At 4 I left to go watch “Beyond the Barrier Peaks,” with someone’s idea of a sequel to classic module S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but I wasn’t too impressed and decided I’d rather go back and watch Allen’s game more. Allen’s group completed the adventure and appeared to have a great time. I observed that Allen doesn’t use a DM’s screen, and takes notes directly in his printout of the module, the way I do nowadays too. I stuck around long enough that I was asked to take their group photo at the end.
By 5, I was getting tired of just watching. I wanted to have as much fun as Allen’s group! Also, the next events on my schedule to observe were Cavaliers & Roundheads on the big sand table, Divine Right on a big board, and War of the Ring -- and I had already walked past all of them before returning to Allen’s group (I got to see Michael Mornard and Theron Kuntz -- Kuntz, I believe, for the first time -- at C&R). The next game on my schedule was “White Plume Mountain Again,” so I decided to ask if I could join that game -- but, again, there was no sign of DM or players at that table! I did get to see Harold Johnson taking down props at a table nearby, though, and said hi.
I saw down at “Neptune’s Emerald,” which would have been my first experience playing Mercs, Spies, and Private Eyes, but the fourth player showed up at last and I had to vacate her seat.
I thought I lucked out when I stopped by “DM Charlie’s The Sentinel” and found “DM Charlie” had just started running that classic UK TSR module. I was invited to play and I was in my first game! …Unfortunately.
I should have taken note sooner that not a single other person at the table was masked. Masking was “required” at the convention, but maybe only 40% of the guests were masked, many of the “celebrity guests” were not masked, and there was zero enforcement going on.
Worse, all the other players were from the same family -- two fathers and two young children. The boy next to me was about nine and, though he talked a mile a minute, somehow managed to slow our game to a snail’s pace by constantly switching his intentions. He would make bad decisions and the DM, not wanting to upset anyone, allowed for no bad consequences. We got through about four pages of the module in three hours and I was glad to excuse myself for another game at 8.
Before 8, I stopped to get some dinner, as I was quite hungry again. I finally bought one of the convention burgers, and regretted it as soon as I bit into it. It was really rare inside, far redder than I normally feel comfortable eating meat. I showed it to the salesman and he was apologetic. He even cut into a second burger, perhaps planning on replacing a portion of the burger I had already eaten, but the next burger was just the same. I’d already spent $6 on that half-raw patty, so I forced it down unpleasantly. Then I ran into Anna Meyer, who maybe wanted to talk Greyhawk, or invite me with her to the wedding she was heading to, but all I could talk about was how awful that burger was.
I wasn’t feeling very good about the last three hours when I headed back into the Evergreen room, looking to watch or perchance play “Jakala City of the Dead,” but before I found that table I passed Paul Stormberg running “Lost Crypts of the Fire Opal.” Paul called out to me and invited me to play, perhaps remembering how I had missed out on “Sunken City” that morning. It was a generous gesture, but Paul was already two hours into the scenario and had nine players around his tables. I sat at the neighboring table, took on an unused cleric (that the party did seem to need quite a bit), and struggled to remind Paul to look my way as I held up written intentions for my character on sheets of paper. I made a lot of useful suggestions, but most of the players couldn’t hear me so I had to just wait for them to come up with the ideas on their own.
Paul, for his part, seemed a little miffed with us that we weren’t figuring out a puzzle involving a magic statue and was distracted by a phone call he had to go take. He waited for players to shout out their intentions instead of going all around the table and was forgetful, like me, about who’s turn it was in a combat round. Still, he commanded the group’s attention and had well-prepared material. My favorite bit was his new monster (I assume he made it up), the gnarly ghoul, that withered limbs instead of paralyzing. It was not an unpleasant way to end the evening, my first day back at GaryCon, and the only day I would spend there in person. I had to bow out and thanked everyone at 10:30 so I could start the long drive home…
Day 2 began at 8 am when I got up and started prepping, at home, for Day 2 of GaryCon and my first day of virtual GaryCon. I was running Monsters!Monsters! at 10 and, while I didn’t tell my players, this was only the second time I’d ever run the venerable Tunnels & Trolls variant and I was nervous.
The idea for the scenario had come to me quickly when I was first planning for GaryCon this year and thinking of different ways of running one of my favorite classic modules, T1 The Village of Hommlet. This time, the players would be the monsters, come from the moathouse to attack the village. The idea had filled all eight player slots initially, but one person bailed.
Monsters!Monsters! was not a well-balanced system, and this showed early on, despite my giving the werebear and the rock monster and the ghost character-based weaknesses. The goblin and the orc were continually overshadowed in the scenario, but it was the slime mutant, squarely in the middle, who got killed early.
Even split up into two groups, they wreaked havoc on the village, burning almost half of it to the ground and killing Jaroo Ashstaff after a tough fight. They had earlier learned who the Temple of Elemental Evil agent in the village was and the players sicced Lareth the Beautiful on him for a final battle that I was not prepared for, so it took place largely off-screen, with just one big melee round determining who escaped and who died in the end.
The players all said they had a good time. I haven’t heard from any of them since, which is too bad, as there were several really good players among them I’d like to play with again.
Virtual events I was interested in were so rare this year that I only had one slot as a player, and that wasn’t until 6 pm. I spent all day in my favorite pajamas, even on Zoom call, just because I could.
At 6, I played “Museum at the End of Time,” a Mutant Crawl Classics scenario. I had played Dungeon Crawl Classics three times before, but this was my first time playing this Gamma World-like variant. We had only four players after a couple had bailed on him too. And we hit technical issues right away. Our GM was not aware that Google Meet had a one-hour time limit until we were about to hit it. He invited us quickly to another gaming site that reminded me of Habbo Hotel (I had misremembered it at the time as Club Penguin and - holy cow, I just looked it up and Habbo Hotel is still around!).
Most people seem to play ____ Crawl Classics for the “0 level funnel” mechanic of the game, but I seem to be the wrong type of player for that. When I have four weak characters, I don’t get more reckless with them, I play even more cautiously, to keep them all safe. I lost one and the other three saw several more character die. Two hours into the scenario we had already secured enough hi-tech items from the museum to, technically, accomplish our mission, so the rest of the two hours were supposed to be us going around being greedy and trying out hi-tech things that could kill us.
And then the weirdest thing ever happened during the game. I went downstairs because I heard a commotion down there and found the rest of the family was tracking the movement of a wild animal in the ceiling! Something, either a large rat or maybe an opossum, had borrowed into the heating ducts from the garage and then got lost and frantic in the ducts, so it was running all over the place in the ceiling. Whatever it was, it was heavy -- when it ran over the vents you could see the vents move under its weight. After a while of this, the critter managed to burst out of the duct work and slide down into a wall cavity and went silent. As of this writing, I still don’t know if it got stuck motionless in the wall and will die in there, or if it somehow slide down underneath the house and escaped.
Well, as you can imagine, it was really hard to get into character after that. That rat (or opossum) had been scarier than anything in the game! Worse, there was a new technical issue where I could only see and hear three of the four other people at a time. I stuck around until the end, but wasn’t really playing for most of the rest of the session.
Would Day 3 be better? I hoped so, and it all rested on my one and only event for Day 3. From noon to 5, I was running OD&D: Castle Greyhawk! At one time I had filled up with eight players, but a whopping three had bailed on me. Five people were coming to Zoom to play in the version of Castle Greyhawk I run in my ongoing home campaign...
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