The Green Goblin Blog

A glorious day to pop down the M4 to Swindon for the first Dragonmeet outside London. The venue was the Croft Sport Centre, easily accessible from the motorway and next to some peaceful playful fields - very different from Kensington Town Hall in December.

Trip down was slowed as three lanes on the motorway became one to get past a nasty accident - upside-down car with a mashed front right corner in the slow lane. The middle lane was also cordoned off to protect the helpfully highlighted bits of wreckage waiting for analysis. Well in advance there were illuminated signs advising us that the two left-hand lands were going to be blocked so we dutifully moved into the fast lane in single-file and slowed to a crawl. To my left hordes of cars and trucks still drove past us so - with an eye on the clock and the meet's 10am start - I pulled out and joined them. Now I hate people that drive along to the front of an empty lane and then try to push into the lane they really want - as bastards do in the Kings Road in Reading before Eldon Road - so I didn't take this decision lightly. I soon found that the accident was still a long way off so I felt like an idiot following the sign's advice so far in advance. The railways didn't offer a better journey - a bus replacement service was needed to get you to Swindon from the East due to Sunday maintenance.

The Sports centre was easy to find (once you bother to read the signs after the Marriott hotel...) and the parking was easy - being able to put the car so close to where I was gaming/shopping meant I didn't have to lug everything around with me all day.

There were a number of trade stands along the outside of the hall...



... with a large arrangement of tables for organised and open gaming:



In the morning I played a role-playing game from Contested Ground, one of the small, independent companies. "Worse Things Happen At Sea" - a 'Post-Apocalypse Dark Horror' scenario was using the Hot War system and run by Matt Nixon (Pheonix Games Club) who I knew from previous London meets.

"...K-R-A-K-E-N, a six letter transmission, sent over and over again in Morse Code from an unknown location somewhere out in the North Sea...
The only person with any answers, an ex-Government scientist serving a prison sentence for treason, is looking to cut a deal with the Special Situations Group. Are you willing to pay the price?"

Only 3 players turned up to play the SSG Agents which did mean the game probably flowed a lot faster then if the full 6 were there. The system uses dice at a higher level than the more traditional RPGs like D&D so a whole encounter or event can be decided by sides rolling a small bucketload of d10s at each other to decide who wins and narrates the result. This does give the players more creativity in the story telling which takes a little getting used to. My character ended up drowning in the North Sea...

During the lunchbreak I tried a dice chess game to fill the time. I can't remember what it was called but the principle was that each die acted like the chess piece showing on its uppermost face and you could move one piece and promote/demote another. Victory was decided on points gained from capturing the opponent's pieces. I lost through misunderstanding a queen-capturing rule obviously added for game balance.

In the afternoon, I joined in on an old favourite - Call of Cthulhu. "Someone To Watch Over Me" was run by Jenny 'Evil Kitten' Waddington with a full table of players all willing to act out their characters.

"Tonight, the latest hotel and gaming monolith has its gala opening. But is it all champagne cocktails and society pages? Welcome to the old Las Vegas, the Vegas of the Rat Pack, the Mafia and exuberant glamour. It gets into your soul and you never leave this hometown. Gangsters rub shoulders with society belles, in the company of policemen and reporters, who've all together trodden the route of the person who's seen too much. Where everyone knows what lies behind the glitter and flashbulbs, but nobody looks. Where the house always wins, no matter what..."

Different from other CoC games I've played, no gribbly monsters turned up and we all escaped. I suppose that's a success :-)

The convention ended at 6pm, as usual, but no-one stayed around as there was no (long, drawn-out) charity auction afterwards so I was home by 6:30pm.

I ended up impulse buying:

# "Munchkin Bites! 2" (Steve Jackson Games, £5) from the bring'n'buy stall even though we rarely play Munckin.
# "Exemplars of Evil" (WotC, £8.50 in a trader's half-price sale) to add to the many D&D books I already have and rarely make use of.
# "T-shirt of X-Ray showing dice for heart" (Pagan Angel, £15) which seemed a bit expensive for the thin feel of the material.



Obviously the organisers will be looking hard at whether this sort of convention outside the big cities is sustainable. If the choice of locations such as this sports centre reduces the cost of running the convention whilst offering most of the facilities we had at Kensington then that works for me. £2 to get in is nothing and the lack of a bar wasn't a problem as I'd driven anyway.

Next Dragonmeets are in November (London) and then Spring next year (Birmingham).

Labels: Dragonmeet

The worst part of DragonMeet is that it is always over for another year so quickly. I know it's not practical for a one-day convention to start before 10am or end after 6pm but, still, it's not long enough. Thankfully, the franchise is being extended next year and will appear in Swindon (March) and maybe a couple of other places.

Today started well - I'd bought a ticket in advance and reached the hall at 9:30am. This year was well organised - they'd handed out "goody" bags and ripped our ticket stubs while we were in the queue, allowing us to speed through to the all-important game sign-up sheets.

The first game I put my name down for was Call of Cthulhu. "I know you", said the person signing their name below mine and Dominic de Bechi introduced himself. I hadn't heard from him since he was a subscriber to my Green Goblin fanzine back in the late 80s and early 90s. All I could remember was that he came from Wolverhampton - postal addresses are the sort of thing that stick in the mind when you write a fanzine. With him was Charles Hammond who I'm sure read a few of the issues too. Nice to see people that I've known from years ago are still active in the hobby.

The game itself was a moonbase rescue mission where communication had been lost and we needed to investigate what had happened, maybe rescuing the dozen miners in the process. Simple props, like photos of the base, no doubt taken from a film or computer gane, really helped atmosphere (of which there isn't too much on the moon - b-dum tish). Roleplaying had an added challenge when my character ended up as a paranoid brain-in-a-jar, a pleasant change from being eaten by creatures of another dimension. Great fun overall although we seemed to end earlier than expected. Maybe we ran away screaming (some of us carried) too efficiently.

With time on my hands (and all the sandwiches I prepared last night consumed), I went shopping but bought no dice, games or rulebooks. I did, though, take up David Griffith's offer of a £5 signed print at the long artist's table at the back of the trade hall. The unhallowed beholder lich looked a perfect inspiration for my Ascent D&D campaign. I just need little creature ideas like this every now and then to provide the root for a whole tree to grow from. At the moment I am nurturing copses of young trees - growing a forest takes such a lot of time and, more importantly, focus.

Here's a picture of the miniature figure that David drew for Wizards alongside a scan of the print:

After interrupting David's work on a large sketch long enough to buy a print, I moved on to Linda Pitman, an artist who'd had work appear in Mongoose-published products. I didn't buy anything - even the black dragon sketch - bit I did have a nice chat and a promise to check out her website at SheBlackDragon.com.

The rest of the table seemed to be taken up by the Horsley family (where I expect even the baby is a dab hand [I'm sure a joke is trying to get out there]) but Ralph was busy so I started another fruitless search round the trade hall for cheap 3rd ed D&D books I didn't already have. I expect that the traders have managed to dump a lot of their stock since 4th ed was announced in May. To be fair, there aren't many 3rd ed books I do need, which is an obvious problem for any business. There are a lot of D&D books on top of the beer fridge and the plastic crates containing them are now full. I'm slightly worried that more purchases will crush the fridge. Good thing the floor in that room is concrete.

I did pick up an Xmas present for someone - maybe they'll like it. Even if they don't, I'm sure I'll benefit from the purchase anyway, having tried it out.

Back to the game signup desk for the afternoon lists, I notice a full Paranoia game. This was a great disappointment to me as I look forward to playing this game. Not many conventions have people running it so DragonMeet is where I get my fix. Denied. The programme did have a mention in the table assignments - I should have been more thorough. Looking at the signup sheet, the 6 names all seemed in the same handwriting so it looked like a group of six friends had bagged the prize. Maybe this was the same sextet that had turned up for the morning Cthulhu game I was in - the organisers (or somebody, anyway) had put out two different sign-up sheets for the same game.

So, instead, I tried a Burning Wheel King Arthur session (run by Paul Drussel) where the main historical characters (Guinevere, Morgana, Mordred, Lancelot, Palamedes, Urien, and Sir Percival (the 8th player didn't turn up so Merlin was an NPC)) are competing with each other to bring the Holy Grail to the King (or not). The game started with everyone coming upon the location of the relic in an enchanted forest simultaneously. A game of tag then ensued as characters got in each others' way. My Morgana even used her witchery on Mordred to stop a fight between him and his step-father, Urien. Tactically a bad move although maybe in character. After a chase through the woods to Camelot and negotiating our way past Merlin, we all eventually reached the throneroom where the disgraced Lancelot handed over the Grail to the King. Sadly my attempts to poison the celebratory wine to allow me to take all the credit came to nought.

The game mechanics I found a little heavy on the dice - you do need a small bucket of six-siders to play this, depending on the character's attributes. I have a natural aversion to games that just use d6 as they remind me of tabletop army games, which is kind of funny. At least it doesn't make me feeling like I'm LARPing.

One aspect of the rules which was interesting was the attempt to tie storytelling and dice-rolling together. For a complex situation, such as getting past Merlin, a series of "attacks" would be chosen (such as 'rebuttal'), each with a short sentence explaining what the character was saying or doing. Eventually, the verbal contest would result in one side or the opther conceding. Apparantly this system is useful when roleplaying the encounter instead may drag on for way too long. I've seen enough of those in my time so maybe it's a good compromise.



To be continued...

Labels: Dragonmeet

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