Turn Tabled - Gen Con Online

Wow! A new episode? It's like I finally got it together so I can upload something - but nah, it's been pretty hectic over here at DMDCPCHQ. I did take some time to enjoy Gen Con weekend though, as a player no less. Got to play a lot of great games with a lot of great people, and figured it'd make for a good experience to share. Campaign logs aren't going anywhere, just taking a quick break from them for this episode. More of these Turn Tabled episodes will also likely pop-up in the future!

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"Nightfall" by Eric Godlow

Transcript

Hey! This is the DM Discourse, a podcast about D&D, focused on the experience at the table from behind the screen. I'm your host Darrell, and today I’m not talking about D&D or DM’ing - I’m gonna talk about Gen Con! I played a bunch of games that weekend and I figured it’d be fun to talk about them! I’ve been wanting to play a bunch of these for a long time, and one in particular that I was absolutely floored by. So hey stick around - campaign logs will resume next episode. For now I’m just gonna ramble about being a player for a change.

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Waking up from cyro was worse than any morning after, at least for Joe. A symphony of jackhammers to the tune of Canon in D-Painful. It would be dark coffee and bland soup for the day's meals to readjust but the corporation never provided much better for their trips this far in the deep black. A crack of stiff bones and the captain hopped out of the pod to head towards the mess. The USCSS Montero's familiar hum became the only noise in the emptiness of space as the cacophony in his head receded.

He was the first up and he kept tabs on his crew as they followed after. Leo Davis was next. “Captain Miller,” he said. “See you’re up bright and early. Are you going to join us for breakfast?”

“In a bit pilot. Checking the cargo.” The vidscreen dumped info on the shipment a few decks below. It read for a clean bill of health on several hundred pounds of explosive material, highly reactive when not contained and absolutely a necessity for the mining operations out on the Frontier.

Joe traced his calloused hand over the numbers. Way bigger than any prize they’d hauled. For the captain of the Montero this was a start of buying his way out from under the corporate yoke. Enough cash for a ship to call his own. He fiddled with the Weyland-Yutani jacket patch and he joined the rest of the crew in the mess.

He preferred to stand than sit next to John Wilson. “Please, Joe, come join us here at the table.” Wilson had the same toothless wry smile as every other corporate agent. “We have plenty of room.”

“I’ll be just fine standing.” He eyed the two roughnecks. “Kyle, Liam, you two alright?” From the bridge he heard Kyle cuss after he broke a mug on the floor. A couple bits were still there. “Make sure you get through all your shakes soon. Work starts here soon.”

Liam gave an eager smile and Kyle a stern nod. “Don’t worry about it captain. Just a bad freeze is all. How far out are we from our destination?”

“Dunno. Haven’t checked. Once we’re done here we’ll meet up on the bridge and get our situation set and-”

The lights throughout the ship began to flash and a blaring message arrived over the intercom. “CAPTAIN JOE MILLER. REPORT TO MOTHER FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTION.”

“Hell, guess we’re starting early.” Joe dug his clothes out from the locker and made his way across the ship to the central computer.

Leo the pilot called out as he got halfway across. “Captain, we picked up a distress beacon but,” he paused. “There’s nothing out here.”

“What do you mean nothing?”

“Not a damn thing nothing,” Kyle said. “Zip. Specks and space dust.” The crew fell silent and all eyes on the captain.

“Ain’t got an answer yet but I think I’m about to get one.”

With each step Joe took to the door that the Mother computer ran behind, he felt the paycheck from the cargo below slip between his fingers. Moments passed weighted by hundreds of zeros. Another day at the beck and call of the corp. All hope of an easy delivery gone, and all it took were a few short words from Mother. “You have a new directive, Captain Joe Miller. This signal is the mark of the USCSS Cronus, last seen seventy five years ago. Your new mission is as follows.”

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If you haven’t heard of Gen Con and you’re in this hobby, you definitely should. It’s a long running convention currently running out of Indianapolis during the summer, dedicated to all kinds of traditional gaming. It’s got miniatures and card games and board games and, what I spent my time doing this year, roleplaying games. Better yet with the current pandemic has the planet on perpetual lockdown, they even made badges free for the event. You just had to pay for whatever events it was that you wanted to attend, which I think is pretty normal as a way to guarantee people will actually show up to play. I can’t lie, I’ve had my share of D&D games I signed up for while drunk the night before and never made it to the next morning.

I’ve only been to Gen Con once in person, back in 2016, and that was a real fun weekend. I can’t recommend it enough to you if you’re even remotely interested in the kinds of things they have going on. It’s a great place to check out previews for products coming out, panels from companies and content creators, and so much more. I was especially impressed with how well it made it to an online environment. They have a ticketing system for sign-ups, and it more or less transitioned seamlessly to running online. Since that was the case and I wasn’t doing anything better that weekend, I ended up playing four games of RPGs, all not D&D, and all as a player. I think I’ll have an ongoing segment like this where if I ever have a chance to have fun on the other side of the table, I can do a recap - especially if the game I got to play was out of my normal wheelhouse.

The first game I got to play that weekend was with a buddy of mine and his friends - Delta Green. It’s one I’ve been dying to get a chance to get on the table for one of my home groups. It’s a Lovecraftian cosmic horror based game and works similarly to Call of Cthulhu, if you’re at all familiar with that, but as opposed to the late 19th/early 20th century that game generally takes place in to be synced up with the time of its source material, Delta Green takes place primarily during the modern era and focuses on conspiracies. Your characters are government agents with stakes in the events occurring, called upon by the eponymous Delta Green organization (whose legitimacy depends on your campaign as well) to investigate what are called Unnaturals, occurrences of the strange and grotesque in our world. They did a standalone release version of the game back in 2016, which is the one I’ve been hoping to play for a while so when my friend said he was looking to play a game there was no way I could pass that opportunity.

I’m not even the biggest H.P. Lovecraft fan - I think his writing is dull, the ideas and inspiration he sparked in others far better. One of my particular favorites for anything is Junji Ito, a prolific horror manga artist and also is iconic of the kinds of things that I want from cosmic horror. The fact that Delta Green takes place in the current time period is what drew me to it, and if that idea intrigues you I can easily recommend trying the game out. There’s a quickstart they have called Need to Know, which you can find for free, and they even have an adventure bundle up on DriveThruRPG due to the quarantine which I’m probably going to force my friends to play.

The mission, or night at the opera as they’re referred to in game, that our Keeper ran us through was called Operatoin Fulminate. It took us out to the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in California, to investigate the sudden reappearance of a child in the park - the weird part was that the child had been missing since the 80s. I played one Dr. Lee Palmer, an anthropologist curator of the Smithsonian in Washington DC with an interest in photography. He and his fellow agents rolled on up to the park ranger hut and met the kid, who definitely didn’t seem right. He had strange markings, but what was more worrying was the sudden storm that was rolling in - a storm that we learned happened whenever a child in this area would go missing.

There’s two things that I think are inarguably true about the CoC style games. They use percentile dice and it always feels scary rolling those d10s, and the game itself is very deadly. I walked into this one-shot without any expectation of living, which became all the more evident as we took out a couple of bikes to investigate a cave site where this missing child had disappeared and one of the bikes ended up crashing.

I’m not sure we got what we were looking for. We found evidence of something, and a frighteningly tall creature that tried to chase after us. We were able to dispatch it, but as soon as we did the campers who made it to the park ranger’s hut had gone insane - and there weren’t enough bikes to get us all back quickly. Two of our squad left to investigate, while the other two of us, Lee Palmer included, began our hike back down the path. The rest of our experience was being chased by small, undead-esque children trying to drag us down. I ended up using my camera flash to help untangle the other investigator as we just booked it down that path.

By the time we got back to the welcome center, the damage was already done. Whatever was going on here had driven one of the campers insane, and he had to be put down. The kid was missing, and we had to think fast. So we did what we thought seemed natural - we lied our asses off to get the survivors to tell a story masking whatever actual terror existed in Hetch Hetchy, which the Keeper told us was about how well you can expect Delta Green campaigns to go. As we drove the SUV back to base we passed by another car with the two parents of the lost child, probably never to see him again.

And damn that was a fun game. I’m sure I’d have more fun with it behind the screen as I usually do, but it was great to see the GM, who was a veteran of the system, really help the game shine for someone who had only this amalgam of thoughts of what it could be like. Definitely one I’m going to keep in mind for the future, either playing or running, that’s for sure.

Next game I played was actually a more traditional Call of Cthulhu experience, but on the opposite of the timeline - cowboy days. I know there’s some other weird stuff that gets added to western setting CoC, but I didn’t get enough into the crunch to see. The adventure we played, Four Hours to Reno, was about escorting a gang we had captured down to another town for justice, and as you might expect it didn’t go according to plan. There were a number of things that went wrong. We all left the wounded sheriff alone with the gang. There was a weird murder that happened, with such a gory scene that my character threw up. And then there was the typical cult stuff that went on, secret societies doing nefarious things. All that happened when the bandits also overtook the sheriff and we had to have a shootout in the middle of one of the cars. 

This adventure I didn’t live through, I ended up getting too deep in the heat and my whip wielding cowpoke bit the dust just a few rounds in. The nice thing about it is that the game is deadly for everyone, so the NPC enemies went down quickly, but not before I did. This was good too but I think it’s the time periods that prevent me from being sold on CoC itself. Whenever something comes out like the Void or the recent Color Out of Space adaptation, I’m ready to jump right in. The fact that VtMB is one of my favorite video games probably is a good indicator about my affection for modern setting horror.

If you put it together from the recap I included, I also played the Alien RPG that weekend, and I loved it, flatout. Even as someone who has only seen the first Alien movie, which I loved, and has some vague recollection of Prometheus and about a half dozen hours in Alien Isolation, I knew within the first hour that it was going to be one of those games that I would remember for a long time to come. And it showed me the real magic of just, as I said in the first episode, what you can find sitting around with a bunch of strangers. One of my friends agreed to sit in and play it with me, little did I know he was a horror aficionado, and we just kept talking about the game after it as well, it was just pure fun what was happening at that game.

Before I get too into it, I’ll start with the system mechanics. If you’re familiar with the Year Zero system by Free League Publishing, then it’s the same as that or so I’m told. It’s all d6’s, where you just roll a bunch of dice and you only need one six in order to succeed. There’s also yellow panic dice, which rolling a one causes you to stress out, and much like the movies the more of those damned yellow dice you roll the closer you are to things going downhill. The one, thematically, is represented by the facehugger, and it hurts everytime you see it. It’s definitely a narrative centric game, and I think if you can get into the feel of its source material the more you’ll enjoy it. From my experience the mechanics provided a fluid system that kept the tension ripe throughout the entire scenario we played, Chariots of the Gods.

Our ship, the USCSS Montero, was on a delivery mission for the Weyland-Yutani corporation, where along the way we detected a distress beacon. We traced the signal, but ended finding just what you may expect: nothing. Mind you we just got out of cryosleep so this was the last thing we wanted to deal with. My character, in particular, was motivated to want to escape his current career of running cargo and instead have his own ship. He just wanted to get this paycheck and keep it moving. Of course, it wouldn’t be in the vein of Alien if it were that simple.

Our Mother, the ship AI mainframe onboard the Montero, informed us that our job has changed. The explosives inside our cargo bay had to wait. Instead we were to triangulate this signal, which came from the long thought missing USCSS Cronus, who were to return from a distant planet with “scientific research material.” All of us at the table knew what was coming, and we couldn’t wait.

Things got off to a rough start right off the bat. We had trouble hooking our ship up to the silent, listless Cronus, and had to risk an airlock tunnel to get in. We almost lost one of our roughnecks to space as he stressed out, unable to actually crack open the hull of the ship to get us in. It only got eerier once we were aboard the Cronus, and once again the game mechanics helped serve this. You have resources, and for each of those you have one of those yellow die. So exploring a ship without a running oxygen system, we had to make air supply checks regularly. The suits we had started with five air units, but each time we rolled and got a 1, we lost one of those units. Time was, ultimately, our most important resource.

We split up from there, carefully navigating through stairwells on the various decks. The engineers made their way down to the reactor to try and get it back online, while the corp agent and myself took a look around the computer systems. It’s weird thinking back to how long just coming up with plans to walk down corridors took out of and in character, but I think that makes sense given the dread and horror you expect the Alien RPG to evoke.

And ultimately, I’d say the game master succeeded greatly. While the crew down below was trying to get the ship back up, a white-skinned alien creature ambushed them, and so began our combat tutorial, a system where one of the attacks the alien can do is literally “instant death.” I love it, so so much. The two of us a couple decks up tried to crawl through some vents to catch up, only to find a number of spore growths in one of the rooms on the ship. Between our fumbling, the crew below was actually able to kill the creature through sheer luck - it was bad rolls on both sides throughout the entire game. When we regrouped, my character saw one thing in this creature. Dollar signs. I gave the order as captain. We needed air, so we headed back to the Montero to resupply and figure out how to tow the Cronus behind us.

Then that familiar light flash and signal blaring came on. Our ship’s reactor was having a meltdown, with tons of explosives just a few feet below us. We had to think fast. We snagged what supplies we could, the pilot set the Montero on auto away from us, and we got back to the Cronus in the knick of time. But we had one more surprise waiting: as we looked through the armory for air tanks and weapons, the ship came back on - and so did the cryo pods of the crew kept in stasis for decades.

A hell of a cliffhanger and an unforgettable game for sure. I didn’t expect this to be the highlight of my weekend but I was floored by what an experience we ended up walking away with. Like I said my friend and I talked about the game for days after, it was just such a rush. The presentation of the materials itself is just as sleek and stylish as the gameplay, and I can’t wait to play this one again.

Speaking of sleek and stylish, I had a surprise checking for last events to fill my weekend. I found one of the slots for a Cyberpunk Red game had opened up. I hadn’t played any of the Cyberpunk games prior, and I am, just like everyone else, pumped for Cyberpunk 2077, but I’ve always enjoyed cyberpunk as a setting. I was crazy into the Netrunner LCG a few years back, and Shadowrun: Dragonfall is absolutely one of my favorite RPGs. So I jumped on this chance and didn’t regret it.

The GM ran us through an adventure he had written himself, with a full crew to run it for. It’s called “And You Thought This Was Just A Courier Mission,” so of course it wasn’t. I played our group’s fixer, named Grease, and I got the vibe from the game that it’s also one that adapts well to a strong narrative table flow. I’ve gone on long enough today so I’ll give you the straight dope: Cyberpunk Red is a badass game. Just as deadly as anything else I played today, but man does it help you feel like a badass. We went to go pick up the package for our job, only to be ambushed by mime assassins on the outskirts of a nuclear blast zone where I called my stalker friends out to help us take them down only to have our driver mow down their entire clown-faced crew. And then the netrunner hacked into a network running turrets and cameras of a warehouse to rescue our client while throwing strobe lights to pick off the corp-cops? Hot. Damn. I picked that quickstart up so fast.

And it’s an easy game too! It’s got more stats than D&D, but for the most part you’re just adding your stat and skill and throwing a d10 to see what happens. The combat system it uses, Thursday Night Throwdown, keeps the fast tempo the game’s genre and style encourages, and so long as you and your GM have room to flex your creativity you’re gonna have a blast.

Wow I didn’t expect my longest episode to be about just playing games about Gen Con but here we are! As always, thanks for dropping by and giving a listen. Let me know what you guys think about me talking about being a player for a change! You can get a hold of me via email, dmdiscoursepodcast@gmail.com or on Twitter @DMDCPodcast. Take care, and have a great week.