Dreamation 1998
Josh and I got to Dreamation with precisely an hour to spare before the first Everway game we wanted to make. This necessitated us making characters for The Nexus, sort of an uberlarp. It's optional to play, but not optional to have characters for it, which is very annoying when you want to make a game at a particular time. As Josh pointed out, the convention should hand out generic characters to be fine tuned later.
Still, we did make the game, and I saw enough of the Dealer's Room to know which items in the $2 bin I'd pick up - Voodoo for Chill, by Nigel Findley, and Whispering Vault. Alas, there was only one game dealer.
I doubt an entire write up of the convention will fit into this zine, so for now, I'll just write up the two Everway games, both run by Bob Dushay.
Bob takes something of a risk by running his games the way Everway is intended to be run. That is, everyone creates their own characters. This is a lot of fun, but it does mean that the adventure starts an hour into the session, which can mean that we run over. So far, for me at least, this has not been a problem. It also means that you have a group of people trying to push for their characters' backhistory to be important, which it can't usually by if one is running a particular adventure. Bob did comment when he ran part one that it was tempting to drop the adventure and see what we did on our own. He didn't, and as far as I know, his players have never deliberately ignored the adventure. I include the above analysis primarily as a caveat for aspiring Everway gms -- be aware of what you're getting into.
Deadlands
The game I really wanted to get into on Saturday evening was Dark Man Comes, a Deadlands game. This had all six slots filled, plus six alternates already signed up. I figured that I didn't have a chance.
Anywhere but a Dreamation or Dexcon, that would probably be true. However, at Dreamation and Dexcon, both run by the same people, it costs nothing to sign up for a game, so people will sign up for a whole bunch of things in the same slot, and only sign up for one of them. So, while I was trying to figure out if I should join Save Weird Tales or Uncle's Lodge, both CoC games, the man who was the 6th alternate for the Deadlands game found me, and said that none of the original players had shown, and he seemed to be the only Official Alternate, so if I wanted to play, I probably could. I followed him, astonished.
I played Virgil Cross, a member of a posse that fights the evil things of the Deadlands world. We had a Mad Scientist (of uncertain gender, played by the gm's SO, I think - I gather that a couple of players were in his regular game with the same characters), a walking dead man, a nun, an undertaker who wielded a mean shovel and who was a child of the Raven, and a somewhat pious man whose name I forget. We all headed into a small village to take shelter from the storm and soon found ourselves in charge of the saloon when the woman who ran it died after realizing that her kid sister had vanished, taken by the Dark Man.
After a lot of spookiness -- the gm, Jason Knizley, managed a beautiful tightrope walk on that fine line between building tension and building boredom -- we started to put the pieces together.
During one terrible winter, a priest lost his fath and made a deal with Dark Forces to provide food. In return, the Dark Man would take away whomever he chose. After a person vanished, there was always food. This had been going on for forty years, and the original priest was walled up in his church. I don't know why. He might have told us, and he might have repented, but the nun put her cross on him and he burned up.
We fought off skeletons, and, after a brief break for an annoying firealarm (confronted by players, not pcs), we cornered the Dark Man, a minor demon, on a hill, and we used faith and bullets to destroy him, or at least banish him. I was delighted to get a chance to finally see the Deadlands rules in action. I wonder how much the gm streamlined them since it was nowhere near as complicated as the game's detractors would have me believe. I'd very much like to play again.
Then I went up to where the card games were and got drafted by Josh into a tournament for Lunch Money. It is downright surreal to hear grown adults who are usually more or less civilized chanting children's taunts in unison as the cards are dealt out. The judge told us he wanted to hear yelling. Then, one of the hotel liason people told us to keep it down. I really don't know why the card games weren't moved down to the lobby where they wouldn't be in close proximity to people who wanted to sleep.
This leaves one more game write up from the con which I hope to have in my zine next month.
