Issue 11 - Gamehole Con 2024 (Part 1)

Harrigan goes to Gamehole Con and has a blast!

Nov 04, 2024

Hello everyone, pull up a stump. As I think I’ve mentioned before, in addition to the 2-3 biweekly games I play in live / virtually, I also have a full slate of play-by-post games, and make time for a few RPG conventions a year. Most of those are the local ones here in Colorado, but annually I try to get to one larger out of state con.

Gen Con (which I’ve never attended) looks great but awfully big. I’ve attended my fair share of 100,000 person conferences for work… and will admit I generally don’t love that mass of seething humanity vibe. Origins might be the biggest I can really enjoy, so I do have my sights set there at some point… but in the meantime, I’ve been quite happy going to Gamehole Con in Madison, Wisconsin.

GAMEHOLE CON 2024

Gamehole Con happens each fall in October; this year it was the 16th to the 20th. I’ve attended three years running for one reason: the people. One of my online haunts is the BS Landia Discord, a community that has grown out of the fandom of the now defunct Gaming & BS podcast. Sean and Brett, the hosts of that show, raved about how well-run their local con was. They pitched up a booth for a few years and would meet listeners and fans when they stopped by.

A few years on now from the show’s finish, that con (Gamehole) has become an unofficial annual meeting for many of the community’s most active members. Not to get sappy or overstate things, but it’s pretty cool that a whole bunch of gaming friends take time once a year to meet up in person from all across the country. We hang out, we game, we sup, we drink and trade stories. It’s pretty great and frankly the main reason I make the trip. It is, however, a very well-organized and run con, it’s at a fairly convenient time of the year for me, and its size (a few thousand) usually means there are lots of different and interesting games on offer.

Gamehole Con generally gets a big thumbs up from me, and this year was no different.

So. What did I play and how did it go? Let’s find out.

On-Book Games

Due to some technical difficulties, I wasn’t able to pounce on the games I wanted when the clock struck midnight on the con’s portal.1 That meant that I didn’t get any of my first or second picks2 for the morning and afternoon slots I was targeting. (I keep evenings free for dinners, beers, off-book games and the like.)

I did get into three games that were further down on my wish list, though, so let’s talk about those.

ICRPG: Altered State

I’m a big fan of Runehammer’s Index Card RPG (ICRPG), I’ve long loved cyberpunk settings, and while I own a ton of cyberpunk games, it’s extremely rare for me to ever get one to the table, as a player or a GM.

So seeing this game on offer at Gamehole was a no-brainer for me. I own Altered State, which was written by Alex Alvarez, so I had some idea of what the game was like — what kind of stories it was aimed at.3

Altered State is pretty balls-out hyper-violent cyberpunk. The emphasis is on dramatic scenes with loads of BIG guns, smashing up vehicles, high-octane chases, duels with killer robots — it is definitely a cinematic take. There’s a transhumanism angle with ‘sleeves’ and cortical stacks… there are psychic powers, and there is loads of wonderfully over-the-top tech.

The ICRPG rules are tweaked to make the PCs more heroic, badass, and able to fuck shit up. So with all that in mind, I was looking forward to the game — which didn’t disappoint. Well, it did in a couple of ways, but I’ll get to that. In terms of the GM’s prep, the scenario, the gang of people gathered around to play — it was great, bombastic fun. Everyone knew the genre well and leaned into every trope we encountered or summoned up. We fought corporate special ops forces who fast-roped into the area where we were getting our mission, we had running firefights through the city streets, and we eventually faced-off with very tough armored mechs that required heavy munitions to take out. The pre-gen characters were actually a little too loaded with loot; it was a bit difficult to sort through all the stuff on my sheet. But that’s part of why you play ICRPG — the loot.

There were just two flaws in what otherwise was a very solid con game experience.

1. GMs! Do not fucking roll a d20 to establish the room / scene TARGET number!

In ICRPG, the GM sets the “difficulty” of the scene or room — the TARGET that the PCs have to hit or beat to succeed at their checks and attempts. Jumping a chasm, shooting an enemy, punching a cyber-nun, hacking a robot, jamming an incoming missile — the difficulty of the d20 roll always comes down to that TARGET number in a given scene.4

The GM section of the ICRPG Master Edition5 lays it out pretty nicely; the TARGET is usually between 10 and 18, with 12 being a kind of default. As the adventure proceeds and tensions mount, the number usually creeps up and up until the final scene when the stakes are highest.

Here, have a gander:

There are rules for adjusting the TARGET based on circumstance and the approach of the PC, but these are the basics beyond the initial advice of “make it a number between 10 and 20.”

So. Let’s say you’re GMing this.

Imagine instead of following this (pretty sound) advice, you decide while running the game to… roll a d20 in each scene to set the TARGET. Imagine the first TARGET being an 8, and the PCs romping in that scene. 8 is little on the low side, but not too bad… let’s do it again!

The next d20 roll lands on a 3. Well, that won’t work, so you roll that bad boy again. 19 this time. Probably too stiff. So rather than keep rolling in front of the table, you instead pick a number out of the air: 14.

And then you leave the TARGET at 14 for the rest of the game, even when scenes change.

It went about how you’re probably imagining it did. 14 is a tough number when it’s used in back to back to back scenes. It made the party burn through the metacurrency that Altered State has: SURGE. And that meant that we were way low on SURGE when we entered the final (pretty damned tough) battle.

But before I move on to that, let me just re-emphasize: if you run this game, or any ICRPG game, for Pete’s sake don’t roll a d20 to determine the TARGET number. Do it sensibly. Lay the groundwork for the action and the fiction everyone is after. Start low and go high. And tell you what — if you really want to do it randomly, roll 3d6, 4d4, 1d3+9, 1d6+12… think about what kind of results you’re going to get from those dice.

Okay, onto the second fly in what was otherwise pretty decent ointment.

2. GMs! Lord love a duck don’t ask people to reroll when they fail just because you’re after a certain outcome in your scene!

Yeah, the party being short on SURGE meant that we failed a lot in the final scene / battle. So the GM, on at least three occasions, just winked and said, “go ahead and just reroll that,” when the d20 inevitably betrayed6 someone.

The first time it happened, I almost missed it. Say, did he just…

The second time I caught, and the third time it was me he was telling to reroll when I failed. I asked, “Ah, why?” and he just made a Go ahead, just do it! face while the other players egged me on to reroll. Against every nerve in my being, I rerolled and succeeded, and felt SUPER LAME about succeeding, and about the outcome that came from it. From there, I also noticed a few interpretations of failed rolls that he turned into outright successes without even asking for a reroll. Not “success at a cost,” but just “you got what you wanted despite missing the TARGET.”

Maybe I’m alone on this, but for me it was a bit of a big wet fart at the end of what was otherwise a pretty enjoyable game. I’m rolling dice for a reason, and I like to abide by what they tell me, and craft the narrative from there.

As an aside here, if you find yourself as a GM in these shoes — desperately wanting the PCs to be successful — think about how you’re robbing them of the sense of actually accomplishing anything, of risking and winning… or of losing. That last bit is important! So, in a game like Altered State, recognize that you have a lever you can pull. Give the PCs more SURGE Capsules! Track that economy, and if they are headed into the finale, especially during a con game or other one-shot, just lean into the PCs-are-bad-asses mechanics the game already has! SURGE Capsules normally refresh at the start of a session, but con games are a different animal. Awarding one per scene would work well, or topping them up for the finale — *if* you want to increase their chances of coming out on top.

Okay, so before I move on to the next game I played, I just wanted to comment that the art in Altered State is nothing short of awesome. I like pretty much everything Runehammer / Brandish Gilhelm does art-wise, but this book contains some of his best. I just adore every single super-colorful piece.

Check a couple out as we head over to my Worlds Without Number table…

Worlds Without Number: Temple of 1000 Swords

I have a complex relationship with Kevin Crawford’s work. I highly respect his stuff. I appreciate the unending creativity in his sprawling tables. I don’t mind the B/X + Traveller base that underpins everything. I like that he seems to be hunting and killing every RPG genre he can find, putting out books left and right. He’s ridiculously prolific and someone who obviously loves roleplaying games.

And writing them. Because he seems to have used up all the available words. There are none left to write anything else!

I jest, but oi yoi yoi I struggle with reading his work. The density, the verbosity, the style, the bloody unending WALLS OF TEXT. Mercy, Kevin, mercy!

I don’t know who first made the joke, but indeed Crawford’s books sometimes feel like they should be called **Words Without Number**.

Still, it’s basically an OSR core and I do like Crawford’s ideas, so — full steam ahead, you have my interest!

Couple that with an OSE module I own but have not read — Brad Kerr’s Temple of 1000 Swords — and sure! Why not? I like Kerr’s stuff on the podcast Between Two Cairns… he’s frankly hilarious. So let’s give all this a whirl!

In the end, this module was probably a little too goofy / silly for my tastes, but like Jason Hobbs said to me after I played — it could be tweaked to run just a bit more on the OSR straight and narrow. Parts of it are lovely and dark… and pretty easy to make darker still.

The GM for this game was prepared. Like really prepared. It was the first time he’d ever run a con game, and he frankly did a great job. The other players were attentive and generally on top of things — it was a good table. The tone of the module — a fair bit of whimsy, bordering on very silly / dumb at times — wasn’t my favorite, but con games tend to slide that way regardless sometimes. As I mention in the caption, above, I think I could work with this adventure and pull some cool stuff out of it that would be more to my own (much darker) style.

So while the adventure itself was fine, if “not really for me,” I did struggle with the system a little. Or rather, I struggled with the way we were set up to play it, and with the way some of the other players ‘gamed’ it.

Remember I said the GM was really prepared? He proved multiple handouts. Rules. Backgrounds. Spells. Abilities. Classes. More rules. And pre-generated characters… something like forty of them.

That’s… a lot of reading and a lot of pregens to choose from.7 And they were all different, each of them some kind of fusion of backgrounds, classes and abilities and all the parts to create very unique characters. Who were all very distinct mechanically, and almost all of whom had spellcasting abilities. The other players chose all kind of crazy stuff — Necromancer-Warriors and Necromancer-Healers and I can’t even begin to remember what else. I tried to take the simplest build I could find (after scanning the long list for not very long) and I ended up with some kind of warrior monk. Cool! But I ended up ignoring a bunch of the spell-like abilities because I just wanted to play… a warrior monk.

Everyone else leaned into their builds. Finding optimal moves. Researching and using little abilities that chained together. Casting magic spell or using abilities in just about every combat round.

It’s just not my game, this kind of hyper-differentiation in the characters, the optimized builds and even more optimized actions during combat. Once one player figured out how effective a certain spell was, he used it in every combat action for the rest of the game. And it was effective — in total, he probably killed half of the opponents the whole group took down with that spell.

There were elements of the gameplay that seemed interesting enough — the shock damage in melee, magical healing stressing out the person you’re healing — but I had enough of a taste to understand that I don’t need to experience it again.

Farewell, Worlds Without Number!

As I say this, understand that my own biases are on display here, front and center. I know people who love WWN. They like it for all the reasons I don’t. But I’m not a D&D 3.0 / 3.5 / Pathfinder guy. At all — never played any one those games beyond a one-shot here or there. AD&D 1e was my last D&D until the OSR emerged, and despite my background in GURPS and Champions, I never dug all the intricate Feats and corner case rules and other dreck8 in those later D&Ds.

Right. Moving on.

Deathmatch Island

Okay, this one I was excited about. Remember how I bungled the ticket-getting? I lucked into getting a seat for this game because someone else backed out and I managed to grab it.

Deathmatch Island, by Tim Denee, was published by Evil Hat in May of 2024 and resultantly has the expected very high-end production values. The book is lovely and wonderfully themed — I have the hardcover and it’s vera, vera nice.

Perhaps more so than ICRPG or Worlds Without Number, this game might bear a little more explanation as to what it is. It might be easiest for me to grab a screen capture to show you…

Think one part Lost and one part Squid Games. Sprinkle in a little Running Man and season with some Survivor and even (swoon) The Prisoner. It’s a competition where the players cooperate and compete, and where losing can have dire consequences. The player characters come to this bizarre arena cold and go from here.

It’s frankly a brilliant setup, and ideal for con games and short campaigns. I happen to love the system it’s based on (Paragon, first seen in John Harper’s Agon before Paragon was a thing, kind of like Champions and Hero), which is also a very specific experience… where you’re playing classical Greek demigods and heroes completing trials and besting one another as you sail the Mediterranean.

I won’t get into the mechanics here, but it’s a very different kind of RPG, and one that many people who are only familiar with traditional games might struggle with at first. There is a rigid scene structure and some board-game like elements that not everyone will love — but if you just flow with it, the Paragon9 games can provide for very unique and memorable experiences.

Anyway, I had a blast playing this game at Gamehole — definitely my favorite on-book game. Good pal Sean P. Kelley ran it, and he did a great job with the setup, with teaching the game and with herding the cats after that, getting us through to a very satisfying conclusion and set of epilogues. One player still hadn’t quite grokked the flow of it all by the end. This is a rough game for people who don’t like to be put on the spot, narrating big chunks of pretty complex scenes before passing to the next player — but he was well-supported by Sean and the rest of the table so I think enjoyed himself. Good stuff.

There’s More

Alrighty, there’s lots more to tell about my experiences at Gamehole Con last month, including all the off-book games I played in, the vendor hall, bumping into a few RPG creators and other nonsense. I’ll cover that next issue since this is already a little longer than I intended it to be. Tune in next time to hear all about my running Into the Odd, Gabe from Analytic Dice running a headless-horseman inspired Swords & Wizardry scenario, Sean running Outcast Silver Raiders, and DigitalHobbit GMing an outrageously fun game of Outgunned.

Ciao for now.