This past weekend, Kat and I went to our first public game convention since Dreamation in February of 2020. A small-but-growing convention called MEPACON had been located in the Poconos pre-pandemic, but has moved to a hotel 15 minutes from our front door. We offered some indie RPGs to the convention at-large, and invited some of our indie gamer friends to join us. Both parts were successful, which made for a really great weekend and a great gateway back towards public gaming for us.
On Friday, Kat offered two games. First was a scenario she wrote for Brennan Taylor’s game in development The Art of Power called “Courting Faerie”, set in a semi-Elizabethan time period. She had 4 players from the general convention population and had a great time. I was a little overwhelmed by the noise and crowded gaming ballroom and took my time easing into it.
Plus, I squeezed in some Frisbee with Dave before it started to rain!
Friday evening, Kat ran Serial Homicide Unit for a very-full table (7, including her). I got to (finally) play Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands with old friend Jim and new friend Steph. My character was a dashing, devoted, and down-to-earth revolutionary who was shop steward for the stevedores at the spaceport, carting around fancy luxury goods for Jim’s entitled blue blood mech pilot and flirting with Steph’s handsome offworld military man. It was a good game.
Saturday morning, neither Kat nor my games had enough players to run, so we got to catch up with Jim, have a non-rushed lunch, and head home for a short rest. In the afternoon slot, Jim’s game of The Hollows also didn’t have enough players, so Kat ran a pick-up game of Everway for Jim, Dave, Steph, and me. We were all descendents of the legendary, ancient spherewalker Caster, who’d started (and left) families in dozens of spheres. Turns out that a curse that was afflicting some of those families was because one of Caster’s powerful lovers was drawing power to try to bring him back to life yet again. We helped him rest in peace, finally.
After a fun dinner with friends, I ran InSpectres for Michele, Dave, Anthony, Nicole, and Tim. We laughed a lot as we ran through three missions: A haunted retaining pool in an industrial park, dancing lobsters in a possessed fancy restaurant, and a necromancer raising dead tenants in an old apartment building. Fun, as always, and a big hit. I’ll definitely offer more InSpectres at the next one.
Kat was able to offer Courting Faerie again on Sunday as a pick-up game. She had two players who really dug into it and they had a great time.
Sunday had my best session of the con. I got to run my Pasión de las Pasiones set in the Star Trek universe game “Love: The Final Frontier” for Jolene, Jim, Dave, and Steph. We had such a great time with Jolene’s win-at-all-costs Klingon Elava (El Jefe playbook), Jim’s half-Vulcan ice queen T’Riss (La Belleza), Dave’s hapless hunk of a Betazoid counselor Orumum (La Empleada), and Steph’s scheming Romulan sub-commander Shal Mnec (La Dona). We had a nigh-omnipotent being fulfilling the fan shippers’ desires by throwing ill-matched pair together; off-handed disintegrations to “make an example”; stolen kisses while everyone else was distracted; love expressed passionately through a raised eyebrow; a tattoo that detects what type of poison you’re afflicted with; and a facing certain death for the chance to destroy the arrogant Metron. It was a really great, intense 3-hour game, full of awesome play. I think my favorite bit was Jim’s half-Vulcan giving medical treatment to Steph’s Romulan, including a hypospray. When Steph’s Romulan was put in command of Jim’s Vulcan, he did a flashback of putting a slow-acting sedative in the hypospray, so T’Riss could be set up to take command again. In a parallel scene, Dave’s Betazoid reaveled a shocking truth that Jolene’s Kingon had switched out T’Riss’s sedatives for poison! Which set up Steph’s Romulan to face certain death and survive with the tattoo. I loved the way all four players got to layer on their own contributions to this one story element.
I was glad to see old friends and make new ones. It was a very good weekend that reminded me why we started doing conventions in the first place.