Had a good first full day at Dreamation. Started the day offering With Great Power for two players who had signed up for +Tony Lower-Basch ‘s Capes game. We had fun with an altruistic superhero whose parents wanted her to make some money of her powers, and a hero who was plagued by demons that caused calamity wherever he went.
In the afternoon, got to play in +Russell Collins ‘s The World Echoes, which is a high school drama with surreal supernatural elements where you track down and fight overgrown negative thought patterns. The game is in early stages, but has good bones. It’s a good time.
In the evening I played +Kathryn Miller ‘s Immortal Beloved. I had taken notes on the game before, but never played. It’s about the love of a mortal and an immortal and whether their love can prevail against the forces pulling them apart. Two (or three) players are the lovers, the rest are gods who are testing their feelings for one another. Our game was set on a generation ship, where an AI who had been given a chassis feel in love with the engineer that tended their body. As gods, we did terrible things to the lovers, but, in the end, they prevailed. It was pretty intense and I even made myself uncomfortable. A good time!
If my Dreamation Friday was all about newer games and games in development, my Saturday was about vintage games. This is our 15th annual IGX at Dreamation, so a number of is offered to run older games.
Saturday morning I ran My Life with Master. I still love this game and it still teaches me things every time. This time, my lesson was that if appeals to engage Sincerely with a situation bounce right off a player, then a 4 hour convention game may not be the best venue to address that issue. It was a good session, regardless, but the game still takes a lot of emotional energy. I still love it, though.
In the afternoon, +Jeffrey Collyer ran Prime Time Adventures, which is one of those classic games that I never ran well, but Jeff certainly did. The setup was essentially “a D&D party, twenty years after their last big battle, gets back together at the funeral for one of their own.” I played a judgmental half elf. We had a lot of cool *moments”, but nothing really happened. Maybe that’s just the way PTA always was, maybe I’m just old.
Speaking of old, in the evening I ran Dictionary of Mu, and the length of time since I’d run it was readily apparent. I introduced the players to the setting, have a brief overview of the rules and let them go to it, clashing with each other over the bloody fate of Marr’d. I remembered to play the demons hard. I navigated the complex conflict diagrams. But something was missing. The players were having fun, but there was a missing tooth in the gear of gameplay. We finished a bit early and as I was packing up, I said it was odd that no one has lost a single point of Humanity. And then I slapped my forhead. I had forgotten to call for any Humanity rolls! No wonder they had a good time! Galavanting around the red sands without consequence. Alas!
On Sunday at Dreamation, I ran a game of Serial Homicide Unit. I often say that it’s the best game with my name on it, and that is no exaggeration. Even with exhausted players, this game always delivers a fulfilling, emotional story. Our civilians were all linked by the fact that they commuted by train from Morristown, NJ regularly. We had a mailroom clerk aspiring to get a novel published, a florist who only wanted to get married, a British ex-pat who wanted to move back to London w/ his wife, an extremely-long distance commuter who wanted to get a job closer to home, and an aspiring financial worker who wanted the promotion that she had more than paid her dues for. It was a great game and a great way to finish up our 15th annual Indie Games eXplosion.