The Green Goblin Blog

This event caught me out by surprise - I knew Dragonmeet was in December some time but I didn't realise it was on the 1st until a few days beforehand. As usual I emailed my gamer friends and, as usual, none of them were interested in the trek to Kensington.
I put off booking tickets in advance, thinking I'd do it before the deadline ... and failed ... so would have to pay full price. For some reason, though, the organisers put a "£1 off" flyer on their website you could print off and use so I ended up only paying an extra £1 on admission.
Not booking in advance also meant a longer queue to get in which means less spaces in the sign-up sheets for games and more people have had a chance to pick what they want before you. So I ensured I arrived early at Kensington High Street and popped into Boots to buy food and drink. And some shopping for the bathroom. Before I knew it, it was 10 to 10 and I was desperately searching for things to buy to break the "spend £20 and get triple points" barrier. I almost didn't make it even when I thought I had - when I checked the receipt afterwards, the sandwich, drink and snack I bought constituted a "lunch" and £1.69 was knocked off the total. Now I'm 128 points better off, so effectively the snack was free.
At the Town Hall across the road, the queues were getting longer and it seemed to take forever to get in but luckily Matt Nixon's Call of Cthulhu game "Filth" still had a few vacancies. The scenario was set in the "gaslight" period so a few decades prior to the classic Cthulhu period of the 20s but that just affects the flavour of the game - the rules are unchanged. I played the best friend of Arthur who was soon to be married to Alice but mysterious goings on mean all is not as it seems. The scenario went well but was marred by chronic timewasting - the game had to finish by 2pm so players can move on to the next session but we started late and unncessarily long breaks were scattered through the morning. I think Matt should have pushed the initial "what's going on?" portion where the players try to discover the plot along a bit quicker so that the grande finale would have the time to complete that it deserved. Overall a decent game and, as always, greatly dependent on the mix of players that turn up to breath life into the main characters.
So at 2:05pm I dash downstairs to claim the remaining seat at John Wilson's Paranoia game. John is the consumate Paranoia GM and one of the reasons I turn up at Dragonmeet. Again, like CoC, you need a good bunch of players who know the genre - I suppose you could have a group of traditional SF gamers but I am not sure it would work. I can guarantee it wouldn't be as funny. This year we had one guy wearing an orange camouflage jacket and, as expected, he played very enthusiastically. No-one willing to dress like that is going to be particularly normal and we were soon down a few commie clones. We did win the day although my clone did die a long, lingering death from radiation poisoning and we lost some of the Computer's expensive equipment. At least I was able to serve the Computer for the Computer is my friend.
This game had the added bonus of being filmed as part of one of the player's University project of some kind. Apparently he wasn't a gamer himself so I expect he was a bit bemused by the whole thing. I'm glad he joined a Paranoia session as Fun is compulsory. I did overhear him later saying to his friend in the loos "you can see why they do it" and I HOPE he was talking about why we play the games we do and not something else!



Paranoia finished a little earlier than scheduled (was it because of the mini-nuke?) so I wandered around buying some bits and bobs. I am not the sort of customer the trade stands want as I don't splash the cash. I do have a lot of games at home but I don't play them very often. The only RPG I play is Dungeons and Dragons and I try not to pay full price for those books - I can import them from the US for 50% off most of the time. So I don't spend much and I'm looking for bargains on game systems I already own. So I bought some dice - not out of necessity (as I have all the dice I will ever need) but out of a desire to spend, even if it was only a fiver. Did find a surprise Christmas present for someone so not too much wasted time.
While waiting for the charity auction, I wandered round trying to find a demo game to join. The problem is that the trade stands - and therefore the demo games - start to shut up shop as attendees start to drift away home so I was lucky to get a quick game of Pinnacle's Savage Worlds in. The game rules were being applied to a Van Helsing-style tabletop battle where the bad guys (me and one of the trade stand guys) were trying to desecrate a church while the good guys (two other random players) tried to stop us. The table was a lovely cross-layout church surrounded by green flock grass, some trees and a wall. The top half of the church was lifted off during play to reveal the altar, benchs, columns and flooring - all very well made. The approach to the rules was similar to other pseudo-roleplaying tabletop games - a tape measure for movement, a card of personal stats and a number of dice to role depending on what combat or spells you are trying to resolve. A few touches I enjoyed included a "critical hit" system where you re-roll whenever a die comes up maximum (6 on a d6 and so on) so on occasion we had a cascade of 6s as reroll after reroll came up 6. This added a nice amount of unpredictability as games that are basically contested dice rolls can just become wars of attrition where the important factor can be how unbalanced the sides are rather then the tactics employed by the players. Initiative was decided with large playing cards - essentially just like using dice but more visual so a nice touch. One aspect of the game I couldn't really see the point of, though, was the use of Bennies - a sort of luck token supply which could be voluntarily depleted to prevent damage, etc. The game system seemed perfectly adequate without this arbitrary manipulation of dice roll outcomes.
By now the auction was well under way and I sat watching until the end - there was nothing I really wanted (unlike last time) and I am not as charitable (or as rich) as the big bidders anyway. The total raised was over £1,800 so about 10% up on last year.
This only left me to catch the tube and train home. I'm glad it was one stop from Paddington to Reading as the woman sitting next to me was not a particularly pleasant person. Firstly, on a nearly full train she was occupying two seats so she could have a private phone call with some whingy partner (which went on for most of the trip). Secondly, she decided to listen noisely to her iPod at a level normally associated with deaf teenagers.

Labels: Dragonmeet

Dragonmeet, again, went well. It's so sad that the event only lasts 8 hours. But the time was well spent. Yet again, I started in a Cthulhu (by Gaslight) game run by the Phoenix Games Club. In a strange twist, Sue jumped into Team 8's Paranoia session (which I had enjoyed last year).

Steve Knott - Cthulhu By Gas-Light "The Last Voyage of the Plutonia"
- "In the autumn years of Queen Victoria’s reign, with the approaching new century, signs & portents foretell of the coming of an Agent of Fortune. Nothing will ever be the same again, a time of change is upon us, when only a motley group of faded, burnt out Investigators can hope to save the Empire…or not."

We managed to complete the game within the 3 hours without losing too much Sanity. Only one character lost their body but apparently in the epilogue we find that they will be getting a new one, which is always encouraging. Steve ran a reasonable game although it seemed he was having to think up content on the fly at times - the adventure was mapped out from a GM's perspective but there was not necessarily as much preparation for what the players might ask about.


I played my first Settlers of Catan - one of those simple games where the rules take a few minutes to learn but tactics take a whole lot longer to pick up. I'm not sure if I'd want to play it a lot as it didn't leap out at me as being
hugely appealing. This is not just because I didn't win - maybe I need to play a few more games. Note - The polystyrene tile set below is NOT what you would be able to buy in the shops!

In complete contrast was the Dungeoneer card game which started off looking really, really complicated but after an hour or so it all started to make perfect sense. Also, unlike Catan, I didn't feel that my initial choices were going to screw me up for the rest of the game. Dungeoneer is like an advanced version of "Sorcerer's Cave", reference to which brought blank expressions from the other players. There is a connecting network of locations (cards) which covers all the places you can go to. The turn system has 2 different phases which is novel to me - you first act as the dungeon master and use monsters to attack other players' characters and then you take on the role of your own character to try and complete a few quests (which revolve around some of the locations). Of course, an alternative win condition is Last Man Standing - I did manage to kill another player's character but died ended up dead at the hands of another player later. Failing to complete one quest with 6-7 consecutive dice rolls where I had a 50-50 chance of success did not help at all.

Shopping was performed - it is difficult to go to any games convention and NOT buy something. As I enjoy making up weird and wonderful monster/character combinations for D&D, I bought "Savage Species" for £17 from Leisure Games - actually cheaper than from Amazon, which was a surprise.

One attraction of the convention is the Charity Auction. Whenever I am at an auction, I try and pick off something cheap as I am not too interested in giving to charity. If I had loads of money to spare then this might be different. Usually, though, there is someone else more charitable and richer than me that is willing to part with their hard-earned cash so I usually come away with nothing. I didn't win the pseudo-leather bound core D&D books, for example - I already had those in non-fancy covers and that would just be too indulgent. I did, though, bid highest on two lots of D&D books and ended up parting with £110. The books were brand new, donated by the game shops to the auction.

• Forgotten Realms – Races of Faerun
• DMG 2
• Eberron - Magic of Eberron
• Eberron – Player’s Guide to Eberron
• Miniature’s Handbook
• Spell Compendium
• PHB 2
• Fiendish Codex I (Abyss)

That averages out at £14 each which is less than retail but more than through the outlets on Amazon. I have since sold off half of them for £40 to some friends (two of the eight books I had already and another two went because I'm not into Eberron) which leaves 2 books I definitely want to keep (PHB2 and FC1) and 2 that I'm not sure. So, overall, the charity did "OK", I added to my growing collection and my friends got some cheap books - winners all round.

Labels: Dragonmeet

It has been MANY a year since I ventured to London and Dragonmeet, once a highlight of my teenage RPG calendar along with GamesFair and GamesDay. As my time in the role-playing wilderness has been at an end for a while, I'm re-discovering all the delights of my youth.
Today I was queuing outside Kensington Town Hall with a bunch of other like-minded people - a good range of (mainly) blokes, usually overweight and wearing gamer/heavy metal T-shirts. My kind of people!

After paying to get in, the first step is to fight your way to the table with the forms where you sign on to games - Call of Cthulhu for me (run by the Phoenix Games Club) which took a fair chunk of the day (10:30am-2pm). Matt Nixon ran "Cheap Seats" where "The Marquis de la Mort invites you to a performance of The Bazaar of the Bizarre - a fine show filled with such wonderment and whimsy that you will never forget !!!" Good balance of sexs in the players - 3 male, 2 female and a male tranny :-) The start had a very visual environment - a small theatre in London where the exits on each floor disappeared to be replaced by chalk drawings on the walls of what should have been there. Of course, being a Cthulhu game, it started getting weird after that.

After a quick browse through the stalls I jumped into a Paranoia game run by Team8. John ran a classic game - all the components were there... nobody could, or would, trust each other; accusing fingers would be pointed in nanoseconds; the computer (who was our Friend, of course) was magnanimously unhelpful; players NEVER knew what would happen next. Hours of fun. Here are the PostIts that we passed to the GM. John's favourite (as mentioned on their forum) was "Just look at me. Smile and say No." I distinctly remember that occurring during the game and having NO idea what it meant.
The plot was that were taking a group of young citizens on a tour of a nuclear power plant with a purge reprogramed nanny bot. Thankfully, although we got through several troubleshooter clones, not one young citizen was injured and they were all returned in time for bed. In the photo I'm in the beige top; John the pony-tailed GM is helpfully labelled; the most devious player is wearing the glasses in the middle - note how he is scanning the players instead of watching the GM. :-)
When the game eventually finished, the convention was starting to run down and traders were starting to pack up. On a whim I picked up "Races of Stone" as I wanted the statistics for the Giant Crossbow (what an indulgence but at least it wasn't full price). I was looking forward to the Charity Auction but still had time to kill. Amongst the near-empty tables was Thud! (Discworld boardgame) being demonstrated by Mongoose Publishing. I'd received this as a present last Christmas, I think, from Sue - we'd tried one game and were slightly disenchanted but then neither of us had played before. This time I was able to play under the watchful eye of someone who knew what they were doing and things went much better.
I enjoyed the Charity Auction although I didn't win anything. There were a couple of reasons for this: everybody bid higher than me, and I'm a tight bastard when it comes to stuff I don't really want and definitely don't need. A stirling effort raised £1,200, a princely sum considering the relatively small number of people. Apparantly Irish auctions are MUCH better - no doubt the bidders are much more pissed on Guiness than we were! Charities benefiting included Alström Syndrome UK (£600).
I did meet up with someone I knew (a bit) from WAY back in the mists of time, Sound and Fury fanzine editor-as-was, James Wallis who was the auctioneer. It made me proud that, 20-ish years on, James was still in the business and now director of Hogshead Publishing, showing that it is perfectly possible to make a career out of a hobby you love. Good luck to him, and may his taste in T-shirts never diminish.

The convention over, I went on a stroll to find a pub to while away a quite moment. Centre of London - "no trouble". I didn't want one of the touristy ones on Kensington High Street so randomly went off down Wrights Lane which was basically across the road from the Hall. Half a mile gets me to the Devonshire Arms - nice pub, out of the way but still busy (was a Saturday night so no surprise). A couple of pints and then home for the night.

Labels: Dragonmeet