I’ve lost count of the number of Stabcons I’ve been to now. I missed the first part of this one due to the charity concert in York, but managed to get there by about lunchtime to find a large room filled with a great many familar faces.
Getting there late meant that many games in which I’d liked to have played were already filled up - I noticed Mike Cule was running Vincent Baker’s “In A Wicked Age” on the Sunday, which would have been fun. Fortunately there was a slot in Mark Baker’s marathon Unknown Armies game running from 5pm until late on Saturday, so I signed up for that.
It turned out to involve time travel; what started as a tube journey early on a Sunday morning turned out as a trudge through the Fleet sewer, in which we emerged in 1829. Out attempts to get back home lead us to various times which increasingly diverged from our own timeline; at various points we killed the vampire Jack the Ripper and encountered Princess Elizabeth as a member of the British Resistance in the abandoned tube tunnels beneath Nazi-occupied London. Eventually we managed to fix the timeline, and get back to what would have been our own time but for some very bad dice rolling; everything was as it should have been except that both our London tube train and the Virgin Pendolinos at Euston appeared to be powered by Stirling Engines.
Sunday’s game was very different - Pete Crowther’s game of Toon. Which was very, very silly indeed. I wrote up a Toon version of Bug, from the Guardians of Dimension games from Gypsycon. Other characters included a 50′ high robot and a squirrel. The plot was probably impossible to summarise, but included live-action Space Invaders, a fight in a tea-room, aeroplanes getting coated in cottage pie, the Welsh village of Llandofmyfathers, and an arch-villains base in the volcanic crater in Mt Snowdon.
Next Stabcon is from the 2nd to 4th January - see you there!