GenCon Happenings, anything good? Options

[Eugene]

Anyone go to GenCon and want to share?

How were the Shadowrun adventures? The FanPro seminar? The con itself?

[Lucyfersam]

The tournament was quite good, although it ran a wee bit long on the second and third nights. There was a wonderful air of mystery to the game that was never clearly answered, the players had to decide for themselves what they thought happened and what they thought should be done about it.

The basic plot:
Night 1- All the players are playing clergy who specialize in doing special ops for the Church. They are called in by a medium prominence cardinal, Renzo, to investigate the disappearance of the heir apparent to the Papacy, Cardinal Mateo. After some digging they find that Mateo was drugged and taken to a somewhat seedy hotel, and ritually sacrificed. There is also the dead body of a troll in the room with him, inhabited by a shedim. Scrolls are found on Mateo's body that are marked as part of the Vatican archives reserved for the Pope.

Night 2 - The players are contacted by Belinda (I think that name is right) the head of the Conservative faction within the church, who tells them her assistant found something strange within the archive's sealed for the pope's eyes only (who know's why he was looking there) that could discredit Mateo, then disappeared. Several strange phone calls come, eventually leading to one telling the runners to go to a warehouse. There is an ambush. On the bodies of the attackers there are strange cards, that when the center of them is pressed a number appears, it is the home # of Cardinal Renzo (who hired us). There is also a pocket secretary with a recording from the caller, who is revealed to be the missing assistant.

Night 3 - Listening to the message on the pocket secretary reveals there is some crazy conspiracy going on, and the answers lie in the head of an otaku who was used to steal files from the papal archives. Belinda's assistant is tracked down, he tells us where to find the head (the vault of the Vatican Public Library). At the library, after getting the head, a group of Templars show up, someone else is fighting them (I don't know who the other group was because I was decking the otaku's head at the time). The information in the otaku's head shows the scene of Mateo being taken into the hotel, but shows it twice, both versions absolutely identical except for the people acting, in one it is Templar, in the other it is Belinda's servants. The file about the ritual is also there, the ritual was desinged to extend life and let a shedim through in the process. At this point we decided it was best for the Church to turn in the footage of Belinda's servants committing the crime, weakening the Conservatives as the Enlightened had been weakened by the loss of Mateo.

My current theory on what was really going on: The ritual was to extend the life of the Pope. The Pope made a deal with Belinda to carry out the ritual (it was revealed at some point that Belinda's bodyguard was involved in getting Mateo to the hotel). In exchange for getting his life extended the pope would sacrifice Mateo who was far to liberal for the Conservative's to allow to be the next Pope. This theory is kind of thin, but I can't figure out why Belinda's servants were involved in kidnapping Mateo for a life extension ritual otherwise, as the only figure involved who seems to need it is the Pope.

[the_dunner]

I attended the "What's up with FanPro?" seminar on Saturday afternoon.

I'm afraid I didn't bother taking notes, so this'll be a rough sketch. Maybe somebody else can fill in other materials. There were two guys from FanPro giving the seminar. I'm thinking Rob was one, and the other was the web site guy, but I don't remember for sure.

They covered Shadowrun pretty thoroughly, and touched briefly on both Battletech and Dark Eye. (Very briefly on Dark Eye.)

Mostly, the session gave us a list of what books were new, and what was on the agenda. The only non-book thing that I remember them mentioning were PDF's. The hope is that old books will be released on DrivethruRPG, with DRM in a couple of months. The rough price guess was $10-15 per book.

One interesting proposed item for the PDF list is a possible Map book. The intent being to throw all the maps from the various sourcebooks into one big PDF so that you can just print out individual maps as needed.

Upcoming books that were mentioned, from memory, were:

SOTA:2064 -- They finished writing it, but the printer didn't get it done in time for GenCon.

Wild ??? -- I know it's been talked about on Dumpshock, but I'm not awake yet this morning. The book with info about new ways to torment your PCs with critters.

Shadows of Asia -- Oddly, they said there weren't any actual Asian writers on this project. This was presented as a "good thing" since there wouldn't be a language barrier. I may have misunderstood, but I believe this will also cover the Middle East.

Shadows of South America -- Updates on Aztlan and the rest of the mess down there.

?Big Spring Event? -- There's an adventure and then a follow up sourcebook coming out next spring as the big event of 2065(?). The name for one was something along the lines of System Crash. The other was something similar. Rob (I think) basically just wanted to drop the name as a teaser, and offered no other info.

This was followed by a decent Q&A session.

[Eismann]

Moin,

[mfb]

five bucks for all the maps in SR? i would.

[PenAgain]

Me too :-)

I love maps, I love not having to flatten out books in order to use what is inside of them, I love PDFs... this seems like a big winner for me.

Of course I have most of the books those maps would be coming from, so I hope that this PDF wouldn't be too pricey...

Oh, and bravo for the DriveThruRPG plans. While I would always rather have a hard copy of the book, I know lots of people who can't fork out the cash for Dunkelzhan's Secrets or Aztlan who would love to have them- and 10-15 dollars beats the pants off of eBay, most days.

--PenAgain

[bitrunner]

for those that like maps, you can also download the Shadowrun Missions adventures from the main SR website...in fact, SRM00-03 FORCEd RECON has a full breakout of a biotechnology research facility with various stages of maps for the players depending on how much information they find out. It has details on the various security aspects and guards as well....of course, you can change/modify anything to fit into a different setting/home campaign...

PS - there has been some problem with downloading this file. Adam is aware of the problem and trying to identify and fix it...some people have no problem, others can't open it...no rhyme or reason...so if you can't, give it a week or so and try back...

[ThatDaki]

Glad to hear the tournament was liked by someone. It's interesting to hear what people thought was going on in that adventure... the fact there are different theories on what was happening means we did a good job.

Hi! I'm Daki. Been a while since I ventured over here but thought I would since I'm interested in hearing what people thought of the tournament (since, you know, I was the writer).

EDIT:: In case anyone is wondering who I was... I was GMing one of the teams on Thursday and did the one-shot at 7pm on Friday night.

[Nath]

[Bigity]

Hm. Sounds AI-ish.

[Adam]

Critical Error, actually.

[JongWK]

[grendel]

[JongWK]

Lies! I've been told that everyone behaves like proper gentlemen and ladies at GenCon. You, sir, are obviously trying to defame him. :silly:

[Bull]

I would second Jong's comments, but... I seem to be missing some memory form the con, so I can;t verify much of anything :)

Bull

[FlakJacket]

[Kesh]

[Young Freud]

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

[Siege]

Bah. Deus was overrated.

-Siege

[craigpierce]

ThatDaki -

your co-gm here (thursday night). it really was a well written plot; it's great how the players had to make that choice at the end. do you somehow choose sides or do you allow the evidence to be lost 'in the best interest of the church'? maybe the best tournament i've been apart of.

[otaku mike]

[Calvin]

At Gencon I saw the Shadowrun Missions guys running several tables. At one point it seemed like they had 8 tables of Missions running. Players were clearly having a great time, even if some of their characters weren't.

Judging from the GenCon program, Shadowrun Missions ran about 36 tables in total, and the Shadowrun Tournament ran about 36. The program listed both as being sponsored by FanPro. Players saw FanPro supporting their hobby. There were also several 'independent' Shadowrun adventures (1 table each), which nicely rounded out the weekend.

Congratulations and thank-you to all the GMs that worked hard to put on Shadowrun at GenCon. You did a great job!

[mfb]

someone--damn if i can remember who--ran a badass SR LARP on saturday. i'm usually not a LARP kind of guy, what with my upbeat outlook and distinct lack of eyeshadow, but i figured what the hell; it's SR, right? gotta be good.

i was not wrong. all 30 or so of us were in a spankin' new high-tech prison in Seattle on its opening day, as either inmates, reporters, or guards (or shadowrunners posing as any of the above). all of the sudden, the lights go out, and when they come back on, all the interior doors are open. we spent the next 3.5 hours trying to escape (if you were an inmate), keep people from escaping (if you were a guard), or survive (if you were a reporter). the SRs, we found out later, had staged the whole thing so that they could pull an extraction. good stuff. my only gripe was that the guy the SRs were extracting was valuable because he'd discovered--by studying Dunk's will, who exactly had the dragon assassinated. i'm not sure that holds up in court, given the actual nature of the assassination and whatnot. other'n that, though, the whole thing was great.

[bitrunner]

As for Shadowrun Missions, yes - we were filled to capacity and our backup judges were good enough to stick around and even run extra tables - we only had to turn away about 3 people during one slot that showed up late because of a scheduling snafu on Gencon's part...they kept moving us around between the 1st and 2nd floor. by the time the guys got there, it was already a half hour into the slot, and we were at full capacity - 8 players at every table...note that we only posted 6 seats per table, but our judges were great enough to hold out for 8, so we were able to take a lot of generic ticket holders that showed up. in the two slots where we had an extra table, it was filled with generics...

almost 50% of our players returned to play more than one slot. about 25% (and most of them generics!!!) played three or more of our 5 events!! everyone commented on how much fun they had during the events, and are looking forward to future SR Missions events. We also recruited about 20 new players to the SR game!

all in all, over 200 people (seat total, not individuals/repeats) played SR Missions events during the con...

as for the LARP...who killed D?? uh, the big D staged the whole thing - no one had the dragon assassinated - they tried, and D let them think they won, but he orchestrated the whole thing...