Nicole and I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Harrisonburg, VA for Madicon 24. (Astute readers will note it is apparently not that obligatory, as we missed Madicon 23. Interested parties can read my write-up of Madicon 22.)
No pictures this time, I'm afraid. There was a lot of cool cosplay around, but I always feel like a creeper taking cosplay pictures, so I refrained.
This one was not as convention-y as last time, because we mostly spent the convention with friends. We didn't do the LARP (sadly, as I heard from a reliable source that it was a blast). Strangely, I did not purchase anything (likely because it's mostly on my shelf anyway), but we did support the Dealer's Room via Nicole. (A particular shout-out in this case to Emizart; it was her first convention, and Nicole ordered a couple of jewelry pieces from her, including a custom order I understand is headed our way in a couple of weeks.)
For us, Friday featured Lords of Waterdeep, a favorite among many I know. If I recall correctly, we weren't paying attention and so the player playing Lord Larissa Neathal — the "building lady" — won.
As one does.
Saturday featured Night's Black Agents; interested parties may read about the game session here. I was fond of it, and the only real complaint was out of the GMs hands — once the vampires appeared, so did the endless parade of 1s. Seriously, we learned there are about eight 1s on your average six-sided die, a number which seems impossible, and yet there it is. In truth, this is probably realistic — when Jason Bourne first encounters vampires, everything goes to goddamn Hell.
I know we ignored some of the refresh options for the purposes of learning the game, but I'm really not sure it would have helped. I watched people blow five points of skills just to make sure they succeeded without rolling, because the dice were our enemy.
Even so, it was a partial success. We stopped the bioweapon, recovered the scientist, and no PCs died. Any op you can walk away from, right?
Later Saturday also featured A Single, Small Cut, a sequel to the Death Love Doom game from Madicon 22. I switched some details around, and once again, the player characters proved to be entirely too careful — they came to St. Gothard's church with a small army of twenty-two mercenaries, and annihilated the Corrector of Sins (which the PCs colloquially called the "ass-monster") in one round. They accidentally summoned the beast again in the catacombs (a weaker version, as they had moved some of the corpses out of the crypt), and still annihilated it in one round. They carefully packed away the Red Bell with the knowledge that they can now generate ass-monsters from fresh corpses whenever they want.
Also, the party elf convinced "Father" Clement to track down his fellows and retrieve Eutaric's spellbook, as he'll pay handsomely for it. Clement knows where they're headed next, so he'll try to retrieve the book and track them down.
Incidentally, A Single, Small Cut was meant to be the cold open to Death Frost Doom, but they stretched out A Single, Small Cut to fit the entire timeslot (again, their preparations are probably a large reason as to why they survived), so Mount Deathfrost waits for another day.
Also, since a couple of us were out in force in our Lamentations of the Flame Princess shirts, we ended up repeatedly explaining about the game system. Which is good advertising for James Raggi, I suppose.
I only failed to perform two activities this Madicon: we did not make the pilgrimage to Glen's Fair Price Store, and I hoped to debut the Carcosa megadungeon at Madicon 24, but I've been neglecting it in favor of other projects. Here's hoping to getting it up and running in 2015.
All-in-all, a successful convention.
