Con Report - ConVocation 2022
It has been a while since I have regularly attended RPG conventions, but with the pandemic now "officially" over (despite half the people I know on Twitter having come down with the dreaded lurgy) I've been considering ramping up my convention attendance. This comes alongside trying to be more involved in the UK RPG scene by interacting more on social media and attending online meet ups, such as the excellent Mitchester Arms. It has been great getting to meet other RPG fans around the country (and around the world) and being able to talk about new purchases, old favourites and books you've recently blown all your pocket money on. While the first convention I properly attended this year was a flying visit to Harrogate's AireCon back in March (which focuses more on board games), I've lined up several RPG-centric cons for the back end of the year, including GROGMEET and a return to Dragonmeet in December. But the first RPG convention of 2022 has been a trip to Leeds for YSDC's ConVocation.
ConVocation (which has replaced the old YSDC Games Day) is a Call of Cthulhu con hosted by Yog-Sothoth.com (if you're a Cthulhu fan and not a member of the forum, you really should join). It is also the only in person RPG convention that I attended throughout the pandemic, in 2021. It is one of my favourite cons—a small and intimate affair that draws in some absolutely fantastic players and Keepers—and I have been running games at since Games Day IV in 2015, when I ran one of the first session of what would eventually become the free Trail of Cthulhu scenario, The Keepers of the Woods.
Originally ran at the Community Centre in picturesque Baildon, located above Shipley in West Yorkshire, the con has been run at The Leeds Library in Leeds city centre since last year. I cannot think of a more suitable location for a Call of Cthulhu convention than this—being surrounded by ancient tomes does add a level of atmosphere to the experience. Also, those who get to run their game in the library's Treasure Room, like I did this year, get to play on a table dating back to the library's founding in 1768.
The game I ran this year was classic Call of Cthulhu scenario, The Auction, published in The Asylum and Other Tales—be warned, from this point on there may be spoilers! I decided to run this after picking up both the HPLHS Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set earlier this year, as well as the Type 40 augmented reality prop of the scenario's central McGuffin, The Brazen Head. Given the wealth of props in the HPLHS prop set, I was a little surprised to find out that the only props it contained for The Auction are a couple of pamphlets representing the auction catalogue and a map of Austria, the country in which the auction is set (personally, I think a map of Vienna would have been a tad more useful!). So, I decided to produce some additional bits and bobs, including invitations for all of the players and some newspaper clippings, which provided an alternative method of obtaining some of the information that the investigators can get from the police in the original scenario, but which can be easily missed. These clippings were based on some props that are available via YSDC and were produced using Cthulhu Reborn's Mutable Deceptions. I've made them freely available to download here too, along with the invitations, if you'd to use them in your own games.
Sign ups for ConVocation aren't done in advance but at the convention itself, so you never know who is going to be sitting down to play with you. That said, after attending the con for seven years now, you do get to know most of the regulars. I was very honoured to run for Juliet, Simon, Chris and Lee. They were a pleasure to run for. The Auction provides an excellent opportunity for roleplaying and investigation, as well as a few moments of tense combat, and because of the latter, I'd provided variety of pregens that ran the gamut of classic Cthulhu investigators, from dilattante to upper class soldiers and occultists to archaeologists. Some of them even had some spells, though I chose to keep the descriptions for these fairly vague, with hints at what they might do, rather than provide the complete mechanics from the books, the idea being that the players had to choose when best to use them and take a possible risk at the same time... My players certainly seemed to get into the spirit of the game and brought the whole thing, especially their characters, to life.
Pacing is one of the key parts in running any con game, though ConVocation lets you get away with a little bit more than most, as games usually start around 12pm and run until 7pm, giving you around 6 hours after breaks have been taken into account. Nonetheless, The Auction can be paced very differently depending on what you want to focus on and what aspects you're able to strip out of it. I've seen Becca Scott run it in under 4 hours over on YouTube, while Seth Skorkowsky says it took him two 6 hour sessions in his review! That's highly variable and did caused me a little concern while I prepped! However, breaking the scenario down into its constituent scenes and using bullet point notes with the key clues definitely helped here and kept everything on track. I had a rough idea that the first third to first half of the session would be the initial roleplay, i.e. going over how the investigators get to the auction itself, doing any preliminary research, visiting Ausperghaus and aiming to have the actual auction itself roughly taking place at the halfway march, at which point the "tilt" happens and things start to go awry. I think I just about stuck to this structure, allowing the latter half to be taken up with the investigation and the final hour leading to the climatic confrontation with ghouls and the main perpertrator, Klaus Hunderprest, at the end. Only one of the investigators died, being killed and eaten by ghouls (sorry Lee!) while the others escaped with the Brazen Head to get their reward from Herr Ausperg. However, Klaus remained alive to seek his revenge...
As an aside to pacing, I did have some concerns about when to use the wonderful Type 40 prop of the Brazen Head. It posed something of a conundrum, as showing it too early might have given the game away, whereas leave it too late and it doesn't get seen again until the investigators find the chambers under Hunderprest's basement. I was also slightly concerned about how much of a distraction it would be. In the end, I decided to use it when the players requested whether they could look at some of the lots prior to the auction taking place. It drew a fair bit of attention (as you can see from the photo here and those over on this YSDC thread if you are a Patron of the site), but I wouldn't say that it became a major distraction. It was nice to play with for five minutes and then we were back into the game. Nor did I think it derail things showing it early in the scenario either. The head is stolen at the point one of the other lots is to be brought out in the auction—an enchanted sword—and I'd made a point of describing those investigators who had already touched this in their view as receiving this slight tingle, like static electricity. So the players at first assumed that it was the sword that had been stolen!
Overall, I think the game went pretty well. There are, as always, some things I would have changed or think that I could have done better, such as rejigging the pacing a little to get to the auction faster and allowing more time for a wider investgation. I am not one hundred per cent on this, as I think the players did a masterful job in tracking down leads and seemed to get to Hunderprest's house around the time I wanted them to, but it might have allowed for some more breathing room, as I noted that a few players were concious of the end of the session approaching. I also made what I think was a bad call at the end of the session by not allowing one of the players to get their hands on the tome they had been after at the auction—I asked them for a luck check to see if their offered to the seller was accepted forgetting that they had literally burnt through all their luck minutes earlier to survive the fight with the ghouls. As I then had Klaus seek his revenge against the investigator with the lowest luck in the epilogue, it was a bit of a double whammy, so in hidesight, I should have just given them the book and let them have that win!
The biggest change I'd make though comes from some excellent feedback from one of the players, Simon, after the session, and that is making use of NPC cards to help the player's keep track of the various NPCs in the game. The Auction is quite NPC heavy and it can be overwhelming at times, especially at the auction itself, where there were the invstgator's patrons, as well as around 7 other NPCs and the Ausperhaus staff! The suggestion to use something like index cards with names and a brief description for such scenes was a revelation and something I hadn't thought of myself. It's definitely something I'll be doing for future con games that I run! So, thanks for that Simon if you end up reading this! Funnily enough, only days after I had run my game, I saw this tweet from Gaz from the Smart Party Podcast showing off the NPC cards they'd created for their games for the Furnace convention this weekend.
In the end, ConVocation was a great start to my end of the year con season. I had a lot of fun running The Auction, it was lovely to see everyone again, plus I got some new ideas to help improve future con games that I run. Many thanks to my players for making it such an enjoyable day!