Luckily for me the group spoke and wanted to play 3: 16 – Carnage Amongst the Stars, so I grabbed a copy of the rules and Mike’s amazing set of props and talked people through the character creation. We had 5 marines in total which was a really great number is terms of banter and general camaraderie. While the players were working out what gear they wanted I rolled up the first planet.

Codename Reuben was a radioactive wasteland, populated by giant flying manta rays that shot bolts of lightening from their barbed tails which ignored the troopers armour.

About this time we had a last minute addition to the group so they made a character while the rest of the players roleplayed their more experienced troopers hazing the newbie and taking bets on whether he would even survive the first mission. I could tell this was going to be a great game.

There were so many wicked moments, and unfortunately I was too tired to take down everyone’s names but some of the highlights were:

• Svend’s character, Greenhorn making it through the mission, despite being dosed with two shots of the hallucinogenic combat drugs the squad were given. At the end of the mission he changed is reputation to “Lucky”.
• One of the troopers tinkering with the Sarge’s weapon, realising he’d broken it and then handed it right back. All with out the Sarge noticing.
• The Sarge managing to avoid a dose of the combat drug the squad had been chosen to trial, and then watching as the rest of the squad started to attack hallucinations of the aliens. It took him awhile to get through to them.
• The constant use of grenades, because of the opportunity to harm the other squad members.

We were running a bit early by the time they tidied up Reuben, so we went through the level up process, got some gear upgrades and shipped out to Codename Renoir. This was a helium gas planet, populated with giant eagle people who lived in floating cities. The squad were given the dubious honour of being recon for the planet, but on the upside they did get jet packs.

3: 16 – Assault on Reuben and Renoir was a great session of one of my all time favourite pick up games and got me pumped for the rest of the day to come.

After a lunch break to refuel the batteries with the traditional KapCon Sunday Burger Fuel I launched into the re-run of my Fright Night game, Still to Come. I had a great group to play with so I felt no issues with the slightly player driven element of the scenario.

The best thing about this run through, especially after Fright Night’s TPK after an hour and a half, was that the players took a totally different approach to the scenario than any of the others. This gave me a real kick, as I had been a little worried everything was too prescribed.

The highlights are too many to count, but some of them are:

• Liam, playing Lt. Cmdr. Fisher, hearing that there will be an orbital bombardment in an hour and not telling anyone else in the team… for another 45 minutes.
• The massive amount of note passing that went on. What a way to ramp up the paranoia!
• The Major, refusing to deviate from the mission. No matter the cost.
• Jon’s portrayal of Lexen, was just perfect.

All in all a very successful end to my GMing experience at this years KapCon. 4 Sessions was my utter limit I think, especially as there were so many games I would have been keen to play in.

Luckily however I had an in with one of my top picks for the Con, The Silver Kiss of the Magical Twilight of the Full Moon, and she agreed to run it after the dinner/prize giving break.

This game lived up to all my expectations and then some. It may have been exhaustion, it may have been the sugar, but it isn’t often that I’m laughing so hard I start to cry and need to leave the room and lay on the floor.

The basic premise for the game is a piss take of supernatural teen romance, a la Twilight. The group of 4 is divided into the supernatural love interest and best friend and the human love interest and best friend. In our group I was the supernatural love interest and between Carla and I was decided on being elemental goddesses. I was Fire, and after a mid game re-name was called Pheonix, Carla was Wind and called Autumn. We needed worship or in the high school way of thinking, popularity to survive, could transport any where in an instant and… There was something else but I can’t remember.

I could go on for pages about how awesome this game was, but I’ll just try to reduce it down to a few bullet points:

• Carla as Autumn as my really horribly mean, but super loyal best friend. She totally loved me.
• Jon’s awkward Callum, our love was doomed. But we tried anyway.
• Thomas’ deeply suspicious Jake. Terribly creepy but genius with his call on using an Earth rune to trap the Wind goddess.
• Callum not even noticing that Autumn existed, which caused her terrible pain each time he denied her existence. It didn’t help is case.
• The fraught Mexican standoff in Callum’s room, when Autumn had gone to kill him to make sure he stayed away from me. So much angst in such a small room.
• The final scenes of Autumn and Pheonix on top of Mt. Everest where they could no longer deny the love of millennia especially when compared with the fleeting love Callum offered, an Callum having set up a shrine to Pheonix in his room, worshipping her any way.

An amazing game, which ended an awesome Con. I still can’t believe it’s all over for another year, but am already plotting what to do at KapCon 20 in 2011.

Briefly (for those reading this who weren’t at KapCon) Reunion was a scifi LARP set 500 years after the catastrophic shut down of the gate system which linked the Union of Planets. Suddenly those same gates have re-opened and now all the players are part of a delegation to the Nexus station to work out where to go from here and re-connect with the other planets. More information can be found here.

While I had a number of goals which revolved mostly around digging up dirt on one of the other delegates, I also had a personal quest to find out what happened to my memories. Then there was the issue of what happened to the gates 500 years ago.

While I wasn’t all that successful in my goals, I had a great time running around digging up secrets and trying to work out who had taken my memories and how I could get them back.

The highlights for me were:

• Having an “oh my god” moment when the station Bartender told me that people were needed to power the gate, moments before the official announcement.
• My genuine feeling of horror when I also realised that unless people volunteered to run the gate, we would all die. Though I did play it rather fatalistic on the inside.
• Holding another member of my faction against a station bulk head, threatening to throw him out an airlock unless he told me why he’d stolen my memories. He didn’t talk.
• Being approached by the high priest of Ecclatisa to assassinate someone, which I agreed to. That same high priest then approached me again to kill on of his faction, which I did while everyone was busy watching the 6 volunteers give themselves to Nexus (the gate system).
• And finally, spilling the beans on the fact that the factions of Arboria and Chapparal actually shared a planet, to the Ambassador to New Berlin. I think that might have set off a chain of events that saw the King of Arboria assassinated and that same Ambassador made Queen… but maybe that was already in the pipeline.

So all in all a great LARP. I think I might be getting the hang of it now, and will always make sure that I tell all my secrets. After all what fun are they if no-one else knows?

This year I took on the rather daunting task of running three written scenarios and one session in the Games on Demand room. This took me to about my GMing limit and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do the same thing again.

Day 1 started with me running In the Blood, a scenario I had written for the new Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin. From a GMing point of view it went fine, though I don’t think I’ll be writing a game for 6 players again any time soon. Unfortunately I’m particularly bad at taking down quotes from players during games but it was a really solid start to the Con. Special mention must go to Erik playing Orik the Dwarf, who just nailed the drunken, overly regressive dwarf stereotype. He even managed to save his fiancé. Awwww…

The first game I played in for the con was American Gothix. It’s a road trip homage to 80s Goth culture in small town America and it was fantastic. I played the Newcomer, a former cheerleader who had recently moved towns and was desperate to fit in with the Goths. Jackie did a great job GMing for the first time at KapCon and the rest of the players really bought into the premise. I was stoked when I basically failed at all my character goals, it was way more fun that way. All the players nailed their characters but a few special moments were:

• Scott, as the Artist, for his angst filled poetry and obsession fuelled crime spree to get a meeting with Robert Smith
• Kat, as the Brat, who I managed to bribe with candy to make sure she didn’t let my secret past out
• Svend, as the DJ, for his interaction with his new pet rat. I’ll never hear the term “the package” in quite the same way
• Frank, as the Uber-Goth, for being just oh so creepy and misunderstood
• Thomas, as the Outcast, for being so very dysfunctional.

Then, after dinner and a quick change into my LARP costume (more on that later) I ran Slayage by Gaslight a Buffy RPG scenario, set in Victorian London, I first ran for my regular Buffy group which I tidied up for the Con. I had a great group of players and I felt they really captured the feeling that I was going for. Happily they beat the Big Bad and saved the world.

Honourable mentions:

• Sam W was a fantastic Slayer and she seemed to have a lot of fun playing Anastasia’s arrogance and totally got into the style of having Slayer strength
• The other Sam was just amazing as Ernest the Watcher. I have never before seen someone sleep with a prostitute because it was the honourable thing to do.
• Penny, as played by Tigger from Auckland. In my mind she was timid and afraid of her power. He just made her kick ass.
• Phil playing the street urchin Charlie, trying to kill steal from the Slayer once again!

Day 1 was almost over, but first I had a LARP to get to.