ConLog LasagnaCon 7
Friday
I flew to Glasgow from Dublin Friday afternoon and landed just in time to meet Paolo, Gustav, Roger, and game jam organiser Gabe at the BECO building (aka Barclay’s Eagle Labs coworking space). The space is just as nice as you’d expect a bank owned startup incubator. Three floors with big desks we could commandeer for board games, meeting rooms for RPGs, kitchens, the works.
That evening, we had just a couple hours after the customary chats and lasagne to play, so Paolo ran a pick up session of Dwarf Land. We rolled silly characters and were sent on a mission, which we chose to mostly ignore so we could hire some rabbits to build a reverse pyramid for us.
Saturday
Most of the day was taken by Roger’s exploration of Slave Pits of the Undercity using his own 52 Pages ruleset (it is indeed 52 pages long, but it’s also called 52 Pages). We had were six to eight players at any time, with eight 5th level characters and a few followers in tow. It was an interesting experience, I think especially for a ‘young’ grognard like me: when you have a dozen delvers, stealth mode becomes very challenging: light sources, noise management, and the sheer space taken by such a large group makes avoiding notice and pursuit interesting. And if the gnome at the back of the column decides to go and explore by themselves, there isn’t much the more tactically minded characters at the front can do. We didn’t make it into the titular slave pits, but got in a few scrapes where the rules showed their potential. 52 Pages strides the line between simplicity and heroism with ease. (I’m not including a link as the last publicly shared version seems to be from 2016. Roger has done quite a bit of work on it since then.)
Later, Roz, Richard and myself tried playing Vial Belli with three players but, as I’ve confirmed by watching the rules video on the itch page linked here, we didn’t have all the rules right. There wasn’t much time to try a two- or four-player game, so I’ll have to update later with full thoughts on this cool little card war game. We followed this with a couple rounds of Scout, which is an easy to learn and fun card game with a thin theme of circus management. I’d never seen the hand management mechanic before.
Sunday
The main event was Paolo’s playtest of Sorcerers & Shenanigans. Based on Gangs & Bullshit but whackier, this is a game of apprentice sorcerers going wild while their master is away. Exploring the tower and the region surrounding it, getting in all sorts of trouble, and generally not caring much about the various crises threatening the land. The game was a blast. It has very simple mechanics and a unique turn structure, which lets a GM work with a large number of players. We played for four to five hours with eight characters and so much shenanigans happened over the course of nine months of game time. It was interesting to see how some apprentices became accomplished wizards, while others didn’t but made friends and arguably accomplished more in the world. Props to Chris for mutating into a Chaos Cat and prompting their new ice dragon god master to take over a city.
During a break, Chris led four of us in a short session of a GMless game he’d acquired that same morning: Stack of Goblins. Nothing new theme wise: you play goblins piled in a trenchcoat sent on a randomly generated mission. I liked that narrative power is distributed according to your goblin’s place in the stack.
And then it was time for Christine’s now traditional session of Mörk Borg. I had kept last year’s character and brother Björnus wasn’t as lucky and finally succumbed to a Type III CyberDemon’s blaster gun. The adventure was supported by Christine’s really cool map and art.
Sunday was arguably better attended. There were people playing board games, and a multi-setting session of 24XX was held in one of the side booths. I wish I could have played in that too but in any case it was great to see this game in the wild!
Monday
There was just enough time to have coffee and say goodbye and thank you to Paolo. Turned out Roger and I were on the same southbound train, so we chatted about 52 Pages for a good bit, long enough to convince me to try running it. These pages are just filled to the brim with simple and clever procedures for old school adventure gaming.
After he jumped off to make his connection, I spent the rest of the trip doing some edits on adventures for Dungeon, Inc., and listened to episode 14 of When We Were Wizards. Wonder if it’s the last one or if they’re planning a more upbeat summary of the series…
I’m probably forgetting things. I have zero brain today and the coffee isn’t helping.