Tag Archives: Stabcon

Iridium Tractor

Posted on September 3, 2013 by Tim Hall

Is this an early incarnation of the Agricultural Thresh Metal of Iridium Tractor, as seen in the game of Umläut: The Game of Metal at this year’s Summer Stabcon. But where is Flossy the sheep?

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Umläut: The Game of Metal

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Tim Hall

One of the most entertaining games I’ve played recently has to be Umläut: The Game of Metal, the collaborative storytelling game of competing metal bands. We played this game at Stabcon in Stockport this year, with four players, the ideal number according to the rules.

You start by making up a band, giving them a name, sub-genre, membership and setlist, then distributing seven points between the three performance traits of Technique, Stagecraft and Power.

Over the course of the game these figures can go up and down, as the band also accumulates scores in Cash, Fanbase, Ego and Hope. Ego is the double-edged score; there are circumstances in which a high ego can benefit the band, but let it get too high and you risk the band splitting.

On the grounds that the your band didn’t have to be any sub-genre of metal, and the first time I played the game at last year’s Stabcon Phil Masters ended up winning the game with an avant-garde French pop band, I came up with the band “Clown Car”, whose genre wasn’t metal at all, but “Neo-Prog My Arse”.

They started out with the following membership

Sharon, prog diva
Nigel, poet and audience frightener
Kevin, keytar player with cape
Vlad, bass player, with too many strings
Bob, guitarist, with too many necks
Brian, drummer, who’s also in 17 other bands

I could use the usual disclaimer stating that any resemblance to any members of real bands is pure coincidence, but somehow I don’t think you’d believe me.

Their songs just happened to contain a lot of software testing in-jokes, with songs like “Blue Screen of Death”, “Object Reference Not Set To An Instance Of This Object”, “Clown Car Abandoned In A Field” and “It Works On My Machine”.

I distributed the starting Performance Traits in the ratio 3/3/1, which seemed about right for a somewhat theatrical prog band, good technique and stagecraft, but a bit lacking in oomph.

Their rivals included the “Agricultural Thresh Metal” of Iridium Tractor, with their mascot Flossy the sheep, and The Risen, a band of zombies of famous dead people.

Having created your bands, gameplay is divided into scenes, going round the table with each player choosing a type of scene for their band. You can have work scenes, describing an episode in the character’s day job, rehearsal scenes in which the band improve their performance stats, publicity stunts in which the band try to drum up support, and so on. In most scenes there’s some kind of conflict, which is resolved by drawing cards; the player with the most black cards “wins” the scene, but the player with the highest value card gets to narrate the scene.

In this game we had things like the great brussels sprout avalanche of Sainsbury’s (a work scene). We also had a situation with members of two different bands having day jobs at the same software house, and a project going pear-shaped saw a conflict scene in the shape of a very fraught team meeting, followed by a split scene as Clown Car’s lead singer emigrated to Hawaii as part of the fallout. That’s what happens if you let Ego get too high.

The key moments are the Gig Scenes, where a pair of bands play co-headline gigs and try to blow each other off stage by accumulating the most Glory over the course of the three rounds of the gig, using the same card-based mechanism, and what strikes me is just how well the rules mirror reality. For example:

At first sight, many people assume that the best way to play is simply to load all your performance traits into Technique, and play Ballads at every opportunity. The theory is that since you’re always drawing loads of cards during the attention check, you ought to pretty much shut your opponent out. Even if you don’t manage to get any Glory (because your power is low and you only get one Shred from the Ballad), you’ll eventually get lucky and score one or two and your opponent has no chance to score anything.

In practice, not only is this very boring, but it doesn’t actually work. Even if you draw more cards during the Attention Check you can’t guarantee your opponent getting a lucky draw and beating you. They get one good Attention Check and they’re usually going to get a whole lot of Glory because you didn’t really put anything into Stagecraft.

I’ve been to gigs where that is precisely what happened.

The game ends after a set time (we set this as three hours after the start, since the game was in a four-hour convention slot), after which we trigger the endgame, which take the form of a final round of gigs scenes involving all the bands. Clown Car, with their new lead singer Tracy blew Iridium Tractor off stage, but even that wasn’t quite enough to win the game for them.

But saying that, the game isn’t really about winning or losing, but telling an entertaining story. At the end of the game the band with the highest score in Fanbase is the most successful (Did you end up touring stadiums? Did you let it go too far? Or did you never really get beyond the toilet circuit), and the band with the lowest Ego relative to their Hope is the happiest, even if they never did make it big.

As a game and a rock fan, Umläut: The Game of Metal is one of those games that demands to be played as soon as you read the rules, and makes for both a highly entertaining game and a suprisingly accurate view into the world of rock’n'roll.

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Summer Stabcon 2011

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Tim Hall

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.

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Summer Stabcon 2009

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Tim Hall

I’ve lost count of the number of Stabcon’s I’ve been to now.

Stabcon is the twice-yearly games convention now held at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport.  It’s small enough that I recognise all the regulars year after year; in that respect it’s almost like a Mostly Autumn gig. Come to think of it, it’s a very similar demographic…

Although the emphasis is on board games, there are also plenty of RPG sessions over the weekend. The organisation is very informal, with nothing booked in advance.  GMs put prospective games up on the notice board, players sign up to them on a first-come-first-served basis. This does mean that popular games tend to fill up by the Friday night, but there does seem some form of self-balancing between players and GMs over the weekend.  I see very few games fail to run for lack of players, and additional games always seem to appear on the board whenever all the other games are full.  This year I ended up playing four RPG sessions over the weekend, more than I have done in many conventions.

Friday night’s game was GURPS Reign of Steel.  The setting was a Terminator-style near-future; the robots had won, and the survivors of humanity are either fighting a guerilla war, or just lying low and hoping the robots ignore them. The plot had the PCs as members of the SAS, the last surviving military unit serving the last surviving government in Europe, and involved Frenchmen stealing Britain’s last remaining nukes, the Channel Tunnel rail link, and this exchange:

GM: The robot manages to dodge the combine harvester.
Me: I’ll turn and try to ram it again – I guess it will take a couple of rounds to circle round.
GM: It’s a cinematic game!
Me: OK them, make that a handbrake turn…

Saturday, after a few card games, was another GURPS game, this time a Diskworld dungeon adventure, run by Phil Masters. I played the stereotypical Hubland barbarian, as we hacked and slashed our way through sewer-slugs and skeletons. The last fight seemed to go on for ages as we had yet another example of my appallingly bad convention die rolling, although my biggest criticism of GURPS nowadays is that fights sometimes go on for too long.

By the evening, things started to get very silly, with InSpectres, which is basically Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off.  I’ve played this game at Stabcon before; a very rules-lite system designed to encourage player creativity, and played strictly for laughs, of which there were many; when we had player characters with combat origami, our ghost containment device was a wet paper bag, and our vehicle was a mutant hybrid of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost armoured car and a bendy-bus. You get the idea?  We had to deal with a demonically-possessed teddy bear, four escaped tigers (due to an accident with the rocket launcher), and how to dispose of a dead elephant stuck half-way up the stairs.

Paranoia on Sunday was the only way to top that. Paranoia is one of those games I’ve always wanted to play, but up until now nobody had ever run at a con I’d been to.  The Computer is your friend! Denounce your comrades as Commie Mutant Traitors!  You do not have security clearance to eat blue M&Ms!  And are you questioning the skills of R&D with the L-shaped gun for shooting round corners?  Report now for termination!

The next Stabcon will be the first weekend in January 2010. I’m already paid and signed up.

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Summer Stabcon 2008

Posted on July 12, 2008 by Tim Hall

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!

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Winter Stabcon 2008

Posted on January 13, 2008 by Tim Hall

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.

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Summer Stabcon 2007

Posted on July 14, 2007 by Tim Hall

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!

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Summer Stabcon 2006

Posted on July 3, 2006 by Tim Hall

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

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Winter Stabcon 2006

Posted on January 11, 2006 by Tim Hall

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!

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Winter Stabcon, 2005

Posted on January 10, 2005 by Tim Hall

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.

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