GameStorm 15

Another year of GameStorm.  It was great, as always.  I didn't get to play in a 'Call of Cthulu' game that I had signed up for, but that's okay, I left a little early on Sunday and mowed the lawn. Yeah, I know.

The headlining feature for me this year was that I ran / setup / spearheaded the first annual GameStorm Savage Saturday Night!  I became the assistant to the RPG coordinator, which wasn't really important, but it made me a staff member this year, so I got in for free.  We got 6 GM's to agree to run in the 7-11pm slot on Saturday night, and we had almost 100% full tables.  The games that were run were:

• Deadlands Noir - Pinnacle's newest setting, Deadlands set in the 1930's in New Orleans
• Ghostbusters - a homebrewed game
• Interface Zero - 1.0, but with 2.0 elements
• Hellride - the Gamestorm classic Savage Worlds recurring adventure
• Clockwork Justice League - steampunk and supers.. What??
• Agents of Oblivion - Spies and horror

Games I played this year were almost all RPG's: Doctor Who, Mistborn, Fudge (Cyberpunk setting) and board game / miniatures game: X-Wing.
Games I ran this year were both Savage Worlds: Wellstone City (Modern crime noir) and Agents Of Oblivion (Spy / horror).

Doctor Who:
Run by my 'con buddy' Aaron Bowman.  His concept was from a very early Doctor Who episode (and forgive me if I murder this, Doctor Who fans, I like the show, but not an avid fan!) where the Doctor jettisoned 25% of the TARDIS.  Aaron's game was based on what happens to 25% of infinity, where did it go, and what can happen?  We blinked around some space time, and saved Earth.

Mistborn:
Based on the books, and again, I haven't read them, so I was enjoying the game for the game.  We were on a mission to steal a silk-wrapped envelope.  Our opportunity was at a party / dancing ball that was being held.  The Mistborn system, besides having all of the magic from the books of 'burning metals' to user your powers, there was the introduction of a different resolution system using d6 dice pools.  It worked very well as a lot of our 'combat' was actually social interaction where characters were rolling for success with social graces that would be at such an event.  It was a lot of fun.
Mistborn Dice pool system:  Basically, you get a number of d6's based on your skill level and various focus skills and maybe a GM adjustment.  Roll the dice, and look for pairs, using 1 through 5 (a 6 means something else). the highest pair wins, and the difference of the pairs (in the case of vs. rolls) measures the comparative success.  A pair of 5's beats a pair of 4's, but beats a pair of 1's with a much greater level of success.  The 6's you ask?  They are 'nudges'.. Think of them as tie breakers or extra goodness, or if you lose a vs. roll, nudges can help mitigate the bad things that might happen. A pair of 4's with one nudge would beat a pair of 4's.  And no, 3 or more of a kind don't do anything, just pairs.

Fudge w/ a Cyberpunk setting:
Using the funny fudge +/- dice, we embarked on a mission to find out how a group of folks were staying in the Atral plane for hours or days on end.  It lead us to a military installation, and a very beefed up secure 'commune'.  We found a machine that would permanently put souls in the Astral plane, and stopped it from happening.  The folks stuck there? Well, they wanted immortality, and they got it.  It's the guvment's problem now.

X-Wing:
A miniatures game for the Star Wars geek in all of us.  A-wings, Y-wings, X-Wings and the Millennium Falcon vs. Boba Fett's Slave Ship and a passel of Tie fighters.  Luck was on the Rebel's side (mine!) and we didn't lose a single ship.

Wellstone City: Breaking Murphy
The newest adventure from Silver Gryphon Games, I got the map PDF free from Fabled Environments, which pretty much decided which one to run.  It's a bank heist where the characters had to go into a bank vault and get the contents of a safety deposit box, and they have to do it now.  The adventure comes with 52 (use a deck of cards, its Savage Worlds!) complications to the plot.  So if just robbing a bank isn't wild enough, now the characters had to deal with: A vault upgrade, one of the character's mother is in the lobby doing bank business of some sort, a cop car pulls around on routine patrol (although the characters might not know that!) and a errant cigarette starts a fire.  I forgot to initiate the fire, but all the other twists threw some wrenches in the works.  It was a fun game.

Agents of Oblivion: Cats Eye
Agents have to locate and figure out what happened to a crew of scientists that were in an old Vietnam War era bio-tech lab.  The lab was trying to produce soldiers with night vision using cat's, and the experiment went wrong.  Very wrong.

Glossary:
Con Buddy: someone I am friends with, but they don't live near me, so we only see each other at Con's.