Issue 12 - Gamehole Con 2024 (Part 2)
A return to Gamehole Con 2024 - the off-book games and more!
GAMEHOLE CON 2024 (Part 2)
Alrighty! Hot on the heels (for me) of a blogpost detailing some of my experiences at Gamehole Con 2024, here is the accompanying piece I promised, wherein I describe the off-book games I ran and played in… along with a few other tidbits that might be of interest. Or not. Keep that scroll wheel or swipey finger handy!
Off-Book Games
One of the upsides of my not getting into many of the on-offer games I was shooting for at the con was that I had lots of gaps in my schedule. Gaps I filled by playing RPGs with some of my best gaming buds — some of the gang I mentioned last issue that I’ve met in the Gaming & BS / BS Landia community. These are good people, and I now count many of them as true friends. And playing RPGs with friends, as we all know, can be a freakin’ great time. So it was with each of these games, so without further pomp and ceremony…
Into the Odd
Earlier in the year Jason Hobbs of Hobbs & Friends, Random Screed, Hex Talk and a bunch of other stuff OSR-heads would know reached out and asked if I’d run one of the ‘Mark of the Odd’1 games for him. Hobbs had been a player in a number of the Into the Odd-inspired games and wasn’t sure everything was clicking. That particular corner of the OSR is almost FKR2-like in its bare-bones approach to things, changing up some very foundational structures that many GMs and players rely on in your average RPG. There’s no roll to-hit. There are no attribute or skill rolls — only saves. The Into the Odd games, which I’ll talk about more soon when I cover Chris McDowall’s new game Mythic Bastion, are about as non-trad as the OSR / NSR3 gets. This isn’t really the place to get into all that; suffice to say I was keen to run a game for Hobbs and whoever else he drummed up.
Well, schedules are a tough thing. My best availability was weekend mornings, his was best in the evenings through the week. Months went by and we never got the game to the table. So when it became clear we were both going to Gamehole Con, I figured that would be our best chance. And it was!
We made it happen on the Thursday night, and dragged in a bunch of all-star players along with Hobbs: Jim, Gabe, Mirko, Sean and Edwin. This is a group of GM-players who probably bring well over a hundred years of experience to the table, and we’re friends who like taking the piss out of one another, so I wasn’t quite sure what I was in for. So after finding a place to play at the hotel and greasing the skids with a few libations, we got down to business.
But actually, wait — I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, when I packed for the trip, I needed to decide which Mark of the Odd game I’d bring and run if given the opportunity. I decided to go with the original, which is one of the simplest and best OSR games around:
And so having decided that, what scenario would I run? Hobbs told me he’d already played in a game that featured the introductory adventure that’s long been at the back of the book: The Iron Coral. So that was out. Over the months since his request came in I’d tinkered with several ideas revolving around exploring abandoned and overgrown garden estates, delving into the tunnels beneath the city of Bastion, or having the PCs be hired to hunt for a lost artifact in an abandoned prison on an island. I liked those ideas well enough but didn’t flesh any of them out in a meaningful way. Instead, at the con (when we confirmed we were going to play) I spent an hour or so in afternoon prepping the adventure we would play in the evening. I plopped it down in the hex crawl that comes in the remastered edition of the game, replacing one of the adventure sites I felt was a little lackluster with my own thing — an ancient observatory.
So, back to the game that Thursday night — I don’t know about everyone else, but I had a grand time. Six players is more than I normally enjoy GMing for, but each and every one of these dorks is a treat to have at the table. I got to provide absurd and loving detail on what it’s like to fire a flintlock4, we all got to see how much one player struggled with my theater of the mind scene descriptions, there was a fun interaction and combat with some ruffians, and then the PCs found their way to the adventure site I’d crafted a few hours before. There were animated wrought-iron guard dogs, there was smart tactical play to get close to a ballista tower so the weapon couldn’t depress and target the party, I got to gorily murder the bejesus out of one character with a fungal-faced zombie soldier (hi Mirko!), there was some weird mind / body swapping at the very end… and an incredibly powerful Arcanum (magic item) that put the party over the top in the final conflict. In short: it was a blast.
Anyhoo — I really appreciated the gang for just diving in. None of them really knew exactly what they were in for except for Hobbs. Who I believe soon intends to run We Deal in Lead, a weird west RPG inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. We Deal in Lead is a ‘Mark of the Odd’ game... so did playing in my game help him better grok the system or answer some of his questions? Probably not… but it was fun and gave me the foundation for a little adventure I might take the time to flesh out and perhaps even publish.
Swords & Wizardry: The Headless Wraith of Haunted Hollow
Skip ahead to Friday night. We convince Gabe he’s up next, and it turned out he’d brought an early version of a Halloween-themed adventure he was writing as part of a Headless Horseman jam!
Now based on the cover above, you might be wondering about why he ran the game for us using Swords & Wizardry Complete rather than Against the Darkmaster (VsD), but there’s a simple answer for that: we all knew or could reasonably fake knowing the OD&D-based game. Annnnd the flipside of that is that Against the Darkmaster is really a love letter to MERP5… which is a game that’s hard to love if you don’t have warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia for it. Our gang’s experiences lead us to believe VsD can work really well when the whole table is into it… and be more like taking nail clippers to your teeth when the table is not.
So hey, ho — let’s go Swords & Wizardry.
Kudos to Gabe here, by the by, as this was another late night game and this time there were seven players6 if I remember right (the above crew + our pal HOOS). We took the time to lovingly craft our PCs, then we immediately split the party. I don’t often play paladins, but when I do… I certainly wasn’t going to truck with evil witches in the woods when there was a murdering horseman about. So two of us went looking for the horseman while the other five ventured into a spooky wood, looking to learn about what was really going on. The two of us found that dude and he suuuuuucked with his stupid “immune to weapons that aren’t magical,” schtick. Because of that, though, it ended up being a pretty great, dynamic and desperate battle — loads of fun and a stalemate in the end! I think the witchy-wood crew did okay as well, but I was too busy paladining to pay much attention to those unlawful dopes.
In the end, it was a kickass good time — thanks to Gabe for putting up with us, and for writing and running a damned fine scenario.
Oh, one quick thing about Swords & Wizardry Complete — I quite dig the latest version of the book, and the momentum Matt Finch is building around the line. Cool to see.
Outcast Silver Raiders
Alright, so when Saturday rolls around, Sean makes good on an earlier offer to run some Outcast Silver Raiders (OSR). It was nice of him to make time to do this, as he was already running two on-book games, and while he’s a local, he and his wife were also dealing with pet issues. Wheee!
None of us had played this game before, so we took our time with character generation and some rules learning. That meant there wasn’t a ton of time left to be outcasts and raid silver, but the prison-break setup we started with worked well and we quite enjoyed the three or four scenes we got through.
For those that know me, my enjoying this game probably comes as no surprise. I’m a huge fan of low-magic, human-centric, kick ‘em when they’re down old school gaming… and OSR is all that in spades. Along with the solid writing and highly thematic art, the box set from the Kickstarter is a physical joy. Accompanying the three core books7 are many maps, standies, trifold adventures and more. It’s a nice product. System-wise, it’s D&D... though it does include some cool angles like d6-based skills and d10-based saves, scarcity dice (basically straight from The Black Hack usage dice), three classes (no cleric!), dark and dangerous magic, XP for (only!) treasure, and a silver rather than gold standard.
In all this, though, the thing that stands out to me the most is the setting — the Mythic North, a hex crawl campaign map that’s loaded with encounters, sites and factions. It’s very dynamic and interactive, the kind of setting that brews and bubbles and changes even if the players don’t lift a finger. Love it.
I will also say that there are potentially problematic religious and demonic themes on full display in this game, so try to catch an in-depth review before going all-in if you think that stuff might bug you. (Hit me up in the comments if you’re looking for sacrilicious specifics.)
In the end, Raiders is a game and a setting I really want to run — so much so that it’s going to be the next thing I bring to the table for the biweekly Thursday night crew I play with. (These are the same jokers I played Forbidden Lands and a bunch of other games with over the last 2-3 years; shout out to Sean, Phil, Wayne and Kevin.) I’m very much looking forward to running OSR for them and I’m sure I’ll use the blog to talk about the game and those sessions once we gets them going in earnest.
Outgunned: The B-Team
To close out the con on Sunday, Mirko stepped up to the plate and ran what was maybe the best game of the whole damned con… at least that I played in. And I do hesitate to say that because all the off-book stuff was just excellent... but even among those great games, Outgunned was a stand out.
It started with the premise our GM used: what if the vaunted A-Team wasn’t available to take the job? Why… call the (second best) B-Team and let them have at it! So that was us8, the B-Team, a collection of badass misfits trying to stop a large oil-changing franchise / conglomerate (Quicky Iffy Lube, that company was called, and yes, MANY jokes were made) from knocking a mom and pop garage out of business to eliminate competition. Oil-changing… competition.
What?! We were the B-Team, I said! Hopefully you weren’t expecting higher stakes…
The system facilitates getting up and going quickly, providing a nice range of easily-tweakable roles for this kind of 80s/90s high octane action nonsense. These are all in the main book:
The action was fast and furious and the fights and set pieces were both fun and memorable. Credit to Mirko for keeping it all rolling — this is not the easiest crew in the land to GM for. While we all loved the moments with blazing guns, karate chops, desperate leaps, inappropriate kisses, beer cans and burnouts in our sweet-ass van… we were also dissecting the push-your-luck Yahtzee-style dice matching mechanics of the game, breaking down the different levels of success, smashing apart the metacurrency so we could better understand how to juice the right scenes with it… you get the idea.
Basically, two thumbs up, play this game — especially if you see DigitalHobbit (Mirko) put it on offer at Genghis Con, next year’s Gamehole Con or the like. He runs it like boss. Don’t tell him I said that, though. I have a curmudgeon reputation to uphold.
Editor’s Note: I’m not sure Outgunned is actually better than Fate, Savage Worlds, Feng Shui or various other systems that are highly tuned for pulp / high-octane / cinematic action, but the bottom line is that it’s a hoot to play and I’d consider running it. Mirko says it’s easier than these other games from the GM’s seat.
And so that’s all the games I played in at Gamehole Con 2024 — a pretty decent set, all things considered. I didn’t know if I was going to get a chance to run something at all… and with Sean’s pet woes it wasn’t a sure thing that we’d be able to squeeze in Outcast Silver Raiders, so I was pretty pleased with it all at the end of the con.
Below I’ll close out the blogpost with some…
Odds & Ends
Thanks to Hobbs for letting folks hang at his booth, leave their packs there and generally use it as a bit of a home base and place to muster. A+ move.
Kudos to Sean for yet another great Saturday night soiree. Zweefer brought more fabulous cider; HOOS and Shanbot brought enough whisky to sink a ship... someone (Eileen and Brandon?) brought snacks. Terrible songs were sung, dumb stories were told, bands were dissected, there was some YouTube view bragging / shaming — a pretty great time was had by all, I think.
Really awesome to see Brett there — Sean’s alter ego on Gaming & BS for many years.
I had fun talking to Luke Stratton (Limithron) about his game Pirate Borg, marketing RPGs and the kickstarter he was just finishing. Luke is local to me in Colorado and a really nice, solid guy. I’m looking forward to making some time in 2025 to join his OSR-focused “Ship of the Dead” monthly mini-cons when I can.
Thanks to my pal Jim, I met Jeff Grubb! And he even pretended to remember a letter I wrote to The Marvel Phile in Dragon Magazine in the mid-late 80s. Seemed to be a super-nice guy!
Made the now annual trip to Noble Knight, and this time got a tour of the warehouse. Whoa. Take the tour if you go. It doesn’t take too long and it’s freakin’ impressive.
The vendor hall, as it has been for three years, was excellent. I bought too much stuff, especially from the Goodman Games booth. This year Nick Baran of Breaker Press Games was there. Nick puts out the horror-tinged ‘Stennard’ line of grim and grimy, dark DCC supplements (classes, zines, adventures, etc.)… and I think I bought just about everything I didn’t already have. Need to get these to the table!
Righty-ho then, that’s a wrap for this issue. Thanks for reading and hope to see you next time!
These are the various games inspired by Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd RPG, originally published 2014. Games branching from Apocalypse World are called “Powered by the Apocalypse” or PbtA games; those inspired by Blades in the Dark are covered under the “Forged in the Dark” umbrella. You get the drift with the “Mark of the Odd.”
FKR = Free Kriegsspiel Revolution. Google that bad boy to see what it’s all about, or check these links to Reddit, ENWorld and Ben Milton talky-talking about it. It’s pretty cool stuff, at least for those of us that enjoy elegant minimalism in games.
NSR = New School Renaissance / Revolution. The OSR has gotten so broad that some folks have re-categorized non-retroclone games like Cairn, Mausritter, Knave, The Black Hack, World of Dungeons, Better Left Buried and other stuff that pursues the feel of the old school games… but generally follows more modern or indie design paradigms.
My undergraduate honors thesis was on European gunflints, you see, and how they should be interpreted in the archaeological record in colonial northeastern North America. I’ve also fired a bunch of blackpowder weapons. Fascinating stuff, right? Right?! Well, it is for me.
Middle Earth Roleplaying, by Iron Crown Enterprises, first published in 1984. It’s based on I.C.E.’s Rolemaster, and the less said about that game the better. In my humble opinion. =]
Now thinking about it, I suspect seven players at the table is another reason why Gabe decided to not run the game using VsD…
Those would be the Player’s Guide, the Referee’s Compendium, and The Mythic North campaign book. The box set with the goodies is long sold out, but the three volumes are now available as a slipcase set on Exalted Funeral. Get ‘em!
If memory serves, the players at Mirko’s game were me, Edwin, Gabe, HOOS, Kristen and Sean. A super-solid and very hard to wrangle crew.
"Wow. That table for Into the Odd. Can't really beat THAT group."
Reads the S&W table "ohhh, apparently you can..."
Agreed, huge props to Hobbs. We camped out there Friday night and played Rappan Athuk C&C in the booth for a few hours, offering a seat at the table to passers by.
Another stellar post, man. Those were some great off books games! I am lucky to have been in a few of them. I come from a long, long way to attend GHC and I don't regret it one bit. It sounds like it is time to lean on Hobbs for We Deal in Lead. Next up BSer Con 4!