#dreamation

(I meant to post this sooner but didn't oops! Here it is now!)

So this weekend, I'm at a local TTRPG convention called Dreamation. I'm attending and running some games. I figured I'd make some blog posts about my experience, day by day! This is for Day 4, Sunday, the last day. I'm writing these with Ellipsus btw!

After getting plenty of sleep, I prepared to run another game of i'm sorry did you say street magic! This game also had 9 people in it, and it was interesting to see the similarities and differences from yesterday's game. Both had cities whose neighborhoods moved & shifted. But this was a sci-fi ship-planet-thing full of robots who went about their programmed duties, unable to see the humans who had awoken from cryosleep.

I did make a few tweaks compared to the day before—mainly, I asked players to focus on making neighborhoods & landmarks primarily during the first round, and to make residents during the second round. This resulted in only two residents being created in the end, and there were much more neighborhoods & landmarks. Definitely something I want to think on as I run this game more.

Here's what the city looked like before the final round:

In the final round, the player decided that the city-changing event was that the ship reached its final destination. That was something I never would have thought of—that's why I like this game so much. People's creativity really blooms here, and together, they make something they couldn't hav made alone.

I was supposed to have a Pathfinder game after this, in the afternoon. I've never played Pathfinder before. Unfortunately, not enough people showed up to play, so I suppose my first Pathfinder experience will have to wait. They did give me a voucher for a online game store as an apology, so that was nice at least.

And that was basically my time at Dreamation! Kind of anticlimatic ending, but hey, the rest of the weekend was great, so that makes up for it. I had a great time, and I definitely want to come back next year! Maybe I'll run some more games, too!

So this weekend, I'm at a local TTRPG convention called Dreamation. I'm attending and running some games. I figured I'd make some blog posts about my experience, day by day! This is for Day 3, Saturday. I'm writing these with Ellipsus btw!

Good news: I got enough sleep last night! ANGEL: NeuEon ended at 10pm and I went right to bed when I got to my room, falling asleep quickly. Hooray! I still has trouble getting out of bed in the morning, but oh well.

My first thing in the morning was Breakfast And Game Design With Meguey Baker—good thing I learned who she was yesterday, huh? Everything happens for a reason. People talked about their TTRPG projects, and Meguey gave them advice and talked about her experiences as a designer. It was nice! But I had to leave early to prep for my own game.

What was that, you ask? Why, I ran a game of i'm sorry did you say street magic! This game ended up having 9 players, and I was a bit nervous, but it went extremely well, I must say. And everyone seemed to really like it!

Street Magic is a city-building game where players construct neighborhoods, landmarks, & residents of the city using notecards. Players come up with the themes of the city together, and build on their creativity to create something they couldn't have made alone.

I play with some enhancements to the base rules to help the experience run smoother. Mainly: colored notecards, and folding longways every landmark & resident card (as Events are folded the other way). I also play with a homebrewed ending to help wrap things up neatly. I find that the instructions on how to end the game in the rulebook aren't fully satisfactory.

Here's a picture of what our city looked like before the final round:

In this game, the players made a city with a dominant population of anthropomorphic animals, whose forms can morph & change. The city had a sacred, immutable temple in its center that never moved, but the rest of the city neighborhoods constantly changed locations.

In my homebrewed ending, players have to come up with an event that fundamentally changes everything (or most things) in the city in some way. The players decided that for the first time the immutable temple moved—it was no longer immutable! After that, I have everyone go around the table. One by one, each player takes a neighborhood, landmark, or resident off of the table and puts it in front of them, describing how that thing was changed by the event. Once there are no more notecards on the table, the game comes to and end, and the players get to keep the notecards they took as a token of their experience.

Every player was awesome and it was an honor to lead this game. I loved it immensely.

After that was Augurs of Glamour, which is another game that's still being playtested. In it, you are a band of queer wizards in a band, trying to open a portal to Atlantis (apparently life is better there). To do so, we have to open portals at various gig events.

The premise is fun & interesting, as are the ways you get powers. You have a picture associated with your character, with 3 colors also associated with them. You roll a d4, d6, & d8 on the picture paper, and what colors the dice land on match what pool of powers you can use. That's definitely unique.

My main criticism is that for a good chunk of the game, we couldn't use those powers! You draw your magic from the van, and the van wasn't letting us do it because of some bad breakup drama. It was annoying to want to do cool stuff, but then find out that whoops, you can't do cool stuff because the van is still grumpy. It sucked. We couldn't use our magic until 2.5 hours into a 4 hour session.

This was the first game where I periodically felt bored, unfortunately. This game has a lot of potential, but since powers are the main way you can affect the world, and skill checks aren't a thing, there isn't as much gameplay as I would like. Plenty of roleplay though.

After this was the game market/swap, with people bringing in board games they didn't want to sell or trade them! During this, I got to get a TTRPG I've had my eye on for years called Overlight! I mentioned wanting it in the wishlist made before the con, and someone was willing to sell it, the DM screen, and the expansion book to me for $20! Yay!

I also purchased some other games that I may share at a later date.

Finally, there was my last game of the night, a LARP being playtested called Vampire Speed Dating.  This was my first LARP ever, ahhhh! It's basically what it says on the tin, vampires speed dating with mortals in a world where vampires and other monsters are common.

You got to choose 4 cards to help guide your character; I thought I took a picture of them to remember what they were for this blog, but it appears I did not. From what I recall, they were your Origin, Occupation, something I can't remember, and Goal. These things helped mold the character and give you something to achieve.

I decided to play a transmasc person named Clarence who works at the Red Hills Theater (this is what I thought the Two River Theater was called, oops) in New Jersey. He's slept around the NJ queer community and is generally a slut. He knows a coven of vampires who have been perfecting gender-affirming surgery techniques for centuries. One of his great joys is when he meets people who are having trouble getting gender-affirming surgery, he knows who to refer them to. Yes, he's slept around his queer community, but he also loves helping his community, and referring people is how he does it. He got his top surgery from those vampires almost 200 years ago, and asked to be turned then. They don't normally turn their patients, but they turned him.

We got nametags to put over our regular nametags, and I decided Clarence wrote in cursive:

During the speed date, vampire & mortals were seated across from each other, and each pair had 7 minutes to chat & get to know each other. Before we started, we had to swap character sheets. Here was mine:

After 7 minutes, we switched to a new person, and the process repeated.

Sometimes I met a character that Clarence didn't click with, but I would've been surprised if that didn't happen tbh. I loved all of the creative characters people came up with—my favorite was the vampire who had been meditating on natural philosophy in a cave for 500 years, and was just reentering civilization. The hillbilly vampire was my second favorite.

After we met everyone, envelopes were put out with everyone's names on them. We had to write little notes to the people we connected with most. I wrote notes to Murphy, Sylvia, and Miriam (these are the characters' names, not the names of the people playig them). Miriam wrote me a note, which I'll share below:

Also, here's a picture of the front of Clarence's envelope. I loved that the organizer added the little loop on the "C" that I gave Clarence on his nametag:

So this weekend, I'm at a local TTRPG convention called Dreamation. I'm attending and running some games. I figured I'd make some blog posts about my experience, day by day! This is for Day 2, Friday. I'm writing these with Ellipsus btw!

Today was not off to a great start. Chainsaw Humans ended at 11:30pm, and even though I went to bed straight away, I couldn't fall asleep until around 3am, and not without taking Melatonin multiple times throughout the night. So that's not great. :/

Anyway, after breakfast I finished the Artfight drawing I was working on (that was the 2nd one I shared in the last post) and relaxed until my first game of the day: Exquisite Corpse RPG. I'd seen it in multiple places on the event list, and I'm glad I got to squeeze it into my schedule.

I used the character I made yesterday—this time, instead of being a Devil Hunter, Aito Carmine was a security architect. We were all professionals helping to look at a new skyscraper's mysterious 13th floor before its inspection. What are behind the doors that even we, staff with the highest clearance, don't have a key for?

Here's a picture of my character sheet:

The game relies on playing cards to help decide skill checks, and for the GM to occasionally determine events. One of the things the GM determines is the type of story that players experience—the number on the card correlate to the genre, and the suit correlates to the tone.

The GM changes every 20 minutes. At the 20 minute mark, the GM switches roles a player. The new GM can draw a new card to change the genre & tone, or keep the one already established. Either way, they now lead the story.

We started off with the genre being Heroic Troubleshooters (a la Leverage) and the tone being Heroic. Partway through, the story changed to a Crime Story with a Comedic tone. And at the very end, it changed to a Romantic Military Espionage tale.

Because a GM & player switch places every 20 minutes, and no one GMs twice except the starting GM (aka the guy who made & runs the game), that means the person running the character also changes. I started the game as Aito, but after my GMing session, I ended up playing as Aiko's fellow security employee, Yohan. Seeing everyone switch places and play different characters was interesting and fun!

Then was a game called Raccoon Sky Pirates. Basically, players are raccoons or other similar trash animals (I was a pigeon) from a junkyard. We have constructed a flying machine, and will use it to raid the neighborhood for human treasures. A comedic adventure awaits!

How it works is that a character has 3 main traits, and when they do an action, they have to use one of those traits. Those traits correlate to a d12 chart on the character sheet. If the trait declared matches the trait rolled, you succeed. Otherwise, you fail, and that makes the current situation worse. You can also play a card to succeed your role, but it makes a consequence happen.

The character sheets were pre-made for this one, so no Aito this time. I played as Kitty Hawk, The Aerobatic Pigeon:

This game was really goofy & fun! I loved the cards you could play to save a failure roll; they really spiced up the game in a fun way. I also liked the personal goals, and the fact that you can customize the ultimate prize you want to steal. It's fun to have a silly time roleplaying a trash animal with other people! I loved it.

After that was a game called Alien Tea Party, which is a game in the playtesting phase. It was made by Meredith Baker of Lumpley Games. Basically, it works like this: players are all aliens from different planets, gathered for a casual tea party. Each alien comes with their own preconceptions of how to communicate (a Rule) and something they must do (a Need). When in conversation with other aliens, follow your Rule and fulfill your Need.

During the first round, we talked to each other in pairs, one by one. My Rule was to talk with only one-syllable words (which I mostly fulfilled, except for the word "people"), and my Need was to challenge someone to a friendly game (I did this with "Rock, Paper, Scissors", which I called, "Rock, Flat, Cut Cut" due to my monesyllable rule). It was fun watching each pair converse and guess their Rules & Needs afterwards.

During the second round, all 6 of us conversed as a group. This time, my Rule was to end everything with a sound effect, and my Need was to apologize to people for splashing my drink of them. I did my Rule just fine, and was able to fulfill my Need with one person, pretending to spill my water bottle on the person next to me.

After that, we all discussed our experience playing the game with Meredith (who was coordinating the whole playtest btw) and gave her feedback. Everyone liked the game and its premise overall, but there were some things that could be improved, like putting players in an alien party environment via gameplau elements. We also discussed how the game could be scored if a points system was implemented.

I had a lot of fun with Alien Tea Party, and I hope to see more about it in the future. Also I think I accidently committed a TTRPG sin by not recognizing the name "Meguey Baker" when Meredith brought her up lol. Oops!

Finally, my last game for Friday: ANGEL: NeuEon, where Aito made his return. In this game, corporations have caused a reality-bending substance to leak into various areas of the world, making non-euclidean spaces calle "Spires". But a resistance group has created cybernetic creatures that can go into the Spires and turn them back to normal, called Angels. Players are the Angels, fighting to bring the world back to a normal state.

This game is played with playing cards, and there are a few layers to it. First, each Angel has 7 playing cards that are in the shape of a body, which act as the body of the angel. Second, there is a grid of cards (the size is determined by dice) that acts as the area the angels are exploring (the mission & exact location are also determined by dice). Each card correlates to a different event based on the number and suit. Also, if the card you step on on the grid matches a number on your body, that part of your body is damaged.

4 aces are always on the grid, and the goal is to get those 4 aces, as they represent what we're trying to retrieve during this mission. In one mission they were radiation machines we had to turn off; in another they were metal parts for out Angels; in another they were the corrupt CEOs who had ruined the world; and so on.

Everyone gets 2 skills for their Angels: one they can use casually (once per round iirc), and one they can use if their Angel is almost dead. Take a look at my character sheet and skills:

Here's the most interesting part: players are all exploring separate areas (different cards) and radioing in to the others. So, during a player's turn, everyone else is blindfolded, listening to the player describe what they see & find. Once they radio out, the next player takes off their blindfold, and the previous player puts on theirs. We radioed in with our codenames btw, not our character names.

This was a unique anti-capitalist mecha romp that I really enjoyed. The blindfolds actually made it more immersive, as imagining every characters' encounters as they radioed in was more compelling without sight. I've never played a game like that before, and I loved it.

I also loved the descriptions for what events you could experience on different tiles—these usually correlated to what you can see or sense, and the game asks questions to help bring out cool answers. Some events also could damage or heal you, and that made things more interesting.

I think the game has some rough edges (the GM also pointed this out); the main one I noticed is that I never needed to use my second skill, the one you use when your angel is almost dead. The most body parts anybody ever lost was 3, so it was never necessary. This could be we happened to roll low for the grid size each time; I think the biggest one we played on was 6 by 3, 18 cards total. You roll a d6 for the grid size, so the biggest it can be is 6 by 6, or 36 total cards; I can imagine that would be much more of a challenging time.

So this weekend, I'm at a local TTRPG convention called Dreamation. I'm attending and running some games. I figured I'd make some blog posts about my experience, day by day! This is Day 1, Thursday. I'm writing these with Ellipsus btw!

The only events today were in the evening. I got to the hotel where the con takes place early, so I had time to look at the layout of the hotel and the rooms the games take place in. I specifically wanted to know where the rooms I'm hosting my game is are. I found them easily, thank goodness!

After that, I grabbed some dinner nearby (QDOBA, it sucked), and afterwards, I met up with someone to purchase the game So, You've Been Eaten. Here's a picture of the game! I'm getting a few board/TTRPG games this weekend, and this is the first.

After that, I basically just drew on my tablet until it was time for the game I signed up for to start. I'm participating in an Artfight in a little art Discord I'm in, and I was drawing stuff for that. Pictures below! The 2nd one I started at this time, and completed Friday morning.

The game I played tonight was CHAINSAW HUMANS, which is a Lasers & Feelings hack. It's basically a TTRPG where you play as a Devil Hunter from Chainsaw Man. Here's a picture of the character sheet I made, of a cold & stoic Loneliness Devil:

I'll put a transcription of its contents here for those who need it:

Name: Aito Carmine | Species: Devil | Number: 3 | Demeanor/Flaw: Cold Demeanor | Profession: Freelance writer | Goal: Find a friend despite being a creature of loneliness | Distinguishing Look: Hoodie under suit, hood on at all times | Contracts/Powers/Abilities: Fear = loneliness/solitary—gives person a vision of being in an isolated world, with no one around.

Let me explain some things about the character sheet:

Lasers & Feelings games are about 2 contrasting traits—in this case, Chainsaws (being brutal, bloody, aggressive) & Humans (being subtle, manipulative, controlled.

My number is 3, which means I lean more towards Human traits than Chainsaws traits.

L&F games are based around the d6 (a dice with 6 sides). When I roll the dice, I want to get under my number if I'm doing something more Chainsaws-like, and over it if I'm doing something more Human-like. If I roll exactly my number, that counts as 2 successes.

In this game, fears are basically the powers you have or wield. Whether you have powers from devils or wield them as a devil yourself depends on your species (basically your class in this game).

Overall, it was a positive experience, even if the GM was a bit disorganized. He made the game into TV "episodes", with players improving commercial breaks (the theme & tagline of the commercial was decided by a d20 [a 20-sided die]). It was some goofy, silly fun, and I loved it for the most part! My character even got 4 successes at one point, totally incapacitating the big boss monster. It was awesome!

The only thing is that one of the players assumed I was female, and thus assumed my character was female, and misgendered them a few times. That made me angry and threw me into a spiral of whether I pass or not, which isn't fun. I called him out on it, saying that (1) my pronouns are literally on a pin on my chest, and (2) if you don't know my character's pronouns, JUST ASK! I was the only AFAB person at the table, and those moments made me feel like I didn't belong there. It sucked.

So yeah, that was my first day. I really liked my Aito Carmine character, and I think I wanna explore them more in the other games. Hopefully I can do that well!