Revelations from VENGER CON V

 

It came, it went, and it was an awesome time... a veritable blast, hoss!

Thanks to everyone who attended and chipped-in with all the aspects of organizing a convention - especially Game Mastering.  I did my best to GM as much as possible.  That translated into 8 sessions over the weekend.

I ran Cha'alt with Advanced Crimson Dragon Slayer four times, the Monty Python RPG twice, Paranoia once, and my sort of rules-light Call of Cthulhu RPG just one time.  In this blog post, I'll be rambling about my experiences, things that caught my attention, that I learned, stuff I thought about afterwards, and amusing things said at the table.

Opening with a lecture on "the riddle of Game Mastering," (and not Heccaeity, Part 2: Now, This is Thisness that was promised to Judd 10,000 years ago in the bathhouses of Ira'ad) the gathering masses chewed upon the fat of wisdom I bestowed upon them as sessions quickly formed, transmuting lead into gold... pure gold, Jerry!

Everyone seemed to have a good time.  I did ask, and unless folks were fibbing, they did, indeed, have the time that was good.  I had between 4 and 8 players each game, with the average being 6-7.

Some of the Cha'alt games were so gonzo that it was almost too much.  Those sessions tend to happen at night, which is why I've begun referring to them as "Cha'alt after dark."  They're usually far sleazier, wilder, and contain more improv than the regular Cha'alt sessions I run.  Drinking, spamming the Cha'alt X-Cards, and an unconscious (at least, I hope it's unconscious; Lol) desire to break the game.  Not in a bad way, but in a "let's just see how far we can go with this before the house of cards fall in an apocalyptic shambles of weeping Vengers kind of way."

Lucky for me, I remain unbroken.  But like taking LSD, a little goes a long way, and it can be extremely hazardous for your brain; microdosing is best, but of course every once in awhile, you need to let the tiger out of the cage and take a full hit.  Otherwise, how do you know what's too far?  Please don't try any of this in your home game.  Some play-styles are strictly for conventions or anywhere you'll likely never game again.

An all too memorable session of the "after dark" variety involved the PCs getting slightly rich from selling a plethora of zoth, and then going to the ultra-modern, skyscraper, cyberpunk city of Qada'ath to buy all kinds of high-tech weapons, armor, and other equipment.  Then, they went back to the subterranean tunnels and caves to fight literal godlike entities.  

I had 8 pre-gens for my Cha'alt games and 7 for the 1970s investigative horror scenario.  The rest were just random tables to get the basics.  I could have had more tables for the Monty Python sessions, and will go that route in the future, but the players did a good job of filling out the blanks by simply roleplaying their characters with whatever came to mind.  In other words... acting!

A single player from our in-person Cha'alt campaign was there Friday and Saturday.  In one of the VENGER CON Cha'alt sessions, he played Deacon Elijah Crane from the strawberry milk dimension.  That was fun seeing his established and lived-in character come to life in the same setting, but completely different circumstances. His interaction with the natives of Cha'alt was amusing.  I only wish there could have been more.  I believe that scenario was the one I ran at Gary Con earlier this year.  A really awesome adventure (appearing in Pulp-Drenched Cities of Cha'alt, softcover pod available on Amazon) that's fairly guard-railed in several places.  Not as much opportunity to cut loose and do whatever, but I still love it.

I also asked for player suggestions and dropped them into the Black Skull of Secrets, only using 2 of the 6 in our first game, and then I think I only asked for player suggestions one other time but forgot to draw any of them.  Oops.  So, it was a winning "mechanic," that I just didn't use as much as I should have.  And if I had to provide one regret for the games I ran at VENGER CON this year, it would probably be that.  It's just a lot of fun on many different levels - everyone's favorite, let's watch the GM squirm as he tries to shoehorn Sydney Sweeney's massive tits with the Kool-Aid man and an NPC who happens to be the Steven Seagal of Cha'alt.

A'amro the midnight-elf thief who toiled in darkness like his father and his father before him, as was the way of demons in Yeathcha'arvenyr.  Marty played that character to the hilt; he did a phenomenal job.  

After perusing the adult bookshop, he window-shopped until coming to a Chinese restaurant and bought some eggrolls... which, as it happens, was something that appeared in another game I, as GM, had never experienced (I tend to include a lot of Chinese restaurants in my sessions).  But it influenced this session to a degree none of us could have imagined.  I like the idea of imaginary realities affecting each other through the consciousness of humans who play these sorts of games.

While waiting for his eggrolls, the proprietor of the Golden Dragon Palace asked if he'd like to have his fortune read by the lady downstairs.  Not sure if that was a euphemism for something else, he took the stairs and found a half-woman, half-snake behind a screen (no Eddie Murphy, though).

He asked for her to read the stars or tea-leaves or zoth drippings - whatever she did behind that screen - and I rolled on the d4 table I had prepared.  He rolled a 1, and she told him he would not survive this adventure.  Taking it in stride, he went back up, got his eggrolls, and met up with the rest of the party.  Later, almost at the end of the session, A'amro died from being burned, zapped, or squished by a tentacle... I can't remember the exact details.  So much was happening, one thing right after another.

Which brought me to a thought... it only happens rarely, but I should have something prepared for when a PC buys the worm-farm in Cha'alt.  A death soliloquy, if you will, to mark the occasion, singing sweet demons that carry a soul to rest.  It brings to mind that HPL story "The Hound," where the narrator mutters a demonic prayer which St. John had loved in life.  Let's see what I can do, shall we?  Perhaps a Cha'altian ha'aiku (4 / 3 / 7)...

Devil-seed spills
Foetid pits
Eternity mocks their gaze

Bill Allan, active and serious throughout the sessions he played, kept everyone on track and in character.  That was much appreciated.  His interplay with the other PCs, not to mention the various NPCs, was fun to watch.  I especially liked how he brought out the best of snake oil Sean in Paranoia who was absolutely playing the most paranoid character in any game that weekend.

Speaking of Paranoia, apparently I have a type of game or play-style that I prefer because I just keep heading in that direction.  Back in the 90s, there was a bunch of player vs player, everyone trying to blast each other in hopes of being the last traitor standing.  And maybe I'll go back to that "Zap!" mode at some point, but my instinct is to take the dystopian setting serious enough so that it does feel real and immersive, with plenty of dark humor to off-set the grim totalitarian absurdism that is Alpha Complex. 

I even dropped-in a little bit of "Backrooms: the RPG" that I had an interest in trying to write just after seeing the movie, as it had a D&D / survival RPG kind of feel, but never grabbed me to the point of writing a whole bunch of stuff for it.  Basically, the PCs wandered a series of different colored hallways and rooms, occasionally containing bizarre stuff, until it started to get a little bit boring, and then we switched gears again.  

I wanted it to end a little bit meta and with a distinct Cha'alt flavor... and that's what we got.  Incidentally, that's also how both the (identical) Monty Python sessions ended.  That kind of self-referential surrealist 4th wall-breaking insanity goes hand-in-tentacle with Cha'alt, so I leaned into it.

As for the running of Monty Python, this was my first time.  I read the rulebook a year ago, when first purchasing it, and glanced at the rules again in preparation for VENGER CON.  So many rules, mon dieu!  It's its own system, and so just one more thing to learn, fret over trying to get right, teach the players, hope they remember as the session continues, with so many bits that stop the game in order to note a mechanical thing-a-m'bob.

BTW, best "prop" I had ready at the table for Monty Python was a bit of music from The Holy Grail here.

As I tell anyone who asks, the game isn't here (pointing to a rulebook and dice and whole bunch of procedures)... it's here (running my finger back and forth between me, the GM, and whoever is in front of me playing).  Rules-light is the only way for me, as being in that moment of decision where the player is considering things from his character's point of view (and in terms of the genre, setting, etc.) eventually unfolding like a story being told in real time, is what it's all about.

That leads me to another anecdote from one of the Cha'alt games.  A rather quiet and careful PC who originally decided to wager a couple gold pieces in a potentially lethal game of chance soon decided to lay it all on the table, so to speak, once it became increasingly obvious that this was their moment to go all-in, actually and metaphorically, risking everything, or go back to being a safe and very reasonable, level-headed wallflower.  

It was a bigger risk for the player to not put themself out there than it was to play it safe.  Playing it safe is great in the real world.  That's kind of the golden rule of civilized people - play it safe whenever possible.  But for a game that's trying to create pulp-fantasy sword & sorcery stories, playing it safe means death.

BTW, gamers are bandying the term "Heavy Metal" around lately to describe that kind of big tits, eye gouging, strange fantasy aesthetic from the 1981 film (as well as the magazine, I suppose).  Its resurgence is partly because of Mr. Dungeon Tuber or whatever his channel is has that Deathbringer game currently crowdfunding.  Personally, I think that's great because I love Heavy Metal and it's heavily inspired my writing - especially Cha'alt.

But should we call it something else besides "Heavy Metal style," like maybe the boobs & sorcery genre?  Just a thought...

This player realized the coin of the realm was attention - being seen, "on camera," and in the spotlight where all eyes are on you and your decisions matter, not just to that player's character, but perhaps the party, Kingdom, or even the entire world.  And that meant doing things you wouldn't normally do if you were really there.  It's one of those eye-opening "A-ha!" moments where you realize that sometimes the player must be immersed in the metagame to get the most optimal outcome, rather than the character being immersed in the world.  And everything I just said goes double - nay, triple!!! - for one-shots and convention games!

At this point, I'm just going to bullet-point weird random words and phrases that I feverishly wrote down in my notebook before they vanished forever on the cutting room floor.  Perhaps, one or two will jog a player's memory and they'll chuckle over that time we really shook the pillars of heaven.  VENGER CON, baby... VENGER CON.  

• Hookah whores
• 18 vermilion talons
• Science-fantasy strap-on laser dildo battle to see who gets to violate the head concubine (who looks like like that voluptuous redhead in the not-official Odyssey behind-the-scenes).
• Red sphere pimp
• Morale majority
• That time the chaos magic fuchsia after-effect gave the sorcerer the power to manipulate reality four times in a row, he chose... making all girls topless, making all the ooga-booga natives understandable, making magic stuff glow so it's easily seen, and giving every member of the party a turkey leg.
• Apparently, there's a system of tunnels and caves far to the south and deep underground named Zemucha.  Who knew?
• A monstrous godlike entity named A'abshaq-Vethyk made his first appearance. Also, I was surprised (maybe I shouldn't have been) that Will remembered the entity's name from yesterday when they first encountered him.  I was just trying to quickly think of a name, and looked back in my notes from the day before, glad to recycle something cool sounding I improvised.  
• A PC bought a lizard-dog to occasionally bleed when it was a spell emergency.
• "I have an alien artifact... in my pants!"
• A sorcerer used so much zoth to fuel his spells that he developed zoth saturation (where his eyes glowed chartreuse), the stage coming right before zoth poisoning.  
• Porn-hub grown sentient
• That time the Q'rull got stuck in a gigantic creature's butt, his anal sinuses cleansed. 
• Infernal sex panther tattoo across his body
• In a parallel universe, there's a book similar to The Necronomicon called something or other that translates to The Book of Dead Demon-Worm Shadow Names.
• When you finally arrive at Taco Bell and order some tacos, bell, and nachos, but then the guy who took you out to lunch brings lobster, french fries, and a roll of quarters (or nickels) back to the table. 
• "Do you know what maps are...?"  "No, do you?"
• Mordor sounds close enough to Morgansteins department store for all your home needs.
• Dude thought he could just grab a floating orange and start eating it - Ha!
• The old teleportation glyph drawn on the underside of a cantina toilet lid and another drawn upon the outside of a pylon so the pilots find themselves in the bowl, and now you can loot the matrix table's dimensional crystals scheme... yes, of course.  Oh yeah, I also determined that pylon crystals are super-charged dimensionally attuned energy crystals.
• This sword is known as the bastard-maker.
• "Tell me of your English volcanoes, Usul."
• Star-69 navigation system
• The French winning their saving throws on dark-elf poison gave them the best cheese soup and women's prison orgy of their fucking lives!
• "Bitch better have my full XP."
• When you add dry ice to the cheese soup, you get a cheese fog.
• As long as there's more tentacles than spam, you know that Cha'alt is winning (and thereby the Monty Python RPG losing).
• Potato famine skins
• Spelljammer is already the French version of D&D in space.
• Keeping Sybil Danning on a leash with her magic vagina, an artifact unto itself.
• The nacho sombrero 
• The color orange has not been invented yet in medieval Europe.  Instead, it's called reddish-yellow.
• Each iron spike must have its own character sheet... and you must track your item's experience points.
• When a PCs gambling problem is so bad that the anxiety-triggered GM pleads for another PC to hold his money for him.
• Some fantastic names (that I had no part in creating) appearing in just one Monty Python session... Saxon Mangold, Archduke Sir Rodney Sea Montbollery, Vanilla Token, Pees Blossom Pete, Durny Knickerbottom, and Flintstaff.
• Canadian pesos & Turkish lyra (wait... lyra or lira is already Turkish?)
• The opposite of scantily clad nymphs in your sex dreams is lumberjacks, obviously. 
• As'Nas Satanis the vengeful... tempting the heroes of Camelot to ruin the adventure by making it more like Cha'alt, thus proving that it is superior to the Monty Python RPG.  So diabolical - m'wuahaaha'aha!
• And as a joke (since this was the last con), VENGER CON VI: Resurrection... The Quest For More Venger!!!!!!

Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment with anything you wish to say... questions, comments, critiques, etc. 

VS

p.s. Want some hardcover Cha'alt?  Here's how (and they're currently on sale!)!!