Con Report - Meeple Con 2
So, the other weekend was the second convention that I have managed to attend this year, following on from ConVocation at the end of September. It was also the second iteration of this convention and, while the first had good attendance, this year's was much stronger. Also, the bring and buy was better stocked and I even managed to make a few quid selling some of my old games, which will no doubt be invested in new games (I mean, I've already picked up a copy of King Arthur Pendragon on today's trip to London).
Last year, I proposed to run two games – Delta Green's OBSERVER EFFECT and my own scenario, Those Within, for Call of Cthulhu. Only the first of these ended up running because there were no sign-ups for the other. This year, I ran Night of Blood for Cubicle 7's new Fourth Edition of WFRP and, again, Those Within for CoC. This time I got a full table for Warhammer and four sign-ups for Cthulhu. Both games went exceptionally well and I had a great time running them, despite fluffing a few rules for WFRP (and Cthulhu for that matter!).
I also ran a GMing workshop with my friend Andy between the games. This was a little experimental – I've run something similar for our FLGS (Meeple Games) previously – but was very well received. We decided to take the 2 hours we had and split the time into a 1-hour open forum Q&A, followed by two 'breakout groups', one focusing on making published campaigns your own, and the other exploring how to improvise at the table. I ran the latter of these, which I think was good, but we were a little short on time due to the Q&A overrunning (and Andy overrunning on his slot prior to mine). This meant I didn't get to incorporate the hands-on activity I had planned – creating an NPC on the fly – which utilised some of the methods I discussed. If you want to hear about these in more detail, do drop me a line and I'll put up another post about them. I do think that there is scope for running an event in our local store though that picks up on a similar theme.
Talking about local stores, if you're ever in Durham, UK, do check out Meeple Games. It's a small but mighty store and Ron, the owner, is great.
That's pretty much it for this post. I'm looking forward to my next con, Dragonmeet, at the end of November...