I have submitted my games for Big Bad Con 2017. This year I decided that instead of trying to run a variety of games in the different time slots I would pick one game and run it twice as my scheduled game, and pick two games and offer them twice for Games on Demand. This means half the work of previous years, when I tried to prepare two games for the schedule, and four games for GoD duty, but I will need to put in extra effort to make sure that what I run is worthy of being run twice.
Scheduled Game: League of Extraordinary Felines – 1854
Last year my League of Extraordinary Felines game went well and I wound up running it twice, so I thought I might as well make it official this year. For those who do not recall, League of Extraordinary Felines is a game about super-powered cats who serve Queen Victoria in a somewhat steampunky England. Last year had the League defending England’s first cat show from the Cheshire Cat and a mind-controlled Charles Babbage. This year the League takes on ghoulies, gheisties, and other supernatural threats when the newly opened London Necropolis Railway Company starts experiencing weird paranormal phenomena.
I’ll once again be running this using Mutants and Masterminds 3rd edition. Most people are familiar with D20 systems in general, and it is pretty easy for me to take on the responsibility of telling players what happens for those not familiar with the M&M system specifically. This year I will also remember to bring the plastic standies so I can put all the charts on the table for the players to refer to. Finally, I hope to have actual paper minis this year for all the members of the League and their opponents. Since I can build upon last year, and I already have the characters made, I should have plenty of time to do bells and whistles this year.
(I am also hoping to convince my very talented wife to do a group portrait of the League, but we’ll see).
GoD Duty I: War of Ashes – Fate of Agaptus
Since Mutants and Masterminds is a rather crunchy system, I decided that for GoD duty I wanted to run games that were easy for me. I considered something powered by the apocalypse, but in the end decided to go for Fate games because 1) a lot of people know them, 2) they are easy to teach to people who don’t, 3) Fred Hicks is an awesome individual who has been very kind to Sophie and I, 4) Sophie works for them (nepotism for the win!).
For the first of the two possible games, I selected War of Ashes – Fate of Agaptus. Sophie and I both worked on the game (it was her baby, but I helped a little), I was involved in playtesting it, and we have two boxes of WoA minis kindly donated by Zombiesmith that were used for Sophie’s games to promote the product. All these factors will make it easy for me to write up a scenario, and the minis should make it visually exciting to play. Plus I can just use the main characters from the book (Rustica Bibulus, Iva the Stubborn and her fawn Kuri, Ulf Long-Tooth, and throw in Bura Bibulus Ven Proudheart if I want a fifth character). I even have minis for them all!
GoD Duty II – Ehdrigohr
This Fate game produced by Council of Fools focuses on a dark fantasy setting based loosely on Native American mythology and culture. We have had the game for awhile now, but I have never tried to run it and thought that this would be my opportunity to finally do so.
Ehdrigohr departs in several places from the core Fate system, and has extensive background material to the setting, magic system, etc. As such it is almost certainly the game I will spend the most time on for the convention, both to master the setting (the core book is 346 pages long, and you know that the rules section for Fate isn’t that extensive, so there is a lot of flavor and setting there) to get comfortable with the rules variations, and to come up with interesting characters that work well together (starting with a decision on which of the nine tribes to include as Player Characters and which to exclude – or alternately the decision to include nine pregenerated characters and let players pick). There’s also setting jargon to master.
But it looks like a lot of fun to play and run in, so I am willing to give it a whirl. Particularly since I am saving myself a lot of effort by running the same games twice, I feel like I can afford to tackle something a little bigger and more complex than I usually want to run at a convention.
So there you have it in sum – the games I am going to run at Big Bad Con this year. I hope that they pique the interest of players and attendees, and help provide Big Bad Con with a small amount of the diverse and colorful gaming opportunities for which it is well known.
ED WRITES STUFF (and nonsense) 