And I had a great time with some fine young people and I'll do it again every year now, because I'm getting too old not to do this sort of thing regularly. The orange dice, by the way, were sold to players for £1 each if they wanted to re-roll their failures. The event raised £4500 for the Rainbows charity.
I signed up to run two games for "Old World of Darkness" and took along my Wraith: The Seven Seas rules set, which you can look at on the Obsidian Portal wiki if you're interested. Last time I took along a carefully plotted story ("Bring Me The Head Of Peter Pan"), but this year was an open ended campaign setting instead, since I figured few players out there remember Wraith and I wanted to do some advocacy from a great but underloved RPG of the 90s. The players were pirates, naval officers and slaver of the 17th century Caribbean who had all died and entered the Underworld as ghosts. They came to their senses as Thralls on a Sygian slave galley that was under attack by Spectres. Fleeing the wreck, they were introduced to their Shadows and had a fascinating time roleplaying each other's dark sides. Then their ghost ship Jeremiah's Bride came to their rescue with its mysterious ghostly captain Khan. Told their lives were the living map to the fabled City of Gold, the wraiths set about recovering their fetters from across the Dark Caribbean.
Both groups headed first to Port Royal in Jamaica. The Saturday gang interacted with the ghostly necropolis there, setting themselves up as the toughest harbour gang, tangling with Diresharks and making an ally out of the necromancer-pirate Blackbeard. Sunday's gang went straight to the Whale & Whirlpool tavern after hours, blasted Blackbeard and his Spectre slaves in a more violent manner. Both groups captured the treasure map.
Sunday's gang went next to Tortuga to find the pirate Laurence De Graaf but discovered him a drunken derelict, no longer possessed by the ancient wraith who had been skinriding him since his wife, Anne Dieu-le-veut, had been captured by the English. They did make friends with the Alchemists Guild but the truncated timetable on Sunday forced us to stop early (and no one told me about the 9am start!).
Saturday's group went to negotiate with the Stygian legions in Santo Domingo, travelled into the interior of Hispaniola, fought off Spectres, reunited doomed (and gay) lovers and had the plot explained to them by a Cimarron witchdoctor.
Everyone roleplayed beautifully, but the popular acclaim (and my award) went to Beth ("Quality Durrand") on Saturday and Simon ("Beauchamp St John") on Sunday. Horsetrading with my fellow OWOD GM gave the first place position to Simon but, honestly, everyone roleplayed with wit, imagination and great good sense so were all deserving of praise. Well done!
Quality Durrand? Yes, the name of my flintlock wielding heroine originated in the fire-tressed artillerist from this campaign. I handed out fliers for Tinderspark and Hexenfire and I hope some of the players will look at the books and get in touch, tell me what they think.
Another feature of the event struck me. Here was a gathering of 700 decidedly unconventional, intelligent and committed hobbyists but no psychometrics went on. In a society where you can't go to a budget Italian restaurant without being asked to rate the pasta and the service in an online questionnaire, it's odd that no attempt was made to gather data from the delegates or the GMs beyond determining winners. I'd love to know: what was the average age? the proportion of males to females? how many delegates were actually students? how did they get into gaming? is Victoriana on the rise? what proportion were here for RPGs or wargames? I'd like to know the year on year trends. How else can you plan for next year?
There's more I want to know as a GM, like how did my game compare to others? Players are too polite to comment and RPGers are, by temperament, incurious about each other's experiences, but some sort of Likert scale could tell me whether my preparation, pacing, time management and plotting were above or below average. How else do I improve?
Then there's stuff I want to know as a psychologist and a sociologist. What's the deal with T-shirts and hats? Why do so many female gamers dye their hair odd colours? Why so few women (although my games were nearly 50-50, overall women were in a tiny minority)? Why so much male pattern baldness? What's the mean IQ? What's the incidence of Aspergers/Autistic Spectrum? I'd love to bring along a team of social science students to survey everyone, carry out some interviews and observations, do a proper study of this. I can't believe the university Sociology Departments aren't all over an event like this. Maybe next year...