MepaCon Spring 2005: Day 2

The long, brutal game of Risk: Godstorm that kept me up until 5 a.m. also kept me from hitting the 9 a.m. gaming slot at MepaCon, despite the fact that it was for a game I really, really wanted to play: InSpectres. Unfortunately, while chasing ghosts around for fun and profit is appealing, sleeping was even more so.

When I finally crawled out of bed around 10 a.m., with four hours of snore-punctuated (thanks Bob!) sleep, I was awake enough to handle the three games I was scheduled to run. After a quick run to Dunkin Donuts for breakfast, I headed to the vendor room, which was small, but packed, and picked up some very weird looking dice which my players will probably be mocking until my dying day. At least until the d20 stars rolling crits … and then they’ll still mock it, but fear it to. Fear it I say!

Escape Pods Are For Sissies

My afternoon and evening was consumed by slots I was running at the con. First up were back-to-back sessions of Mongoose Publishing’s Babylon 5: A Call to Arms miniature starship game. They were straightforward, get-to-know-the-rules type scenarios, and I think it’s safe to say my players had a lot of fun destroying each others starships. Next time though, I think I’ll do something a little more creative than simple “blow stuff up” scenarios.

The session inspired a bunch of questions about the A Call to Arms rules, and thanks to the hotel’s WiFi access I was able to post questions to Mongoose’s online forums immediately. The turn around on the answers wasn’t quite so quick, but I wasn’t really expecting anyone to get back to me in the four hours that I was running my sessions.

Winning Scenarios

The dinner break saw James’s uncanny luck field in full effect (of the 10 or so raffle tickets he held for Lance and I, half of them were called), yielding Lance a dual-stated Arkham source book for Call of Cthulhu, a collection of Lovecraftian short fiction, and a brand-ew Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide and me a Stormbringer role-playing game (Stormbringer being the name of Chaosim’s Elric RPG).

The well-attended game auction had a huge amount of stuff up for bid, which may have contributed to lower-than-normal bids on a lot of the items. The auction was pretty amusing: lots of catcalling between gamers, running jokes from long-time conventioneers, and just a general air of relaxed fun.

Praise Yog and Pass the Ammo!

Rounding out the night was a game of The Hills Rise Wild by Pagan Press. The session was made up entirely of my own campaign members (namely Lance and Bob) which was fine — we hadn’t played THRW in years, and it was great to plunge back into the hillbilly madness.

We played the Marsh, Whatley and DeGhoul clans as they battled their way across a backwoods countryside searching for the lost Great Seal to open the magically sealed Whatley Mansion, find the Necronomicon, and summon their Dark God. Bob’s unnatural luck held throughout the game, allowing him to find both the Great Seal and the Hidden Whatley Seal, either of which would allow him to enter the mansion. Lance and I put up heavy resistance, trying to keep him from the building, but Bob laid waste to our forces; by the end of the game our factions were destroyed, and he still had five out of his six characters.

The game ended around midnight, and while I’d planned on playing James’s Crypt of the Devil-Lich, I decided to sleep instead; gaming would have been great, but crashing into a bridge because I was too tired to think straight driving home on Sunday.

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