Kat and I ran a house-con this weekend for folks we know through running the Indie Games eXplosions at DEXCON and Dreamation. The location was a bed-and-breakfast in an amazing renovated church owned by a gamer friend of ours, in a small steel town in central Pennsylvania. It was a great get together of not-quite two dozen folks and for many of us (myself included) the first in-person gaming we had done since July.
Kat and our friend Michele and I drove up on Thursday night to prepare and were happy to spend some time with our hostess Andrea. Friday morning started off slowly, with the card game Chimera with Kat and Michele. More friends arrived that afternoon, so we played For the Queen out in the gorgeous spring sunshine. Michele, Kat, Bobbi, Jeff, Jamie, Andrea and Jolene chronicled the journey of an aloof but inspiring Queen. It was one of the only games of For the Queen I’ve played that had casualties, as a number of people suffered from sunburn from the aforementioned seductive and dangerous spring sunshine.
After dinner, almost everyone was there, so we broke up into a raft of games. I got to play Monsterhearts set in Regency England (Bridgerton with Vampires, if you will), MC’d by Kat. Jolene played a delightfully catty vampire. Andrea played an innocent young woman who had gone off to the countryside to recover from consumption and came back as a ghoul, driven by compulsions of a different sort of consumption. Jim played the queen, the troublemaking head of a group of Oxford students who was always at the center of whatever machinations were afoot. I played the hollow, created by my heir-less father’s deathbed wish, arriving with everyone remembering me, and me remembering nothing. It was a good session and would have been a great campaign.
Saturday started off with the Church comfortably full, without being overcrowded. I had a relaxing morning playing Rock, Paper, Wizard and more Chimera with Michele and Kat. In the afternoon, I had my highlight game of the con. I GM’d a session of Pasión de las Pasiones set in ’90s-era Star Trek. It was great! Jamie played a Klingon warrior advancing his honor and overflowing with passion. David played a Klingon scientist and schemer with the most beautiful mane of Klingon-style hair. Andrea played a human Starfleet vice admiral hiding the terrible secret of being addicted to a Vulcan emotion-regulation drug. Jolene played a Betazoid nurse who was in over her head. Jim played a version of Jolene’s nurse that had come from the Mirror universe and was constantly switching places with her. It was my first time GM’ing Pasiones and the group was wonderfully creative and supportive. We had passionate love scenes on the holodeck in full Kingon battle regalia, a deadly neurotoxin concealed in a hypo-spray, and a power-mad officer who faced certain death but lived on through a mind-meld. Delightful!
Saturday night, I got to play Bill White’s game-in-development Fantastic Adventures with Mel, Jim, and Neko. It was a good time with a quick-moving fantasy adventure we conjured from thin air. What I love about Bill’s game designs is their exuberance. The game has more ideas in it than the rules can actually hold with dice and cards and tables galore. But, as Bill said, sometimes the process of game design is like chipping away the marble to find the statue hidden inside. For me, a regular feature of playing one of Bill’s new games is waking up the next morning with my own ideas of how I would implement his design goals. This time was no exception! I haven’t written a game design using different die sizes in years, so it was fun to stretch those muscles again. While Pasiones was the game that filled with me with the most joy, Fantastic Adventures was the one that filled me with the most gratitude that I had played.
Most people understandably got on the road early on Sunday. Kat also awoke with game-design ideas and sketched out a new iteration of Serial Homicide Unit. She playtested it with Michele, Bobbi, Andrea, and Tracy while Jeff and I chatted about everything under the sun. It was a great way to decompress after such an intense weekend of socialization. I thank everyone for making for an awesome weekend!