Our third year at Tabletop Scotland! In previous years we've attended all three days, this year we went for the Saturday only and wow: There's a lot to see when you only have a day to get round everything! Plus I was actually running a game this year so, really, we only had about half a day to find our favourite new games. So it was a very different vibe to previous years where we've taken our time to try and see everything, not been too fussed about a long wait for food or a queue for the toilets, etc. But we still managed to find some cool stuff!
Lo! Thy Dread Empire, by Tanya Floaker is a narrative wargame and tactical RPG with a killer tagline: "The Skeleton War against The Death Cult of Capitalism". The grimdark artwork by Julia Nevalainen is incredible and the text of the game is uncompromising, angry, and funny. When I picked up the book Tanya briefly explained to me that the game contains a ruleset that allows you to run large-scale pitched battle combats in your RPGs. It does contain this. It does a great job of this. But that's burying the lead. For me the juice of this book is the second half, detailing the Factions of the game's assumed setting in which Capitalism has progressed to its natural conclusion and literally destroyed every living thing, leaving only the dead to fight back. These are just excellent, and I love this book!
I also picked up the extremely cursed book Spine by Backwards Tabletop, which I've not delved into yet but really looking forward to. I honestly can't remember where I first heard about this game, it could have been the Yes Indie'd podcast, maybe Dice Exploder, maybe Bastionland, who knows? Maybe I've always known about it...
Natalie and I went in together on Elements of Power by Heartborn Studios. We bought Escape from Tibbles Tower from them last year, which was great fun, and had since picked up their Flippin' Dinosaurs game. Elements of Power is a skirmish game where each side takes control of 3 or 4 unique 'hero' type minis and battle it out. You can use any minis for it, but the starter box comes with its own, so I'm looking forward to painting them up and playing this with Natalie.
Also: I ran a game! This was my first time running a convention game, so I was a bit nervous in the couple of hours before. But I'd done plenty of prep, including subjecting my regular gaming group to a practice game (thank you so much again if any of you are reading this!), and I was really excited for the chance to run Mythic Bastionland again.
About the game itself, there's some great advice on the Bastionland blog for running Mythic Bastionland one-shots but the myth I was most keen to run for this game was The Tournament: Which sees a Tinkerer turning up to challenge the Knights of the Realm against a company of clockwork Knights of his own creation. As written, the myth would see the knights being called back from their questing every so often to compete in the next round of The Tournament, which would work great in a longer game with several sessions, less so for the one-shot. So I decided to compress it down into a three-day event, add some more activities inspired by Old Man Lucy's Tournaments for Mythic Bastionland, add a bit of intrigue between the other competitors, and set the whole thing within the Tournament festival grounds. I was a little bit concerned that my players might be disappointed at being denied the full hex-crawling experience, and I would've argued that drama within Holdings is just as big a part of the game as wandering round the wilderness bumping into myths, but I didn't have to. They had a blast squaring off against the Clockwork Knights, sabotaging their shifty creator, and digging into the courtly drama. My players were great as well (thanks to any of you that might be reading!), none of them had played before so they were all excited to get into the role of their knights, and they engaged with the material generously.
So overall the game went well and I was glad I gave running a convention game a go! I'd say something I'd encountered before when running Mythic Bastionland that I ran into again for this game is that I definitely struggle with the arithmetic of dealing damage between Guard and Vigour and subtracting Armour. It sounds simple but at the table I find it fiddly. I think my brain just prefers adding things than subtracting them, haha!
That's all for now, till next time!
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