Conflagration

Well Conflagration, the annual Glasgow Gaming Convention, was great fun. Granted, it wasn't on much bigger a scale than the Gugathons and other periodic big gaming nights. Well, maybe three times as big as one of those. Great fun though. We took over most of the QM union. The card and board gamers took over the ground floor, RPGs and wargaming took the massive Food Factory that spans the whole of the second floor, and the LARPers used the various committee rooms up on the third floor. I meant to try LARPing at some point, but I pretty much lived on the second floor. I volunteered the first morning, helping to set up and then matching people to games (and prodding GMs into writing out their synopses for prospective players to read).

Then there was a great game in which I got to play an 18^th century French farm girl turned whore turned aristocrat who decides to steal this new invention: it's called a hot air balloon. And did I mention that I and everyone else who independently stowed away on the balloon could all do magic? Ah, the adventures you can get up to despite hooped skirts and a white beehive wig!

Later that night we went out for drinks with friends who had moving away from Glasgow but had come back for the Con, mainly Cat and Graeme and a friend of theirs who I had met before but hadn't really had a chance to talk with at length. We had one drink in a pub, but Saturday nights in pubs are clearly designed for something other than conversation. Alas. We cast around for ideas of where to go where we could have another drink but actually talk (since they were visiting, and our tiny one room bedsit is a wreck right now, going “home” wasn't an option). The answer? Head back to the QM of course! There's often a cover charge that late at night, and indeed Bedlam was in full swing by then, having displaced the card games of the ground floor. But our Conflagration passes got us back in! So up we went to Jim's bar where we could actually hear ourselves think and, even better, hear each other talk. We finished off that night by going back up to the 2^nd floor to point and laugh at (and say goodnight to) the last die-hards still gaming upstairs.

And then the next day it all started again. For the morning game I got to try out the Cortex gaming system with Battlestar Galactica (and they only gave away one major spoiler; I still haven't gotten to see season 3). The Cortex system is the same system as the Serenity RPG uses, and I plan to run a Serenity game one of these days. BSG was great fun. This time I was playing a guy, a computer programmer working on the computer systems for a prototype ship that could replace the raptors. But the code was buggy. Luckily that guidance system networking I was supposed to install...well, there was just something strange about it, and I couldn't get it integrated with the other systems in time...which meant our ship *wasn't* crashed by the Cylons! We made it to the fleet after various adventures. I'd love to have continued that one into a campaign!

And then, in dramatic contrast, I finished off my weekend of gaming with a My Small Horsey game. Think about the title a moment. Well, using ponies that were little could be copywrite infringement. But playing Bounty, a pirate pony in the newly updated My Small Horsey land was great fun. I did fall into hysterical laughter (and I do mean hysterical; I couldn't stop at all) when a giant squid nearly attacked the sea-ponies we had called for help...and then I laughed even harder when the pluckiest sea pony solved the problem by giving the giant squid a hug!

Then I got online for a few updates to my online role playing. Then it was back down to Jim's Bar downstairs where I joined the joint IO-GUGS pub quiz team. There was flagrant answer sharing going on between our team and the pure-IO team. But nevertheless, the pure-IO team came in 3rd while our team came in 2nd. It just goes to show you that the Ponies were right--cooperation and team work does make all the difference!