I'm not that into gaming conventions, as that many people tend to be a nuisance (or health hazard), and I certainly don't like traveling far just to visit one.
Which is why it's great that the nice people from Nerds United are still into making one of the larger role-playing conventions right next door, basically. The first one I visited a couple of years ago was just a few rooms in a youth center, last year (here's my report) they already moved to a much larger location in nearby Unterföhring, and this year they topped that by an even larger event location, and the con now being spread over two days instead of just one–14th/15th of February.
(Yes, I'm late, sorry. It's been a busy year this far.)
Booking the Stadthalle in Germering (not quite a suburb of Munich) was a big enough event that the local mayor held a nice little speech–and the people responded with a Happy Birthday in turn.
After that, we even got some live chamber orchestra music (with the usual movie soundtrack stuff), and there were plenty of booths of companies and artists present, book readings etc.
Not sure whether that's worth the effort/money, as most people I talked to mostly got there to play some new and old RPGs. Then again, I was one of those people, too, so there's probably a few different kinds of biases in play here.
Due to me moving, I couldn't attend the Sunday event, but I had three games booked for Saturday:
- A funnel in Mutant Crawl Classics
- My own mini version of Keep on the Borderlands, Wu Xia version
- Some Pirate Borg
I had to run between those games, and they were basically closing shop after we finished the third, so there's very little I can report about anything else, but I'll try to give a short overview of my experiences.
Mutant Crawl Classics - Museum at the End of Time
Mutant Crawl Classics is the post-apocalyptic equivalent of Dungeon Crawl Classics, or in other words, where the latter copies D&D, MCC copies Gamma World. Meaning, it's not just Mad-Maxian desolation, but also the lost high-tech and plenty of mutants, including a good helping of anthropomorphic animals.
And it was a funnel, a game where you take a lot of not-yet adventurers (no classes, so level 0) through a deadly adventure, and whoever survives gets to pick a class and level 1. Everyone's playing multiple characters, and the "fun" part is that the ones surviving might not be the one you expected or wanted. Personally, I think it removes a lot of opportunities for even more mundane background stories–although that often leads to the contemporary trend of people already having survived adventures or being heroes, which has issues of its own. But I think it improves on the "3d6 down the line, use even bad one, it's a challenge" line often spouted by DMs and DMs only. If your character with the bad attribute roles survived, you probably formed an attachment, and the level 0 thing is the back story…
To get back to the actual game: We were five gamers, and each one had four pre-generated characters. I had a leonine fletcher (so he had a bow, but was quite bad at it), a below-average astrologer (with a looking glass!), a fisherwoman with decent stats and a very, very dumb mutant. I called him Bob, and naming was the first funny part of the game (a hat tip to a fellow player who just used "Ayden, Bayden, Cayden and Dayden").
Now, 20 characters can get quite bothersome. I think you're supposed to not get into the role-playing too much, to speed up play. So of course, us being players, we didn't do that at all. There was lots of soul-searching for each combat round etc., so even though the GM adapted, we had to skip a few things to squeeze the ending in.
In other words: It was lots of fun. I thought I was extraordinarily lucky to not lose any characters, but of course the final scene cost me two.
Would I play or run it again? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not a fan of MCC/DCC with their funky dice and oh so random mechanics, but I think I still got the Dungeon magazine that contained the "Omega World" rules.
Art of Wu Xia - Tea House on the Borderlands
This was my adventure! I had good experiences with OSR-ish rules at the Bavariacons. The rules are easy enough to explain, I don't get to play them as often as I like in the last two, three years, and everyone likes to mix things up (you're bound to run into a lot of D&D 5E and The Dark Eye players at those cons).
Once again, I spent way more time into preparing some artsy tidbits and pregen character sheets than the actual adventure itself. But that's why I went with a riff on the legendary Keep on the Borderlands. I know the core tenets of that, andWu Xia being more about fight scenes plus this being a con makes railroading through some central locations more welcome. Depending on the speed, I expected to easily improvise. And I actually did, this time!
Now, I had a few title screen and central characters prepared, and wanted to show them on an external screen. But boy, having a monitor attached to my Macbook really drained its battery, and I was too far from the next outlet (I was very envious of the next table, where the GM not only had a much larger external monitor, but also a good extension cord).
So I couldn't show them splash screens, and it was a lot of talking–nay, shouting, as the room was the loudest I played in at any Bavariacon.
Art of Wu Xia is based on the d00lite system first used by Barebones Fantasy. There you got your D&D-ish attributes, but in percentile, and then you get a very limited amount of skills, with a lot of them being basically the old D&D classes. Everyone started with two skills, so this made class variants or multi-classing very natural.
For a Wu Xia game, the rules version doesn't stray too much from its heroic fantasy origins. You still had Thief, Sorcerer and Warrior as skills, augmented by secondary roles/tropes like Scholar, Mystic or Detective. The biggest difference was the presence of Kung Fu maneuvers and skills and that everyone was basically supposed to have a few points into the Warrior skill, if you didn't want to be out of the game.
The pregens varied from a very minmaxed warrior type to a less combat-heavy mystic, and I couldn't have wished for better players. The warrior suddenly was more Michelle Yeoh than some maul-wielding brute, the mystic player even came prepared with a few pearls of exotic wisdom to spout!
As intended we breezed through a few scenes: The players met at the tea house, being sent to fight secred sects at a gorge where their pagodas oppenly opposed each other. They fought some mercenaries in a non-lethal manner, the only casualties being a few tables and lots of fruits and vegetables.
They decided to not go to the neutral deathmatch arena where the sectarian warriors fought each other (as intended this was more the the infiltration route), but went to the hermit who was supposed to be an ex member. On the way they rescued a wizened sage carried on the back of a huge, but cowardly monk from some Frog Demons.
Time was drawing to a close, so the hermit let them in on the biggest secret: The standstill between the sects was due to a Demon General being at the bottom of the gorge, but he know a way directly to him!
Even that wasn't enough to end on time, so after fighting the Lacquered Monk Mummies, the minotaur-ish Demon General burst through the doors and we faded to black…
The players seemed to like it, there was plenty of funny interaction, and the rules worked out very well. I actually got quite fond of the d00lite system, and really want to run it in the near future.
Pirate Borg – Buried in the Bahamas
And off I ran to the Pirate Borg game that should close the convention for me. I played some Mörk Borg before, and apparently Pirate Borg was an adaption to that set in a version of our own world, namely the Dark Caribbean.
There's a theme to the third games for me at Bavariacons, apparently. Last year, I joined a group playing Electric Bastionland, and my randomly generated character was a bunch of kids. No, this wasn't a funnel situation, everyone else played just one person. But for every hit point I had, there was one person there. It was mostly a visual thing, but rather weird, even for the, erm, odd system.
This time: I was a chicken. Not anthropomorphic. Not 6 feet tall. A chicken. Cursed human or uplifted fowl, who knew?
I did have some magic powers, which I instantly used in the first scene when our ship was boarded and I could control one of the evil pirate zombies to fight for me.
But it was all for naught, and me and some fellow pirates were now shipwrecked on an island. But there was also a treasure map we got from our now-drowned former captain, and it was pointing to an island nearby!
After some minor shenanigans, we got to this island and there a dungeon crawl started. Which we breezed through quite well and managed to escape with a lot of booty.
We enjoyed ourselves at the table, although the crawl itself was a bit by the numbers. The funky pirate characters work better when there's more stuff to play against, like NPCs and lower stakes situations.
I've recently started running a Pirate D&D campaign myself, and I'm aware that it's quite hard to marry the two genres sometimes. The more recent, heroic D&D variants plus the swashbuckling pirate style harmonize better than peg legs echoing through dungeons, but I wouldn't mind exploring this game a bit more. The production values of our player's handbooks (the GM had a few of them) were excellent.
Looking forward to next year
If they're continuing with two days next year, I'll try my very best to make both days, probably running one session of my own on each.
And this time, I swear, I won't postpone creating the pregens in a DTP application the night before…