My GaryCon Photo Blog

So I’ve been gone to GaryCon and visiting family. I’d like to share with you my experience at GaryCon.

I’m on the left. The other guys are Gary and Mike. It was through their constant praising of the GaryCon experience that I decided to plunge ahead and join this group.

Here we’re standing in line on Wednesday. Though there were a couple thousand people ahead of us in line to check in our spirits were high thanks to the vendors selling beer while we waited.

After check in we got free pizza and beer and played Mike’s D&D-themed drinking game, Beer-Halla. Mike came from behind to win!

The three of us chose to run an 18-hour D&D event on Thursday. Three DMs. 16 players. Each table rotates between DMs every three hours. They return to their initial DM for a finale event, This was a test of fortitude for sure, going from 9am to midnight.

They placed us in the Chalet. It isolated us from the Con, but that worked out, allowing us to offer a wonderful campaign experience to our players. Plus, we served Mike’s wonderful homebrew beer on tap, which kept us going.

Before going to the con, I picked up a copy of Puzzles and Traps for Gamemasters. In it there’s a trap where there’s a hallway with a foot of mud throughout it. Under the mud are bear traps. Trigger a bear trap, all the torches fall into the mud, I forgot to mention the whole hall smells like methane. The room goes up in a fireball.

My players got past the trap and decided to use it against the session villain, a beholder named Hy’lex. The Priestess Asha had been captured by the beholder’s minions and was to be forced to wed the beholder. She stood at the end of the trapped corridor and screamed that she was getting out of this place, drawing the beholder and its spectator friends to rush into the hall, where the party was positioned to trigger the trap and roast the beholder.

The priestess had druidic powers and preferred to turn into an owlbear, as can be seen in the picture.

The third group chose to take on the beholder in its lair. There was an illusionist on a divan, made to look like Priestess Asha, making the party realize they might not have rescued the correct Priestess.

Mike is a master of Dwarven Forge. He hunts stores for little bits he incorporates into his builds as details for the setting. This was one of his builds.

Before the finale the groups got to level up to Level 9. For my finale I pitted the group against two Adult Void Dragons from Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts. Why two dragons? The party was over 5th level. They could banish and polymorph. Easily one BBEG could be taken out. I needed a second monster for the group to fight. Along the way to the dragon’s lair they found a wasteland filled with portals. Sucked into the Underdark through a portal was a celestial. She wanted the group to kill the dragon so she could return to her own plane. The group asked her to join them in the fight, not knowing she wasn’t a celestial but in fact a balor.

Also, the group came upon a Temple of Lolth desecrated by mind flayers. They needed to perform a ritual requiring two rolls to re-sanctify the temple. The person with the least total disappointed Lolth, who turned her into a drider. The drider retained most of their original abilities and kept their personality for the duration of the event. Here is the drider versus dragon.

So, as a suprirse to me, the cleric summoned a celestial of his own to join the fight. She appeared, looked at the celestial-balor and asked upset why the group was associating with “that thing.”

The balor dropped the illusion and joined the fight, taking on the dragons first (to great effect) and then turning on the party, which was a greater challenge.

I was up early for a 9am Conan game. I ran “Ghoul River” which segued into the second adventure, “Owl in the City.” For my Conan games I provide a pregen from each of the dozen splat books released, designed to represent Conan at different stages of his career. There’s everything from barbarian to knight to oracle.

One player chose Shamura, the Zamoran thief. She had a background where the underbelly of the city was hunting her in Zamora. Sure enough, the adventure drew her to the Maul in Zamora. Her contact betrayed her, and 20 thieves descended on the brothel she had met her contact at, to apprehend her. Zamora went to the rooftop while her friends defended her in the street. She saw her contact whom had betrayed her on the opposite roof. She leapt across and battled her nemesis. They fell through the rooftop. The nemesis dropped her blade and then fell effortlessly onto the bartop and headed for the exit. Zamora dropped and managed to tackle her nemesis, capturing her enemy. What a game!

Saturday morning I prepared to run my six-hour-long Star Trek Adventures game. Why six hours? I’d been running this adventure, “Every Day is a Winding Hyperspace Lane” and felt like something was wrong with the adventure. It felt like it lacked a third act. The original adventure includes the crew racing Klingons and Ferengi to go satellite to satellite which broadcast musical-based clues to a moon base where Wyatt Crow, a geneticist gone missing, has 100 clones of his mother Sheryl Crow, who he wants to send on tour to make the galaxy happy (and make money).

I added a third act where several of the Sheryls had been tampered with my the clone of Keith Richards, making them augmented and Manchurian Candidate type of characters. On Risa, they took over the Orion Syndicate leaders’ skybox and beamed them onto their flagship. They declared themselves the new leaders of the Syndicate and took off into space. They went to the Badlands to give stolen Federation ships to the Maquis.

In my game the player of Dr Crusher, while on the moon base with the clones, made a point to study the genetics of each clone. She found the alteration. Tasha Yar found security footage of Keith Richards showing up, having a toast with Wyatt, then drugging Wyatt so he passed out. Then, he altered the clones’ genetics.

So, part of my third act came out in the second act, making the third act shorter and more direct as the crew already had most of the information they needed to figure out what had happened with the rogue Sheryls.

The players used their intimate knowledge of the Next Generation characters to inform their roleplaying choices. They even brought in characters the players hadn’t chosen, including Worf and Deanna Troi, for critical moments of roleplaying and for mechanical advantages.

The game ran closer to five hours than six but was a big hit.

Mike and I got to play together Saturday night in a Deadlands game. To our joy, it was an original adventure. There was a great mechanic where we were going car to car on a haunted train. Each car we passed into, the Marshal had us draw a card. The card determined the content of the car. This allows for replayability of the module. The Marshal said he’d been talking with Shane Hensley of Pinnacle and thought he was close to getting Pinnacle to publish his adventure. I wish him well.

It was a good game. Even though I was playing a muckraker with little combat abilities, I survived and thrived.

I’m already thinking of what I’m going to do next year. Mike, George and I are going to do a follow-up to our Underdark game, but certainly not 18 hours worth. I want to do an 8-hour long One Ring game. One Ring deserves some love from an experienced Loremaster.