The Nucleartech Diaries

Conceptions 2007
DISCLAIMER: The order of actual events in this post along with accurate content of gaming sessions and the provision of names are not guaranteed correct and no apologies shall be made if I get it wrong. The con was spread over 4 days, there was a fair amount of alcohol, not enough sleep and my utter inability to remember names under even the best of circumstances to contend with. Deal with it.

So it was that time of year again and Conceptions, the UK's premiere south coast roleplaying convention, had once more rolled around. Is it me or does it seem to creep earlier in the calendar every year? I swear if this keeps up I'll be celebrating New Year by playing PTA 2 1/2 hours drive away from my wife in a few years time. Note that if this occurs I am a dead man. Pray for me.

Anyway, I headed down to the con all on my lonesome and without in-car music (if only those parts had turned up a day earlier, curse the timing!) on the Wednesday. I set off reasonably early (just before 2 pm) so that it would be light enough for me to read the road signs when I got there. This was a stunningly good piece of planning on my part as my AA directions ran out several miles short of the venue and I had to rely on guess work and my vague, hazy memories of doing much the same drive last year. Against all of the odds it worked and I got there without a single error. No one was more shocked than I! Naturally (being the first to the chalet) I stole the room with the double bed and ensuite bathroom and unloaded my stuff.

Other people (namely

thoughtfulwolf,

littlestkobold and Dave) turned up throughout the day having had varying journeys, none of them as hassle and incident free as mine. I cooked a rather tasty pasta bake and we wandered over to the convention hall for a generic look around. The Collective Endeavour table was in use but, given that none of us had actually met before, we had no idea that it was Rich Stokes running a playtest of his game Umlaut. Doh! Ah well, we got to meet up in the following days so it wasn't all bad. Oh, I picked up a couple of nice d6 bombs from Bob's Dice Store ready to playtest Anarchy later in the con and grabbed a game called Collosal Stadium (I think) that turned out to be good fun. That evening was pretty quiet other than that, we got relatively early nights as everyone was tired after the drives down and we all wanted to get a relatively early start the next day.

Thursday is...a little hazy for me. I got up late (it was nice to get a lie-in for a change) and generally bummed around on the CE stall for the afternoon.

littlestkobold, Dave and I played Cthulhu 500 and

littlestkobold and I made pit stops during the game (pun fully intended) to talk to interested looking passers-by and browsers. Dave and I signed up for a WFRP game in the evening and had a blast playing that. The scenario involved oddly 'off' meat that tasted sweet, a magical tower and an angry dwarf. That and a wierd arse monster int he troll infested forest that we killed. Upon it's death the party members who had been eating the dodgy meat began to vomit up baby parts. Yuck! That was as far as we got during the game, apparently it was further than any other group had managed up to that point (we killed the right monster) but the GM wouldn't tell us how it ended. Bastard! I think the rest of the night was pretty quiet again but someone els ewho was there is free to correct me if I'm wrong.

The next day I once again slept in a bit before going down and hanging out on the CE stall until lunch. Then Dave and I played a game of Savage Worlds in the afternoon slot that, by conicidence, Rich and his other half Claire happened to be playing in. I know that he, as an experienced and awesome (so the lego dinosaur thread on Story Games leads me to conclude) Savage Worlds GM, wasn't too impressed but I thought it was okay for a first time trying a system. Not great but an entertaining way to pass an afternoon. The evening was where it really kicked off though. Scott, one of Rich's friends and another CE poster, was running a game of Mortal Coil in the evening slot and we'd all filled it up before the sign up sheet had even gone up on the wall. I'm glad we did too as it was a stunning game.

I can't begin to do it justice but I'll give it some kind of vague shot. We began by thinking along the lines of Hong Kong in the 80's, a setting for an east meets west magical, corporate show down. This quickly morphed to being 1997 with the hand over about to take place and be some kind of significant, magical event. It was decided that the two sides, eastern mysticism and western hermeticism, would be in a kind of street war controlled by rival corporations with the two sides mediated by the sizeable Indian population, led by a guy we called Suresh who was ritually killed just before the start of the game. After that it gets a little hazy.

I know the Rich was playing a cop, the only magic user on the force and, naturally, assigned all of the weird cases. Claire was playing Rich's characters brother, an employee in one of the corporations, head of the magical department but scared of his own powers and afraid to end up hurting his family. Said corporation was the one that my character was high up in the power structure of. In fact I was nominally Claire's boss. Dave was playing a strict, disciplined, German hermeticist (or arcanist as he styled himself) who, it turned out, ran a dodgy business importing and selling stolen Chinese magical artefacts. Then there was his son played by....one of Rich's friends... (this is where my inability to recall names lets me down) who was the adopted son of Dave's German, friend of Clarie's character, extreme sports fanatic and devotee of eastern mysticism (much to his father's annoyance.) Finally there was

thoughtfulwolf playing an official in the British Government who was, indirectly, the boss of Rich's cop (LAMMMMMM!) And then we were let loose. What followed was a blur of cool scenes, great roleplaying, hilarious comments and one liners, brilliant little magical tricks and the most complex murder mystery ever created. Somehow (with the judicious throwing around of power points right at the end) we wrapped it all up satisfactorily. It turned out that Suresh had killed himself and stolen the skin of extreme sports guy. The only minor disappointment was that we never got a handle on the conflict system, although this was possibly becuase the entire game only contained two conflicts! All in all it was very fun and definately my game of the con, even if I did end up supplying beer to most of the table ^_^ (it was well worth it).

The next day started off very well for me with a Skaven WFRP game in the morning slot. Man was that fun! I got to play a brown rat barber-surgeon, lacky to a new grey seer (who had a black clan rat bodyguard) and rival of a brown rat slavetaker. Good god but it was fun being a sycophantic little squeaky fucker out for anything that I could get my paws on! The game was masses of fun for me, I think aided by the fact that I didn't know any of the other players of the GM. I put on the accent, Imade appropriate motions of abasement and grovelled like a champion. I also conned the grey seer out of a warp token, murdered other skaven for food, picked up an assortment of weaponry for trades, stole a guard room's bronze warning bell and used it to trade in that city's bazaar for some khaine-cap mushroom (my characters ulterior goal for the scenario). Not only that but I got my rival the slavetaker ripped apart by a mob after he betrayed us, got out with my hide intact and somewhat richer and rising in the notice of those in power in the world of the Skaven. Oh yes, much fun was had!

The afternoon and evening of the Saturday (which it by then was) were spent watching the rugby (the England vs Scotland game was actually rather good, even if the Italy vs France game had been bloody boring) and then playing various games with Dave and

thoughtfulwolf in the chalet. All in all it was very relaxing and an ideal way to spend the day. Eventually

littlestkobold returned from the Dead of Night game he was running in the evening slot and, after faffing a little, I ran the first playtest of Anarchy. It was informative. A very useful and eye-opening exercise that has given me a lot to think about. Unfortunately it's all on

thoughtfulwolf's ipod at the moment so writing it up and incorporating insights into my design will have to wait for a few days! Still, I'm glad that I did it and I look forward to running another playtest in the near future.

Finally came Sunday and home time. I headed off before everyone else because I had Steph and the boys to go abck to and I was missing them and they were missing me (well, Steph was anyway.) The journey up was much like the journey down, just in reverse. This was a good thing as it meant no incidents or hold-ups, just annoying Sunday drivers doing 35 mph in the 60 pmh zones. Fuckers.

Anyway, that concludes my whirlwind overview of my trip to Conceptions 2007. Undoubtably I've missed a bunch of stuff and I've not gone into things from a CE point of view or noted what

littlestkobold or

thoughtfulwolf were doing when I was up to other things but it's as complete as it needs to be from my perspective.

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