Terminal City Tabletop Con has come and gone, leaving us dazed but triumphant!
We posted here about our plans last Thursday. Things went great! Gabriel spent the weekend running the Compose Dream Games booth with the talented Dave Kenny (Magnum Galaxy Games). I ran three games, bought two, explored some prototype board games, and had some fun demoing Blank Me.
I’m a huge fan. The Terminal City Tabletop Con keeps getting bigger and better, and I can’t wait for next year.
As I mentioned last week, this was my first time running games at a convention. I thought I’d use this space this Tuesday to discuss what I learned from each one.
Here goes!
GM Experience #1: Fronds of Benevolence
I’d previously run two sessions of Fronds with the WatcherDM ‘office’ gang (the office is more a state of mind), running the same team first to the Blue Oak and the second time to Overseer Feng. If you haven’t read the module, this is a pretty thorough exploration of both of the adventure’s possible goals. This was good because running three games in two days did not leave me an acre of prep time. Familiarity was my friend.
Four people (mostly Troika newbies) took the golden barge to Feng. Mole primitives were sacrificed. Shaggy Red-Wine Raiders were befriended. Assassins, assassinated.
Ultimately, a Porter crushed Feng beneath his girthiest employee, but not before the Mathmologist was polymorphed into a cockroach. Troika! You’ve got to love it.
Lessons learned?
Troika’s an awesome con game; it’s easy to pick up, weird, and consistently delivers memorable moments. Characters are easy to dive into. Adventures are (generally) good at provoking interesting reactions from players. There are some tough learning curves, though: armour, the use of luck, and initiative all take a bit of getting used to. The answer there is mostly encouraging and prompting players to use their luck as often as possible and avoiding heavily armoured opponents (though I’ve already made my feelings on that topic clear).
Fronds is also a good convention module, IMHO; it gives a great sense of agency, has a fun conclusion, and wraps in the right amount of time. I’d run it again.
GM Experience #2 Black Chamber
Once Fronds was done, I had about an hour to eat and prep my second game of the day. Again, I’d run Black Chamber before, so this felt like enough. We had a great little group of five, all level 3 (except for a level 4 specialist). I’d brought seven premade characters (one for each LotFP class), so I told my players that if they died, there were two extra lives on the table.
I like Black Chamber quite a bit and intend to do a thorough flip-through-style review soon. I’ll leave myself some material and not focus too much on the adventure here, except to say it ran great, everyone died/was infected/captured/lost in an alternate dimension, and a lot of fun was had.
Instead, I’ll focus on the ‘convention lessons’ I learned.
For starters, giving the option of ‘extra-life’ PCs was a mistake on my part. The session ran great, but I have a feeling it would have been more satisfying if everyone had just died once—a rookie mistake.
Secondly, if I were running this adventure again, I’d bump everyone’s level or let them bring hirelings. Our party was a cleric, elf, magic user, fighter, and specialist; all well and good, but it had the effect of putting the specialist on the front line. We could have really used a dwarf (or other meat shield).
I also started everyone off with level one gold, which I wouldn’t do again. I should have given the characters more survivable gear. Plate mail, particularly, would have been swell. Oh well!
One great thing about Lamentations is that I always feel like I’ve run a module most correctly after a good, memorable TPK. Perfect for a convention!
GM Experience #3: Long Bear Valley
I’ve played Long Bear a lot more than twice at this point.
This was the only module I ran this weekend that I wrote myself. It held up pretty well. The Cascadian Fantasy pitch seemed to confuse people at first, but after the first ten minutes of gameplay, they were chopping down trees and doing brain surgery with the best of them.
I was extremely grateful to myself for writing up some Hex Crawling advice for 5e; with the help of past me, things went very smoothly, despite my exhaustion and under-preparedness.
Speaking of preparedness, the two-page format held up really well. It’s light-weight, simple, feels open to improvisation; as much as I like Black Chamber, I spent a fair bit of that session flipping around the book. Maybe it’s just because it’s my own material, but I felt the format did well, in terms of usability.
Adventure module aside, this was probably the trickiest session to run, mostly for interpersonal reasons. We had a mix of pretty different personality types, and balancing the eager veterans with the newer players wasn’t effortless. Still, things went pretty well. Some changes I might make next time:
No player-made characters. Because 5e is so familiar to so many people, I wasn’t terribly surprised when half my table showed up with characters. As I only had four players to start, this made the nine pre-mades I’d hurriedly printed fairly irrelevant but better safe than sorry. Despite the game description, one of the characters ended up being for the 2024 release of 5e, so there was some on-the-fly rewriting of the character. There were also some unplanned magic items floating around.
Having two editions with the same name is a pain in the ass, and it makes 5e nearly unrunnable at conventions, in my opinion, especially when juggling people’s home characters. If I did it again, I’d mandate playing a premade. I also think that if I were running anything less procedurally focused than a hex-crawl, I’d be very tempted to do something like ShadowDark’s always-on initiative.
That’s All Folks
Anyway, those are my ramble-y, exhausted, post-convention thoughts. Next time, maybe I’ll talk a little about two of the products I picked up: Nirvana on Fire and the 2d20 Mophidius Fallout RPG Starter Set. See you then!
Looking for something less meta and more meaty? Try the Mad Moors, a build-your-own-adventure kit.