Another convention has come and gone, and now it is time to reflect.
The first thing I noticed about this year’s EyeCon was that there were a lot of new faces there. It seems that word is getting out about these Sydney conventions, as there were a lot of people for whom this was their first time coming. this was probably helped by this Eyecon being part of the Will Wheaton/Felicia Day sponsored International Tabletop Day.
I spent most of the convention running games, but for International Tabletop Day Melissa and I took a break from running our games to play some boardgames. we had picked up Pandemic the day before so we brought that along. Pandemic is a really great cooperative game, where players work together as CDC agents trying to stop the outbreak of four diseases around the world. it is quite difficult to win, but still a lot of fun to play. we also played some Fluxx, which is a wacky card game, vaguely similar to Munchkin.
We only played two other RPG’s this time, the Learn to Roleplay 40k using the new Only War setting/rulebook and A Marvellous Game, which was a Marvel superhero game.
Only War was good, though we somewhat stumbled though our mission. I have all the current 40k books, but haven’t actually played them. I saw this as a quick way to get up to speed on the rules, and get to check out the new book at the same time. It was quite fun being an Imperial Guardsman, the GM was good at making you feel like a very insignificant cog in the wheel that is the Imperium 🙂 . we were up against Orks so there was a there was definite feeling that we were all about to die. And it was really cool that we were Catachans, the awesomeist IG regiment 🙂 . I believe what we played was the Free RPG Day module, and it was a good into the the system and the setting.
My character was a female heavy weapons soldier with a heavy flamer, the GM introduced her as “basically Vasquez from aliens”. Melissa chose the Commissar, I think just because he had a Chainsword. We didn’t have a CO so i radioed HQ and got myself a field promotion, though it’s not like the others actually listened to me 🙂 we also had a Techpriest, a preacher, and two regular guardsmen. we ended up taking on a wave of Orks led by a huge Warboss, who was eventually taken down in hand to hand by the Techpriest. but in ture Vasquez style I leapt into the swarm of Orks and detonated my Heavy Flamer’s ammo tanks, and then used my two fate points to survive, shining in The Emperors light. In the wrap up I think she ended up being taken by the black ships. so, overall a really good game.
The second game we played, named A Marvellous Game, used the (relatively) new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying System from MWP. I had picked up the book, but again i hadn’t gotten around to reading it so i was unfamiller with the system. however, since the Marvel Unlimited app for iPad came out a short time ago i have been reading nothing but old marvel comics, so i was thoroughly prepared for playing. There was a good selection of characters to choose from, I picked Captain America and Melissa picked Ms. Marvel. It was very fun playing up the super pro-american do-gooder, There was lots of “you should do this because Freedom!” and “you failed because America!”. When the game started there were doom-bots attacking the Baxter Building, but i first had to help a little old lady and rescue a kitten out of a tree.
The GM for Marvel had some great background music/sound effects that he used during the game. It’s not something you see see very often in a convention game, and it worked well. I also really liked the large range of characters that were playable. its a credit to the GM that he could run the adventure with a wildly varying mix of characters, there were about 20 to choose from, with a mix of Avengers, X-Men, and individual heroes in there. I did notice that there was no telepathic characters playable, and that was probably a good idea. we did get a bit lost at the end, my Captain America got hold of the Infinity Gauntlet but couldn’t really do anything with it. I think it might be a mistake to give players access to such a powerful item if you don’t want then running around doing whatever they want. over all, a really fun game that makes me want to play the system more.
Check back later for Part 2 of my convention wrap up, which will cover me running my game for 7 sessions.
Never Stop Gaming!
Steve