GothCon
This should have been written a couple of weeks ago, but life and a general knack for living life in a worse manner than necessary led me here. But I'm not here to purge myself, I'm here to talk about games.
Since this life is about doing little and using the majority of the time to digest and talk about what you actually did, Jonas has already written about How we survived GothCon. Five of us went there and two returned without dying even a bit, which is a quite astonishing result after the typical Swedish horror friform session of the last night.
For us five this years GothCon was really about RPG.
Fem och slottsmysteriet (Five and the castle mystery) was the third part of three in a series of rpg-convention adventures created for Västmark. I have earlier gamemastered the first adventure in the series - Faller snö växer sten - with a group that to a very large extent was the same as this time (only now I was a player) and must say that we found that one a bit problematic. Strange enough this scenario had some of the same faults.
But first to the good stuff. We all enjoyed playing it, most due to nicely created characters. They have without any doubt been the best part in both our Västmark-encounters. So good actually that Linnéa decided to buy the book (Västmark version 3, version 2 can be found free on the net). The cast is of a quite unusal kind for people used to american rpg:s. Four young girls and one boy were the adventurers this time. In the first episode only the four girls were present. A lot of roleplaying goodness was made between these, according to me.
But the scenario wasn't as good. We arrived at a castle, carrying a wounded knight. The lot living at the castle were a strange bunch indeed and as time went by you realized with an increasing certainty that a lot of things were wrong with our hosts. The worst thing in the old scenario - Faller snö... - was inability to interact with other characters, since they were all made stupid by a curse. A bit of the same problem was found this time, but as I understood it afterwards this partly was due to our gamemaster, who cut out some of the communication parts.
At the moment I'm not much into roleplaying with any kind of dice and I haven't accepted fantasy as an acceptable form of mind food during this decade. For being a game containing fantasy as well as dice it's really good and has quite nicely thematic mechanics. But it contains dice and fantasy, so it is definitely disqualified from my main brain food.
Bli snygg eller rappa på svenska (Get beautiful or rap in Swedish) was a scenario from the extremely strange Swedish countryside humoresque RPG Svenil. Some of us played a very successful scenario led by the main creator of the game two years ago at GothCon. Our GM this year was a much younger person, but as good. Actually he was very enthusing and energetic and without him we hadn't been able to find that typical Swedish Svenil atmosphere. Still, I must say I couldn't really get into the game. I can't really explain why, I guess I had some problems with my character.
Guzman is a immigrant rapper from the Swedish suburbs. Only that he is born not in the suburbs and his parents are actually from the Swedish middle class. He is also a quite bad rapper, but will now try to make money through a docu soap, where a fat Finnish man will be turned into a hardcore rapper.
There were a lot of fun stuff, but for me it was a bit over shadowed by the fact that I struggled with my character.
Snövit tomhet (Snow white emptyness) was this years friform scenario. I'm quite sure that these have decreased in availability during the last years and that is really a shame. This one was a traditional horror game with an expected everyone-dies-or-get-insane ending. Not very new, but a good solid game, even if I have a bit of a problem with this obsession about having scenarios being deterministic towards the death of all characters.
But it was definitely my favourite game of the three scenarios played. Me, Kristoffer, Anna, and Linnéa played men at 45 years of age special forces soldiers doing a repetition exercise in the Swedish military led by a very young girl, played by Jonas. To make things worse we got real ammo, real grenades and real everything. To make things even worse my character was a very unpleasent lawyer, working for Swedish Hells Angels and having a bad history of pedophilia. Why not throw us back to the 15:th century also.
A lot of fun it was. I have a lot of stuff to write, but that will have to wait until when it's not 2 in the morning.
Since this life is about doing little and using the majority of the time to digest and talk about what you actually did, Jonas has already written about How we survived GothCon. Five of us went there and two returned without dying even a bit, which is a quite astonishing result after the typical Swedish horror friform session of the last night.
For us five this years GothCon was really about RPG.
Fem och slottsmysteriet (Five and the castle mystery) was the third part of three in a series of rpg-convention adventures created for Västmark. I have earlier gamemastered the first adventure in the series - Faller snö växer sten - with a group that to a very large extent was the same as this time (only now I was a player) and must say that we found that one a bit problematic. Strange enough this scenario had some of the same faults.
But first to the good stuff. We all enjoyed playing it, most due to nicely created characters. They have without any doubt been the best part in both our Västmark-encounters. So good actually that Linnéa decided to buy the book (Västmark version 3, version 2 can be found free on the net). The cast is of a quite unusal kind for people used to american rpg:s. Four young girls and one boy were the adventurers this time. In the first episode only the four girls were present. A lot of roleplaying goodness was made between these, according to me.
But the scenario wasn't as good. We arrived at a castle, carrying a wounded knight. The lot living at the castle were a strange bunch indeed and as time went by you realized with an increasing certainty that a lot of things were wrong with our hosts. The worst thing in the old scenario - Faller snö... - was inability to interact with other characters, since they were all made stupid by a curse. A bit of the same problem was found this time, but as I understood it afterwards this partly was due to our gamemaster, who cut out some of the communication parts.
At the moment I'm not much into roleplaying with any kind of dice and I haven't accepted fantasy as an acceptable form of mind food during this decade. For being a game containing fantasy as well as dice it's really good and has quite nicely thematic mechanics. But it contains dice and fantasy, so it is definitely disqualified from my main brain food.
Bli snygg eller rappa på svenska (Get beautiful or rap in Swedish) was a scenario from the extremely strange Swedish countryside humoresque RPG Svenil. Some of us played a very successful scenario led by the main creator of the game two years ago at GothCon. Our GM this year was a much younger person, but as good. Actually he was very enthusing and energetic and without him we hadn't been able to find that typical Swedish Svenil atmosphere. Still, I must say I couldn't really get into the game. I can't really explain why, I guess I had some problems with my character.
Guzman is a immigrant rapper from the Swedish suburbs. Only that he is born not in the suburbs and his parents are actually from the Swedish middle class. He is also a quite bad rapper, but will now try to make money through a docu soap, where a fat Finnish man will be turned into a hardcore rapper.
There were a lot of fun stuff, but for me it was a bit over shadowed by the fact that I struggled with my character.
Snövit tomhet (Snow white emptyness) was this years friform scenario. I'm quite sure that these have decreased in availability during the last years and that is really a shame. This one was a traditional horror game with an expected everyone-dies-or-get-insane ending. Not very new, but a good solid game, even if I have a bit of a problem with this obsession about having scenarios being deterministic towards the death of all characters.
But it was definitely my favourite game of the three scenarios played. Me, Kristoffer, Anna, and Linnéa played men at 45 years of age special forces soldiers doing a repetition exercise in the Swedish military led by a very young girl, played by Jonas. To make things worse we got real ammo, real grenades and real everything. To make things even worse my character was a very unpleasent lawyer, working for Swedish Hells Angels and having a bad history of pedophilia. Why not throw us back to the 15:th century also.
A lot of fun it was. I have a lot of stuff to write, but that will have to wait until when it's not 2 in the morning.
posted by Sven Holmström at 3:15 pm
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