Sentinels Of The Multiverse: Campaign Game

Another one of those games that I've blogged about on here on a few occasions is Sentinels.  Seeing that someone was running a 3-part scenario driven game of this at Gen Con I knew that I had to play in it.

The linkage between the scenarios was light so that it didn't get 2 prescriptive based on results.  Each scenario had 2 objectives - a primary and a secondary.  It was the successful completion of these objectives that determined specific things for the following scenario.

The villains we played against were -

The Ennead : I've never played against these guys before and DAMN! are they a tough nut to crack.  Unless you're able to nullify their stacking abilities or deal out some serious damage then you're not going to get very far against them.  Which is about as far as we got...  It wasn't a loss but it wasn't much of a victory either!

Then it was Ambuscade : Far simpler to combat than The Ennead (as there's just the one of him!) but he's really tough. Success awaited us in this game though and we managed to take him down although he did take out 2 of us in the process - including Chrono Ranger who I'd been playing.

And finally it was Gloom Weaver.  In this game I'd changed character to Fanatic and boy was she uber effective against him. We didn't defeat him in the time allocated but we did complete the secondary objective.

All in all it was a fun way to play the game and having the clock ticking really added to the play style of the group. After all none of us knew each other before we started to play.

Might look to do something similar for future times we play Sentinels!

Atomic Robo RPG At Gen Con!

So as you may have gathered from previous posts I'm a bit of an Atomic Robo fanboy.

Perhaps you can imagine my fanboyness reaching exponential levels when +Liz Mackie and I played in a game of Atomic Robo run by +Mike Olson who only went and wrote the game!

Ok so I think I actually played it kinda cool and didn't have any fanboy moments but I'll let others judge me on that!

So the game - "Bring Me The Head Of Doctor Dinosaur" had the description of "Twelve years ago, a lunatic calling himself Dr. Dinosaur murdered everyone you know. And to make matters worse, he's your brother. Majestic 12 wants to study him. Tesladyne wants to bring him to justice. But you? You just want revenge."

I played Fang - An almost human with lizard abilities and the character sheet is below.

Our mission was simple enough and that was to find and kill Doctor Dinosaur.
This obviously wasn't that easy to achieve but along the way we encountered Robo, Jenkins, Majestic 12 and many other characters from the comic books which really helped to bring it to life. My companions in the game were
Ghost - A Lemur "ninja" with a thing for knives. Played by +Liz Mackie
Tank - A bipedal Triceratops who hit REALLY HARD.
Professor - An octopus who was supremely intelligent especially in relation to Chaos Theory.

Needless to say we managed to catch the crazy one and managed to put him in an early grave.

Afterwards Mike signed both Liz and I's copies of the game and we had a good chat about stuff.  Liz and Mike are looking to synchronise schedules to try and get something recorded for +NearlyEnoughDice too which would be awesome.

Funniest out of game moment was when Mike realised who we were - "Hey, wait you're David Wright!" and the girl next to me (name forgotten apologies but you were playing The Professor) turned and asked if I was famous.  I politely said No and explained how I'd got in touch with Mike prior to the convention.

Lots of fun had and now I need to start thinking about running it...

Gen Con 2014 - 3 Key Lessons Learned

Going to something like Gen Con is not a small undertaking when you live in the UK.

For me it involved travelling 3,765 miles (give or take a few miles) each way.  All of that went fine. Flights etc were without problem, we had enough time in between connecting flights to relax and take our time without the gap being tooooo long. Apartment we chose was also completely fine with a few niggles, which is where the 1st lesson comes from.

1st Lesson - Location Does Matter.
Despite being ONLY a 15 minute walk away the apartment felt too far away at times.  Not just when I was carrying 327 bags of stuff but also just the general tooing and froing between the venue and the apartment.  It was just too far away that it made a quick bag drop too time consuming and so whenever we did anything like that it invariably resulted in us staying at the apartment.
Some of that was down to general tiredness but as strange as it sounds, being just 10 minutes closer or being in one of the adjoined (via skywalk) hotels would have made a lot of difference and made it more likely that we'd be gaming later into the night.

That aside we all managed to stick to the minimum 3 hours sleep, 2 meals and 1 shower per day rule shared by those awesome UnderGophers at Under Discussion.  Although on the Thursday I had to have 2 showers as I was sweating buckets carrying around all of my purchases.  Picking up my purchases was something I managed to do very very easily thanks to having early access to the hall what with being press and all that.  It did mean that both Liz and I had to be there super early on the Thursday to make sure we were amongst the first 100 press passers but that was easy enough.

2nd Lesson - Press Pass Was Worth It
Ok so I was always going to write a number of things about Gen Con in the blog but getting the Press Pass enabled a number of things.
1) Attendance of Trade Day Seminars - Ok so these were a bit hit & miss or possibly closer to miss & miss in the main but what I learned from them both from a content and lack of content perspective was useful.  I'll have a few posts about the Seminars I attended in due course.
2) Press Room - I really didn't use this for much of anything other than a "rest point". Free water / juice was enough to get me to use the room and of course the free Wi-Fi that was offered to the press was useful although I didn't really use it that much.
3) Early Access to Exhibit Hall - Definitely the biggest benefit.  1 hour before the masses entered the hall meant that I got the majority of my shopping done quickly. It may have been a bit frantic in places but that early access was worth it and I'd definitely do it again.

As I posted in the run up to Gen Con I had a pretty packed schedule.  What I didn't appreciate fully was the distance between all of the things I wanted to do and similarly my level of desire to actually do those things instead of these other things would diminish.  Don't get me wrong, it's not like I wasn't having fun or anything just that the schedule became a bit more erm fluid once I got there and other than some specific games (posts to follow) and a couple of seminars I might have been better off just buying a bunch of generics and randomly playing stuff.

3rd Lesson - Don't Pack Your Schedule
As I've said above this was more a question of over planning rather than being spontaneous.  If I was ever to go to Gen Con again (not next year but sometime) then I'd more than likely want to keep an abundance of space other than some MUST do events.  Keeping things fluid let's you see more of the convention itself.  Sure you might miss out on some really cool stuff but at the same time you might discover some other REALLY COOL STUFF!

There are other lessons that I learned whilst being at Gen Con but these 3 are probably the stand out ones for me.  If there was a 4th then it would be - Don't try to eat 24 donuts and drink 3 litres of coffee in 1 day.  Fortunately I learned that one BEFORE I tried it.