive Producer were still feeling our way round the rules. This time we recognised that it’s really a game where everyone is a co-GM, and anybody could introduce NPCs or throw in plot twists. For instance, I introduced the main villain in one of my turns. As before, the brainstorming session at the beginning was a fun part of the game, with the final setting (the PCs as members of a circus who really do have supernatural powers) being an amalgam of several people’s suggestions.

I’ve already signed up for the Winter 2007 Stabcon in January

This is the first time I’ve managed to make it to the Winter Stabcon; usually the date clashes with the Maidenhead and Marlow Model Railway clubs annual show. While the summer event is still held in the traditional venue of Woolton Hall, the winter convention now takes place at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport.

Because it’s quite close to my current home, I decided it would be a cheaper option to travel in each day, since the taxi fare home late at night worked out rather less than cost of a hotel room. Unfortunately the hassle of getting there in the morning, especially when trains run late or the Sunday rail replacement buses turn out to be at inconvenient times made me wonder if I’d really made the right choice.

It’s always advertised as a ‘small friendly convention’, which probably explains why I did very little actual gaming on the Friday night, spending the time chatting and drinking beer. Unlike the summer event, we didn’t manage to drink the bar dry by the end of the con, although we did finish off all the bottled real ale by the end of Saturday! As is usual for events like this, I met up with a few old friends such as Sasha, L’Ange and Toni.

Stabcon is really a boardgame convention with a minority of roleplayers; of the 150 or so attendees, the majority spent the weekend playing complicated boardgames with thousands of pieces that lasted for 14 hours.

In the end I only played two RPGS. On the Saturday I played in Kev’s Call of Cthulhu game set on Mars during the early days of colonisation. On Sunday I played in the GURPS Discworld epic GMed by Phil Masters, in which the beer tasted of herring, and I played the axe-wielding barbarian Volf Volfssonssonsson, and no cliché was left unturned. I’ll avoid spoilers just in case anyone encounters either scenario at future cons, but I will mention Volf’s drunken Viking sea shanties, and his attempts at fishing for freshwater herring.

The third game I’d signed up for sadly failed to attract a sufficient number of players, so I ended up joining a game of Munchkin Bites instead, the latest of Steve Jackson Games Munchkin games. This one mercilessly parodies both White Wolf Games and Goth subculture in general. The game ended as a three-way tie with three players all at ninth level, because it was getting late and most of the players wanted to go to bed. I also played in a game of Credo, the game based on the Great Council of Nicea, in which the players represent different factions of the early church attempting to hammer out a Creed. Ours started with “We believe in many gods, including…”, although it went mostly orthodox after that. There were quite a few shorter games, most bizarre of which had to be the Mornington Cresent-like game played of Friday night with assorted dice, empty beer glasses, pencils, bits of paper and empty milk containers.

I’ve already signed up for the Summer Stabcon, on 8th to 10th of July at the traditional summer venue at Woolton Hall in Manchester.