Conquest 2009
I went to Melbourne for Conquest – the Easter Games Convention. Much fun (and some pain) ensued.



Up early on Friday to head south. Flight was fine. Twenty minute wait on the tarmac for them to get the airbridge to work? Not much fun. Met at the airport by mobdrazhar, who gave me a ride to the convention site. He'll be up here in Brisbane later this week, so hopefully we can catch up again then, as I did not see a lot of him at the convention itself.

After paying my registration fee and confirming with my first few GMs that I was present, I encountered my esteemed team-mates bunnitos, fengshuiguy and James (if he has an LJ, I don't know it).

First game off the rank was Prime Time Adventures. In this game, you collectively develop an idea for a TV show, then play an episode of said show. We came up with "Victoria's Secret Service", a show about lingerie models who are also secret agents for the Victorican State Government. I think I probably set the tone of the game by naming my character "Randi Canyon". I had fun in this session, though I think we had a bit of a mismatch between the intended design of Prime Time Adventures sessions (each player in turn shapes a scene around a specific conflict) and what was interesting to us about the show we'd created (having our characters do goofy stuff). But I think most of us had fun anyway. James didn't enjoy it, but fengshuiguy got to play a lurking criminal mastermind, and bunnitos (as the fashion-challenged nerdy girl) and I (as the fabulous supermodel) had plenty of silly entertainment out of it.

Second session was "A Cold Wind Comes", a Dragon Warriors scenario. We'd played the GM's last DW game at Arcanacon, and ti had been kinda bland, but I'm a big, big fan of the game, so I decided to give him another chance. This proved to a mistake, as we spent a painful three hours to learn. Basically, the strength of DW as a game is its fabulous atmosphere, which really sets it apart from more typical D&D-style fantasy. This game had none of that on offer, and wasn't much of a D&D-style game, either. We spent the first hour desperately looking for the plot (well, some of us did. bunnitos gave up pretty early and just made jokes about gay knights). It turned out looking for the plot was a mistake: if you just do nothing then time will pass and it will come to you. And it'll prove terminally dull and pointless. A monster is killing people! For reasons you never discover. And it has other monsters working for it! Monsters that are thematically unrelated and who line up in dumb ninja style to take you on. I feel a little dirty that I ended up winning one of the 'best player' awards for this one.

Session three, things picked up: "Tales from the City – Apotheosis" was a sequel to a freeform we played at Arcanacon. My character from the first game was now deceased, so I migrated to a new one; a once thoroughly corrupt official who was feeling his first twinges of conscience. He turned out to have very little to do with the major plot or plots of the game, but he had plenty to keep him occupied, including a fun series of near-arguments with three women who scared him senseless. bunnitos and fengshuiguy also played, reprising their characters from the first game (bunnitos was in fact one of the scary women I had to talk to). From their feedback, they both seemed to enjoy it, and fengshuiguy obviously made an impression, as he picked up the players' choice award. I did think this session was a bit less focussed than its predecessor; or at least, far fewer players were aware of the "big" plot. But that's not entirely a bad thing, as it gave the game a more sandbox feel, and there was a colourful cast to support that. One thing the GMs do need to work on is time management. We ran rather over time in the debrief. There was also a minor issue with "locked door syndrome", which often blights freeforms: several players spent a long chunk of the game off by themselves, and no-one else could approach them or interact with them. While this was feasible in-game (one of them owned the mansion the game was set in, so could easily find a private room none of the rest of us could enter), it rarely makes for a more interesting or enjoyable session when it happens.

To bed at about 2am, and then up the next morning for a Conquest tradition: breakfast at "Torch", complete with a Virgin Mary each. I'm not quite sure why bunnitos lets us badger her into this, since she hates the drink, but it's fun watching the faces she pulls every time she has a sip :)

Saturday's lunch time session was "Slightly Apocalyptic", a D&D 4e game with flavour text for a wacky post-apocalyptic setting bolted on top. I played Bull Horn, a combat robot with a really big hammer, a really big gun, and – as I played him – the voice of an original series' Battlestar Galactica Cylon. The game itself was not a good one, being quite literally summed up as "boxed text, fight, boxed text, fight, boxed text, fight". We managed to have fun despite this, mainly by riffing about our goofy characters in combat. We would have liked some time to riff about them between fights, but the GM didn't really give us a chance to do so, and we didn't push for it. Probably just as well, as he apparently got really huffy with groups who did. Bizarre. Anyway, the game ended up running only two hours, so we were able to have a nice long break before the next session, and we came away in good humour. At prize-giving, the GM announced that he couldn't be bothered to give prizes by merit, so he was awarding them randomly. I hope this was a joke, since (a) my name was the first he read out, and (b) if you don't want to hand out prizes, tell the con orgs so they don't waste money buying them.

The afternoon session was a Legend of the Burning Sands game called "The Tale of the Princess and the Eye of Night". This was great fun. I played a priestess who was guided by her dreams to seek an "emerald-eyed princess from another land", who would "save an empire". I had the assistance of an amoral street thief and an aging but still deadly mercenary to do this. Legend of the Burning Sands is an Arabian Nights-style setting, and this hit all the right notes: the Princess was an amnesiac street beggar, there was a jinn trapped in a statue, there were strange cults, cannibalistic ghuls, lost cities, scheming courtiers, hashish dens and more. A very nicely planned little module, with plenty for all the characters to do, and a worthy climactic sequence. All four of us played and enjoyed this one, and we picked up the 'best team' award as well, which was very cool.

Our planned night-time session for the day had been cancelled, so we went to dinner at a local Thai restaurant instead. James proposed that we all share the dishes, banquet-style, which was a great call. It took a little while to convince bunnitos and fengshuiguy that the two omnivores in the group were willing to eat a wholly-vegan banquet, but once that was accomplished, tasty food was consumed in good company.

Sunday was my only morning session, as I had signed up for Mik Bonsall's "Project Eden". This is the first time I've left one of Mik's games feeling disappointed. I had a character who's only goals related to the TV show we thought we were on, but then it turned out that we were secretly robots, and those goals became meaningless. I tried to engage with the new plotline of "what's really going on?", but ran into the aforementioned "locked door syndrome", where the interesting stuff was apparently going on somewhere I couldn't get to. And then apparently a nuclear missile was coming to destroy us, though who knew if that was real either? (it wasn't, as it happens) Should have gone to breakfast with bunnitos and fengshuiguy instead. Still, I'm looking forward to Mik's game at Pheno, since it'll be a tabletop and hopefully won't have the freeform-related issues this one had.

The next session, we played "Love Lies Bleeding", which is a very intense game about a highly dysfunctional, drug and alcohol dependant family, whose already miserable lives slide into an even greater level of madness and distress than usual during the course of the game. All of which sounds horribly miserable, but was actually made of pure awesome. Caine Chandler, the author and GM, had done a really good job of integrating lots of terrible things into the game without ever making them puerile or sensationalistic. Hallucinations, substance abuse, murder, arson and all kinds of other nastiness – most of it motivated by a kind of atavistic, unreasoning desire to keep the family whole ensued. Honestly, if you have the stomach for the content, play this game. We all had a great time, and bunnitos, fengshuiguy and James were all on when it came to their characters. For me, this was the highlight of the con (with "The Tale of the Princess and the Eye of Night" a close second). We were all very proud to pick up the "best team" award for this game. If I see Caine's name on a game in future, I'll definitely put it on my list to play.

Game three for the day was "Freedom City Private Investigation" (FCPI), the second in a series of games about a PI firm in a superhero setting. The PCs all have low-level powers, and they often get involved in cases where superhumans are involved. We'd played the first FCPI game at Conquest last year, and found it to be a really satisfying mystery with a solid group of characters. This second entry was also a solid, though occasionally slow-moving, mystery … until the climactic scene. When we finally confronted the culprit/victim of the case, we basically felt like we were in a situation where we either had to find exactly the right words to talk the guy down, or be forced into a tedious and unsatisfying fight. Since we didn't luck into the "magic words", the last half-hour turned into a very frustrating experience. I'd still give another FCPI game a try, because last year's was very good … but if it was like this one, it would be my last. bunnitos and fengshuiguy had a similar reaction. I expect James would be less willing: he didn't play the first game, and he felt like his character had very little to do in the investigation, so he particularly disliked this session.

My late game for Sunday was "Lockdown". James and I were both in this game, while bunnitos and fengshuiguy were off playing Laser Tag instead. The game is about a group of people who are present in a US government building when the emergency alarm goes off. They all head down to the secure bunker, for what they assume will be a routine, hour-long wait. After all, these things are always false alarms, right? Of course, for those "in the know", in quickly becomes apparent that something is very, very wrong. As one of those "in the know", I enjoyed this game a lot, which was helped especially by a great performance by Mik Bonsall as an ultra-conservative Texan senator. I do think a couple of changes might make the game stronger: it took nearly ninety minutes out of a two-hour playing time before we finally told every one else what was going on (four of us knew earlier on, but two of those only because I and the other 'in the know' character brought them in on it). In particular, there's a scene early on where a GM NPC (which you haven't been told is a GM NPC) suddenly drops dead. I think the game might be stronger if he collapsed into a coma, and – while he could be stabilised temporarily – needs to get to a hospital within 30 minutes or he'll die. That creates conflict between people who think this is 99% likely to be a false alarm, and want to break lockdown and take him to hospital; and those who know that something is very, very wrong and that opening the doors might get them all killed. That's a lot more drama, a lot earlier, and I think gives people much more time to explore the "oh my god, what does this mean?" reactions they would experience. As it was, some of the other characters seemed to have very little relevant to do.

Monday morning was breakfast again, this time at the "Banff" in St Kilda, so bunnitos and fengshuiguy could enjoy the house baked beans and we could all enjoy ogling the waitresses. Hmm, Banff waitresses. Then we came in for our final game: "Lucifer's Mega-Fun Games of Strategy and Chance" (that's probably not the exact wording of the title, but close enough). This was … a bit odd. It was basically just playing poker and other games while pretending to be demons. There wasn't really a plot, or an objective (other than winning the card and dice games). I never felt like I wanted to run screaming from the room, but I don't need to go to a convention to play Texas Hold 'Em, you know? I can do that anywhere.

Managed to stay for most of the prize-giving, but had to cut out a little early to get a cab to the airport. Trip back was delayed a little, but otherwise okay. Had trouble sleeping last night, though – the late nights and late starts at the con have thrown off my body clock!

All this mayhem was interspersed with much fine company and conversation with my team mates, covering topics both profound and profane. One or two incidents will go down in our personal convention folklore, I'm sure. And don't even get me started on our spitballing for "Bogan Wedding: The Freeform".

One last thing: big kudos to the canteen staff at the con. There was a good selection of food (both junk and real) all weekend, and the service was always prompt and courteous. They thoroughly deserved the big round of applause they got at prize-giving.



All in all, it was a great weekend. Looking forward to Pheno in June!