Concrete Cow
Concrete Cow was yesterday in Milton Keynes. It’s always a pleasure to attend: a little convention, focussed just on playing games, in a community centre.
The morning was Nick’s Burning Wheel game. The scenario, The Gift, worked well, with pregenerated characters designed to be at each other’s throats. Fun stuff. Burning Wheel was interesting enough that I’d like to play again. One rather not-fun aspect was that, at one point, I was injured, and got a two-die penalty for the rest of the scenario, making me rather ineffectual. Otherwise, fun. At one point, Phil Masters asked us to be quiet, which must have meant we were enjoying ourselves.
In the afternoon, Scott’s Dead of Night scenario, Project Lazarus. An eclectic and large group of players. Scott intended this, I gather, as a deeply personal horror game about the dead returning to their families. Instead, it became about a zombie A-Team taking out a military base. This was fun too. Afterwards, I bought a spare copy of Dead of Night from Scott, so I’ll run it at some point.
The evening session is always quiet at Concrete Cow. I grabbed the nice quiet room at the end and we played my murder mystery game, A Taste For Murder.
It was a great playtest and a superb group of players. The mechanics are pretty solid now: I’ll change little after that playtest. Some rather superb, screwed-up relationships emerged: this game insists on gravitating to incest.
Anyway, a lovely day, incest and all. I’ll be at the next one.
2 comments
Yup, incest – I said so!
Thanks for the kind words on Concrete Cow and thanks for coming along. It’s the gamers and the games that make Concrete Cow a success. The next Concrete Cow is 27 September 2008.
The wounding effects in Burning Wheel are a deliberate feature, commented as such in the rule book. It makes more sense when the game is played as a long-term campaign when characters can have downtime to recover. It also didn’t help that your character failed his health roll: succeeding would have reduced the penalty. It’s all part of getting the full Burning Wheel flavour.