Kapcon Report

This past weekend was Kapcon XV. It was grand fun. I had a great time seeing loads of good people and doing some catching-up (well, more like doing some ‘let’s catch up soon’ stuff because it was a busy weekend) and generally feeling happy to be here with such great friends.
Did I mention how good it was to see everyone again? Well, it was this good:

Big write-up of the whole thing, behind the cut.

Kapcon is all about the games, and I asked the lovely organising team (Matt & Debz) to just throw me in any game as they saw fit.
Saturday
Session One: Ace of Spades
First up was Robert Urquhart’s Ace of Spades. This is Robert’s own game design, a shared-narrative game where players generate the setting in the opening moments of the game based on a generic plot see provided by the GM, in this case ‘you’re under siege in a building’. Our player group decided the building was a hospital in Bolivia, and we were under siege by refugees from an earthquake that had just happened. Players took on roles such as a private investigator, a British investor, a medical intern, a young woman connected with the local Church, a local woman, and a janitor (played by Svend). I decided I was going to be the janitor’s pet monkey, who was actually a superintelligent escapee from a laboratory.
It was a fun game, but it took a while to get going. The system Robert devised looked intriguing but was only loosely adhered to during the game itself. There were problems in the group in terms of bringing story to the characters, and something like the concept of Kickers would have been incredibly useful here. At about the half-way point, the game was in danger of stalling completely. Players are able to introduce new complications into the story, so Svend and I decided to go completely apeshit. Everyone else followed suit, and the game picked up substantially and worked its way to a very solid climax.
Session Two: Octopus Rising
Second I was in Daniel Gorringe’s Octopus Rising for GURPS. It was a Hellboy-styled game, in which a quartet of super-powered special agents descend into the murky deeps to rescue the crew of a stricken submarine. I really enjoyed this game’s unhurried atmospheric buildup and wealth of detail, but with GURPS’ time-consuming fight scenes it was too long for a Kapcon 3-hour slot and the ending had to be rushed as a result. I particularly liked the steadily rising tension – about every ten minutes I said to myself, Oh crap, things are worse than I thought. Every ten minutes, for three hours. Nice work, Daniel.
Session Three: Dangers on a Train
This was the first of two slots in which I ran Dangers on a Train, for a/state, that wonderful game by Contested Ground Studios. I had a great bunch of players, and it seemed that none of them felt they’d wasted their time for a session. So that was okay. Zak won a prize for grabbing someone by the bollocks.
See it from player POV here: AndyMac, Jenni, Zak (down the page – how do I link to a post?).
Live Game: Victoria Regina
The formalised Kapcon live game is a tradition stretching back to 2001, when I masterminded the entertaining Breakout Day (a.k.a Call Centre of C’thulhu). Since then, expertise in running large-scale live games has skyrocketed, and Victoria Regina made Breakout Day look incredibly clumsy. VR (by Matt and Debbie and Svend), a three-hour freeform for 60 people, was a really fun piece of alternate-Victoriana. Characters from fiction and history clinked their glasses and toasted the Queen, Oscar Wilde rubbed shoulders with Dorian Gray and Earnest Worthington, and Professor Moriarty and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen manoeuvred in the shadows.
I was playing Dr William Gull, physician royal, a real historical personage who made it into the game on account of being fingered as Jack the Ripper in Alan Moore’s incredible graphic novel From Hell. He wasn’t the Ripper in this version, though, and I spent the evening sitting in a corner and chatting to all manner of people. It was lots of fun even though I didn’t have much luck achieving my goals – it’s the chance to interact with such a vibrant bunch of characters that really makes these things hum. A resounding success.
Sunday
Session Four: Dangers on a Train
Second run of this scenario. More great players, who managed to keep things on the train much more controlled than their Session Three counterparts. Good stuff. Player POV down the page here: Mash.
Session Five: Normality
Hugh Dingwall’s Normality is a self-published game by Hugh and Vishala Jekic. It takes place in a nasty, dystopian future, so much so that it doesn’t even pretend to be real and instead operates on a symbolic level.
As characters, kids trapped in a horrible school environment, we are impelled to seek some kind of purpose, and truth, and beauty, and as we act towards this kind of self-realisation we changed both physically and psychically. I clicked on very quickly to what Hugh was doing – essentially, enacting an allegorical quest for spiritual development in a three-hour con game – and got very deep into it. Not everyone around the table was on the same page, but Hugh managed the diversity of approaches well and I think everyone had fun.
Also in this game I had my Most Memorable Kapcon Moment TM. I had decided that what we should do was kidnap some random person off the street in order to wake them up. Hugh invented a secretary named Chloe, who was on her lunchbreak. After her initial resistance to coming with us had been overcome, I re-christened her Echo (a partial anagram of Chloe) – and in that moment I understood that her fate was to find fulfillment singing over the radio (other characters had decided to find a way to transmit).
I don’t know how I understood this, pure intuition, but it was very strong. I didn’t mention this to the other players – my character was cryptic at the best of times – and about another half-hour of game time went past as we pursued other ends and discovered other things. Finally we reached a radio broadcasting station, and as we broke in I excused myself from the table to fetch a sweater (it was a bit cold).
When I returned to the table, five minutes later, I was astonished to find the other players acting to bring about exactly the fate I had foreseen – talking Chloe/Echo into singing on the radio, and then supporting her as she did so and achieved an incredible fulfillment from it. The fact that this all came to pass in this way made a big impression on me – I was already feeling this game on a pretty deep level, and seeing this shared intuitive understanding enacted was an incredible rush. It was one of those moments that remind me why I game and what I’m reaching for apart from entertainment.
(See Conan’s comments on another session of this game here.)
Session Six: November Falling
Dale Elvy‘s Mutants and Masterminds adventure only ran because Jenni made him do it. I’m glad she put the guilts on him, because this was the funnest time I had at the con. It was a veritable all-star group of players, with Nick, Jenni, Luke, Debbie and Matt around the table (and Sam along for the ride as a spectator). I got to play Ground Zero, the wrestler-turned-powerhouse who explodes when he gets mad. We all dove into things with both feet, and the soap-opera angst was firing on all cylinders as we faced Dale’s amusingly lame villains (and one or two genuine dangers). I laughed very, very hard.
(See Matt’s take on this game here. Jenni’s is here, and Dale refers to it in the thread-of-doom too.)
What a con. It was fantastic, and as I said at the post-con gathering at Norman’s, Kapcon stacks up as the best con for gaming I’ve ever been to, and as a weekend experience it stacks up very strongly against the best of the best overseas. (Irish and UK gamers may, however, be confused by the sobriety that maintained throughout the weekend.)
Especially good to see hix honoured as best GM (and to see his Lucky Jones playtest received so well) (and to finally meet him), and the incorrigible Jon Ball get even more incorrigible after being awarded Best Player.
Nice work Debbie and Matt. Thanks heaps.