Revelation VII - Convention Reflection

The weekend of 11th & 12th Feb  saw me at my first convention of the year, Revelation at The Garrison Hotel in Sheffield. Revelation is a small, local con dedicated to PtbA and FitD games, which has been running since Feb 2017, this is the 6th one I've attended as I only discovered it in its second year.

It's a 2 day convention with 5 slots, 3 on Saturday and 2 on Sunday.

My first game was a double-slot of The Between, where you play Victorian monster hunters, associated with London's Hargrave House, in the vein of the BBC show Penny Dreadful and the game captured the setting beautifully. 
I choose the Vessel playbook which comes with Rites of Salt and Smoke as the standard move and picked Familiar from the list of optional moves, and Talon the Crow joined us on our adventure. 
We also had the American, the Factotum and the Undeniable in play

I was glad this was a double-slot game as it took me a while to get my head round the different phases of the game, but by the second pass through the phases it was much easier.

Sending Talon out to observe the haunted house in the mystery worked really well, giving my character the chance to stay home by the fire in relative safety using the psychic link with him, or so she thought. Talon lost a few tail feathers to the grasp of the homeowner whilst trying to escape up the chimney (after the ghostly presence had lured him in) resulting in a hand-shaped bruise on her arm 

After the game l tucked into my usual Hunter's Chicken which was delicious as ever and the whole food delivery seemed much less chaotic than normal, which made it even better.

After dinner it was my turn to sit in the GMs seat, running the Monster of the Week scenario l wrote for Revelation last year. I had a different group of players this year and squeezed an extra one round the table in one of the cells to help ensure no-one was left without a game after some last minute GM drop-outs due to nasty bugs etc (that they kindly decided to keep to themselves rather than share them with the whole convention, thank you for being sensible folks).

I was conscious of the extra time it took to build all the player history links with a 5th player, but they do help break the ice and create some good roleplaying hooks so it was worth the extra 15 minutes or so. Once we got started there was some brilliant interplay and the table came up with a genius plan I've never been presented with before, which was really lucky as l managed to ”get" 2 of the pcs with the big bad's minion which could have been very nasty if they'd not been able to see that happening.

It was a great game made more dramatic by my "deliberate" mistake of completely forgetting to let the players know about the luck mechanic until nearly the end of the game, but at least they'd not run out before the final showdown.

Fortunately the players triumphed in the end, although l had the friend who helped me make sense of the MotW Mystery Creation (and thus appears in the scenario as an NPC) playing in this session so l sort of killed one of the players and he got to see the result of his "l hope you kill me horribly" quip about 14 or 15 months ago.

The game filled the entire slot, so it was a quick scramble for an Uber after packing up to head home for some much needed sleep.

Sunday morning's slot was Robyn Hood and her Merry Maids using the Thirsty Sword Lesbians system. Sue had cleverly reskinned the main characters in Robin Hood with female versions of the familiar names. I picked Jill Scarlet, we also had Briar Tuck, Little Joan and Dutch the Miller's Daughter in play, with Robyn Hood and Alannah Dale as NPCs. We were presented with several of options for our mission and we started with rescuing Robyn and Alannah from the dungeon of Nottingham Castle, setting fire to the cells and rescuing the rest of the prisoners in the process. Which was bonus as Widow Smith was one of them and she bakes the most marvellous Apple pies. On our way to the dungeon we had noticed the 2 brides who were due to be married to one another, Lady Gas of Gisbourne and Maid Marion looking less than excited at the prospect of their upcoming celebrations, so what else could we do but rescue them both. Cue much swinging from chandeliers, even more serious fighting and some, now, very blushing brides leaving the castle and heading into the trees with people very much not their intended. Robyn's camp in the forest swelled considerably that day. This game was the highlight of the con for me, silly, over the top and wonderful.

The final game was Apocalypse World using the setting for the video game Metro 2033.

I was seriously flagging by this point and consequently feeling very hard of thinking. I failed miserably to grok the playbooks and picked completely the wrong moves for the scenario (think l was still in Jill Scarlet mode) and was baffled by the player connections questions (though we grabbed the updated versions and it became much clearer). This made the game feel very slow to get going. But the big bad was a genius piece of design and we negotiated a clever compromise so the game finished on a very positive note. I'd like to play it again, but with more sleep first.

Another blast of a Garrison Con as usual, l get so much enjoyment out of these friendly gatherings.

I found that l struggled through Monday after this one though, ending up sleeping through my alarms on Tuesday, only waking up when  my doorbell went at 11am as my grocery delivery had arrived. Luckily work are really flexible so after a quick message to my line manager (and putting the chilled and frozen groceries away) it was straight back into bed for a few more hours. When I got up again l promptly  booked off all the Monday mornings after the rest of this year's conventions to avoid a repeat performance, just in case this wasn't just temporary stamina damage caused by my bout of COVID over Christmas.