On Saturday the 22nd of February 2025, I was at a roleplaying convention in Munich, held by the esteemed Nerds United club: the Bavariacon.
It was my second time, I attended two years ago and had to skip 2024 because of a heavy cold that got me the day before. In the meantime, the attendance grew so much that they had to move to a bigger community center, this time in Unterföhring, a "suburb" of Munich that you might pass by when traveling from the airport to the city proper.
But I'm not here to review the convention itself—no need, it was basically ideal given its size and that we didn't play in a castle where every group has their own cool, isolated room…
I just want to talk about the three games I played there, two of which I never played before, and one where the last time didn't occur in this millennium.
Coriolis
I knew the basics of the game: It used the "Year Zero Engine", it's set in a space-opera-ish sci-fi setting that takes its visual inspiration from the Middle East, and that it has a slight leaning towards horror. I also knew a bit about our gamemaster, as I was following them on Mastodon for a while.
There were five players, and we picked pregenerated characters, apparently from the official quickstarter. Being a "forever GM", I'm easily overcome with choice paralysis, so I let the others pick first. And thus I ended up with Samioh Amin, an "adventurous courtesan", who's now a sensor operator for the common space vessel our party crews. The quickstart character sheets also had a description of how I relate to all the other members of the party, which is always a good prompt for initial roleplaying when you don't have the time to build that yourselves.
We didn't actually play the adventure from the quickstart, but something called "Tamir & the Palace of Dreams", which I think is some kind of con adventure.
Anyway, it started out with a common Traveller setup: Your spaceship comes out of hyperspace, something went wrong and you have to find a place of shelter where you can repair. And of course, right as we're out of the Low Pass…, erm, I mean cryo chambers, we're being hailed by a space station nearby. Some noble family has a luxurious asteroid out here, and we're free to enjoy their company and participate in some sports events while we wait for the ship to be repaired.
In the end, nothing is as it seems. There's a weird hovering "dream stone". We discover puppets that look like us, created long before we arrived. Talking to the person who made it, they freeze, as does everyone else in the palace. Tamir, the son of the chief noble family appears out of the blue, etc.
Spoilers: Everyone died years ago, and a djinn is recreating all this pageantry forever and ever, Star Trek TOS style. Confronted with this, we fight the djinn, almost die, and while the asteroid collapses, we head to our ship and barely escape. The End.
It was fun. One of the key principles of this variant of the "Year Zero" games is that you get a certain dice pool for skill tests (d6s), and need at least one six to succeed. If you don't, you get the options to call on the icons (the game's gods/saints), for a price. Whether you succeed or not, the gamemaster gets a Dark Side Dice or something like that, and can use that to skew the game in their favor. This includes items like repeating non-player character's rolls, but there are also adventure-specific options, in this case all the various horror funhouse tricks.
I have to admit that I'm not totally on board with this. First of all, it sets it up so that dice rolls—even frivolous ones—are required to propel the game's story. I generally want to avoid too much rolling, especially in more "narrative" parts. And in this specific case, the weird events also provided some needed hints. If you don't fail enough, or don't try all your skills on everything, it might take longer to get things moving. I wonder how this works in a less directed narrative, where it's more the equivalent of random encounters and other table-based play, but here I'd have preferred the more streamlined mystery mechanics of GUMSHOE. Actually, this setting with the system from Ashen Stars…
Our gamemaster knew the adventure, setting and system inside out, and we actually did try our skills on everything, so those complaints are mostly theoretical. But con gamers, when faced with a character sheet, tend to fiddle with all the thumbs and widgets on there anyways.
Verdict: STR (system): 12, DEX (adventure): 10, WIS (gamemaster): 16
Talislanta 2E
The game I decided to run. On my first Bavariacon, I ran my very own Hidden Fête of the Krakonspiracy adventure with Old-School Essentials. A short dungeon site based on a Dyson Logos map. Last year I wanted to run GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, and as I didn't get to that, I thought about finally doing it. But given that this was probably full of dungeons, I wanted to run something more colorful, without the time it takes to turn GURPS: DF into that. As I just got yet another message that my Talislanta EPIC EDITION!!! Kickstarter was nearing its end stages, I remembered that I once collected two copies of the only German edition for this, and thus it was decided that Talislanta, 2nd edition was on the table.
I spent more time on making pregenerated characters (16 of them, to show the wide variety of options) than the actual adventure. For a travel-based con game, you basically need two locations, a simple hook and then let the characters interact. I had a rocky oasis full of bandits, a sunken ziggurat with a stolen windship nearby and a fetch quest of "steal the fuel back from the bandits and put it in the windship to bring it back home".
The first three editions of Talislanta were still level based. In the end this meant that on top of the starting abilities that ranged from -2 to +6 you got to add a bonus of +1 if you knew a certain skill or technique, and that beginning magicians could cast from 3 to 5 spells per day. Checks are rolled with a d20, and you subtract your enemies skill or the general hardness of the problem from your own value, than add that value to the roll. If it's 6+ it's a partial success, 11+ is a full success and 20+ is a critical success. There aren't many guidelines about that apart from combat (half / normal / double damage), but for "modern" players, it's very easy to go with "Yes, but…", "Yes", and "Yes, and…" success levels. Quite a gem of game design, I think.
My players picked a "gnome" warrior & crystal mage, a giant half-sloth trader, a knife-wielding assassin, an armadillo-like sapper/engineer and a "far eastern" crimson-skinned, needle-toothed animal trainer/tracker (I kid you not, their fighting/hunting lizard creature is called a Tarkus). Rought entry points to the adventure were decided upon, and the tracker asked if she knew the bandits who escaped. A 20 was rolled, and thus she once roamed with them for a while. So the gnomes and the armadillo decided to scout out the place and create some traps for a possible escape. The tracker and the assassin, accompanied by the sloth ("the fastest fighter in the south-east", according to its player) were to approach the bandits, spread some quickly brewed laxative and then a common heist was to emerge organically…
It went in weird directions, but I thought it was fun enough to not cut it short, so once they did escape, there wasn't that much time for the final event, never mind the city-based frivolities that could've been an intermezzo after a very speedy first act. But in the end the players went straight for the kill: No entering the ziggurat dungeon to retrieve the original engine, they tried to jack the windship and escape with the barely functioning "technomantic" replacement drive. The gnome crystalmancer got one special spell that could create doors, either to some limbus, just through doors or… connected. They were clearly thinking in portals, and thus entering the ship and throwing the guards overboard was done timely enough for me to look for my next session…
It was described as a "very 80s game", with all the barbarians and colorful creatures, and I won't object to that. As I wrote above, I liked the core mechanic a lot, although I see why later editions added some more skill points to starting characters. Getting rid of the levels is a bit more of an issue, as I like the natural limit it puts on things, but it's not a big of an issue here, given the wide variety of characters. Pick a giant, and it'll take a few levels for the rat person to catch up when it comes to combat.
I'd pick the system again, and wouldn't mind playing myself a bit. Next time maybe go all into the 80s "Heavy Metal" style (both comics and music genre) from the start. Also maybe only 4 to 5 characters…
Verdict: STR (system): 15, DEX (adventure): 11, INT (gamemaster picking system): 14
Electric Bastionland
For the last game of the day, I wanted to pick something new to play, but nothing too mechanically involved, as after 8 hours of play, concentration might suffer. And luckily, I saw an entry for Electric Bastionland on the schedule. I have some minor experience with Cairn, which is also from the "Into the Odd" system family, but "EB" is supposed to be rather weird and "tesla-punky", never mind getting to see how a whole bunch of people would react to the system.
And a "whole bunch" it was, as due to some scheduling errors, the gamemaster was confronted with 8 players, and this being one of the few games, where character creation was part of the deal!
But it's to the credit of both game and gamemaster that this happened very quickly and was a good slice of fun. You basically roll three characteristics (strength, dexterity, charisma), your starting money (1d6 "new pounds) and your "hit protection" (1d6). Cross-referencing your lowest and highest characteristic you get your "failed career", and within those you get two abilities or pieces of equipment according to your rolled money and hp. I guess this means that those with the more "meh" rolled stats get the more interesting careers, and if you're low on money or hp, you get the better equipment or power.
Amongst our many talented people, we had someone with three trained crows, a revolutionary with a non-firing musket, a cat-masked vigilante with one that actually did work, a safe cracker, and me, three kids in a trenchcoat. Apparently if you get the street urchin class, you get as many members of a (literally) small-time gang as you have hit points. My abilities were a language no one else understood (I made up a lot of slang terms) and the fact that two of my group didn't talk to each other.
Also as part of the character creation, you end up heavily in debt—together. We collectively owed 10 thousand pounds to a brewery and had one day to get that. In a city where everything is possible and nothing works.
We had a safe cracker amongst us, so headed for the Sunken Boulevard (of Broken Dreams?) to find some money left there. Along our travels we encountered
- The "Hyperloop", a public transport system based on pneumatic tubes. The queue was endless, so we found ways in, all of which were quite colorful, none of which was legal.
- A weird scientist, creating cyber-chickens (we heard a weird noise in the tunnels, I stated that this clearly sounds like "someone shaving chickens with a fan", and the GM went with that). Our military animal rights crow-keeper threw the scientist into the electrified fan, and we ended up with a laser-eyed chicken.
- A bouncer from the brewery's pub trying to get our precious chickens!
- A casino standing at a 30 degree angle with a frozen safe in the basement.
- A half-dozen near-total party kills based on the cyber-chicken getting too excited and cutting us in half with her laser eyebeam.
We ended up with all of us surviving, and a license to print licenses, which is apparently better than a license to print money, as you can just write yourself one of those.
Well… It was fun. A gamemaster very good with improvised stuff, a group that prompted a lot of the jokes and zany mishaps themselves and a setting where anything comes true, maybe not your dreams.
I'm okay with the Into the Odd mechanics. They're a low bar of entry, which is the primary goal of the designer. Left to my own devices, I'd pick something more complex, but it's workable and not too high-falutin'.
The setting… Well, I'm not sure how close to the universal experience we were. I think the tech level went a bit over-board, as I get the feeling that the game is aiming at a more just-beyond-steampunky experience, where both "cyber" and "laser" might just be a bit beyond that. But that's a thin veneer, if it was "steam engine chicken with death ray eyes", the experience would be the same. Probably says more about me fixating on words than the game itself.
A very nice end to a great convention. Not sure whether I'd want to play that game myself, though.
Verdict: STR (system): 9, DEX (adventure): 12, WIS (gamemaster): 17