I miss convention game mastering. I don’t go to many cons these days. I used to go to UBCon every year. I would run 1 or 2 games to get my entry fee waved and would just use these events to build up a body count. That’s what Con D&D games are for after all. Everyone knows it. Players are not usually attached to their characters in any way. The proper attitude to a convention game is o have fun with whatever you are given and try to make a bigger splash then everyone else so you win the prize. As DMs we get to act out every dirty party killing trick that we can think of; the kind of thing we don’t dare unleash on our regular gaming group. DMs wear their kill counts as badges of honor after the Con. Some break in down to kills/session especially if the run many events but I almost always just total all the kills for the weekend. I seem to remember one year that our own KarasDjun was sitting at the post Con dinner table moaning “I didn’t get to kill anybody!”  

The most fun I had was when I ran back in ’94. A friend and I teamed up to run a particularly nasty adventure. First off we registered the event as a 10 person event (instead of the usual eight) but then took two tickets and gave them to two friends of ours who were going to play secret traitors. They were instructed to not encourage the party into doing anything specific, just to be ready to act on targets of opportunity. Second the intro told the PCs that they were going to assault a magic school to claim the bounty on the 10 main Wizards. They thought it was going to be a short trip to the back door and then a lot of fighting wizards. The switch was that the secret entrance they were using was filled with the most devilish traps we could devise. The wizards themselves were pushovers; getting the party to them is the whole challenge. Their thief died in the first room. He was cowering in the back of the party, hoping to live, the fool. The Stone Golem concealed as part of the floor (one of my old favorites) rose up after the party passed over and attacked the last guy in the marching order. So much for the thief. The best trap we had was a room with a magical floor. As the party moved across it, it randomly opened up a hole and sucked down one of the party’s mages leg closing to hold it in place. The floor then becomes transparent and the party can see a bunch of very poisonous spiders closing in on the trapped leg. Desperate to free his compatriot the other wizard tries to dispel the magic of the floor, and damned if he doesn’t pull that off! Unfortunately the non-magical floor now can’t be moved at all. Now the trapped wizard tries to cast Knock on the floor. Ironically this would have worked if he went before his fellow spell caster but as the floor is no longer something that can open, knock does nothing. The Ranger of the party then informs the trapped mage that the spiders are too deadly and that the leg has to be amputated. The wizard loses it and rants at the rest of the party threatening them. Regardless, they hold him down and proceed to cut off his leg. Now the best part of this for us the DMs is that we didn’t have to do anything but judge the effects of their actions. If they had dispelled the magic before crossing the floor, or if they cast knock on the floor when it was enchanted they would have survived without a scratch. Even our inside men just sat back and watched the events unfold. After that the player of the one legged mage was very bitter and sullen. He limped along on his makeshift crutch taking a certain satisfaction when his fellow party members fell to our other traps. They proceeded to get ground up especially with the timely betrayal of their fellow players or should I say our players. A couple of them got thru to the wizards school, including the crippled mage. They found the ‘powerful wizards’ that they were hunting were just 2^nd level Conjurers. They took them apart with glee and technically won the scenario. There are several reasons why this was such a great adventure. The first is that no one left, even when their characters died. They wanted to see how the others ended up. When we unveiled that our 2 friends were working for us all along the players were all amazed. Not one of them suspected anything until after the turncoats had struck. Also the kid who played the mage who lost his leg was the most excited of all of them. He said he never played in a game like that and had so much fun that he asked if he could come back when we ran it the next day and be an extra traitor. (We let him of course.) Everyone had fun and we had a 75% kill ratio. Good times!

In other news, the master of all things Nerdcore, MC Frontalot has a new album out. Secrets From The Future may not quite be the equal of Nerdcore Rising (my review), but as far as second albums go it is much stronger than most. Frontalot continues to mix a variety of musical styles with his distinct rap style and geeky lyrics to make masterpieces. Unlike his first album which was half remixes of older songs, all but two tracks on his new album are brand new. Topics include cryptography, old video games, creationism, blogging, dead squirrels, and the concept of Frontlot’s progeny. They are all good, even the ‘Very Poorly Concealed Secret Track.’

Now playing: MC Frontalot - Secrets from the Future

Also if you want to combine enjoying MC Frontalot with taking part in a gaming convention he is, as always, playing the Penny Arcade Expo Sat Aug 25 in SeattleWashington.

Some excerpts from my favorites:

Secrets Form the Future:

Best of all, your secret: nothing extant could extract it.
By 2025 a children’s Speak & Spell could crack it.

Origin of the Species

So I lay down my scheme: we’ll make it seem as though creation
isn’t anything we’d like to interject to education.
We’ll wrangle up the language: science, data, theorem,
the irreducible complexity of the ears we use to hear ‘em
gnashing teeth and wailing from Kansas to PA.

It’s Pitch Dark

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

If this predicament seems particularly cruel,

consider whose fault it could be:

not a torch or a match in your inventory.