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tamolineYay! We managed to make it this year! Without being infectious with COVID even (as far as we know). True, we do seem to have caught something respiratory, judging by the way that we're both coughing, and our COVID-less state might well have been helped by catching something nasty around September time, but still.
The con was a lot less paranoid about COVID in general than in 22, as well - masks were hardly a thing. (We did bring a box of masks just in case, but hardly used them after the first game.)
Thankfully, we had a good con overall - I'm not sure I'd call any game outstanding, but we didn't have any bad ones, just various levels of good.
Slot 1 - Death has reared himself a throne
This was a game set in the World of Darkness, using the Monster of the Week system. (Powered by the Apocalypse, for those that that means anything to.) So, uh, neither Amber nor Diceless, as were the rules of ACNW at one point, but shhhh. It was set mainly in the Mage cosmology, with the twist that none of us were actual mages - I was the closest, playing an avatar (basically a thoughtform/guide that represents the part of a mage that makes them a mage) inhabiting the body of her former mage.
The concept was that three years ago, <i>something</i> swept through the deep space mage community we were all a part of, killing everyone, but the members of the group were the people who'd been able to be revived when rescue came. (With the exception of Louisa's character, who was a ghost doing a body share with her twin sister.) We got the news that the spirits of the dead were still trapped there, so we mounted a mission to go lay them to rest. (Luckily, no one questioned why one of the spirits that reached out was that of the mage I was pretending to be.)
We generally enjoyed ourselves, and it was run by the same guy who ran League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen, so we were definitely expecting great things from it, but it, uh... I don't know. Didn't feel like it quite came together? Granted, the League game had some amazing players who it'd be hard to match, but it felt like the characters - all created by the GM - had a lot of potential that the game didn't quite reach. I think some of the problem was that, given we were the only survivors of this presumably fairly close knit community, we didn't really have any ties to each other, so our various issues didn't really come out that much. Sure, we as the players could have come up with something, but we didn't and myabe we could have used a little prompting on that front.
Not bad, but not as good as it feels like it could have been.
Slot 2 - Survivors of the Bleed
This game took place in ye typical D&D fantasy world - originally run in Forgotten Realms - using the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow system (an Amber variant). Louisa and I were playing natives to that world, the other three characters came from other worlds, each with their own goals, and we all got swept up into solving what was behind a series of random monster attacks that had been plaguing the world over the last several years. And by monsters we meant humans and other creatures twisted into monsters, as my character had already found out. By a signal, she found out at the beginning of the session, which could overwhelm her own shapeshifting abilities when she was connected to something being actively twisted, she also found out.
Whoops.
Thankfully, percussive maintenance seemed to fix that particular issue, still it let her a bit wary.
My character was a mimic who'd mastered the ability to turn herself into any form she wished, including humanoid forms - though she still preferred to go to sleep in the form of a chest, with some shinies stored inside her. Louisa played a far more standard elven magical detective. I suspect the GM was fairly new to con games, because he made the rookie mistake of setting up this fort haunted by the undead as our first step in the investigation, which we proceeded to spend way too much time at. We were finally ready to move onto the next part of the investigation when we only had 45 minutes left in the 4 hour slot, and the GM was going to end it there, but I pushed to carry on and see how far we got, and we managed to quickly rattle through the rest of the adventure, and find and contain the magic sword causing all the issues.
(We met an old friend at the end of the con who said that a GM had told her that one of our GMs had told her that we'd saved their game by moving their game along - she'd said that she was unsurprised because in her experience if you left me alone too long I might suggest destroying the world when you came back to me (I swear, you create WMDs out of boredom one time...) - and this game is our most likely candidate. Still, always nice to hear.)
Slot 3 - Sandman: The Greater Arcana
Part of the long running Sandman game using the Nobilis system we're part of, this was... alright. The problems are the usual - the game itself is fine, but the GM insists on offering to have way too many people in it, resulting in (this time) having 10 players in it, which - together with a somewhat fiddly system which the GM isn't that familiar with - meaning that I didn't actually get that much playing in. (Especially given how much of a blunt object my character is.)
Still it was fun watching other people come up with the kind of crazy stuff the game is capable of, and I did have a few fun moments. So, still a good game, but probably the bottom of the list as far as games this con went.
Slot 4 - Big Trouble In Little Amber
This was actually supposed to be another game entirely, but a couple of days before the con, the GM emailed everyone saying that he'd come down with COVID so wouldn't be able to make it. Thankfully, one of the players had a one shot ready to go, a Big Trouble in Little China riff set in one of the kingdoms near Amber, which had a mysterious and exotic Amber quarter in its capital. All the characters were pregens, with most being inhabitants of the quarter (one was even from Amber), and the last being Jack, a cart driver who frequently ran supplies to the quarter.
The plot itself was nothing to do with the film. Someone had stolen a magic ring - certainly not my tour guide/cat burglar character - and the new (foreign) queen (who had taken over the country after her husband had died, along with the noble who'd tried to succeed him) was looking for it with strange, foreign, shapeshifting soldiers. Not only that, but princes of Amber had been seen in the quarter, roughing up perfectly innocent cart drivers.
There was nothing for it but for our motley group of PCs to join up in the back room of the local Amber restaurant and go and sort these things out. By roughing up one of these shapeshifters - after they attacked my character - we managed to find out about this ritual the Queen was going to be taking part in on this 'Broken Pattern' that she needed to the ring (or 'Spikard') to be sure that she'd survive. And by putting on this ring - that my character totally didn't have - we managed to locate this squiggle deep beneath the ground in Little Amber.
So off we tromped, and located it, guarded by various people, human and not.
With the thankful distraction of one prince of Amber, we snuck in and attacked the Queen, pushing her onto the Broken Pattern and setting her on fire. She pulled me onto the pattern as well, but thankfully - due to this ring that I totally didn't have - I didn't take damage, but I did manage to push her further onto the pattern. Another prince turned up to save his wife to be - Brand, for those keeping track at the back - but thankfully Louisa's werewolf managed to roll really well and disemboweled him. Not quite killing him, but forcing a retreat. He teleported onto the Pattern to rescue his fiancee but unfortunately his blood with the pattern, causing a flare up of power and managing to finished off the queen, who'd been on death's door at the time.
So, technically, he killed the queen and we didn't, and in a way that totally isn't going to come back and bite us in the back.
Ah well.
And my character finished up with the night with the magic ring, which she still totally didn't have.
Honestly, a lot of fun, and a nice surprise given we weren't really expecting much given the short notice.
Slot 5 - A Lammas Darkness Falls
This was a our first time playing in what was a clearly very long running game, with two other players who were much more experienced in the setting than we were. Their characters too - I generally see guesstimates for the age of the main character of the first books at c. 700, with only his eldest brother being described as being over a millennia. At one point in this game, my character goes back in time - tentatively identified as being 65,000 years ago - and not only does she meet said eldest brother, but one of the other player's characters was alive in that time period, and the main character of the books was either alive in that era, or would be soon.
So, uh, apparently the GM has expanded out the already long history of the Amber family just a little.
One of the fun things in this game is the clear sense of history that it conveyed. The other characters had a lot of complicated issues with many of the other characters in the setting - especially the 65K+ year old character, but it didn't feel like Louisa and I were more overwhelmed than our characters (both new to the court) would be. (Though this was probably helped by the fact that we were half the group - if there'd been four existing characters, there might have been more of an issue.) And this despite the fact that we were very much less powerful than the other characters - the 65K PC had literally double my character's combat skill (by far her best stat), had better other stats, and a whole host of other powers as well, but it didn't feel like we didn't have stuff to do.
The game wasn't perfect - a large amount of the ongoing strife in the court was the fact that the queen was extremely nice, but the king (father to the 65K character, grandfather to the rest of us) absolutely could not keep his dick in his pants, and had one official mistress, had recently brought another former mistress back to the court, and was having a thing with the 20 year old daughter of the official mistress as well. And, sure, it wasn't as though either of the existing characters seemed to like the king, but seemed to reserve much more of their animus for the other women, which... I guess some of them were awful people, and maybe the king is too powerful to do anything about, but... Yeah.
That being said, it's the game I'm still thinking most about, almost a week later, and there are a lot of things about it I'm turning over in my mind, figuring out what I want to use/see in games. Characters apart from members of the royal family being able to hold their own with the characters is something I think really worked, for instance (granted this is because most of them are from Chaos, but I'm not sure that's something I'd want to keep) , as did the much clearer sense of interpersonal history than the books is really interested in, even if I'm not compelled by various of the character protrayals.
Plotwise, the queen is almost assassinated. Upon magical investigation, she was stabbed by someone who looks like the former mistress - who both of the existing characters hate with a passion, because she's a poisoner (and maybe killed a brother/uncle in the past?) - while my character figured out that the queen had previously been drugged, which more magical investigation showed to have been done by the official mistress. Said women hate each other, of course, and the official mistress has been getting on with the queen recently, so... Something smelled rotten.
Something being someone had manipulated the daughter of the official mistress (who looked a lot like her mother, but had cut her hair and worn a wig to hide that fact) into drugging the queen's wine, to frame her mother, and someone from the Abyss had (seperately, we think) attempted to kill the queen and frame the former mistress to cause chaos in the court because Amber was making moves against the Abyss.
The characters got the daughter banished for a while. (Honestly, probably for the best, because wtf? The age and power gap between her and the king is... ugh.) And then conducted a big ritual to harm the Abyss guy (because they liked the queen, and he was awful anyway) and the former mistress (because the existing characters hated her and persuaded us to go along with it) and frame the ritual as though they did it to each other if either of them went looking. The ritual went well - both of them were banished back to the Abyss and hopefully wouldn't be seen again for some time - and there was enough power left over that each of us had some good things happen to us. My character got a chateau and dance school anonymously funded in the city (she's a trained dancer, and that's what she came to the court to try and organise) as well as a familiar (a gazelle) in the future. Louisa's character got some boons as well as - being a somewhat feral Disney Princess who could talk to animals - managing to rescue a sentient bear from one of her uncles and starting up a feud there.
My character... likes the existing characters, thinks they are very charming in a Mean Girls kind of way, but really has no intention of getting drawn into all their bullshit if she has any option whatsoever.
Slot 6 - Corwin's dead
A game (from the same GM who stepped in for slot 4) where we were mostly playing characters from the books, with the twist that the main character dies at the beginning rather than being hospitalised. (I say mostly playing characters from the book because one character was the OC daughter of the main character, who gets drawn into all this madness and becomes determined to avenge her father, partially because of the whole father thing, mostly because his dying curse is tearing up Earth)
I played Flora who mostly survives in the books by dint of everyone thinking she's so stupid and useless that she's not really a factor in the family infighting. (And yet manages to always end up on the winning side.) Amber... does not really model that kind of character well, partially because of the sexism in the original books, where most of the sisters of the family aren't really active participants so the family battles, partly because the game was written in the 90s and though there's a hefty female playerbase (waaaaaaaaay higher than was the average in D&D at the time) the game wasn't really that interested in most of them either. So I burned most of her points in ways that didn't come up at all in the game.
Honestly, though, I think she ended up doing fairly well by being a voice of somewhat calm in the whole proceedings.
A fun game that took an interesting twist on the setting with some of the weirdness of the books that often gets lost in games, though not helped by the fact that one player was at times incapacitated by her back and two others (out of seven) came down with migraines. (Louisa had a headache, but powered through it.)
Slot 7 - The Smith Academy
A member of the royal family finds something odd in shadow, a place that's more Real than it should be, centred around a boarding school. What does the royal family do? Detail him to round up some of the teenage royal byblows scattered amongst the mulitverse and send them to this school to find out what's going on, of course!
Out of seven characters, we had one who was familar with how the family works, one who knew her somewhat absent father, two who - until recently - had had their mothers in their lives as a family friend/mentor, and three who didn't know their royal parent at all. My character was called Medea, grew up on a greek style island and generally disturbed the other inhabitants with her sorcery. To give her a reason to come along on this, I gave her issues with said sorcery - notably her signature spell was summoning 50 skeleton warriors with swords and shields, Harry Hausen style,
which is very useful when you want a fighting force, somewhat less so when you want, say, less skeletons, or maybe skeletons that do other things, like help you with your chores. I also decided to consciously give her some of my more autistic qualities, which... It was a little weird, seeing them from the outside. Not bad, just... self conscious, if not in a totally bad kind of way.
Medea had no interest in the investigation per se, but she did manage to find a tutor on the magical arts - Dr Stephen Strange. Because it turned out that the school was populated by fictional characters. (As well as lots of phantoms to help make up the 5000 pupils without breaking the logistics) Strange may or may not have been a fictional character in the school, though, because it turns out that the school was created by Franklin Richards, a reality warper from the Marvel Comics verse, who was lonely and wanted a school to go to, so had populated it from all the books he'd read.
The Amber books did exist in this universe, so there cause a certain amount of existential crisis, but it turns out that our characters are real, probably, and that the Amber books are just a shadow of the true reality. It's not as though our characters are in the books, anyway.
We reported back and... okay, Medea was generally less than impressed with what she'd encountered of her family. Partly because of the whole 'summoned to go solve a problem after being abandoned' and large chunk of 'the one person who actually seemed to know what was what was a massive dick in general, and specifically in ways that grated at her autism, and also contrived to give the impression that the rest of the family were as big dicks as he was'. So her report was reading the family for absolute filth - something along the lines of 'My report is that you gathered up a bunch of your children that you'd abandoned - neglected at best - and then sent them into danger to solve a problem you couldn't be bothered to look into yourselves', which seemed to cause a certain amount of shuffling among the family - and then went back to the school because there was someone who could teach her to use her magic properly, and that was of infinitely more use than the family. (Not that her father was interested in her anyway, because she was a girl. Oh, also, massive dick boy? Her brother.)
So, yeah, a light and fun game to round off the con.
Incidentally, Louisa thought she saw Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards fame when we were getting off the plane. Cut to the next day, and Robert Evans mentions on social media that he's in London this week, and he lives in Portland. So, yeah, that probably was Robert Evans.
The con was a lot less paranoid about COVID in general than in 22, as well - masks were hardly a thing. (We did bring a box of masks just in case, but hardly used them after the first game.)
Thankfully, we had a good con overall - I'm not sure I'd call any game outstanding, but we didn't have any bad ones, just various levels of good.
Slot 1 - Death has reared himself a throne
This was a game set in the World of Darkness, using the Monster of the Week system. (Powered by the Apocalypse, for those that that means anything to.) So, uh, neither Amber nor Diceless, as were the rules of ACNW at one point, but shhhh. It was set mainly in the Mage cosmology, with the twist that none of us were actual mages - I was the closest, playing an avatar (basically a thoughtform/guide that represents the part of a mage that makes them a mage) inhabiting the body of her former mage.
The concept was that three years ago, <i>something</i> swept through the deep space mage community we were all a part of, killing everyone, but the members of the group were the people who'd been able to be revived when rescue came. (With the exception of Louisa's character, who was a ghost doing a body share with her twin sister.) We got the news that the spirits of the dead were still trapped there, so we mounted a mission to go lay them to rest. (Luckily, no one questioned why one of the spirits that reached out was that of the mage I was pretending to be.)
We generally enjoyed ourselves, and it was run by the same guy who ran League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen, so we were definitely expecting great things from it, but it, uh... I don't know. Didn't feel like it quite came together? Granted, the League game had some amazing players who it'd be hard to match, but it felt like the characters - all created by the GM - had a lot of potential that the game didn't quite reach. I think some of the problem was that, given we were the only survivors of this presumably fairly close knit community, we didn't really have any ties to each other, so our various issues didn't really come out that much. Sure, we as the players could have come up with something, but we didn't and myabe we could have used a little prompting on that front.
Not bad, but not as good as it feels like it could have been.
Slot 2 - Survivors of the Bleed
This game took place in ye typical D&D fantasy world - originally run in Forgotten Realms - using the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow system (an Amber variant). Louisa and I were playing natives to that world, the other three characters came from other worlds, each with their own goals, and we all got swept up into solving what was behind a series of random monster attacks that had been plaguing the world over the last several years. And by monsters we meant humans and other creatures twisted into monsters, as my character had already found out. By a signal, she found out at the beginning of the session, which could overwhelm her own shapeshifting abilities when she was connected to something being actively twisted, she also found out.
Whoops.
Thankfully, percussive maintenance seemed to fix that particular issue, still it let her a bit wary.
My character was a mimic who'd mastered the ability to turn herself into any form she wished, including humanoid forms - though she still preferred to go to sleep in the form of a chest, with some shinies stored inside her. Louisa played a far more standard elven magical detective. I suspect the GM was fairly new to con games, because he made the rookie mistake of setting up this fort haunted by the undead as our first step in the investigation, which we proceeded to spend way too much time at. We were finally ready to move onto the next part of the investigation when we only had 45 minutes left in the 4 hour slot, and the GM was going to end it there, but I pushed to carry on and see how far we got, and we managed to quickly rattle through the rest of the adventure, and find and contain the magic sword causing all the issues.
(We met an old friend at the end of the con who said that a GM had told her that one of our GMs had told her that we'd saved their game by moving their game along - she'd said that she was unsurprised because in her experience if you left me alone too long I might suggest destroying the world when you came back to me (I swear, you create WMDs out of boredom one time...) - and this game is our most likely candidate. Still, always nice to hear.)
Slot 3 - Sandman: The Greater Arcana
Part of the long running Sandman game using the Nobilis system we're part of, this was... alright. The problems are the usual - the game itself is fine, but the GM insists on offering to have way too many people in it, resulting in (this time) having 10 players in it, which - together with a somewhat fiddly system which the GM isn't that familiar with - meaning that I didn't actually get that much playing in. (Especially given how much of a blunt object my character is.)
Still it was fun watching other people come up with the kind of crazy stuff the game is capable of, and I did have a few fun moments. So, still a good game, but probably the bottom of the list as far as games this con went.
Slot 4 - Big Trouble In Little Amber
This was actually supposed to be another game entirely, but a couple of days before the con, the GM emailed everyone saying that he'd come down with COVID so wouldn't be able to make it. Thankfully, one of the players had a one shot ready to go, a Big Trouble in Little China riff set in one of the kingdoms near Amber, which had a mysterious and exotic Amber quarter in its capital. All the characters were pregens, with most being inhabitants of the quarter (one was even from Amber), and the last being Jack, a cart driver who frequently ran supplies to the quarter.
The plot itself was nothing to do with the film. Someone had stolen a magic ring - certainly not my tour guide/cat burglar character - and the new (foreign) queen (who had taken over the country after her husband had died, along with the noble who'd tried to succeed him) was looking for it with strange, foreign, shapeshifting soldiers. Not only that, but princes of Amber had been seen in the quarter, roughing up perfectly innocent cart drivers.
There was nothing for it but for our motley group of PCs to join up in the back room of the local Amber restaurant and go and sort these things out. By roughing up one of these shapeshifters - after they attacked my character - we managed to find out about this ritual the Queen was going to be taking part in on this 'Broken Pattern' that she needed to the ring (or 'Spikard') to be sure that she'd survive. And by putting on this ring - that my character totally didn't have - we managed to locate this squiggle deep beneath the ground in Little Amber.
So off we tromped, and located it, guarded by various people, human and not.
With the thankful distraction of one prince of Amber, we snuck in and attacked the Queen, pushing her onto the Broken Pattern and setting her on fire. She pulled me onto the pattern as well, but thankfully - due to this ring that I totally didn't have - I didn't take damage, but I did manage to push her further onto the pattern. Another prince turned up to save his wife to be - Brand, for those keeping track at the back - but thankfully Louisa's werewolf managed to roll really well and disemboweled him. Not quite killing him, but forcing a retreat. He teleported onto the Pattern to rescue his fiancee but unfortunately his blood with the pattern, causing a flare up of power and managing to finished off the queen, who'd been on death's door at the time.
So, technically, he killed the queen and we didn't, and in a way that totally isn't going to come back and bite us in the back.
Ah well.
And my character finished up with the night with the magic ring, which she still totally didn't have.
Honestly, a lot of fun, and a nice surprise given we weren't really expecting much given the short notice.
Slot 5 - A Lammas Darkness Falls
This was a our first time playing in what was a clearly very long running game, with two other players who were much more experienced in the setting than we were. Their characters too - I generally see guesstimates for the age of the main character of the first books at c. 700, with only his eldest brother being described as being over a millennia. At one point in this game, my character goes back in time - tentatively identified as being 65,000 years ago - and not only does she meet said eldest brother, but one of the other player's characters was alive in that time period, and the main character of the books was either alive in that era, or would be soon.
So, uh, apparently the GM has expanded out the already long history of the Amber family just a little.
One of the fun things in this game is the clear sense of history that it conveyed. The other characters had a lot of complicated issues with many of the other characters in the setting - especially the 65K+ year old character, but it didn't feel like Louisa and I were more overwhelmed than our characters (both new to the court) would be. (Though this was probably helped by the fact that we were half the group - if there'd been four existing characters, there might have been more of an issue.) And this despite the fact that we were very much less powerful than the other characters - the 65K PC had literally double my character's combat skill (by far her best stat), had better other stats, and a whole host of other powers as well, but it didn't feel like we didn't have stuff to do.
The game wasn't perfect - a large amount of the ongoing strife in the court was the fact that the queen was extremely nice, but the king (father to the 65K character, grandfather to the rest of us) absolutely could not keep his dick in his pants, and had one official mistress, had recently brought another former mistress back to the court, and was having a thing with the 20 year old daughter of the official mistress as well. And, sure, it wasn't as though either of the existing characters seemed to like the king, but seemed to reserve much more of their animus for the other women, which... I guess some of them were awful people, and maybe the king is too powerful to do anything about, but... Yeah.
That being said, it's the game I'm still thinking most about, almost a week later, and there are a lot of things about it I'm turning over in my mind, figuring out what I want to use/see in games. Characters apart from members of the royal family being able to hold their own with the characters is something I think really worked, for instance (granted this is because most of them are from Chaos, but I'm not sure that's something I'd want to keep) , as did the much clearer sense of interpersonal history than the books is really interested in, even if I'm not compelled by various of the character protrayals.
Plotwise, the queen is almost assassinated. Upon magical investigation, she was stabbed by someone who looks like the former mistress - who both of the existing characters hate with a passion, because she's a poisoner (and maybe killed a brother/uncle in the past?) - while my character figured out that the queen had previously been drugged, which more magical investigation showed to have been done by the official mistress. Said women hate each other, of course, and the official mistress has been getting on with the queen recently, so... Something smelled rotten.
Something being someone had manipulated the daughter of the official mistress (who looked a lot like her mother, but had cut her hair and worn a wig to hide that fact) into drugging the queen's wine, to frame her mother, and someone from the Abyss had (seperately, we think) attempted to kill the queen and frame the former mistress to cause chaos in the court because Amber was making moves against the Abyss.
The characters got the daughter banished for a while. (Honestly, probably for the best, because wtf? The age and power gap between her and the king is... ugh.) And then conducted a big ritual to harm the Abyss guy (because they liked the queen, and he was awful anyway) and the former mistress (because the existing characters hated her and persuaded us to go along with it) and frame the ritual as though they did it to each other if either of them went looking. The ritual went well - both of them were banished back to the Abyss and hopefully wouldn't be seen again for some time - and there was enough power left over that each of us had some good things happen to us. My character got a chateau and dance school anonymously funded in the city (she's a trained dancer, and that's what she came to the court to try and organise) as well as a familiar (a gazelle) in the future. Louisa's character got some boons as well as - being a somewhat feral Disney Princess who could talk to animals - managing to rescue a sentient bear from one of her uncles and starting up a feud there.
My character... likes the existing characters, thinks they are very charming in a Mean Girls kind of way, but really has no intention of getting drawn into all their bullshit if she has any option whatsoever.
Slot 6 - Corwin's dead
A game (from the same GM who stepped in for slot 4) where we were mostly playing characters from the books, with the twist that the main character dies at the beginning rather than being hospitalised. (I say mostly playing characters from the book because one character was the OC daughter of the main character, who gets drawn into all this madness and becomes determined to avenge her father, partially because of the whole father thing, mostly because his dying curse is tearing up Earth)
I played Flora who mostly survives in the books by dint of everyone thinking she's so stupid and useless that she's not really a factor in the family infighting. (And yet manages to always end up on the winning side.) Amber... does not really model that kind of character well, partially because of the sexism in the original books, where most of the sisters of the family aren't really active participants so the family battles, partly because the game was written in the 90s and though there's a hefty female playerbase (waaaaaaaaay higher than was the average in D&D at the time) the game wasn't really that interested in most of them either. So I burned most of her points in ways that didn't come up at all in the game.
Honestly, though, I think she ended up doing fairly well by being a voice of somewhat calm in the whole proceedings.
A fun game that took an interesting twist on the setting with some of the weirdness of the books that often gets lost in games, though not helped by the fact that one player was at times incapacitated by her back and two others (out of seven) came down with migraines. (Louisa had a headache, but powered through it.)
Slot 7 - The Smith Academy
A member of the royal family finds something odd in shadow, a place that's more Real than it should be, centred around a boarding school. What does the royal family do? Detail him to round up some of the teenage royal byblows scattered amongst the mulitverse and send them to this school to find out what's going on, of course!
Out of seven characters, we had one who was familar with how the family works, one who knew her somewhat absent father, two who - until recently - had had their mothers in their lives as a family friend/mentor, and three who didn't know their royal parent at all. My character was called Medea, grew up on a greek style island and generally disturbed the other inhabitants with her sorcery. To give her a reason to come along on this, I gave her issues with said sorcery - notably her signature spell was summoning 50 skeleton warriors with swords and shields, Harry Hausen style,
which is very useful when you want a fighting force, somewhat less so when you want, say, less skeletons, or maybe skeletons that do other things, like help you with your chores. I also decided to consciously give her some of my more autistic qualities, which... It was a little weird, seeing them from the outside. Not bad, just... self conscious, if not in a totally bad kind of way.
Medea had no interest in the investigation per se, but she did manage to find a tutor on the magical arts - Dr Stephen Strange. Because it turned out that the school was populated by fictional characters. (As well as lots of phantoms to help make up the 5000 pupils without breaking the logistics) Strange may or may not have been a fictional character in the school, though, because it turns out that the school was created by Franklin Richards, a reality warper from the Marvel Comics verse, who was lonely and wanted a school to go to, so had populated it from all the books he'd read.
The Amber books did exist in this universe, so there cause a certain amount of existential crisis, but it turns out that our characters are real, probably, and that the Amber books are just a shadow of the true reality. It's not as though our characters are in the books, anyway.
We reported back and... okay, Medea was generally less than impressed with what she'd encountered of her family. Partly because of the whole 'summoned to go solve a problem after being abandoned' and large chunk of 'the one person who actually seemed to know what was what was a massive dick in general, and specifically in ways that grated at her autism, and also contrived to give the impression that the rest of the family were as big dicks as he was'. So her report was reading the family for absolute filth - something along the lines of 'My report is that you gathered up a bunch of your children that you'd abandoned - neglected at best - and then sent them into danger to solve a problem you couldn't be bothered to look into yourselves', which seemed to cause a certain amount of shuffling among the family - and then went back to the school because there was someone who could teach her to use her magic properly, and that was of infinitely more use than the family. (Not that her father was interested in her anyway, because she was a girl. Oh, also, massive dick boy? Her brother.)
So, yeah, a light and fun game to round off the con.
Incidentally, Louisa thought she saw Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards fame when we were getting off the plane. Cut to the next day, and Robert Evans mentions on social media that he's in London this week, and he lives in Portland. So, yeah, that probably was Robert Evans.
