Tabletop Scotland 2024

I went to Tabletop Scotland at the weekend and it was awesome! This was my first time attending and I was blown away by how much there was to see, and the positive atmosphere and enthusiasm that seemed to energise the whole event. I felt like I could have happily drifted around the makers’ stalls talking to the artists, writers, designers and crafters there about their cool stuff indefinitely.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the abundance of indie RPGs on show. It was hard not to have ideas sparking off in my head about games I JUST CAN’T WAIT to run, harder still not to just spend ALL OF THE MONEY on weird little books and new games. I did spend more than I planned but have zero regrets and wanted to highlight a few standout faves:

"Odd Jobs" by Macguffin & Company

Macguffin & Co. was the first stall I stopped at and although I didn’t realise it at the time I’m 90% sure the person I spoke to was Jonathan Sims, whose voice I’ve listened to for hours on the excellent audio drama The Magnus Archives. He made a great pitch for their book Odd Jobs, which is a collection of RPG Micro Settings. These are intended for running short campaigns and are system agnostic, which is not something I’ve seen much of. I was really impressed by the diversity and imagination in the settings themselves, and looking forward to running one of these as a break from my regular games.

"For Small Creatures Such as We" by Blackwell Games

I was keen to check out Blackwell Games after seeing Anna Blackwell speaking about Fantasy & Folklore in games at one of the panel discussions. When I got to their stall there was a copy of For Small Creatures Such as We, open at this page:

One does not simply walk away from space otter.

Sold! This is a solo/co-op sci-fi game where you play the Captain of a spaceship and travel around the galaxy doing jobs to get paid and have adventures. There’s a big emphasis on customising your ship and hiring your alien crew as well, so my partner and I are really excited to play this one together and see where it leads us.

"Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland" by Handiwork Games

My favourite discovery from the convention. I’d not even heard of Handiwork Games and it turns out they are based in Falkirk, which is actually where we were staying over the Tabletop weekend! I was hooked by the mixed media cover-art (which reminded me a bit of Dave Mckean’s Dust Covers), and reeled in by the title. This is a game in which you play witches in the mesolithic era, travelling through true wilderness between primitive settlements, helping the communities there and banishing dark spirits. It’s a rules-lite, story-focussed game and the vibe is very much in the same wheelhouse as my version of Hags in Legends of Alba. It’s exactly what I want to see in a game about witches: Exploring a vision of the witch as a healer, a sage, a wise woman with a strong voice in the community. I couldn’t wait to get this one home to start reading, and cracked it open on the tram back into Edinburgh from the venue. Aside from the game itself there are also really interesting stories about its artwork, and the inspiration for its setting. This book really is something special.

That’s by no means an exhaustive list of the games I fell in love with at Tabletop Scotland, and not even close to a list about everything I enjoyed at the convention, but it is all I have time to say with this post. I’m already excited for next year’s event and who knows? Maybe I’ll have something to run or show off for Legends of Alba by then! 

Till next time!

Kafka: 100 Years Dead

3rd June this year will mark a century since Franz Kafka’s death in 1924. So he and his writing have been on mind. Not that they are ever far from it - it’s hard to think of an author who’s had a more formative impact on my life than Kafka. I finally visited Prague in 2016 with the specific purpose of seeing where he lived, where he worked and wrote, seeing the castle that inspired “The Castle”, visiting his grave, all that stuff. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

I wrote this during that trip:

The Kafkaesque is so readily confined to the domain of incomprehensible bureaucracy and surreal nightmares that it’s easy to overlook its most beautiful aspect: That it expands the realm of possibility. Kafka’s world is dark but also magical, possessed by wondrous potential.

I think past me did a pretty good job of summarizing just what it is I love about Kafka’s work and having an excuse to revisit it feels like catching up with an old friend.  And of course, the natural thing to do with all this inspiration was to write a one-page RPG called The Riskiest Moment, which you can download here.

Why is it called The Riskiest Moment? I’m glad you asked. The concept of the riskiest moment is one that's never far from my thoughts, that the moment of waking up in the morning is the riskiest moment of all. I’ve always thought I read this in The Trial but had trouble finding it in my copy. According to John T Hamilton writing here, it’s actually a deleted passage from that story (which explains why I couldn't find it). But the essential idea is that it’s pretty miraculous when you wake up in the morning and find the world just as you left it. In Kafka's words:

“For when asleep and dreaming you are, apparently at least, in an essentially different state from that of wakefulness; and therefore […] it requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That was why [...] the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day.”

There is something uniquely destabilizing when this moment bears its teeth, when one does wake to find the world irrevocably changed.  Nowadays it can feel like this happens every day.  The first thing many of us do on waking up is check our phone, which is all too keen to show exactly that.  And perhaps this is the first mistake for we have, in that simple act, already given up so much.  Considering how often Kafka’s work conjures a sense of helplessness and futility, the quote above places a surprising - almost supernatural - degree of agency upon the waking person.  It is up to you to seize hold of the day.  If it is a shortcoming of our will that fails to correctly summon the waking world back from the dreaming one, perhaps we also have the power to conjure it back not simply as it was, but better than it was.  With risk there is always opportunity.  Hidden in that riskiest of moments, there is the invitation to awake in the best version of reality.

Vampire Adventure

It was my birthday. Then I got sick. Feeling old and wretched, I was in the perfect mindset to revisit the excellent Thousand Year Old Vampire solo RPG.

It had been a while and I stalled a bit at Character Creation. "Imagine a character from the distant past" is such an open prompt, I ended up rolling some dice to generate a year*, then googling what happened that year.  Apparently in 1498, The English Merchant Adventurers Guild were granted a trade monopoly with the Netherlands.  Merchant Adventurers Guild?  Sign me up!

That sort of discovery is a huge strength of the game. I'd found a corner of history that captured my interest and imagination and I had fun reading around, finding out about these Merchant Adventurers. 

After a couple of hours I had a newly sired vampire, skulking around Amsterdam having just murdered his best friend, with a beloved child sister back home in London whose prospects were suddenly looking very bleak indeed.  She actually became a vampire too, I don't know what became of her after that.

I had a fun afternoon bouncing around the prompts in the book making friends, drinking blood, getting buried for 100 years. Wikipedia was a helpful co-pilot for the gamebook, though I definitely found there was a balance to be struck with how faithfully to stick to history. I settled on a relaxed approach, using it mainly as a jumping off point (similar to the prompts in the book). This is pretty much the same approach I use for running D&D in a published setting like the Forgotten Realms.  Try to relax, and let your own version emerge organically.

I should have adopted another good practice from running D&D actually and had a 'go-to' resource or method for generating character names.  You need a lot of names for TYOV!  Next time I play I'll maybe try it with this random name generator from Behind The Name.

There's also a balance to be struck with how 'close' you position yourself to your vampire. You want to get into their head to be able to make decisions that are true to the character, but the game is at its best (I think) when revelling in the gloom, embracing the darkness as things just get worse for your vampire. So you don't want to be too close.

I did notice though that I'd created a vampire that was mostly just trying to find a quiet, safe space to Get Stuff Done.  The most heart-breaking moment for him was having to flee his research laboratory in Florence. By the time he'd re-established himself in the University of Altdorf, he'd forgotten what drove him to seek knowledge in the first place.

As with the last time I played it, real life started happening before my game finished, and I'm not sure when or if I'll get a chance to find out what happened to my vampire. But I left him in a good spot, somewhere in the 18th Century, schmoozing around the aristocracy offering private night-time tuition.  What could go wrong?

* I used 3d10 for a d1000, then added 1000 to the result to give me a year between 1000 and 2000 AD.