Friday, March 16, 2018

GaryCon X


Last weekend's GaryCon X was fantastic. Every year the con is awesome and this was no exception: the organizers go all out to make sure it's the best convention for gamers. We had the entire Geneva Ridge resort this year, providing massive amounts of play space.

I ran 5 games this year, and only 1 wasn't full (which is great for a con of this size). I started with Super Dungeon Explore on Thursday.

SDE is a fun chibi minitaures-based dungeon crawl game; I rarely get time to play at home, so I decided to run a session for the convention. It went very well, but we ran out of time towards the end & had to accelerate the final boss battle. Overall, everyone had a good time, but I don't see myself bringing it again next year: it's a lot of gear to lug & the setup/tear-down time are a bit much to rush through at a convention.

One of my convention standbys is Marvel Super Heroes and I had 2 sessions this year. It's the 5th year I've run MSH at GaryCon and I've got a few players that sign up every year. On Friday I ran "Project Prometheus", an adventure set in 1960. An unknown object is headed towards Earth and the government launches giant monsters towards it in the hopes they can stop or destroy whatever is controlling it. I had a great group who totally got into playing the crazy Jack Kirby monsters.
My second Marvel session was Saturday morning. That scenario was set in 1985, with the New Mutants trying to stop the Circus of Crime from looting Westchester. Again I has amazing players who seemed to have a blast with the game.
The old TSR Marvel system is great at swinging between the cosmic power levels of Fin Fang Foom and the relatively mundane abilities of Wolfsbane. Unquestionably one of my favorite systems.

I ran the first Vehicle Mayhem International Championship (sure, why not) on Friday night. The turnout was excellent, with around 17 players participating over the course of the race. It was very tight competition for the top spot and there were some great moments. One player successfully jumped to another car after his was destroyed. He convinced the driver of the car he was sharing to slam into the car that was in a three-way tie with them for first place (both cars were on the verge of destruction & that was a risky collision). But as the car moved, he successfully jumped to another vehicle. The other cars collided and both drivers were killed. Unfortunately, the jumper's new driver was less open to having a passenger: as the two fought in the car, it went out of control and both were killed.

The last game I ran was a playtest of Star Crawl. It was late afternoon on Saturday, prime time for play, and I had a few no-shows. But the 4 remaining players were spectacular. They took the rules through their paces and gave some excellent feedback. I got to try out the space combat rules, which worked fairly well but still need some work. I'll be running some local games in the next few months & should be able to tighten them up.

A big thanks to everyone who played in my games this year: hopefully I'll get to see you all again at GaryCon XI!

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