Mostly Geek

Play reports from KapCon ’09

I had three sessions at this year’s Con where I got to play rather than GM and I’d decided quite early on that I’d like to spend the majority of those sessions in the Games on Demand rooms. In the end I had two sessions with the GoD guys and also played in a Buffy game, which turned out to be quite an inspiration.

So the games were:

• Mountain Witch – a game of Ronin in a mythical Japan fighting to the top of Mt Fuji in order to destroy the Mountain Witch.
• Not our Future – a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game set in the modern day around a group of misfits.
• My Life with Master – where all the players are the minions of some crazed ‘Master’ figure who makes them do many odd and morally questionable acts.

Mountain Witch

So first up Mountain Whitch. This is a system that I’d played once before at KapCon in an awesome Residant Evil game, so I was keen to give it another go. We started of making out characters and it became apparent for then that there was a bit of a disconect between some of the players around the tone of the game. However we carried on and I developed a Ronin named Tanaka who had killed his master due to being in love with his master’s sister and was now trying to find the money to buy her out of indentured servitude. It seem a dark enough past made all the better when I picked the Past Alligence dark fate.

The first few scenes didn’t really flow that well for me due to the tone issues, but once they got sorted it really got going. Tanak’s dark fate managed to keep itself pretty well hidden until the last scene, when he killed one of the other characters who was about to kill the Mountain Witch’s lover.

Key moments in the game for me were:

• Simon’s (the GM) describtions of all the verious Japanese demons. He really knew his stuff.
• Malc’s reveal of his dark fate as his character plunged his sword into is stomach. Very dramatic.

Not our Future – Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Next round was Dan’s game, Not our Future, and was a faithful rendition of a Buffy episode. Unfortunately Dan was caught slightly unaware and hadn’t known that he was running that round, so we were really a bit of a play test but that was all good. The group of people playing obviously really loved Buffy and knew the tone to take. The players and their characters were:

• Mitch the Slayer – me
• J.D. a former Vampire Groupie (I think) – Played to hilarious effect by Jenni
• Jo the geeky wannabe witch – Bryn
• Paul the werjaguar and Mitch’s on again/off again boy friend – Played in all his sullen glory by a girl I hadn’t met before and whose name I forgot to write down. Sorry!
• Brand the jock and Mitch’s protective older brother – also played by someone I forgot the name of! Talk about bad notes! Edit: However thanks the to joy of comments, his name Lance!

The characters where great fun to play and interact with and everyone around the table totally through themselves into the action and most importantly the pithy diagloge. It was awesome and unfortunately I didn’t write down the quotes due to excessive laughter.

My Life with Master

On the Sunday I got to play in my final game of the con, My Life with Master. I had played this game the year before, in the same session with the same GM and was very keen to give it another go.

After quite a long period of brain storming we established that our Master would be an Ed Wood-esque Z grade director named Hershal Castle. He needed money and props in order to make that movie that would finally show the critics that he has worth the time it took to review him! The townsfolk, not surprisingly were the people of Hollywood.

My minion was named Jamison, a very short actor who’s less than human trait was “Extemely short, except when on film” and more than human trait was “Utterly convincing, except when telling a lie”.

The others were:

• Earnest the AD played by Ruth
• Jack the elderly muscician played by Naomi
• Bob the blind special effects guy played by Christian

Unfortunately the remaining time was enough to finish off the game, but we had some golden scenes in the mean time. The highlights were:

• Bob’s scene with his dog, trying to gain more affection and constaintly getting stopped due to ties in the dice roll. Who knew that dogs were so hard to crack?
• Jamison’s scene with his very secret boyfriend, played by Naomi. It was actually pretty gut wrenching for Jamison when he realised that his main squeeze wanted him to get out of the acting game.

So there you have it. Another whirlwind two days of gaming. It was a fantastic time and I’m all ready thinking about next year!

Tags: actual play, Buffy rpg, KapCon, Mountain Witch, My Life with Master

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