SinisterConSo the gang (the Hottie, Bandar, Patches, and myself) take off from Corporate Headquarters (Cincinnati) Friday afternoon. The drive to Fort Wayne was a little longer than three hours. Let’s just say the route we took from Northern Cincinnati to Fort Wayne was freakin’ boring. Luckily, the car ride was a little more alive with crazy conversation.
Anyway, we get to the “pre-party” somewhere around 9…meet the peoples, and then its game time. I decided that I would run a super-difficult Battlestations mission for the group that helped play test some of the game. I was thinking to myself I would get to rock some major face.
Boy was I wrong!!!! Holy crap! I didn’t even think about the fact that these were play testers… my bad! The game came down to one little ability…”Overloader!” This ability basically allows the character to take power from the helm or the shields as well as guns. So they had fourteen to sixteen dice of damage. Most of my ships did not survive two shots from that blast. Really, I didn’t play all that much. I just made my ships explode. It was the weakest game of Battlestations I’ve ever ran. I didn’t even get a hull check from the group.
I am not going to really talk about the mission, because I will be running it again, for a group that doesn’t have a character with the “I hate the Story Teller” ability.
The player with Overloader had four killed ships, four killed fighters, and a dozen missiles. Single-handedly he wrecked my mission.
So, we get to the place we were staying, and the guys decided to play some Legend of the Five Rings. It was the stupidest game of l5r EVER! Seriously we played for like 45 minutes…then Bandar and I looked at each other and was like “Patches wins!” It was 4 in the morning at that time, and we were getting up at 7 am. It was awesome…really…
Anyway, Saturday rolls around and it’s go time. The TTG team doesn’t have much going on until two pm, so we just hang out and play games. We ended up playing Suitors for like a million years. It was awesome.
http://cybergenerations.firestorm-ink.com/ We also played some of the Z-Man card games, like “Bushwhackin' Varmints out of Sergio’s Butte.” The B-Movie card games are a TTG Classic. We love them! It’s great!
http://www.zmangames.com/ Anyway, two pm comes around, and its time to rock the WEGS. The 2 pm story was the adventure into the ruined city deep in the home of the ‘shroom clan. First we make characters. I had two warriors, a dwarf and a human; a Gnobbit trickster; an elf ranger; and an elf mage. I was pretty pumped with such an awesome showing, considering the small size of the con.
So the players get their mission from the Adventurer’s Guild. Like I posted above, the idea was to get into the ruined city and get the treasure…alive. The Guild wanted its cut of the treasure, so living was important to them. The Guild was able to provide the map to the lost city, but once the group was in the city, they were on their own.
The first encounter was a group of four mutated monkeys. These monkeys ate way too many ‘shrooms and became monsters. For you that know the rules, theses bad boys where 33s, and really didn’t do anything to the players, but I wanted to show how the rules went. Anyway, the combat went really well and I thought everything was going well. Obviously that was not the truth…as two of my players left the table. I tell you what, even with my ego and my megalomania, having two players leave the table really cuts you down. 50% of the new crew is gone. I do my best not to let the other two players feel it, and I get some ringers to play (namely Bandar) and continue the game.
Once the players made it to the entrance into the city, they had to fight two Stone Golems. I made them both 55s with a special ability that forced all damage to round down. So a 19 would be a 10. It was a cool idea, I thought…but a couple of good shots and the game were over. I probably should have used four stone golems instead of two, but I was not thinking about the good shots. O well!
Once in the city, I allowed the players to choose their path. The first path, into the north corridor of the city would have the group fighting zombies and skeletons. The path into the south corridor would have them against a crazy (more so than normal) group of ‘shroom eaters, led by Gush-gas the High Priest of the Dark. Finally, there was a path that did not have any combat until the “final” boss. Of course my players selected the path without enemies. I did not tell them which path was the best (of course) but they some how knew. When they got to the temple, I had some eerie noises coming from the Temple-Estate where the treasure of the city was buried. Anyway, I was hoping they would run down another path to fight some more monsters, but instead they went into the temple to fight the final boss: The Plague King! (Insert scary music here!)
The idea was simple. The Plague King was a once powerful lord of the city. When he was dyeing, he found a way to attempt to live forever. The King discovered a magical sword that consumed the soul of its victims and transfer that to the wielder. Well the King didn’t know that the blade was evil, and while it provided him with unnaturally long life, he also became poisoned with all the evil and sickness of each of his victims. So, over time, the King became a walking plague of evil and sickness. The king killed most of his subjects, and the plague killed the rest. It was totally awesome fluff, and I wanted some awesome epic battle.
In game terms, the King was a 66 with two abilities. The idea was that every time the King successfully damaged one of the players, a ghost would appear, with a rank of 33. I thought it was going to be a really tough fight and I would be able to maim a player or two. Man was I wrong. I could not roll to save my life, and the King was more like a chump. I could not hit, and when I did, it was all bad shots. The players where running their characters well and I am lucky I survived as long as I did. I started the King with two spirits, and never got another to appear.
Stupid character and his awesome fluff!
Anyway, because of some poor dice rolling, I created a house rule that allowed another player to give up his action to pull another character out of “lost action” phase. If I didn’t do that, the Trickster would never got to play!
Anyway, the second game was a total bust! By six o clock everyone that was just there randomly had left and everyone still at the convention was just there to play certain games. So the group decided to pack up our stuff and head home. We’d all had about 3 hours of sleep the night before, and were really freakin’ tired. So we say “later!” and head off into the sunset…back to the cradle of life, Cincinnati!
So, it was awesome to get to run events at a convention, which is totally new for us. It was also great experience to deal with the backside of things.
That being said, the convention was super-small, and while we will probably go again next year, I don’t think sponsorship is the right direction for us to take at such a small convention.
Look forward to seeing TTGs involvement with more conventions, and remember to get your game on!
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