Greetings, Serious Scholars! I return to you from the gaming mecca of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Garycon remains one of my favorite conventions. I played some incredible games, talked shop with some awesome designers, and just enjoyed spending a weekend surrounded by fellow gamers.
Hackmaster, or Lessons in Overabundance
I had an idea of what I’d be getting myself into with Hackmaster. I’d heard legends of the crunchiness in passing, and thought I had fully prepared myself, boy, was I wrong. We started the session with character creation, and I’m not going to bury the lead here; it took more than two and a half hours of a four-hour slot. I knew I was going to be in for an interesting ride when the gentleman running the game proudly proclaimed, “We don’t use race anymore. We changed it so species. So now when you look at the table that tells you which species hate which, you can’t call us racist, you have to call us speciesist.”
Now, listen, scholars, I’m not opposed to a bit of crunch in my games. I love a good system and even a subsystem or two. Hackmaster provided systems and sub-systems in endless supply. I rolled for how many siblings I had, how I felt about my siblings, if I had good parents, how I felt about each parent, my BMI, then used the BMI to calculate my weight based on my height, which I also rolled, and on and on and on.
Listen, I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum here, but this just isn’t for me. And frankly, none of it was likely to come into play in a two-hour con game where two and a half hours were spent making my character. So I rolled, and rolled, and rolled, and eventually I found out I was superstitious about wearing the armor of an enemy the day before I was going to make a journey (yes, that was on a table). Finally, after putting the final touches on my character by buying gear, we set out on an adventure.
I had enough information about my character at this point to know my great-grandfather’s sister’s favorite dress color. So we set out to find our great adventure. We met a few workers on the road who pointed out that a storm was approaching. We then found shelter, only to be attacked by spiders almost immediately. I then learned that unlike other systems’ initiative system, Hackmaster accounts for every second. Since we were surprised, we rolled for our initial place in the order, and then the rounds started counting forward, second by second. One interesting mechanic I did enjoy was that players who had been attacked in the surprise round could alert the others in the party. I believe they called it “raising a mortal cry” or something like that. This allowed us to bump ourselves up in the initiative order.
I should mention that once the surprise was over, our characters could do something every second. For the most part, this essentially equated to moving five feet every tick. There were some ways to move a bit faster, but essentially, you were just trying to get to the point where you could swing your sword or cast your spell. I was finally able to swing my sword, and my reward? Well, I had to wait 12 ticks before I could swing it again. The gentleman running our game kept telling us how much better this initiative was because it kept everyone engaged at all times. I don’t know if I’d agree. Once I got next to a combatant if I just sort of waited for someone to kill it or for my chance to swing again out of fear of opportunity attack.
All in all, the experience was fine, but the system definitely isn’t for me. The funniest thing about the whole ordeal is that I guess there was some sort of competition between groups that ran through the event over the weekend, and my group won. I got my very own copy of Hackmaster!
Deep in the Demon Lord’s Shadow
My next game was Shadow of the Demon Lord. A game I’ve read about and have been anxious to play for a long time. I sat down with a great group of players, excited to try it out. The GM was fantastic. They had run the system quite a bit at home and really had a strong grasp on it. The story for our session was heavily inspired by the British folk horror film “The Ritual”. I do wish I could have experienced this particular story in a different setting. The table layouts and noise at Garycon are not ideal for creating a horror atmosphere. That said, the game had genuine creepy moments thanks to the chops of the GM. I found the system really enjoyable. I felt most of the characters were pretty distinct mechanically, and thanks to fantastically created pre-gens, we had great synergy among the team.
I’d be really interested to see how the progression plays out. I’ve always been really interested in how Rob Schwalb designed the game to run for 10 sessions and 10 levels. Mostly, the system felt fifth edition adjacent. I didn’t think mechanically it was drastically different. It was more like playing a tuned-up version with a really nice new paint job. I think he fully captured the beer-and-pretzels ideal of just rolling some dice and having a good time. I can see how systems like these, which emerged from the 5e era, continue to inspire games like Shadowdark.
Heists at the Edge of the Empire
I ended my first day playing a game I love and don’t get to play nearly enough, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. I can’t express to you how glad I am that Edge Studios brought this game back from the brink. I don’t know if many of you have played any of the games that were once Fantasy Flight Star Wars games, but they use a proprietary dice system. Star Wars says, “Let’s forget about math and use symbols.” The dice system is an interesting bit of design where certain symbols cancel others, and once you cancel everything out, you are left with a few story-forward results.
It’s a really elegant system that, once you’re past the learning curve, can be very evocative. Essentially, after you roll, you have either a success, success with an advantage, success with a disadvantage, or the inverse of that. The Triumphs and Despair outcomes can create an added oomph to the result, but they are pretty rare. In my opinion, it is the perfect fit for Star Wars. The biggest downside is that you need a GM who is really on their toes and capable of improving significantly based on their interpretation of the dice.
This particular adventure was fantastic. Pure Star Wars fun. We were a rogue band of mercenaries working for Rebellion adjacent, tasked with infiltrating an Imperial base and making sure it was vacated. The GM expertly gave us just enough information to plan the heist, carry it out, and throw the plan out the window when everything went sideways. Heists in tabletop roleplaying can be quite tricky, in my opinion. The best heist films walk a fine line of making the characters seem like masters of their craft in the planning stage. Allow the plan to go off the rails a bit, and then reign it back in so that the main characters come out looking slick. I don’t know about you, but in my experience, players are unpredictable to a degree that would baffle even the most astute minds, and we were. Somehow, our GM managed to wrangle us well enough to come out the other end feeling like Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven.
That concluded my first day of the convention. I went back to the lobby to enjoy some homebrew beers and booze with friends, then called it a night.
Partying Pendragon Style
The next morning, I rolled out of bed to try Pendragon for the first time. I’ve read many of the Pendragon books, but this is the first time I’ve played after a couple of years of unsuccessfully trying to get friends to try it. I had the good fortune of interviewing Greg Stafford shortly before he passed. From what I can tell, Greg was every bit the progressive-thinking, warm, wonderful man he was during that interview.
I sat down at the table with my cousin and a very lovely group of players. Everyone was all in right from the start, assuming their roles. The GM was fantastic and helped us ease into the system. We started with a party scene that really helped us, through play, establish who our knights were to the other players.
The really interesting thing about Pendragon is that your character sheet really informs you who your knight is. It has a really awesome system of traits based on a character’s duality. For example, you could be more proud than modest, more chaste than lustful. This doesn’t mean you can’t be lustful, but when you’re fighting your superior, leaning, you have to make a check. This tells you how your knight will try to act, but doesn’t lock you into it, allowing you to get a clear picture of who this person is and how they’re apt to act. I think this allows for some very interesting roleplay moments where you can break from who you are to great dramatic effect.
The story itself was about a lady who had a giant move onto her land. He was helpful at first, but had now fallen in love with the lady and was creating complications. She enlisted our help to convince him to leave. Along the way, we faced bandits, made a pact with an errant knight to help him save his lady love, and eventually arrived at the lady’s holdings. I don’t want to spoil too much in case any of you play this at a convention, but I will say it was a ton of fun and truly brought the age of Arthurian legend to life.
Salvage Operations in the Vast Grimm
My last convention event was a game called Vast Grimm. First of all, just take a look at that art! I mean, the visuals are just incredible for this game. The GM immediately showed off a bunch of it, and all I can say is you need to look at this game’s art. Vast Grimm is a rules-light system very similar to Mothership. It’s based around the idea that some space monks accidentally unleashed these parasitic worms across the galaxy, essentially undoing most of civilized space.
I don’t know that I’d play Vast Grimm long term, but for a convention, it was a riot. We were dispatched to a derelict ship full of monsters, oozes, and slimes that inflicted all sorts of body horror on our poor legionnaires. The system does what it sets out to do efficiently. You feel squishy, you die if you push your luck, and you get infested and mutated by worms. It had us all laughing, cringing at the gore, and having a raucous good time. I think if you love rules-light, gritty space horror with a punk rock twist, this is the game for you. We finished the adventure, but not without suffering heavy casualties. 10/10 would recommend.
Closing Out the Con
I kept Saturday free because I was planning to run The Middle Lands for my friends. This would be my first robust playtest of the system. I run a play-by-post AD&D game and ported all of my friends’ characters from that campaign into Middle Lands characters. The conversion was actually pretty simple, but the Middle Lands versions were certainly more powerful than their AD&D versions.
The session went really well, and I got to put my corruption, armor, and shield, and combat mechanics through the paces. I was really happy with the results. Shields soaked damage, but eventually broke. Armor deteriorated over time, but lasted the whole adventure. Everything seemed to work pretty well, and everyone had a great time. It gave me enough info to begin tweaking, tinkering, and building out systems more robustly.
We finished off the night watching a screening of my friend Josh Knapp’s new show, Draw Your Weapons. I hope you’ll all check it out on Beacon! It will also be coming to Amazon shortly. If you want a more bite-sized actual play with a lot of laughs, I urge you to check it out.
After that, we closed out the night with our annual Blood on the Clocktower game that went about the way any Blood on the Clocktower game ever goes. Hilarious arguments nearly tearing your friendships to pieces.
Garycon remains my favorite convention. It gives me a chance to try a lot of systems I’ve been hoping to try, offers fellowship and love, and is a great place to just spend time with friends. I can’t wait until next year.