The last weekend of July saw Megan and me at Continuum for a weekend of gaming. Mostly freeforms, with some ttrpgs and a few board games. Plus seeing lots of old friends and talking nonsense all weekend. What’s not to love?
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| Playing Mycelia in the atrium |
TL;DR: We had a great time!
Here’s what we did:
Friday
We arrived mid-afternoon and didn’t do much other than check in, chat to a few friends, and have a bite to eat.
Four Gods and a Funeral
Four Gods and a Funeral is an 18-player fantasy game written and run by Megan Jones. It is set in the world of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Five Gods books, which I’ve not read. Luckily, I didn’t need to know anything about the world as it was all contained in the game materials.
I played Sarlos, the 18-year-old heir to the Vardo empire – and my mother’s puppet. And not just my mother’s puppet – I had been kidnapped twice and used in other players’ machinations. So I was a fairly useless kid and pawn to the real powers.
I was also in love with a queen, and was trying to work out how to marry another character. (Unfortunately, that other character was played by Megan, which made that side of my game somewhat awkward and we just didn’t go there. That was a casting goof by Megan J, but wasn’t a huge problem.)
Anyway, the game was good – political and angsty. There was a whole side of the game (magic) that I didn’t know about and, amazingly, I think I was still the heir to Vardo at the end of the game. That’s probably because I was no real threat to anyone…
Game material reading order
One thing that I noticed when reading my character information was that my character made much more sense after I had read the game background material. It did make me wonder if we ought to spend a little more time thinking about the order in which players read their characters.
For me, most of my games have a “setting and cast list” document which I send to players with the casting questionnaire. That way the overall setting is the first thing they read, and that puts everything else in context.
(Hopefully they haven’t forgotten that when they receive their character – but I do always give them another copy of that initial document.)
Similarly for Freeform Games, the front cover of the character booklet has the same short boilerplate text roughly setting the scene and explaining the setting. Hopefully players read that first.
When a freeform character pack contains several documents, it's not always clear in which order to read them, and I find that can cause some confusion. Anyway, something for me to ruminate on.
Saturday
After a hearty breakfast, we had nothing scheduled, so Megan went back to bed, and I played a few light board games. After a meal deal from the Co-Op, it was time for our first proper game.
Hades Plan
In Hades Plan (for 12 players and written/run by Ray Hodson and Simon Clark), we were Greek gods who were putting together the third series of a reality TV show that involved lots of puzzles. So while being bickering gods, we had to come up with ideas for a show. (Ray and Simon provided lots of props.)
I was Demeter, the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture, the harvest, and grain. (I’ve just looked that up; I know next to nothing about Greek gods.) We chose the gods pretty much at random, and ironically I ended up being one of Megan’s parents. (Megan was playing Persephone.)
The game was silly and energetic, but not really my cup of tea. It’s the kind of larp where the players bring the game (characters were two paragraphs long). That’s okay, but I have two issues with games like this:
First, they rely on the players having a common understanding of the game world. As already noted, I know next to nothing about Greek gods (or Norse gods or Roman gods for that matter). That’s less of an issue when nobody knows anything about Greek gods, but in this case we had a lot of players who knew a lot about them. So less fun for me.
Second, the games often work on the basis that whoever is loudest gets their way. And I’m not a shouty type.
So it wasn’t really my kind of game, but those for whom it was their kind of fun seemed to have a good time.
With that done, it was time for tea.
The Highgate Club
After tea, I ran The Highgate Club, a game I co-wrote at Peaky back in 2010. I ran it with Alan Paull, one of the authors, who brings the Continuum board games library.
The Highgate Club is a private member’s club filled with weird people – aliens, elves, immortals, zombies, Atlanteans, cyborgs – even an angel. It has lots of crazy plots, and while I expected it to take about two and a half hours, the players were still going strong at three hours in.
It definitely needs two GMs, though. So I’ll update the guidance. (Along with a load of other tweaks – as always, I found lots of little things needed improving.)
Megan told me she enjoyed it, which was a relief as she influences which games I run at Continuum.
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| The Highgate Club before the players got their hands on it... |
Sunday
We had another free morning on Sunday, so Megan and I played Mycelia and Sanctuary, a couple of weightier board games. We preferred the sprouting, fruiting and decaying mushroom fun of Mycelia over the zoo-building fun of Sanctuary.
Good Society
After lunch, I ran a tabletop session of Good Society while Megan played in a horde larp.
For Good Society, I had four players and used the pregenerated playset I talked about here, updated to use the second edition reputation consequences.
My four players were all blokes but had no problem playing female characters. One had run a swashbuckling game of Good Society the day before, and agreed that trying to create a coherent backstory at a convention takes a long time.
As is often the case with Good Society (and Hillfolk), the game took a few scenes to get running, but it didn’t take long before the players were busy creating drama and interfering with each other. Most of the time I just listened, occasionally suggesting scenes between characters or jumping in when I felt that a scene was over. (That last skill is important – players are often so caught up in their characters that they don’t spot the obvious end to a scene.)
I had been slightly hesitant to bring Good Society to Continuum, as it’s very different to many other ttrpgs (and Hillfolk was a bit of a struggle last year). But unlike last year, where I got the impression it was the last choice for at least one player, all my players were keen to play Good Society – and wanted to play it because it was so different from the other games on offer. And as a result, we had a great game.
(Good Society is like Fiasco and Hillfolk in that it is very dependent on the players. With the right group, these games are brilliant. But with more reserved players (or players who expect more direction from a GM), they can struggle.)
A few thoughts
So much going on: With four main characters and eight minor characters, I found it hard to keep on top of everything that was going on in the table. There were main arcs, yes, but there were also a lot of minor things happening that didn’t always get picked up later.
(I couldn’t now, for example, tell you much about what the story – and it’s only 48 hours later as I write this.)
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but worth bearing in mind. I think I’d need to take a lot of notes were I playing a game over several sessions. (My recent online game of Good Society only had three players, which probably made it easier to hold in my head.)
Perhaps I need to figure out a way to take notes.
System doesn’t matter: Once again, I found that we didn’t use many resolve tokens. One or two, perhaps? The game flows brilliantly without needing the tokens, and for most of the game they sat on the table, ignored. (At least with Hillfolk, a drama token is at stake in each scene – even if they don’t really have much use either. Perhaps I should try mashing the two systems together?)
So that was Good Society. While I was doing that, Megan thoroughly enjoyed her larp. We had tea, another game of Mycelia (where Megan thrashed me), and then it was our final game.
Plan 8 from Outer Space
Plan 8 is an eight-player game written by Mike Young and run by Ezzy Pearson and Vikki Sterling. It’s an extremely silly game of aliens completing a post-mortem of their previous plans for dealing with Planet Earth, and preparing their 9th plan.
Broadly, the game consists of being in a ghastly business meeting (it even has a PowerPoint deck), trying NOT to take the blame for the previous plans, and then coming up with daft ideas for the next one.
It’s lots of chaotic fun, with a lot of laughter. It’s not a good game for wallflowers, though – be prepared to be loud and argue your corner.
I played the Head of Marketing, while Megan played the Head of Accounts. Her costume was so much better than mine, but that was true of most games. It was about two hours of frantic fun.
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| Head of Accounts |
(The game takes its name from the legendarily bad movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space. I’ve not seen the movie, so I can’t say if it is in any way relatable.)
Locked in
We had one final bit of excitement on Sunday as the bathroom door handle broke and trapped Megan in the bathroom. Luckily, I was able to get help from reception, and it was sorted, but it could have been serious had I not been around. I don’t know how easy it would be to raise the alarm from inside the bathroom.
Monday
And after breakfast on Monday, we headed home.
