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oldschoolgaming · 5 years

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Dragonmeet 2018

I find it hard to believe that it’s December all ready but it must be true because I’m just home from Dragonmeet, my last gaming convention of the year!

Dragonmeet has been around for decades in one form or another but this year’s event was only the second I had attended.

I set off early on Saturday morning to collect my mate Darran from Derby. He’s recovering from a broken leg and knowing he normally relies on public transport I thought I could help a fellow GM out. I’m sure navigating the tube in London would be hard work with crutches but it wasn’t completely altruistic; sharing accommodation costs made the trip much more affordable and it was good to have company on the long drive.

We made good time down to Hammersmith. I’d booked the same B&B I used last year which, even with the extra (but very affordable) parking charges worked out cheaper than a room at the convention hotel.

I’d booked to run two games this year. In the morning slot I ran Stephen Newton’s ‘Children Of The Fallen Sun’ for Mutant Crawl Classics RPG

Initially I was unsure the game would run as sign ups were thin on the ground for some of the morning games. I had two confirmed players but picked up more as other games were cancelled and late arrivals drifted in, finishing the adventure with five players at the table.

The game was great fun with some really memorable moments including a near TPK when our Yak manimal fumbled his artifact check on a control panel, blowing the thing up and killing himself and two of the party’s Porcupine men companions!

Some quick thinking and good rolling got the rest of the party back on their feet but it seemed that the party’s very own ‘great disaster’ didn’t put them off prodding and poking the rest of the artifacts. Before long we had a mutant with a freshly acquired set of gills and (despite reasonable warning) another who was reduced to a dehydrated husk and spent the rest of the adventure rolled up in another character’s backpack! It’s a great module and I look forward to running it again soon.

Mutants, Manimals and Humans united!

During a swift lunch break I sat down with a sandwich and a pint of Guiness and was finally able to meet up with with fellow tabletop nerd, twitch streamer and 3D printer geek LaughingBoy who was visiting Dragonmeet for the first time with his son. We’d missed each other at the Expo this year so it was great to catch up!

On the subject of the expo I also caught up with Kalum from the Rolistes podcast who had recorded one of Brendan’s DCC games at the Expo this year. I also had a chat with the non stop ball of energy known as Lloyd Gyan, who works for Modiphius but is also involved with the ‘Games On Demand’ at UK Games Expo It looks like I’ll be running some shorter ‘on demand’ Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, X-Crawl or Mutant Crawl Classics sessions at the Expo next year.

Me & Lloyd

I didn’t take any photos in the trade hall this year but l behaved and was almost on budget, December being and expensive time of year! I picked up physical copies of a couple of bits I’ve already got as PDFs:

The Midderlands is fantasy OSR setting based in the part of the country I reside in, which I picked up from Squarehex’s fantastic stand.

Mothership, an awesome OSR Horror/Sci fi game with simple mechanics and divine artwork and layout. I bought a physical copy mostly because the home printed version I made from the PDF doesn’t do the product justice (or my eyesight any good!)

I also picked up a new Lamentations Of The Flame Princess T Shirt (the Ramones shirt of the RPG hobby?) but made my saving throw against James’ sales pitch and avoided buying any more product for that game - I have a backlog of stuff to run already having overspent at both last year’s Dragonmeet and the UK Games Expo this year.

My afternoon game was Julian Bernick’s ‘Outlive, Outsmart, Outkiill’ a funnel adventure for his Noir/Urban fantasy ‘Nowhere City Nights’ setting for DCC which I reviewed here.

The adventure is a fairly linear dungeon - not a bad thing for a funnel in this judge’s humble opinion. The simple premise is that characters from all walks of modern life (fast food chef, executive, cab drivers and IT worker, stripper and so on) have been kidnapped and are forced to make their way through the trials of the dungeon, whist being constantly taunted and ‘encouraged’ to fight each other by a hidden group of sadistic NPCs.

We had some PvP early in the game resulting in one of the players knocking another of his OWN characters into a spiked pit trap, but the group mostly worked together.

Highlights included an attempt to make an improvised flame thrower from a bottle of vodka and a length of rubber hose; one character aimed the device, another blow the vodka through the tube. As judge I was desperately hoping for a crit or a fumble on that roll, but it was not to be!

The adventure is a good mix of combat, traps and a wicked trapped puzzle encounter that had the remaining characters playing very cautiously.

We had a death toll of just over 50% as we reached the final encounter. I tried my best to encourage PvP by offering a ‘special prize’ (I had a full set of funky dice to give away) but no one took the bait and the players opted to stick together and fight their way out of the dungeon. The final encounter was pretty chaotic and good fun despite me rolling a ‘1′ on the bad guy’s initiative check!

After the game I did another lap of the trade hall, resisting more goodies from The Dice Shop and Atlantis miniatures. (check out their awesome Dwarf sculpts!)

The real downside of a one day convention is how quickly things seem to wrap up in the evening. I thought about trying to get another game going but although the mind and heart were willing the body (and voice!) was weak so I decamped to the bar with friends for more Guinness and an excellent, if expensive, portion of fish n chips.

Another great Dragonmeet experience and an excellent finish to convention gaming in 2018!

#tabletop #rpg #dnd #dungeon crawl classics

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