KantCon: Elder Evils and Inquisitive Licks!
By Cape Rust
After our Characters had been introduced it was time to start our adventure. It turns out that we had all been captured, knocked out and awoke in a cell. The cell didn’t have bars, it had walls and a door with a viewing slat and a small opening at the bottom to slide food in and out. We quickly came up with at least 5 different plans to escape our cell and finally settled on three of them. Glad we could only whittle it down to three because it ended up taking elements of all of them to pull off the escape.
During our short stint on Ingenium’s version of Hogan’s Heroes, I was blown away by my fellow players’ abilities to express their characters through their role-playing. It turns out our Merchant type character was a coward and only wanted to get the heck out of the cell and to get home. Our likeable evil Magic user was well… evil. It turns out that our Dwarf inquisitor licked this to determine their properties. Yes he licked things to figure out what they were. He would lick the wall to determine if it was human made. If we encountered a dismembered body part (and it turns out we did, often) he would lick it and tell us what type of creature it came from.
After our harrowing we escaped our cell and learned that the entire keep we were being held in was under attack by something nasty; something really, really nasty. We then went through the normal machinations of trying to recover our gear and escape. The merchant and I were not so worried about our gear, but some players can’t escape their love of Monty Hall. To his credit our GM was most definitely not running a Monty Hall type game.
By the time we exited the keep proper we had fought a nasty creature, encountered rooms with “interesting” features, found our weapons, found some stuff we couldn’t identify, been poisoned, poisoned something else and completely abused magic, in the most entertaining way possible.
As the adventure progressed and we got more comfortable with our characters and the game mechanics, things just got better. When we exited the keep we were greeted by a sight none of us expected, but that all of us feared. I could go into details, but why spoil the fun you’ll have when you buy this adventure… We ended up succeeding with some quick thinking from each of the members of our group. I wasn’t surprised by our group’s success so much as I was thrilled to get the opportunity to revel in how successful we were as a group.
I know that Con games are different than regular games and this session of Silver Gryphon Games’ Ingenium was an example of gaming in any setting done right. The game was fun, the mechanics allowed us to do what we wanted and most importantly everyone in the group was 100% invested in the game. Some convention games go better than others and I think the key factor is always the players. Why can’t we get this kind of play from our regular gaming groups? What is it about a convention game that brings out the best in some folks? There are hundreds of reasons why Convention games can work out so well, but whatever the reason, I think it is important to try to capture that convention spirit whenever we sit down at the gaming table. No matter what side of the screen you are on, gaming is a team sport and it should always be fun!
Follow Us!