A Tale of Two GMs [Gen Con 2016]

Saturday night, and one of our GMs for Hex Games suddenly couldn’t make it to Gencon. This left his sold-out game with no GM and very, very short notice. We didn’t want to disappoint the nice people, nor did we want Hex’s reputation with Gencon to suffer. So, with only a couple hours lead time and nothing but the original GM’s scant blurb to go on, Leighton Connor and I stepped in to co-GM the game.

It was a Hobomancer game, and the program blurb mentioned a time-traveling pocket watch that needed to be destroyed in the first nuclear reactor (Chicago Pile-1, Chicago University, 1942 btw) and a bunch of Lord of the Rings references. Mere minutes before the game was scheduled to start LC and I put our heads together while I scribbled key-words and brief ideas on index cards:

Gordon the Gray

Bikers as Nazgul?

Sneaky Snakes/Serpent Men in Valusia

King Kull

VLHRG the Timewyrm

The Old West

Retro-Future Sci Fi Era

Post-Apoc Ape City

Etc…

And thus we started madly improvising.We managed to lift large sections of plot from the “Swords & Serpents” chapter we did for LC’s Electric Team comic. It helped to have a common framework we could hang things on. LC and I can banter well with each other. In fact, we had to pull back a couple times, lest we forget about the PCs while we continued to bounce shtick off each other.

The adventure session went great, and the players had a fun time. (Pretty sure, I think, I hope. Everyone was laughing and smiling.) I can can at least guarantee the adventure was unlike anything else they’ve played. One of the players smilingly called us “you glorious BS artists” which I choose to take as a compliment.

At any rate, next year I am running three “Hobomancers in Time” adventures. This idea has legs!

Universes BURN at the voice of VLHRG!