This past weekend I went to Acadecon
in Dayton for the first time. It’s a smaller con, a few hundred attendees maybe.
I spent way too much money on the (admittedly nice) hotel, but the con staff
were all friendly and the whole thing seemed very well organized, which is more
than I can say about a lot of cons of this size (BASHcon).
I had registered to run two Dungeon
Crawl Classics adventures, and I signed up to play in a few other games
over the weekend. This is how things went.
Friday afternoon I ran “Sanctum of the
Snail” from Crepusucular #1. Not surprisingly, I can
pretty much run this game in my sleep. I had three players—one who had played
DCC a few times at cons, one who had played DCC, like, once, and a third who
had never played DCC but had heard stories about its unique and deadly experience.
All together they had 12 zero-level zeds ready to run through the funnel.
I don’t get a lot of TPKs as a GM.
Perhaps my hippy-dippy upbringing has made me soft. But this session wound up a
total blood-bath. Things looked pretty promising for the players at the start,
when they all got initiative over the Sharkboys and raced through the sanctum
door to relative before the monsters could attack any of them. Things went
down-hill quickly after that.
Post-game, when I shared the dungeon
map and went through the adventure a bit, one of the players quipped “Wow, we
really did take the path of most resistance!” Through no fault of
their own, they missed every weapon cache, armor stash, magical benny, and treasure
pile. Gong farmers fell like cordwood, the party split up, and the “replace
your PCs here” room was avoided. Blorgamorg was never encountered.
The swarm of 1hp floating skulls were
the worst menace. The fragile little monsters chewed up the PCs while bad dice
rolls prevented the heroes from landing blows. The last three survivors managed
to make it all the way to the Snail Sorceress’s bedroom, but breaking down the
door created a lot of noise that attracted Chaos Slug Men. These wandering
monsters were the death stroke for the party. All hands lost.
And yet! Despite that, the players all
had fun. They knew DCC’s rep, they knew what they were getting into, and they
had the proper DCC experience. Good times all around!
I didn’t run anything on Saturday, but
I got to play in three different games. All Out of Bubblegum is one of
those one-page mini-RPGs you find on Reddit. This one was about playing 80s
action dudes. It was very silly and fun, and run by one of the guys from the
Critcast podcast (which I will have to check out now).
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| Also, a gift from Chris Lauricella! |
Later, I got to play Shadow of the
Demon Lord for the first time. I’ve been meaning to try it out for some
time. The adventure was a pretty linear—take this evil artifact to the obelisk
and destroy it—but it did a good job of demonstrating the system and setting.
That’s what I want from a demo game! The GM was also engaging and system-smart,
so kudos to him.
My last game on Saturday was Worlds
in Peril, run by another of the Critcast fellows. Worlds in Peril is a “Powered
by the Apocalypse” superhero game. I love PBtA games, and I love superheroes,
but I’ve never found a supers RPG that I really loved. I’m not sure this is it
yet, but I like how “Bonds” worked a lot. I still have to find a group to play Masks:
A New Generation with.
On Sunday, my Leopard Women
co-conspirator Leighton “Laser Ponies” Connor came up from Cincinnati to
play. We had a power-brunch at Waffle House, then went back to the con to do
some “Saucer Full of Secrets.” “Saucer” is the zero-level funnel for LeopardWomen of Venus. I’ve run it once before at Gencon, while LC has ran it a
couple of times himself at various cons. LC would play some zeroes in this
session, but he’s very good at “fading into the back” and letting the other
players run things. All together, I had six players with 18 zeds in total.
The adventure started with the gathered
zeds receiving their mission from Forecastle J. MacBeth, leader of the Humanoid
Coalition and my favorite NPC. The party needed to cross through the dangerous
jungle to a crater where an alien spaceship had crashed 72 hours previous. They
were to salvage what they could from the saucer and find out what had happened
to the previous retrieval team.
The trek across the jungle was treated
like a dungeon, with paths connecting to various clearings. No need to
overwhelm new players with wilderness-crawl rules right out the gate, I figure.
The party encountered a shrine to Fantomah, got the jump on some Martian
scouts, fought a deranged Flying Saurian, and avoided the deadly Venusian Bees.
Little-to-no casualties at this point, thanks to luck and sound tactics.
When the party arrived at Gorgon’s Gorge,
things started to turn. Three giant flaming claws smashed, squeezed, and
burned several members of the party before they were destroyed.
Eventually the party found the wrecked
saucer and set to exploring it. The radium miner’s geiger counter let them
avoid the ruptured core at the center of the craft. The Martian cafeteria seemed
promising until mutated slime puddings dropped from the ceiling killed several
of their number. The sadistic surgical robot the oversaw the bio-lab also
managed kill some of the players before getting scrapped. The Martian barracks
were the most deadly of course, as a cadre of Martian pikemen and gunners
winnowed down the PC party. When they party eventually decided to examine the
saucer’s power core, the co-mingled monstrosity that was once two members of
the original team killed several more PCs (It had three attacks!). At long
last, the PCs managed to rescue the two survivors from the original expedition
and were able to call in MacBeth for an extraction. Of the 18 level-zeroes that
started the adventure, only seven made it out alive. That’s what I call a good
funnel adventure!
Acadecon was fun, and if Dayton’s in
your travel zone, you should consider checking it out. My only real problem was
that it was the first convention in a long time (maybe ever?) that I attended
by myself without buddies or family. That makes for some boring downtime. If I
go back, I’ll certainly need to bring company.
x
