I agree with grrlshapedthing: Kapcon was wonderful this year--maybe the best experience I’ve had here in a long time. Every single person I played with contributed their best towards making our games awesome. And we played a few games I've been dreaming about / hoping to run for a long, long time (Home and Fall of Electricity, see below).
I facilitated the following games at Games on Demand / late-night Kapcon:
* Home: a mash-up of Grace, Silver and White and Okult
* Fall of Electricity
* Cartel
* Fall of Magic
* Heists / Master Thieves - a playtest of one of my games-in-progress
* Fall of Magic
And I played Monster of the Week in the final session.
HomeGrace and Silver and White (S&W) are two of my favourite games. They're GMless explorations of what it's like to be a teenager. While Grace is naturalistic, S&W has an overt supernatural component to it. About a year ago, it occurred to me you could combine both games, and use them as the starting point for a Stephen King story in the style of IT.
For simplicity's sake, I decided you'd play out all of the childhood/teenage material first, and then leap forward to the adults returning to a darker version of their town. Probably with an ellipsis, so that you weren't quite sure what had happened in the interim.
After looking at When The Dark Has Gone as a possible third game to use for the 'we're grown up and coming back to the creepy town we grew up in’ section, I decided Okult was a better fit.
In play, the game was rushed: we all agreed that it'd be fantastic to spend one session on the childhood years, take a break and then return for the adult years. The challenge would be to convince con goers to sign up for two sessions of a game, when the social and creative rewards of Kapcon (to me) are about dabbling and exploring lots of different cool things.
But wow. Much pathos. So creepy. We were a group of kids who bonded over a school hike into the nearby national park. The early stages of the game were centred around reacting to one of the kid's being heavily involved in a bible study class and dealing with Trent (the new kid transferred from a nearby school) and his alienation and the way he lashed out and rebelled.
But Jarrod subtly (at first) described how Trent was looking paler and thinner. His revelation that he was terminally ill fed perfectly into the second phase of the game, where ordinary teenagers make contact with something supernatural.
This mash-up has inspired me by demonstrating how few rules you need in order to create a satisfying play experience. If the character creation process gives people meaty things to talk about, disagree with and change opinions on, then normal everyday scenes can be filled with lots of great material. (In fact, S&W is quite crunchy in comparison to Grace, and having to explain its rules felt a bit too much of a gear change.)
Fall of ElectricityOne of the things I love about Kapcon and the Games on Demand room is that you will nearly always find the right players for a particular game. So, this is how I pitch Fall of Electricity (FoE) now:
You play a post-grunge band who have heard rumours that a second version of Seattle has appeared somewhere in America. And you set off on a road-trip to find it. You play the band’s guitarist and drummer. And the guitar and the drums.
This game uses Fall of Magic's (see below) map-based scene prompts to structure its story. As a group you travel between different areas on the map. Each area has locations that contain prompts like "What you see in the clouds" and "The throne room" and "Alternate impending Copenhagen". Each player takes turns visiting locations within an area, narrating a scene (that can involve the other characters), and incorporating the required scene prompt.
(What I like about the scene prompts in both Fall of Magic (FoM) and FoE is that they can be interpreted in a number of different ways, making it easy to revisit and reuse them).
FoE has a bit more overt flexibility that FoM in how you go through the journey, with its layout encouraging you to consider visiting locations again.
FoE impressed me right from its incredible first phase, where we establish relationships between the musicians and instruments.
It turned out we had a generation gap between our drums and guitar. The drums were new and excited to rock. The guitar was older: it'd belonged to Andrew’s grandfather, who’d also been in an alt band in the 60s and 70s. The guitar was cautious about whether Andrew could live up to the grandfather’s legacy but also incredibly encouraging and continually supportive, even in the most trying of circustances or when dealing with Andrew’s frequent self-doubts.
Our story brought in the idea of a war between two different musical preferences, a lot of polyamory, and an opportunity to have a cathartic moment with David Bowie. When we were writing songs or playing gigs, we also visited scene prompts inside an area repeatedly, to build up the tension inside a sequence of whether we'd fail or not.
Fall of MagicI played two games of Fall of Magic, a game in which you play the companions of the Magus, who is dying and travelling to the land of Umbra, to the source of magic.
Character creation is elegant. Each word you choose (from a perfectly-considered list) to construct your character inspires you to create a character arc and give you attitudes about particular areas on the map.
I love FoM's slow build. The game starts with reflective and introductory scenes that don’t necessarily bring the characters together. It then moves onto areas that contain scene prompts that facilitate the characters observing each other (without compelling it). After that, it starts to give concrete opportunities to develop sub-plots. As part of that, I love the slow pace at which character relationships can be built, and the way sub-plots can be introduced and reflected on before being developed.
In our first game, a midwife was a central character, and the game (in hindsight) was about midwiving the Magus into the magic and midwiving his apprentice into a new position as a magus. One aspect that emerged from the game (that I loved) was how we started dismantling the 'power acquisition' trope of fantasy fiction: through the game we acquired artifacts and power, but the resolution seemed to pivot on us giving up those crutches and relying on ourselves and each other.
The second game was powerful powerful stuff. As players, I felt we started (as FoM games often seem to) with some scepticism, some hesistation, some slowness about establishing characters and plot. But those inital scenes are great at 'tuning' the group: helping us develop a shared understanding of the tone we're aiming for. In this case, we gradually realised we wanted a fully melancholic tone and we played into that, hard. By about halfway through the game, we were starting to tear up occasionally. By the game's end, we were struggling to hold back our tears.
I learned a lot from both games.
There’s a powerful ability for players to tell a parallel story about the Magus through their ‘between locations’ narration. Because responsibility for that narration swaps around all the time, you get to understand different aspects of the Magus.
My narrations in Game 2 were all about the arrogance of humans welcoming the fall of magic and the return of the rule of the sword, but also - increasingly - about the frailness of the Magus’ body and the ways in which it had begun to fail. And eventually that transitioned into a meditation about accepting death, bringing the literal subject matter of the game through metaphor and back into literality again, but this time with a massive emotional weight.
I also felt (and resisted) the temptation to steal imagery or ideas from previous games I’ve played. In this creative context, it feels like cheating. And it's easy to resist, because a key part of playing the game involves respecting the creativity of others: building on their ideas, supporting them, and creating our own mood.
I almost feel like the attraction for future games of Fall of Magic for me is ‘exploration’. Playing through other areas of the map that I haven’t been to before.
There’s also some thoughts I need to develop about the different types of voice you can use in your narration: first person observational monologues, inner monologues about a character's emotional life, conventional GM narration, setting a scene for a conventional in-character conversation, and inverting/subverting the story prompts: giving them double-meanings or using them as metaphors.
CartelThis was the game I was most confident about running at Kapcon, but was the most disappointed in myself for how I facilitated it. I think I learned a lot about how I want to run it in a con environment.
* I think the strongest way to run that game in a one shot is to have everyone involved in the family
* I'd definitely not offer the option of players doubling up on playbooks in a small (4 player) game
* I'd like to open with a family- centric scene, bringing everyone together
* I'd consider not offering the ‘dirty cop’ playbook at a con (to make it easier to tie everyone together into regular scene). The Dirty Cop is great for an extended game, though.
(I also think the final version of Cartel will benefit from lots of advice about how to put pressure on the dirty cop. Advice I may have to write

Our Kapcon session centred around a weak, new and young narco taking over as cartel boss from his dead father. At the same time, a young and ambitious cousin was working his way up from the street corner. If we’d played another session, I'm certain the cousin would have been challenging the boss for control of their operations.
The crux of the boss-cousin relationship came from the terrible decision of one of the cousin's buddies to get involved in ripping off a drug shipment and making it look like a rival cartel had done it. It compromised the cousin, forced him to kill his friend, and led to a shoot-out in the suburbs while trying to regain the drugs.
The other two characters were dirty cops. One was involved in a scam to sell black market weapons. The other was having to work with the US Military Police, to track and recover stolen black market weapons. The second cop was also being more and more suspected of being involved in the cartel.
It was an extremely complicated storyline. I was happy about running it and inventing internally consistent details about what was happening, but I don’t think it was as entertaining session for the other players as it could be.
Conclusion: Steve must do better.
Heists / Master ThievesThis is my game-in-playtest, inspired by Ocean's 11 and shows like Leverage and Hustle. I was nervous about offering it, so it was great to have Dan encourage me to run: I really appreciated that extra push.
I ran a new heist during this session (the first one I’ve designed): trying to rob the time-locked vault of a mob bank (similar to the bank in the opening sequence of The Dark Knight). Instantly, the thieves threw me completely: they decided not to rob the bank, but to adjust the bank's security procedures so that when an alert was raised, the bank would transfer money ... effectively robbing itself.
I decided to go with it - I was sure the rules could handle it. A fun session resulted, complete with a mini-heist in the middle of the game and a courier-bicycle assisted assassination attempt. Rather than overcoming challenges, the theives subverted and defused them - so that at the end the theives could essentially press ‘Go’ on their plan and it all worked perfectly.
I got lots of feedback and have been analysing the results. In particular, the rules need to support the thieves being more competent and there need to be clearer rules for what a roll will achieve.
There’s still a lot of work left to do but I’m feeling confident about taking it for another spin soon. I'm guessing that the cause of that confidence is being able to address some specific issues thereby feeling more confident that the game will be better on its next run.
Monster of the Week (MOTW)I have only played this a few times (I think this was my third). It’s so much fun.
As the final session at Kapcon, it had to deal with all of us being wired on adrenaline and making jokes with each other. But we had all played MOTW before, so character creation went as fast as I’ve ever seen it, and we had a strong idea of how to run a hunt.
What it required was for us to gradually pull ourselves into the fiction space as opposed to joking around. I was one of the players who took the lead on that, framing a scene with my Mundane friend in a car just to check in with them about how they were feeling about monster hunting.
Then I stated what I was going to do as my initial bit of research: reading the local newspaper reports. That spun out into a whole sequence, which included our commander
trying to impersonate a CIA agent in order to get police files (“Sir, the CIA doesn’t operate inside America, and you’ve misspelled ‘CIA’ on your badge.”)
From that, we realised we needed to impersonate FBI agents and needed an FBI code book. The Expert rolled a 7-9 on his move to have access to something rare or unusual. The codebook wasn’t with him: he'd left behind at a previous town.
This led to my favourite part of the game: I pitched that it’d been left behind at the house of a woman the Expert had hooked up with but then abandoned. I’ve always been fascinated about what it would be like if Sam or Dean went back to a town where they’d had a fling (the Evil Truck town of Route 666, for instance) and had to deal with the emotional blowback.
Turns out it’s a fun obstacle that humanises a lot of characters.
I was a Wronged with an obsessive focus on troll-hunting (based on the Monstrous’ breed selection). I took my backstory from the Thomas Jane Punisher movie: trolls had murdered all of my family and friends at a huge wedding. Our final fight against snow-trolls was brutal and probably the best implementation of the Kick Ass move that I’ve seen: lots of trading harm, and some attempts to be smart about how to hurt the trolls without being hurt ourselves.