Last weekend we went to the first Dreamation since February 2020, just a few short weeks before the world shut down. It was great to be back. It was great to see old friends and make new ones. It’s been a difficult few years for the Double Exposure team, but they still always present a great convention.
Games I Played:
Pasión de las Pasiones: Love, the Final Frontier: My Star Trek-inspired setting for the excellent telenovela RPG Pasión de las Pasiones always delivers hilarious melodrama. The setup is that a nigh-omnipotent alien Metron is holding a contest to see who’s worthy of taking their place. Teams of the Federation, Romulans, Klingons, and others vie for position and passionately scheme. This session had a Klingon captain incapable of wearing a shirt, a scheming Betazoid La Dona, and a revelation that the Metron was actually luring the teams here to kill them all and conquer the galaxy. Fun times!
With Great Power: Master Edition: Attack of the Somethings! It’s rare that I get to play a game that I designed, so I definitely jumped at the chance. Charles ran a great session and I really learned a lot from his house rules. It was a fun session where we created a sort of dark steampunk setting with our heroes at the intersection of gothic melodrama (a la Frankenstein) and kinda-gross talking animals (like the TMNT comics). It’s nice to see the game producing fun improvisation.
InSpectres: Bobbi and Michele played an unsuccessful stage magician and petty, New Age-style grifter. Their InSpectres franchise was run out of the back of a New Age shop. They were hired by the city’s parking authority to track down the ghost cars that were filling up all the parking, but never paid a ticket.
Pasión de las Pasiones: Love, the Final Frontier: This session had time travel hijinks which resulted in changed time lines, Vulcans undercover as Romulans, a dead twin being revived because of the alternate timeline replacing their main timeline character, a battle on a cliff during a lightning storm, and a Captain who saved the ship and got demoted to Lt Cmdr. So very, very much laughter.
Fall of Magic: When I heard that Anja had brought her never-used copy of Fall of Magic to the con and wanted to break it in, making sure that happened became one of my goals for the weekend. I’m so happy I got to play in it as well. Our tale involved a coup in Stormguard, the mythic musings of a raven of Ravenshall, the anti-Magus visions of a magically-bound wolf, and a scholar who just wanted to draw pictures rather than write words. We didn’t make it to the end of the map, but we did bring the story threads to a satisfying conclusion.
InSpectres: We had a bigger table, so Bobbi & Michele’s characters from the night before were joined by an astrophysics grad student, a down-on-his-luck engineer and a high school track star. They investigated a warm-up case of glowing floors and weird ooze. Their second case was really fun: A haunted house that was actually haunted. The proprietor couldn’t get his safety certificate from city hall, because every safety inspector kept running from the place in sheer terror. His insurance was about to be cancelled. He needed the InSpectres to remove the real ghosts so he could put in fake ones and charge people money to be scared by them.
Such a good time. So great to be back.