I have now officially lost count of the number of Stabcons I’ve been to, and I’m not totally sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.For those of you that haven’t read my writeups of previous ones, Stabcon is a games convention that meets two weekends a year in Manchester. When I started attending a few years back the venue was Woolton Hall, but the last few have been in the convention rooms at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport.
Stabcon is billed as a small and friendly convention, and more or less does what it says on the tin. Most of the faces are familiar from year to year. The RPG side of things is very informally organised; GMs turn up with games, and decide when and what to run based on whatever other GMs are and aren’t doing; players then sign up on a first come first serve basis, and it all works quite well. It’s settled into a pattern of games sessions running for three to five hours, with one slot Friday night, three on Saturday, and one on the Sunday.
As well as some Games Orkshop Space Marine stuff (Eat hot plasma death, green things!), and an awful lot of Chez Geek, I played three RPGs over the weekend.
The first was GURPS Transhuman Space, run by Phil Masters. I always find the central problem with this 100 years in the future SF setting is that there are so many options, it’s difficult to decide what to actually do with it. Phil set this one (like all but one of his I’ve played in) on Earth, with the player characters were a team of freelance security ops hired as bodyguards for a Mexican folk singer at a festival in a small South American state. Naturally our problems turned out to be more complicated than fending off groupies.
The second game, on the Saturday night was one of those strange Narrativist games that’s come out of The Forge, InSpecres. As the GM described it, it’s basically Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off, crossed with a bit of parody of Internet start-ups. We played it very strictly for laughs, travelling around in a converted Routemaster bus playing a very bass-heavy version of Jingle Bells with the volume stuck on 11 (One PC tried to turn it down, but failed her roll, and the volume knob fell off) After dealing with usual green slimes and exploding zombies, we ended up on the trail of dyslexic Satanists, which explained why we tried to break into their lair while dressed as elves. Having subsequently purchased the game, yes, it is supposed to be that silly, so we were indeed playing the game exactly the way it’s supposed to be played.
Sunday’s game was GURPS again. This time in the GURPS Infinite Earths setting, on the parallel Britannica-6, a steampunk setting into large scale engineering projects and a culture far more decadent than our own Victorian era. We’d visited this parallel before as dimension-hopping I-Cops agents. I’d remarked to Phil Masters that this setting seemed to combine the worst stylistic excesses of the 1870s and the 1970s. He’d taken that as inspiration for an adventure set entirely on that parallel with the PCs as local cops; “Lyme Regis Vice”. What started as a simple case of arson got a whole lot more complicated once the Zeppelins started appearing. (It’s a parallel world; of course it has Zeppelins, they always do)
Thanks to Michele and Hammy for running yet another excellent convention. The next one in at the same venue, on the 4th to the 6th of July. See you there.
