Con Schedule: GenCon 48 (2015)

Game Schedule

After a break of several years, I will be running two events this year. With one or two exceptions, I haven’t done any events for several years, even longer for two events, and never with two events from two different systems. I got the notion for running events last year on Sunday when I was talking with a couple of my friends who are heavily involved with running Champions events (Champions, Fantasy Hero, Horror Hero, Justice, Inc, etc.) at GenCon: I played in a number of their events in the past, and ran my own Champions events at GenCon even before they were running them. (In fact, I ran the very first official Champions events at GenCon in 1982.) They told me they were asked about me running again, apparently because there were a lot of former players who really enjoyed my events, and I decided to consider it. Over the succeeding months, not only did I consider it, but came up with the characters and the scenarios to use.

Both events will be in the JW Marriott (the new Marriott hotel down across from the far end of the convention center) on the third floor.

“The Legend of Korra: Team Avatar Rides Again!”

I will be running this event (RPG1569246) Thursday evening starting at 7:00 pm.

I am a huge Avatar and Legend of Korra fan. Therefore, it was only natural that I run something based on the latter series, and I am taking the opportunity to explore some elements from the series and questions I started asking about it. I won’t go into too many details (wait for the post-convention writeup for that) but I will say that this event will start with a video of the opening title sequence and the following title card:

Since there is no official Avatar or LoK roleplaying game, I wanted to use an easy system to understand and play, so I will be using the FUDGE system with some slight modifications. This is not the first time I have done this: several years ago, I ran a Harry Potter event at the local gaming convention where the characters were new American students at Hogwarts, the year before Harry enrolled. Since there were few mechanics involved, the game was mostly roleplaying and players having fun playing in the Potterverse: I have the same hopes that this event will turn into largely roleplaying as well.

And, yes, this event is designed for six players and there are six characters involved. Four are obvious: Korra, Asami, Mako and Bolin. The fifth is probably obvious, too: Opal. That covers all four bending types, with Korra representing her native Water Tribe water bending. The identity of the final character is a secret, one that I hope will surprise and perplex the players. I will be posting copies of the character descriptions online after GenCon.

“Just a ‘Little’ Favor to Cash In”

I will be running this event (RPG1569247) Friday evening starting at 7:00 pm.

This event will be using the “Lords of Gossamer and Shadow” rules from Rite Publishing that are based on the Amber Diceless Roleplaying system created by Erick Wujcik: I was one of Erick’s playtesters with the GenCon Amber campaign and I am a big supporter of the whole diceless roleplaying experience.

The scenario is a simple one: do a little favor for Drake, one of the high ranked “sovereigns” of the various Lords of the Grand Stair. Of course, the execution of the scenario is the hard part. Since all of the characters owe him several favors (or, in at least one case, expect him to pay well for their services) they all agree, especially since getting on his bad side is not something anyone really wants to happen. This favor involves going to the barred world of Finisterrae and retrieving something, all without anyone else finding out about it. I will be using the characters I created when I was exploring the rules soon after I returned from GenCon last year with a copy of the original sourcebook: those characters can be found here. Note that the characters described were only my first drafts of the characters and they have evolved somewhat since then.