On the Gen Con Trail
I'd signed up with the intention of running Trail of Cthulhu, The Wreck and The Yellow King RPG, The Night of Masks. When it comes to Gen Con, for me it's all about the Pelgrane. Not the evil flying gargoyle like creatures from the Dying Earth but the titular games company that continue to churn out wonderful RPGs from the pen of Robin D. laws, Kenneth Hite, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and more.
I've been a fan since the release of Trail of Cthulhu and I now regularly see it as my “duty” to run a few of their games at Gen Con Online, in return for the years of wonderful gaming material they've produced.
So onto the games…
Trail of Cthulhu - Facts Pertaining to the House on Hill Street
I jumped in last minute to run this scenario, after a friend of my Discord became ill. I'd never run, played or seen this scenario before so I was excited and nervous in equal measure. It is a great scenario, a perfect con scenario that explores similar themes to Thro’ Centuries Fixed, a Cthulhu Hack scenario from Paul Baldowski. The basic premise of strangers thrown together with unreliable memories is shared and then it diverges, without giving away spoilers it's a combination of PCs talking to each other and investigating the starting scene, that puts them on the trail of a common goal.
I was lucky to have a wonderful group, one was a regular player on my Discord, which gave me a bit of comfort. But everyone contributed and got into the mystery, fleshing out their characters with little details and in the case of one, a scene stealing performance of a spiritual if creepy as hell clerk. I think with all the shocks I threw in the mix, none surpassed her esoteric proclamations.
I was really energised by the group and the scenario and we raced along to the conclusion, a very satisfactory game with a nearly full house.
The Yellow King RPG - Who Knows Where the Time Goes
I managed to give myself thirty minutes between games, time to wolf down some food, chat to the family then on to the game.
It used The Black Book, a discord integrated Browser and Bot VTT. I'd had variable experiences with it but it worked really well… for me, for about one third of us it gave up and we resorted to a 2nd dice bot, no Biggie, YKRPG works well Theatre of the Mind.
A few of us had our video cameras on, which was great as I find it hard to get engaged in a game without these visual clues. But then the GM announced, “Let's turn off our cameras to save bandwidth.” I groaned but decided to be a good citizen and not complain, who knows, maybe someone was from the 1990s and dialling up via a 56kbps modem.
The game began with a vigorous debate with an NPC on “fake moon landings”, we used our investigative abilities to provide evidence of why it was real and the NPC/GM then refuted it with counter evidence. This went on for quite a while and I was struggling to understand if there was an objective to the scenario, I also had around four pages of back story that I kept referring to for clues, which didn't help. This was my own fault as I put my hand up when the GM offered a more complex character. Note to self…
The game carried on and we started to trace the underlying but slight mystery, there were some good setup scenes and I felt I contributed some cool ideas. The horror element was missing for me until the final scene, which did pull the whole story together in a very clever and unique way. The other players were a the stuff of Gen Con legends, one seemed to be trapped inside a washing machine, so bad was the noise whenever they unmuted. At one point, as the game reached peak jeopardy, they seemed to go onto a spin cycle, barely heard over the cacophony around them. One other player was oblivious to others and continuously talked over the top of the other players and GM, maybe headset issues? The rest were lovely and interacted well, fleshing out relationships as we played.
I look back and there were a few enjoyable moments and a very intriguing and well thought out story, but not really enough horror or peril for me, parts of it didn't feel gameable, more that we were on a tour bus, surveying the scenes as we passed. I got the impression this is a homebrew that is being developed for potentially a commercial release, it definitely has great potential, the ideas, research and enthusiasm from the GM come through but I'd like to have a few more challenges in the game, to expose elements of horror, especially early on. Perhaps this is an aspect of the setting too, it's supposed to be quite normal, then the horror bursts out in unexpected moments. Kudos to the GM/writer though, I hope they get it to a release, I'll be checking it out if they do.
Trail of Cthulhu - The Wreck
After a good sleep it was on to day two and I had two players from my discord sharing space with four newbies, one of whom then had to drop out for reasons. It reminds me that Cons, online or otherwise can be a challenging and confusing experience at times. We moved on and I did a little montage with the players, before moving on to the game proper, it's a nice little ice breaker and fun for the GM but you need to take care not to get carried away and end up running a completely different scenario!
It's hard to talk about the scenario without giving too much away but, as one player pointed out it “harkens back”, there are a lot of direct references to Lovecraft stories but I'd say it's a classic. Elements of The Usual Suspects, Key Largo all come together in a satisfying conclusion linked to real world events.
The main element of this game I struggle with is timing, I'd say this is an incredibly difficult scenario to fit into four hours, I was frantically hand waving travel scenes, flash forwarding to new scenes until we had fifteen minutes left to play out the final conclusion. There are storms, flames & monsters; The end of the world basically and there is a specific mechanic invoked which favours the coward in the party… so, as it was, the brave Doctor and P.I. met their doom.
So nothing mind blowing but a good solid scenario, that everyone seemed to enjoy, especially this GM having TPK’d the party in the monologue and then got nearly half of them at the end.😁
I was glad I'd not listened to the demon inside me and played or run an evening game, instead time to chill with the family.
The Yellow King RPG - The Night of Masks
I'd run this before and had a good handle of the pace and details of this, but it was massively helped by the enthusiasm and role playing of the players, for some reason the Yellow King and especially the Paris segment appeals to a more diverse set of RPGers, I loved the fact we had in our midst an expert on Absinthe Cocktails, check out an Earthquake!
So, as you can expect there were some powerful and detailed PC introductions which added loads of flavour to the game.
The first scene pitches the players into immediate action there were screams, players rushing out into the street, two players leaping to help an unfortunate NPC, the barman panicking, total chaos, lovely and all with the background of screaming hangovers for the PCs.
The fun continued from scene to scene and different players came to the fore, bringing out memorable moments, the mystery, almost, but not quite incidental.
We ended on the dot with an epic battle; flaming candelabras, haymakers, ming vases smashed overhead and all this just to escape the big bad.
I have to give a heartfelt thanks to the players, I hope they go on to play more Yellow King as they are a perfect fit for the game.
So after sixteen hours my Gen Con Online was over, I'd gone through the usual dreading running and playing so many games to enjoyment to planning what I could run next year.
I did try and play some other games, I looked at Mothership, which I'd bounced off of before but I was horrified at the price $38 for a session. I wonder if Sean McCoy knows - probably not, as I'd imagine he'd be horrified too. Surely Gen Con should put some kind of $ cap on games? Most other games were not in my time zone, but I also felt that the number of games was down on previous years.
So overall I would recommend Gen Con Online as a, mainly, cheap way to try out new games, be aware the quality of games, GMs and players can vary but there are also amazing gems in all three categories.
Finally a shout out to Cat at Pelgrane for organising our game and the wonderful supportive Pelgrane GMs, always on hand to give advice or support, even just a 👏 or ♥️ emoji is well received!