Convention Report - VENGER CON IV

 

You know it's going to be a good time when God strikes your house's water well transducer with a lightning bolt, frying it two days before your convention. 

Call me a crazed cultist, but experience has taught me that when something awesomely momentous happens, it's usually preceded and / or followed by potential misfortune (in other words, you never roll all 20s).  As it happens, this fits with my latest DriveThruRPG release Zeeku.

Luckily, the day before the con, that got sorted out.  Had to spend a Divine Favor to take care of the issue, but that particular juice was well worth the squeeze.  A $700 bill is much preferable to $10k (if the entire system had been destroyed, requiring replacement).

Yes, VENGER CON IV: Post-Modern Apocalypse happened this past weekend.  So many, many things!  I felt like I was all places all at once, much like Yog-Sothoth.  I didn't take many photos, but the ones I did take were primo!  And I didn't even record any video.  Although, Lord Matteus recorded his podcast at the end of the first night, and I made a cameo.

Ultimately, it was successful.  Not perfect, but then what is?

Sandy Petersen was this year's Guest of Honor and he did not disappoint.  I started off (after the ceremonial gong, of course) by asking his origin story.  Between all three days, Sandy must have fielded hours of questions, but he was happy to chat with us about roleplaying games, ye olde times of publishing, the Cthulhu Mythos, and what he's been up to lately.  

All the Call of Cthulhu RPG books (with his name on it somewhere) acquired in the 1990s (and a few I lucked into acquiring through garage sales and such) were signed, along with my "demon skin" Cha'alt campaign bible notebook.

Attendance didn't hit above what we did last year, about 35.  I've got some new ideas for next year... yes, I'm already planning on VENGER CON V.  But an official announcement will have to wait a month or so.

I ran two sessions on both Friday and Saturday, but nothing on Sunday as I came down with some sort of cold and was barely hanging on by the convention's end.  So, I was a bit disappointed that I didn't get to run Alpha Blue for that final slot as I planned, but shit happens.  I'm still recovering, will probably be back to my old self by tomorrow.

Every session I ran was Cha'alt via the Advanced Crimson Dragon Slayer ruleset.  Sometimes, the Cha'alt X-Cards played heavily (occasionally, a bit too heavily) in the proceedings.  Other times, they were barely touched.  

I got to debut my take on the complication / opportunity + enhancement game mechanic that I released on DriveThru over a week ago.  Zeeku is something that happened intentionally and by accident, consciously and via my subconscious.  While not every single instance was a knockout success, those little prompts proved to be, overall, fun and useful for my sessions.  

Get Zeeku, now!

The most notable examples were someone's face hitting the floor of a worm-flesh cavity and being covered in pink goo - and then covered in demon flesh and bone when one exploded a round or two later.  A couple PCs avoiding that invisible sorcerer's fireball when they were in a different area of the temple dungeon beneath Kra'adumek.  And a squeamish rogue not having to murder a dark-elf woman getting a massage because, as luck would have it, the masseur planned to assassinate her himself and plunged a dagger in her heart before the PC could raise his dagger. 

I was able to playtest what became Zeeku in a couple game sessions prior to VENGER CON IV.  It held up then and it holds up now.  

While I had originally wanted to find a superior alternative to whatever DaggerHeart thought it was doing, the cherry on top (my own unique twist on something that's been done before) is the idea that the universe is curved or cyclical.  If something bad happens, something good can come out of it - especially if that suffered is consciously experienced.  

While not for the faint of heart, Zeeku will give Game Masters that sharpness which could mean the difference between a memorable game and sessions you never think about twice.

It's hard to write enough text to cover all these great pictures!  Oh yeah, I could talk a little about the central adventure I devised.  Instead of multiple adventures, I decided to write one big, multi-part scenario with the possibility of mixing in older stuff.  

So, Escape From Tenzarith was modified into Hunted In Tenzarith with a lot more encounters written down + micro-scenario side-trips to places like Qada'ath and Chud-Letha'az.  However, we never got around to exploring those areas.  Next time!

Going back to the narrative game mechanics, those Zeeku moments and many, many more would not have happened if not for the 1s and 6s on those narrative d6s.  So, that was an absolute win and something that I'll continue to use in my Cha'alt home game.  

Oh yeah, I decided to use pre-gens in my VENGER CON sessions.  In years past, I've saved pre-gens for other conventions where disruption (noise and other distractions) might have made character generation difficult.  But I've come to realize that that little bit of extra thought I put into pre-made characters elevates them to a higher level.  

Let's face it, you sit down to play an unfamiliar game (or maybe one that you've only played once or twice) with a GM and fellow players that you don't know too well.  Perhaps the rule-set is also strange.  You're probably not at your most agile and inspirational, creativity-wise.  Take my advice, GMs.  Come up with pre-gens for your con games!

The amount of players also varied from session to session.  One table had 8 (it's a good thing I came up with 8 pre-gens), another 3, and the other two were somewhere in the middle.  I had one player from my home game (another planned on coming but he couldn't make it, sadly), a couple from the previous Gary Con, a lovely couple who looked like they wandered into VENGER CON by mistake.  An OSR gamer who I've known for years who brought his two buddies, a bunch of awesome VENGER CON regulars (irregulars?), and a few folks who I'd never met but were willing to give the Cha'alt experience a try.

• There were weird connections between stuff I created just for this convention and stuff that transpired randomly in The Black Pyramid, like Milton's stapler from Office Space.  
• Combining locations in unusual ways - gargantuan worms below subterranean dungeons and holes in cave walls that led to different cave systems of adventure.  
• I spontaneously asked for a random d8 vibe-check.  
• One Dead Game Society player and VengerCon alum, who played the 40-year-old virgin PC, clung to those dirty panties like his life depended on it - hilarious and Cha'alt-appropriate (which basically translates into wildly inappropriate for every other sort of game, aside from those based upon lounge lizards).
• Great throw-away lines were said, such as "The map is not the worm's anus."  A riff on the adage "The map is not the territory."
• I read the room and subverted expectations (in an actual good way - take note Disney Star Wars) that led to a fish-folk massacre when the PCs learned that these were reformed cultists who didn't believe in ritual sacrifice.  
• I heard and/or read post-game commentary such as "That is the most crazy weird fucked-up adventure I've ever experienced." And... "Venger's DM style is outrageously fun."
• Described a new (to me) weapon type, the "2 finger" lady knife - inspired by Deadpool's blind roommate's pearl grip handgun.
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• The players got a nice running gag going with a pre-gen PC's name.  "Don't queef this one up."
• The Cha'alt-X Cards brought forth both White Goodman's Globo-Gym and the Kool-Aid Man (thank the Dark Gods not in the same session - that would have been too much, even for me).
• A player came up with an amusing porn / Lovecraft title for a book, movie, or whatever - "The Jerker at the Threshold."
• Players made me realize that all rooms in The Black Pyramid either look like Arizona or New Hampshire.
• A player chose his character's animal companion to be a night-clown pygmy that I think was also described as a juggalo goblin. 
• And who could forget (well, I almost did) the adventurers finally encountering Spongeba'ab Trapezoidal Pants and his entourage under the sea?  They went to Hell where they belonged, after Vandrake, son of Uthrak the Unconquered bested the little yellow freak.
• "What happens when a frog and a bat have a baby?  Evil mogwai or the Great Old One T'sathagg-Kha?

A few months ago, I bought a soft plushy fish.  I didn't know why, exactly, except that I would at some point slap a player in the face... for reasons.  I let the unknown sit in my unconscious like a naughty idea on a time-out.  

But then, when a player rolled an 11 on his d20 and a 1 on his d6, I realized that "111" meant something important.  I remarked upon it at the time, but it wasn't until the next day when it hit me.  I excused myself from the game I was playing in and walked over to the room across the hall with my fish to slap the player from last night who was, as of now, DMing his own game.  I asked the table to pardon my intrusion for 5 seconds as I needed to slap their DM in the face with my soft fish.  Thankfully, he was all about it, and demanded pictures be taken to memorialize the occasion.  

Henceforth, when someone rolls an 11 on their d20 roll and a 1 on their d6, it shall be known as "one-eleven."  That player shall be slapped in the face with a fish because the fish-slapping is also happening in the game to that player's character.  A portal opens (or maybe there's an NPC nearby), the PC is slapped with the fish, and then it's over. 

Well, not completely over.  I'd feel bad if there was no compensation for such a gratuitous display, so that player gets a polished fuchsia stone - Divine Favor!

Random stuff... 

• I'm so glad that Sandy brought his Hyperspace boardgame to the con.  He got a chance to demo that with an assortment of folks several times.  And since a handful of GMs scheduled to run games had to back out or left the con early due to unforeseen events, it was a nice activity to make up for the shortfall. 
• I never showed-off my tattoo!  One of the reasons I got it when I did was to have the thing for VENGER CON.  Well, I did have it, since it was tattooed to my forearm.  And it did come in handy, in a metaphysical way, being the Kort'thalis meta-sigil that leads to Cha'alt and has come to symbolize the skinematic Vengerverse.  But I never called it out or drew attention to it.  It just was.  That's fine, I suppose.
• I played in three sessions this convention.  Two were under GM Judd as he ran the Red Room's Wretched New Flesh and an indie RPG called Tripod, d6 dice pool where insects have colonized humanity in the far future.  The other session where I played was under GM Bill Allan.  He ran a tactical paramilitary RPG using d4 dice pools called Ruins and Remnants in the world of Cha'alt.  This is the promo video he made.  Fun games!
• Sandy Petersen's seminars on creating a horror scenario and campaign were great.  Just hearing the information from another perspective gives it that little bit of extra life. 
• I had purchased a bunch of unusual but cool looking dice from an online retailer prior to the convention.  Since I already have a million of them, I decided to sell each new dice set for $10 a pop.  There's no way I didn't lose money on that deal, but I always think it's fun to get new dice at conventions.  There was nearly a dozen, I think.  And only a couple sets remaining by the convention's end.
• I sold a bunch of softcovers and gave away lots of Cha'alt hardcovers.  Next year, I'll have a bit more stuff to offer attendees, in terms of homemade Cha'alt X-Cards and those dice display stands like the one I use for my set-of-seven. 

Several people at the con and afterwards told me they had an awesome time.  That's the main reason I do it.  

Next VENGER CON will be marketed in a completely different way, so expect to see some wild stuff in the months to come.

If you have any questions, please ask!  I'd be more than happy to provide whatever insight I can...

Enjoy,

VS

p.s. Want the hardcover Cha'alt trilogy?  Here's how (and they're currently on sale!)!!  Want to join the Kort'thalis mailing list to stay up-to-date on what's going on in the skinematic Vengerverse?  This is it!! 

p.p.s.  RIP, Ozzy!  You were the Prince of Fucking Darkness!!!