DexCon 2007, Part One

I had smooth sailing for the actual trip to the con, hotel check-in, and registration. I'm not always that lucky. I reconnected with a couple of friends that I rarely see outside of conventions, then checked the Big Board to see how many people I had signed up for my games and who they were. Things weren't looking good. One person had pre-registered for all three of my games, including the one he'd played before, and someone else had signed up for the first of the three. That was it. Cursing the possibility that nothing I'd offered would actually run, I perused the rest of the Board and came up with a backup plan. I hadn't needed to worry that much, as it turned out.

Kevin Meares (fellow GM and a regular face in my games) showed up first, shortly followed by my friend Michele Mishko and Lou, a friend of hers with a lot of experience in RPGs at home, but not much convention experience. I now had enough people that the event would definitely run, and was happy with the combination of two familar faces and a new one. We were then joined by Jason, another familiar face from some of my previous events, but new to my GURPS Cabal series, and Lowell Carson, the guy who'd signed up for all of my events. The Cabal series in general has been very popular (which is why it became a series), but for some reason this particular installment, "Controlling Interest", hadn't drawn well. I don't think I've burned out the series, and think it's more likely that I just haven't written a sufficiently appealing event description for it. This particular session went very well, with the players puzzled by how the main Bad Guys worked, as they're supposed to be. Kevin Meares gets credit for figuring out most of it, but the players were still sufficiently in the dark that I think I can use those particular villains again in the future. And as usual, there were at least two situations generated by the players that I'll be able to use to generate future scenarios. I don't know why this works so consistently for the Cabal series, but it does, and I plan to keep using it as long as there's enough interest in it.

One quick dinner, courtesy of the Indies Games Explosion contingent, and some conversation with friends associated with said contingent, and I was back at my table for the next session, which was a GURPS Banestorm scenario called "A Slice of Blackwoods". I'll confess that I'd run out of time and opportunity and did not playtest this one as I usually do, so I was worried about unexpected plot holes or other difficulties that might turn up. Fortunately, there were no problems of that nature. Again, I just had one player originally signed up, and ended up with five by the time everybody trickled in. Kevin, Lowell, and Michele all turned up again, along with Duke (another new face for me) and Glen, who knows a lot of the same people I do and has turned up in a few of my games before, though I don't remember which ones. The way the scenario actually played out surprised the heck out of me in that I'd been worried about it running short because there wasn't enough going on, but the complications I'd written into the characters did in fact make the problems of the story challenging enough to fill the time slot almost exactly. Michele's performance as the shady goblin with an eclectic skill set won first place, as her character literally stole the show. I only had two player characters survive the scenario, so this one might be more dangerous than I'd realized.

This entry is getting long, so I'll continue it tomorrow.