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For the first time in many many years (since 2006) I attended KapCon. It's something I've been meaning to get back to but if money wasn't an issue then it was finding the spoons to organise travel and accommodation. This year I had additional incentive and logistics assistance :) (And an ice cream container of home-baked gluten-free chocolate chip cookies to help sustain me over the weekend <3 )
I was skeleton crew at work for the first week back, so I was not able to travel up early and help set up. Flying in Friday night I simply taxied to meet D. at our hotel. The accommodation was nothing fancy, but it did at least provide the opportunity for a cooked breakfast on site Saturday morning before heading to the venue.
Although I recognised quite a few faces, and got to put faces to some names, I didn't really spend much time over the weekend actually talking to people. I did get to play several systems I have heard of but not experienced before.
Session 1: Nightmare town, a Prohibition era San Francisco meets Vampires/cultists mystery using the Gumshoe system. I liked the system, it is designed for the detective genre and puts the basic information you need to solve the mystery up front as you discover it if you have the right skill rather than relying on the players making the right conclusions, while still leaving it wide open how you actually resolve the situation around the mystery hook. Or perhaps the scenario was just well put together.
We were playing members of the Continental Detective Agency (the "Pinkertons") and Dolores Malone [?] had her throat ripped out by a vampire after preventing the completion of a human sacrifice, guns blazing.
Session 2: Dr Maxwell and the World Snake, a bit of an off-the-wall game where we played children who received Nobilis powers. The scenario was slow to start, in part I think due to some players focusing on arbitrarily chose personal goals rather than moving through the story.
Edward Stockton, age 12, became infused with the essence of "chains" which although I took the one that was left I think was the strongest of those available (the others being "berries", "childhood aspirations", "waterfalls" and "television") and used this to "change the fate" of a mystic ward holding closed a door between the real world and a faerie sanctuary to be "capture and bind forever all agents of [the bad guy] who are present", resulting in two people (one of whom had already been thrown through a wall by a pre-teen girl) being encased in said door and unable to cause any more trouble.
Session 3/4: sadly had to pull out of Session 3 because D. was exhausted and needed to rest up, and had not planned to attend Session 4 / the LARP anyway. After a nap we went to the Southern Cross bar/restaurant for dinner. The food was good but the surroundings were loud.
Didn't sleep particularly well but breakfast at Americanos (the equivalent of Christchurch's Drexels) set me up well for the day.
Session 5: Dusk City Outlaws is a heist game within a fantasy setting. Like Gumshoe it puts a lot of information up front while leaving how the situation is resolved wide open. It also has an explicit mechanic to stop sessions getting bogged down in planning.
We completed two modules; the first one accidentally and very publicly when my character seized the initiative as a hold-up we were staging to size up some NPCs started to go wrong, grabbed and carried off the NPC who happened to be holding what we were after. The second one we staged a fight between the setting Mafia and Russian Mob equivalents to draw out the local gang faction from their lair (with the city guard in on it to clean up after the fact) then accidentally blew up the entire tannery the lair was under when our alchemist's knockout gas mixed with the fumes of a very unstable attempt at translating/replicating the stolen gunpowder recipe we had been hired to destroy or retrieve.
Lunch break: D. & I made an excursion so she could introduce me to her favorite jewellers and teach me some more about what she likes.
Session 6: Planet Mercenary, a is a roleplaying system spun out of the Schlock Mercenary universe. Our group of just-above-dirtbag mercenaries managed to complete our mission and also acquire significant upgrades. My heavy-weapons specialist got to fire goober rounds from an autocannon thanks to an error on the pregen character sheet which the GM rolled with :D
Session 7: Dungeon Delvers - a simple dungeon crawl through a dynamically laid out dungeon using an OSR system, 3d6 in order for abilities which then affected very litle except the occasional check, one of 4 classes for a hit die and very basic set of extra abilities, every thing else pretty much set dressing. XP for being involved in combats and picking up loot. My half orc rogue made it to 3rd level at the end of the game, picking up stuff no-one else was paying attention to. He tried in combat but rolled terribly most of the time. We fully explored and looted the dungeon, but ended up cutting a deal with and working for the demon we accidentally summoned. Surprisingly there were only two PC fatalities over the course of the game, unfairly both to the same player.
~~~
Monday was mostly spent meeting D's family, her mother for brunch and her monkeys & ex for afternoon ice cream and a playgrond visit. Between these I also managed to organise a catch up over ice cream with S & H.
Then to the airport and a small meal before the evening flight home. We were both utterly exhausted but for me at least the trip was worth it and I expect we'll be making it a regular trip.
I was skeleton crew at work for the first week back, so I was not able to travel up early and help set up. Flying in Friday night I simply taxied to meet D. at our hotel. The accommodation was nothing fancy, but it did at least provide the opportunity for a cooked breakfast on site Saturday morning before heading to the venue.
Although I recognised quite a few faces, and got to put faces to some names, I didn't really spend much time over the weekend actually talking to people. I did get to play several systems I have heard of but not experienced before.
Session 1: Nightmare town, a Prohibition era San Francisco meets Vampires/cultists mystery using the Gumshoe system. I liked the system, it is designed for the detective genre and puts the basic information you need to solve the mystery up front as you discover it if you have the right skill rather than relying on the players making the right conclusions, while still leaving it wide open how you actually resolve the situation around the mystery hook. Or perhaps the scenario was just well put together.
We were playing members of the Continental Detective Agency (the "Pinkertons") and Dolores Malone [?] had her throat ripped out by a vampire after preventing the completion of a human sacrifice, guns blazing.
Session 2: Dr Maxwell and the World Snake, a bit of an off-the-wall game where we played children who received Nobilis powers. The scenario was slow to start, in part I think due to some players focusing on arbitrarily chose personal goals rather than moving through the story.
Edward Stockton, age 12, became infused with the essence of "chains" which although I took the one that was left I think was the strongest of those available (the others being "berries", "childhood aspirations", "waterfalls" and "television") and used this to "change the fate" of a mystic ward holding closed a door between the real world and a faerie sanctuary to be "capture and bind forever all agents of [the bad guy] who are present", resulting in two people (one of whom had already been thrown through a wall by a pre-teen girl) being encased in said door and unable to cause any more trouble.
Session 3/4: sadly had to pull out of Session 3 because D. was exhausted and needed to rest up, and had not planned to attend Session 4 / the LARP anyway. After a nap we went to the Southern Cross bar/restaurant for dinner. The food was good but the surroundings were loud.
Didn't sleep particularly well but breakfast at Americanos (the equivalent of Christchurch's Drexels) set me up well for the day.
Session 5: Dusk City Outlaws is a heist game within a fantasy setting. Like Gumshoe it puts a lot of information up front while leaving how the situation is resolved wide open. It also has an explicit mechanic to stop sessions getting bogged down in planning.
We completed two modules; the first one accidentally and very publicly when my character seized the initiative as a hold-up we were staging to size up some NPCs started to go wrong, grabbed and carried off the NPC who happened to be holding what we were after. The second one we staged a fight between the setting Mafia and Russian Mob equivalents to draw out the local gang faction from their lair (with the city guard in on it to clean up after the fact) then accidentally blew up the entire tannery the lair was under when our alchemist's knockout gas mixed with the fumes of a very unstable attempt at translating/replicating the stolen gunpowder recipe we had been hired to destroy or retrieve.
Lunch break: D. & I made an excursion so she could introduce me to her favorite jewellers and teach me some more about what she likes.
Session 6: Planet Mercenary, a is a roleplaying system spun out of the Schlock Mercenary universe. Our group of just-above-dirtbag mercenaries managed to complete our mission and also acquire significant upgrades. My heavy-weapons specialist got to fire goober rounds from an autocannon thanks to an error on the pregen character sheet which the GM rolled with :D
Session 7: Dungeon Delvers - a simple dungeon crawl through a dynamically laid out dungeon using an OSR system, 3d6 in order for abilities which then affected very litle except the occasional check, one of 4 classes for a hit die and very basic set of extra abilities, every thing else pretty much set dressing. XP for being involved in combats and picking up loot. My half orc rogue made it to 3rd level at the end of the game, picking up stuff no-one else was paying attention to. He tried in combat but rolled terribly most of the time. We fully explored and looted the dungeon, but ended up cutting a deal with and working for the demon we accidentally summoned. Surprisingly there were only two PC fatalities over the course of the game, unfairly both to the same player.
~~~
Monday was mostly spent meeting D's family, her mother for brunch and her monkeys & ex for afternoon ice cream and a playgrond visit. Between these I also managed to organise a catch up over ice cream with S & H.
Then to the airport and a small meal before the evening flight home. We were both utterly exhausted but for me at least the trip was worth it and I expect we'll be making it a regular trip.
