Catch Your Hare

I woke up this morning feeling depressed, exhausted and slightly dirty: as though I’d had a row with someone while drunk and woke feeling the emotional aftereffects, before remembering the argument.

It took me ages to realise the source. It was that Shadow of Yesterday game. I hadn’t realised it had affected me so much.

Anyway. Up, without having had enough sleep, and to Furnace. I was down to run Fear Itself in the afternoon and had brought various Gumshoe books – Fear Itself, Esoterrorists, The Book Of Unremitting Artwork – to sell if the game went well. Andrew and Iain kindly offered to display them on the stall.

I’d signed up for Keary’s Cthulhu game, which proved very entertaining: a slow, atmospheric build, which I love. He stalked around the table as we sat. A lovely little game, although I screwed up the timing, and, thinking that my Fear Itself game started at 1.30pm, requested to leave at 1pm. Damn. And just as we were amputating an arm from an unwilling victim.

For Fear Itself, we were in the Armoury, not my favourite room: it feels rather energy-sapping, somehow. (That’s right, Graham, blame the room.)

The game went well, but, as with Lacuna, didn’t hit the ball out of the park, as I’ve seen before. Nice group, low energy. Still, it was Sunday afternoon, perhaps to be expected.

Afterwards, I returned to the Collective Endeavour stall, where all the Gumshoe books but one had sold. I persuaded Iain McAllister to buy this, on the completely spurious grounds that, since he hated the system, he should buy the book to analyse why he hates it.

All in all, a lovely little con, with very pleasant people, and nice to see Andrew Kenrick there, too. There was a superb choice of games, with indie games mixed in with old favourites.

For me, to be honest, the gaming didn’t quite take off, but that’s the luck of the draw. My twin highlights were running Lacuna and playing Keary’s Cthulhu thing. I still feel vaguely violated by the Shadow Of Yesterday game. It’ll pass but, gosh, what an odd experience. I can’t remember the last time I was so deeply affected by a game.

Back in London now. Probably bedtime.

I’m staying with Andrew Kenrick, in Nottinghamshire, and we’re commuting to Furnace. Furnace is a small, rather lovely, convention in Sheffield. So here I am typing, at half past midnight, and Andrew has advised me not to write my journal while tipsy.

Oh well.

So, I’ve had a good day. The convention’s nice, the people are nice, the location is fantastic. It’s a former garrison and many gaming spaces are former cells: tiny little rooms, big enough for six gamers, but bricky enough so the sound doesn’t carry.

First thing, I signed up for Cthulhu Rising (it’s Cthulhu in Space). I was third to sign up but, when I got to the table, there were six others expecting to play. I did the decent thing and found another game.

So, I played RuneQuest.

(Between this paragraph and the last, I have gone downstairs and raided Andrew’s kitchen. It’s a very nice kitchen and has a bloody great granite pestle and mortar, of which I am jealous. Specifically, I have raided his bread and peanut butter. He thought to hide his bread in a non-descript metal container but, oh, no, it didn’t fool me.)

Tim, who ran RuneQuest, was a lovely bloke, struggling against a throat infection, keeping us all involved. The game didn’t quite work for me. Skill checks seemed superfluous: once, we needed to row to shore to progress the adventure, but I failed the check, so we sat in the middle of the sea until someone succeeded. Also, Tim often read long descriptions from the book, which I found it hard to concentrate on. Nice group, but I didn’t think the scenario showed the game off to its full potential.

In the afternoon, I ran Lacuna. I think it went OK. At first, the group seemed quiet, but later began to warm up. I’m getting much more theatrical with Static: I keep track of it by dropping tokens into a glass and, these days, enjoy holding tokens threateningly over the glass. Good feedback from the players, afterwards, but it didn’t really take flight, which I’ve seen Lacuna do before.

In the evening, I played The Shadow Of Yesterday. Now, I’m not sure what went wrong here. Probably, it was me. I was drained after running Lacuna and, to be honest, had had a couple of pints.

But it was curiously unsatisfying. The stakes, often, worked against me: I’d try to steal something, but the stakes against me would be “If you fail, you get injected with poison!”. Which I did, so that, although I didn’t really care about the poison, I had to get rid of it. Then, I tried to steal something else, but the stakes against were “If you fail, you get put on a sacrificial slab!”. And that’s where I ended up.

It’s my fault, of course, for agreeing to the stakes, but it felt curiously deprotagonising. Well, let’s blame the Guinness and the aftershock of Lacuna.

Tomorrow, it’s Call Of Cthulhu and me running Fear Itself. And so to bed.

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.