State of the Madicon 2016: Better Late Than Never Edition

The state of the Madicon is strong.

Nicole and I made the annual pilgrimage to Harrisonburg, VA for Madicon 25.  (Interested parties can read about Madicon 22 and Madicon 24.)

Unrelated to gaming, I collected samples for thesis research.  Still, I did it on the road to Madicon, so it belongs here:

I should probably get around to testing these; grad school is nothing if not time triage.

I was able to meet with an old LARPing friend of mine whom I haven't seen in years.  We didn't get to hang out much, but it's a thing.

Depicted here as Miley Cyrus speaking with Agent Baccarat of MJ-12

This foray into the dealer's room made up for the lack of purchases last time.  I managed to get a bunch of Gale Force 9 battle maps, as well as weather dice and more Dungeonmorph dice (the city sets).  Nicole, unsurprisingly, got more dice.

rushputin ran Colossus, Arise! which is an interesting introduction to high-level Dungeon Crawl Classics for me.  (You can get a brief comment on the session here.)  I think DCC might be a hair too swingy for my tastes, and there's a little frustration in the fact that you can't predict what a spell is going to do.  Examples follow:

• I kept setting my fellow adventurers on fire because I rolled a little too well.
• I protected one by turning him into a fire elemental.  For several hours.  With the only way to turn him back being to cast polymorph again.
• I barred the exit.  For a year.  Note that "barring" the exit is an understatement — I erased it.  Just a brick wall where the door used to be.

Basically, we went into a ruined city, made a fine mess of things, lost the fighter, and left.  The cleric kept pissing off his deity (there are at least five 1s on a d20, it turns out) and most of the party was almost killed because our enemies were not open to negotiation.  On the plus side, I enjoyed being able to cast spells with impunity (although the dice hated us; fumbles seemed to be a worse enemy than the giants and demons and whatever we were fighting, and I certainly forgot a couple of spells as the night progressed, only to remember them by spilling my own blood).

Protip: if magic doesn't work, you're not using enough.

Saturday involved Death Frost Doom, which is a misnomer, because it was just the barest hint of DFD.  Having previously played Death Love Doom, the group talked to the creepy woman, climbed the creepy mountain, investigated the creepy cabin, and finally got spooked when they saw the Dead Sign in the second room of the dungeon.  (The last time they saw it, they were attacked by mutilated body parts.)  They took the key to the dungeon (smart) and left — making sure to suggest to the villagers that they found what they came for, so that anybody passing through and looking for the Emerald Tome of the Devourer will come looking for them (hopefully) rather than traversing the mountain on their own (also smart).

Unfortunately, an assassin tracking them since the aftermath of Death Love Doom finally found them and caused a rockslide.  He took out most of their mercenaries and almost killed two of them, but the group managed to track him down.

Interested parties can read about the whole thing here.

The rest of the weekend is the blur of socializing that one has come to expect from Madicon.