Catch Your Hare

Concrete Cow happened yesterday, in Milton Keynes. It’s a lovely little convention and went well.

In the morning, I ran Fear Itself, which went superbly. The system does one thing very well: mysteries, which the players uncover piece by piece. I’ll review it on RPG.NET and I’m hoping to run it again at Furnace.

In the afternoon, I playtested Graham Spearing’s game-in-development, WordPlay. It’s like HeroQuest, with some interesting tweaks. The setting was Middle Earth, at the time of the Silmarillion: we alternated between speaking in epic voices (”Give us your counsel, O King!”); making fun of our epic voices (”I am desirous of one of your Tic-Tacs”); and using modernisms for silliness. Good fun, although I hope our irreverence wasn’t annoying, and I think it gave Graham using feedback.

I playtested Blackguard, quickly, which went usefully badly. I need to tweak some stuff.

In the evening, we played Stewart Wilson’s Aeternal Legends. It was moderately fun, but I don’t think the scenario showed the system off well: it was a gradually-revealed-mystery scenario, and, in fact, made me realise how well Fear Itself handles these.

(I must admit, I’d had quite a bit of wine by the end of Aeternal Legends, so my memory may be addled).

On the train home, I read The Unremitting Book Of Horror, a companion book to Fear Itself. I’m not easily shaken, but, that night, the darkness of our house was creepy, and I feared mummified Victorian surgeons were hiding in the bathroom.