This was my twelfth straight year going to AmberCon NorthWest (ACNW), my favorite American convention. There remained a good crowd of over a hundred fifty - which was a full twenty or more over the previous year, though it remained mostly long-time comers, as shown by the opening ceremonies. My full list of events were:
Slot #1: The Fall of the Jade Throne?
Best moment -
Slot #2: Sunnydale Psi-Run
Best moment -
Slot #3: Hnefatafl
Best moment - The story of how Blackjack won back the king's daughter by proving his wife was even more ugly than the ass end of a cow, and her ugliness stunned the trolls that had kidnapped her.
Slot #4: You've Come a Long Way, Baby
Best moment -
Slot #5: Stop the Madness
Best moment -
Slot #6: Sons of Ambarchy 6: On the Devil's Path
Best moment -
Slot #7: Studying the Passage of Time
Best moment -
GM John Kim
Thursday - 7pm to midnight
This was the fourth year of this game - my first and only continuing campaign game thus far. It is a re-imagining of Zelazny's Amber around a Chinese theme, where all civilizations and universes are merely reflections of the great Jade Empire, and the Pattern is housed deep in the Forbidden City within the capital. There are many relatives since the first emperor long ago, and those in whom the imperial blood runs true are superhuman - able not only to walk the Pattern, but to leap to the tops of buildings and engage in fantastical swordplay. It merges Amber with the Chinese wuxia genre. My players the their characters were:
Important NPCs included:
The plot in brief: Another secret society known as the Yellow Turbans has apparently been infiltrated by Chaosites. They were previously opposed by the Knights of Heavenly Purity, but with free reign they established a fortress deep in shadow. An imperial force successfully found and defeated these foes.
I didn't keep good notes, but this was a less satisfying episode of the series.
GM Virginia Lore
Friday - 9am to 1pm
This was a run of Meg Baker's game, Psi-Run, with an alternate setting. The original setting is psychics on the run from mysterious agents; while this variant was instead set in the town of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We created characters on the spot, along with a possibly-remote connection to the canonical characters from the TV series. The players and their characters were:
We all started together, stowed in coffins in the back of a truck. At first we made a break for the woods, which turned out to be highly spooky, with the trail disappearing behind us. Then we made our way along the road to town, where we were briefly attacked by a vampire - cutting on , then cut through a graveyard into the town proper. Conflicted, we eventually went to the Magic Box shop, only to find Anya and Giles unconscious. The chasers caught up to us there, and we defeated the four in front, but more in the back managed to capture Anya. At that point, we wrapped up into end-game to answer the last few questions, and resolve the characters' crossroads.
I think we had good characters and good character questions - something that Virginia helped pull out of everyone. There was a lot of good interplay in playing out the characters and the answers to their questions. Sam found out that he was pledging to a fraternity, and that his tuxedo was a break-away costume for his hazing. Marisol found out that her father was among the grey-suited chasers, and that her mother was crazy. My telepathy a few times gave answers - but more often, my telepathy side effects made all of us uncontrollably learn secrets of others. My full character questions and their answers were:
On the bad side, a number of the Psi-Run mechanics didn't fit that well with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer show, unsurprisingly. The whole game is intentionally a chase, but doesn't have a resolution of the theme like a TV episode would have.
GM Julian Morley
Friday - 2pm to 6:30pm
This was a a playtest of a storytelling system that Jules was developing, about viking warriors sitting around a fire and telling stories. We would go a number of times around the circle of players, where each player tells a story about themselves or one of the others. Each story would change the collection of Regard points that each player has, where at the end of the night, the player with the most Regard is the leader. At that point, the traitor (...).
The idea of the game is the characters are telling tales around a fire the day after a war party gone terribly wrong. The king lies by the fire, grievously wounded, and the remaining huscarls tell tales because they cannot sleep. Secretly, one of the characters is a traitor.
There was an economy of points in Reknown, and someone could spend to challenge parts of the story of the current storyteller. Characters had options in their story: [b]boast[/b] of their own exploit, [b]hail[b] the exploits of another (with a supporter), or [b]sleight[/b] another warrior (with a supporter). After everyone has had a turn, the warrior with most Reknown was the leader, and others have to secretly decide whether to follow him or sneak away in the night. If the leader is the traitor, then only those who sneak away survive. If the leader is not the traitor, then only those who stay survive.
It was an interesting concept, but it was difficult for some of the players to jump into Nordic war stories. Having run a vikings campaign for several years, I felt comfortable, but I felt like there were others in the group less comfortable with it.
GM John Kim
Friday - 8pm to midnight
This was my run of a modified version of Julia Ellingboe's game of this title. The basics were still the same, but the original game is supposed to run in 45 minutes, but we played for about 3 hours by delving more into both the film and the actor relationships. Notably, I played the director and created a scene of my own for the opening - a clear break from just being GM.
This was a lot of fun to play through as a sort of guided improv. We decided on the following scenes:
We also added in the character of "Burt Breaker" - the 28-year-old American stuntman for the Old Flame. We did a number of tricks like jumping back and forth in time between the scenes, which made for interesting re-integration of ideas.
GM John Kim
Saturday - 9am to 4:30pm
This was a diceless, statless game of playing quasi-government agents in 1950s America, stopping and suppressing paranormal threats to the country. The players and their characters were:
I ran this as two independent episodes. The first was taking on the inventor of the defibrillator, Claude Beck, who clearly was evil based on bringing people back from the dead - plus he was involved in muscle grafting. The second episode was was taking on Rosalind Franklin, Watson, and Crick - who were trying to discover the secret to engineering new life.
While it was amusing, I decided afterwards that I didn't think the concept worked all that well as a parody. In later years, I came up with a better concept along similar lines called "Stop Those Kids!" - where the PCs were top scientists working for the government trying to solve a local problem, but local kids on bikes are making their lives hell and threatening the whole world.
GM Clint Whiteside
Saturday - 7pm to midnight
This was the sixth of a continuing series of diceless games using a loose variant of the Amber Diceless system set in a close parallel to the Sons of Anarchy TV show - where the characters are the family members of Zelazny's Amber. I had joined in season three along with Rose. She played as Ron's son Cory (based on Corwin), while I played her "old lady" Didi (based on Deirdre) - who was pregnant. Didi is a kind of psycho, gung-ho biker chick who definitely did not intend to become a mother.
GM Jennifer Schwarting
Sunday - 10am to 4:30pm
(....)
ACNW remains my favorite role-playing convention. The community is a big part of that, which is helped by the shared culture - and also by pre-convention organizing.