It was a great weekend to get together in central Pennsylvania with a group of gaming friends, new and old, for Spring Role 2023. This semi-regular house-con is one of the highlights of my gaming calendar, and this one may have been the best one yet!
Thursday was a day for packing, travel, reunions, and meetings. Kat and I spent a low-key evening playing Sentinels of the Multiverse with super-fans of the game Jolene and Mendez. A far better experience of the game than the first time I’d played it, years ago.
Friday morning, Brennan ran his PbtA hack of Legends of the Five Rings for Kat, Lilith, and I. What started out as an “everyone wants the jade cup—the stuff that dreams are made of” scenario quickly turned into “everyone wants the love of Lilith’s buff Lion Clan warrior and will gladly die to win her heart (that already belongs to her handmaiden.” Games where my character gets to die on my terms are always fun.
Friday afternoon I ran a playtest of Topia Outpost Prime, my PtbA game-in-development inspired by ’90s space station TV shows. Kat, Michele, Jeff, Bobbi, and Jolene were very generous with their time, insight, and enthusiasm in helping me to see the strong and weak points of my current project. I’m glad the game didn’t crash and burn. It may not yet be at escape velocity, I think that it’s on a good path to break orbit in the future.
Friday evening, Kat ran her game “Courting Faerie” for Kade and I. It’s a scenario she wrote for Brennan’s forthcoming game The Art of Power that’s centered on both court intrigue about the next queen of Faerie and a family drama about parents and children. The game makes it easy to pick and and play NPCs, so just the three of us were able to offer each other hope of our hearts’ desires, and also stab each other in the back.
Saturday morning, I got to play with Sharon, Vince, and Mendez in a game that’s so early in development I’m not allowed to talk about it. Other than it was a good time and I’m greatful to my fellow players for a fun game.
Saturday afternoon, I played two games of Decaying Orbit with Bill, Jeff, Bobbi, and Michele. It’s a card-driven storytelling game, clearly influenced by For the Queen, about a spaceship plunging into a star. It was an enjoyable way to pass a few hours, but I’m sure I would have had fun playing anything with that group.
Speaking of great groups, on Saturday night, I ran InSpectres for Andrea, Jeff, Bobbi, and Michele. The game was hilarious as always. Jeff played Vic Ricochet, a hard-boild detective who acted like it was still 1950, speaking his Raymond Chandler-esque narration out loud. Bobbi played the daughter of lion tamers who ran away from the circus to hunt ghosts and whisper to animals. Michele played an older woman who had just been released from a mental hospital for the psychic impressions she got from touching things. Andrea played a former star of the home shopping network and jazzercise instructor with a purse as bottomless as her enthusiasm. Together, they helped three clients with their supernatural problems: A certain hallway in a hospital basement was causing things to disappear, including a corpse; an elephant at the local zoo had woken up as a woolly mammoth, with a saber-toothed cat in the next enclosure and a neaderthal as night watchman; a skycraper downtown was infested with frogs—then flies, locusts, hail and … then our heroes showed up before anymore biblical plagues could rain down.
Sunday morning was good-byes and a quick game of Diceland: Deep White Sea with Kat, Michele, Jeff, Bobbi, and Mary Rose. It was a fun time, but the printing on those little dice seem to have gotten much smaller since I last played a decade ago.
Thanks again to everyone who made this gathering so special.