Thursday
By accident or happenstance, every event I had received was either at 4:00 pm or 8:00 pm, so I had all day to wander through the exhibition hall and see the sights.Besides Castle Greyskull (the TSR mega-booth) and FASA’s cityscape, both of which are regulars now, the biggest company presence was Five Rings Publishing, publishers of Legend of the Five Rings, which had just been bought up by WOTC. All of the other regulars were there, too.
There wasn’t a killer game this year; there really hasn’t been one in the past couple of years. Even Magic wasn’t the big game the year it was released: that took a year to get off the ground.
Amber and Shadows Do Not Mix
The game that night (Thursday was the only night I had only one event, at 8:00 pm) was an Amber/Babylon 5 crossover. It was nothing like I had expected. It did turn out to be one of the three enjoyable games, in part because it did surprise me and had some unexpected humor, but it did have a few problems, too.
The game’s biggest problem was that it took too long for everyone to get collected together. We all wound up in the same place, using the same method, but setting up those circumstances took over half of the four hours allocated for the game. It also had too many people, but that’s more of a personal issue: I think that only the best GMs can handle a group of eight players in a convention game. I could, but I prefer to keep the number of players at a more manageable number of six. This GM wasn’t that good. Close, but not enough to really handle eight players at once. And Amber is not a forgiving game in that regard, either.
But, like I said, I had fun. There wasn’t the feeling of getting railroaded into helping out, and I found the justification for getting the character involved to be logical. And the finale had personal triumph and humor.
The scenario opened with all of the characters somewhere in Shadow. My character, Brigid (the half-Faerie shapeshifter / sorceress / Pattern wielder) was riding in Shadow, experimenting with her new Pattern powers. Suddenly she noticed that Shadow was changing around her, and that she wasn’t doing it. Furthermore, and more disturbing to her, she was noticing gaps in her memory as she was travelling: she would suddenly notice that her horse was heavily lathered, as if she had been riding for a long time, but it would only seem like a second or so had passed.
When she began to investigate, a strangely-mottled dark cloud appeared, and after some attempts to evade it, it engulfed her. She appeared out of a large globe of the same strange substance in a valley, where other globes were positioned in a circle. Everyone appeared through one of those globes.
In the next valley was a very tall tree, and next to it was the blue fire of a Pattern. On the Pattern lay a man wearing black and silver (and I immediately thought of the B5 command uniforms): on further investigation we discovered it to be Corwin. He had several crossbow bolts sticking out of him, but it was apparent that he was still alive. How we couldn’t tell. There was also this rainbow effect stretching from one part of the Pattern leading to the Abyss.
What we eventually discovered, after convincing one of the characters to walk the Pattern and rescue Corwin, was that he was using the Pattern to fish for Deirdre in the Abyss. He didn’t expect a group of Chaosites to ambush him and leave him for dead: the only thing that was keeping him alive and keeping the Pattern from being damaged by his blood was that he was wearing the Jewel of Judgement.
What he also didn’t expect was that Shadow creatures from the Abyss were now using the “fishing line” to make their way into Amber’s reality. And because of Corwin’s desire to bring Deirdre to Amber they were hunting for Amber.
In the first valley, the globes were hatching. They were hatching into Shadow vessels. Some went shifting into Shadow to go to Amber. Others went after us. One started strafing the Pattern, trying to kill the person walking it, when Brigid pulled out her collapsible bo staff, charged it with as much destructive power as she could, and fired it like a missile at the Shadow vessel. It destroyed one of the “legs”, making it scream, and it went after Brigid. Brigid changed into something very fast and started running and dodging. Finally another character halted it telepathically, and, seeing this, Brigid assaulted it mentally, too: when it couldn’t defend itself it tried to kill us by crashing on us (but failed.)
Another character climbed the tree and leaped off onto another Shadow vessel. He wasn’t doing much except to annoy it, but he was pretty annoying. IIRC Brigid fired spells at it and damaged it, so she had parts in kills of two Shadow vessels.
Back in the valley, one of the Shadow vessels tried to assimilate another character, but he was blind, and so it took his dog instead. (It was like the Shadow ship couldn’t see him if it couldn’t see through his own eyes, so it took the dog thinking it was him.) As we joked, now there is a Shadow ship that can fetch sticks and roll over and play dead. There were also jokes about Minbari Stick Torpedoes.
And with Corwin rescued and ourselves safe (for the moment) from Shadows, the game was over. I can see the possibility of a sequel next year.
Being at the game, I missed the anniversary party out front, where GenCon closed off a major street and threw a party, with live music by the Violent Femmes. I hear that it went pretty good.
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