The Blackrazor Motor Pool was forced into action on Day 2 of NukemCon, as car troubles harried our otherwise excellent day of gaming.
It started with Bill’s car; when we went to get the third television out for our Xbox network, he caught a glimpse of something gleaming in his tire. Yes, in his tire. It turned out to be a screw embedded in the rubber, and rather than risk the tire exploding on his’s trip back to Delaware, Bill decided to get the tire fixed. That necessitated a short trip to Phillipsburg, where we dropped off his car to be repaired and returned to Easton.
We were only back a few minutes when my wife Sue called — the Jeep Cherokee wouldn’t start and she was stuck at the bank. Lance and I jumped in the Wrangler, and went to see if we could fix it (ok, to see if Lance can see it. Once there, Lance toyed around with the car, finally realizing that the car wasn’t “clicking” into park correctly, and thus, couldn’t start. After jamming it properly into park, the car and started and we were able to get home.
Once back, Lance and I finished setting up the Xbox network: 3 Xboxes with three televisions scattered over two rooms. With the network completed, gaming began in earnest. Half the group headed upstairs to play Jon’s Conan d20 adventure, while Lance, Bob and I launched into a huge Halo fragfest on the Xboxes.
Conan d20 went well — by the end of the game the PCs had subdued and trained a dire sabertooth tiger, which they used as a mount (but not before it nearly destroyed their wagon when they tried to hook it up to the beast untrained).
As for Halo, we started off with a straightforward deathmatch, but then moved onto an excellent, high-tension sniper duel followed up by a “crazy king” scenario in which players tried to control a given area on a map … at least until that area moved somewhere else. We finished that session with a deadly “rockets” duel that Lance utterly dominated. Halo’s multi-player capabilities really impressed us — while it didn’t have TimeSplitter or Perfect Dark’s after-game rankings (best shot, coward, etc.) or any programmable bots, the maps were challenging and there were an impressive assortment of multi-player options.
After Halo, with Conan d20 continuing, we played Hunters and Gathers of Carrasone. Sue joined us for that board game, in whcih players take on the roll of prehistoric humans trying to survive in a barbaric land. It proved to be a very entertaining and strategic game — not quite as challenging as Settlers of Catan, but still good in its own right.
For lunch, we followed a GenCon tradition and went out to eat. There’s no Rock Bottom Brewery in the Lehigh Valley — and thus no beer, titan toothpicks and firepepper steaks — so we had to make do with mexican at Don Pablos.
After Don Pablos we returned home and broke out Munchkin, with its two expansions, “Unnatural Axe” and “Clerical Errors”. It was the first time we’d tried “Clerical Errors” and it proved to be just as funny as the earlier releases. Our favorite addition was probalby the new “gnome” race, whose special ability allows players to summon illusionary monsters from their hands to fight for them.
With Munchkin done, it was clear that we weren’t going to have enough players for the Delta Green adventure I’d planned to run. So instead of that Call of Cthulhu scenario, we launched into part 2 of the Dungeons & Dragons adventure. In it, we finally caught up with the forces of Heironeous and learned more about the nature of the threat to the realm. We also received our charge: to prevent the forces of Hextor from securing their god’s flail, which had fallen to earth as a fiery comet in the previous adventure. That adventure took us until just past midnight, when we decided to break and start again in the morning.
Nuke(m)Con 2004: The Schedule | NukemCon: Day 1 | NukemCon: Day 2 | NukemCon: Day 3 | NukemCon: Afterthoughts