Moon City Con 2019 Recap

Hi, it’s Ethan, with the long promised (and long delayed, sorry) recap of my time at Moon City Con 2019! Two months isn’t too late for a blog post, right…?

This is a local tabletop game convention in Springfield, Missouri, home of our fine Role Playing Public Radio and The Mixed Six podcasting friends. It’s also home of my own brother, Neil Cordray, proprietor of his own podcast, Geek Fanthology! I also met up with long-time friend of the podcast -- and long-time name-sharing nemesis -- Ethan Fiset, who was working a booth promoting his OWN podcast, The Adventurers’ Vault. There’s some sort of trend here…

It was a wonderful three days. The con itself focused on board games and card games, and we also squeezed in some late-night RPG sessions at Ross Payton’s house, AKA RPPR headquarters.

The con had an extensive game library, so we were never at a loss for options. Every single game I played was new to me, so it was a real banquet of new games! A few highlights/capsule reviews:

• Century Spice Road - played 2-player, with Neil. A good deck/engine builder, like a faster-paced Dominion. Very good, even with just 2 players.

• Point Salad - played with Neil, Ross, and Ethan Fiset. This deserved the buzz it got at Gen Con. A very elegant card drafting game. We played it like three times in rapid succession, and it was interesting every time.

• Heaven and Ale - played with Ross, Neil, and a friendly stranger, helpfully taught/game mastered by Spencer of The Mixed Six. This worker/resource placement game was not quite my cup of tea. Apparently I played very well and scored highly, but my board still felt kind of cramped and sub-optimized the whole time. If I feel frustrated even when I’m winning, that’s not a great sign. Also, no way could we have learned it without Spencer’s expert help.

• Wingspan - played with Ross, Neil, and two friendly strangers. This one lived up to the hype, big time. Fun engine building, cool bird cards and egg tokens, and a surprisingly elegant engine design once I finally understood how it worked. Highly recommended, everyone is right. Also, I won.

• Giant Killer Robots: GKR Heavy Hitters - this was our final Sunday morning game, played with Caleb, Ross, and Neil. Wowie, what a great free-for-all wargame! And those awesome robot figures! I did not come anywhere close to winning, but it was a great time.

For RPGs, the first night I got to play Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition run by Ross. Good times with a pre-published criminal scenario, we impersonated Triad goons and infiltrated a pachinko parlor while a Firewall Erasure Squad conveniently distracted their guards. 

The second night was the main event for me, though: running Red Markets: Black Death for Neil, Ethan Fiset, Ross, and Caleb Stokes himself. They were tracking down an undead Bishop, which led them to a suspiciously friendly monastery of Black Leper monks. Things did not go as anyone had planned -- or even as I had planned. But it was a fantastic game, full of memorable monets and great playtest feedback. Ross is going to release it on RPPR. But that might have to wait until we’re ready to have a little RMBD Kickstarter down the line a ways…

In sum, Moon City Con 2019 was wonderful. I’ll certainly be back next year, and I hope some of you might be able to join in!

Short Fiction - Monsterhearts: Neko - Starting from the Bottom

I’m waking up…good, as planned. The Great Spell still works. Thanks again, Osiris. But you still owe me.

Wait...there’s something off. This isn’t the tomb I commissioned in Thebes. Those aren’t my shabtis and my scarabs. Hell, those aren’t even my canopic jars. This is just a bunch of random junk, stolen from a dozen other Pharaohs’ tombs -- where’s my stuff? Where am I?

My eyes are still clearing... There, I can focus them again. The walls and ceiling are some sort of plaster, painted with random inscriptions copied from who knows which pyramid. Nothing about this tomb is right. And there’s a big fresh crack in the ceiling, still dribbling broken plaster and letting the sunlight in.

Something’s gone very wrong.

The last time I woke up, Osiris had returned my ka after 400 years as per our arrangement. The secret priests got me back on the throne in short order, and I got to work. Unsurprisingly, the kingdom had badly rotted in my absence. I restored the temples and got tax collection back in order. I started a new canal and even built a navy, something which had apparently never occurred to any of my idiot heirs.

They hadn’t held onto my conquests in Syria, either. So that was a top priority. I made a little alliance with the Hebrews (that name sounded familiar -- hadn’t they been slaves or something? I guess they must have gotten free somehow in my absence), and marched north. That’s...when things get vague for me.

I’ll bet I died in battle. Shit, I must not have made it back to Egypt. The Babylonians probably captured my body. But why would they have put me here, in this crappy fake tomb? Thoth, I’m going to need some answers.

Oh, good. I hear voices outside the doorway. I should be able to wring some information out of whoever these guards happen to be. But what language is that -- something from the Arabian desert tribes? I don’t recognize it.

Let’s hope at least some of these stolen trinkets are authentic. I need to get some magic going. Here we are, this Ibis figurine looks legit. Thrice Wise Thoth, Lord of All Secrets, Grant Me Knowledge of This Tongue.

Much better. They’re talking about an airstrike, by someone called the Americans, and how their boss President Hussein will probably execute them if his museum got damaged.

I don’t really know what any of those things are, but I know how slaves sound when they’re afraid of their master, and I can gather that they’re currently in the process of losing a war.

And I can start putting pieces together. New languages. New nations and titles for kings. New weapons of warfare. That fresh crack in the ceiling -- I’ve been sealed in here. No way for my ka to return to my body when the time came. It’s been more than 400 years. Maybe a lot more.

When the guards come in to check on the damage, I’m ready. I don’t quite have the full strength of my majesty back yet, but I’ve got more than enough to dazzle a couple of downtrodden lackeys. Anwar and Malik drop to their knees, and I have them fill me in on the details. I’m in a place called Iraq, ruled by a man named Saddam Hussein (who calls himself President instead of King for unclear reasons). This tomb is in the basement of one of his palaces, a museum put together from artifacts he’s bought, stolen, or dug up. I was his prize centerpiece, found right here in this city -- Tikrit. Okay, I know that name. Now I know where I am.

As to when -- It’s been almost 2,600 years. It’s 1411 in their calendar, 1991 in the Americans’ version. And these Americans are the ones currently kicking the shit out of Saddam in this war. Anwar says they’ve got invisible flying weapons called stealth fighters, which can drop exploding stones called bombs anywhere they want. That’s what blew that crack in the ceiling.

Screw this Saddam guy, he sounds like a chump. Looks like America is the big-deal empire right now. Richest, strongest, most famous -- they boss the world around and do whatever they want to whoever they want. Malik says they have a city called New York where billionaires live in glass towers taller than the Great Pyramids.

Well then. Sounds like my kind of place. Anwar fetches me some of his old master’s best clothes, and Malik gathers up the still-functional artifacts from the tomb. I take a look in a full-length mirror on our way out the door. Nice job, Osiris, I’m back to looking eighteen. And I like this new style of suit, much sharper than robes. I miss my double crowns, though. All in due time. Right now, let’s focus on what’s essential: getting to the center of the action and starting to climb back on top.

Short Fiction - Monsterhearts: Catrin - Off to College

Catrin rolled over and fumbled for the alarm clock on her bedside stand – no need to wake her parents for this little chore. Especially not at 8am on a Saturday. One of the so very few times in the week she was sure she would have some privacy. She just needed to finish packing her personal things before starting the drive to the other side of the country. The last of the graduation parties had been thrown months ago, at the beginning of the summer, but still, there had been the chance she’d run into someone at her crummy retail job, or out on the beach over the summer.  With only a couple days until she left though, it was time.

Sitting up on the edge of her bed, feet flat on the floor, Catrin rubbed her face briskly for a moment to wake up just a little more. She then grabbed the scrunchy on the stand and pulled her hair back into its customary ponytail. Standing up, she briefly debated not getting dressed but settled on a loose pair of yoga pants and a sports bra – easier to lie to Mother that she’d gotten up early for one last morning meditation that way. If it came to it. Not that Mother would approve of meditating with all her bracelets on.

Looking down at the open dresser drawer, Catrin had to admit that Mother might have a bit of a point. Enough thin, single-band stainless steel charm bracelets to form a solid(ish) cuff of two inches up each of her wrists was a lot of bracelets. Slipping them on one-by-one was a pain in the ass too, but moving from just one to multiple charms per bracelet would make it harder to grab precisely the right one in an emergency. Which had been the entire point in the first place.

Having finished slipping all of her bracelets on, Catrin reached in the back of the drawer and pulled out a box. It wasn’t a very interesting box to look at it, just one of those cheap colored cardboard pieces jewelry stores packed your purchases in to walk out the door with. But inside were about half of the charms which had originally come with the bracelets. She was going to need to put a lot of them back on.

Sitting down in the middle of her floor, between the packed suitcases and sealed boxes, Catrin began systematically taking off all the bits-and-bob sympathetic tokens she’d collected from her classmates over the past four years of high school. Once those were all off and in a small heap at her feet, Catrin examined her other charms, the teeny-tiny test tube charms she’d spent so many hours scouring the city for. Be a shame to lose those, but she really didn’t need the scraps of bloody tissues in them anymore.

Trying to work the first of the little corks off a tube nearly sent it flying out of her hands and across the room. Tapping the end of the tube to get the tissue out didn’t work either. Catrin made a moue of frustration with her lips for a second, then her face cleared and she headed off to the bathroom for a pair of tweezers… and the tiny bottle brush that’d come with the box of test tube charms.

Half an hour later, the heap of old sympathetic tokens on the floor included all the test-tube contents and all the bit-and-bobs had been replaced with some of the original charms. The cutesiest of the originals stayed in the box – Catrin figured she might need them at some point, like if some of the tubes broke. Maybe she could drive over to that crafting store she’d found them in the first time and pick up another set today.

Catrin paused at a faint sound from her parents’ room next door. Were they getting up already? No, must have just been turning over in bed.

Looking at the heap of tokens on her floor, Catrin bit her lip. Some of them were probably old enough to have lost their emotional significance to her former classmates. But the others could still be magically useful for hexing their original owners. Wouldn’t be fair to the classmates for her to dispose of them only for some other witch to come along and use them. Seemed like a remote chance, but still. Worth the time to do things right, Catrin figured. A cleansing ritual should do it.

From the back of the bracelet drawer came her blade. She did rather hope that Odin would approve of the wisdom of using a butterfly knife as her magical tool. She wasn’t really worried that any of the Æsir would object to using a practical fighting knife for magic, though. After all, what good was a knife you couldn’t fight with?

Kneeling down, Catrin took a deep breath and centered herself. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. As soon as she’d cleansed the tokens of their sympathetic links and disposed of them in the trash, she’d have plenty of time to start hiding her sex toys in suitcases before her parents woke up.

GM’s Corner 03: He Calls Me By The Thunder

I hope you've enjoyed the first of my Civil War Cthulhu scenarios! I had a great time running He Calls Me by the Thunder for the Technical Difficulties crew. I've been developing this scenario for quite a while now and this is about the sixth or seventh time that I've run it. You can hear a very early version that I ran about two years ago for Ross and Caleb of RPPR over on their feed. Each run through has been unique and it’s been especially entertaining for me to see how each group makes different choices in their investigation.

As I’ve developed the scenario, I’ve added a lot of elements to help encourage the PCs to progress, including the encircling buzzard swarm, the missing seal for the parole passes, and the objective of discovering the whereabouts of Eveline’s family. Still, it’s up to the players to decide what they feel is important. Aaron, Greg, and Laura were a lot more cautious and deliberate than some of the other folks I've run it for. They almost went straight for the Tobacco Shed without even exploring the big house first, which would have been very interesting. But then they backed off and decided to collect clues. Darn!

But they also had some interesting failed rolls that changed the way the scenario progressed (as a side note, one of the things I like most about Call of Cthulhu is how failures can have a very dramatic effect on the story). They distinguished themselves as the least greedy group (in most other runs, one character has taken the gold and hidden it for themselves), and they're the only group I've had so far that almost tried to brave the deadly buzzard swarm and make a break for it! Private Cubbins has only survived one playthrough, and he bit it again this time. Poor kid!

Overall, we all had a great time with the scenario and it’s encouraging to me to learn that it still works even online and split into two parts. It was pretty tough to wrap up the ending, though, so we went a bit long.

I can't quite identify when I first got the idea to write some cosmic horror tales set amidst the very earthly horror of America's bloodiest war, but I've found it to be a rich combination.

Even since I first began reading Lovecraft and playing and listening to Lovecraftian horror games, I've been interested in the realistic historical aspect of the genre. Even though Lovecraft was writing stories set in his own contemporary era – often with cutting-edge science and technology – the Call of Cthulhu RPG retained the 1920's as its typical setting, which makes it a historical game to us 21st-century players. It's a short leap to set similar tales in other eras, like Adam Scott Glancy's World War I games and Caleb Stokes' No Security was probably the biggest direct influence in prompting me to write my stuff).

In each of my Civil War scenarios, I try to combine the themes of Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the difficult issues of the American Civil War. In this case, I focused on two things: the suffering of wounded soldiers and the legacy of plantation slavery.

The Random Wound Table is a major feature that sets up the scenario. I've found that rolling randomly emphasizes the arbitrary nature of battlefield wounds and it helps the players embrace the fragility of their disabled characters. They can then focus on trying to overcome their physical weaknesses as they play through the story.

Slavery is (to make an understatement) a difficult topic to approach in gaming. The character of Eveline Prentis emphasizes how terribly racial prejudice stifled African Americans' opportunities to express their natural talents and how casually their abilities were exploited by their owners. Eveline was directly inspired by Blind Tom Wiggins, a real life African American musical prodigy from the Reconstruction era, whose talents were constantly exploited by white "managers."

Hikiton Mound Plantation was partially intended as a commentary on so-called "patriarchal slavery," the idea that slavery was actually in the best interests of African Americans. Promoted by major figures such as Benjamin M. Palmer and Jefferson Davis, the idea was that slavery could best balance the relationship between naturally inferior blacks and naturally superior whites, to the benefit of both. As absurd and casuistic as this sounds to our modern ears, many Southerners genuinely believed it and some slaveholders such as Davis tried to run their plantations as "humanely" and "progressively" as they could. I designed Hikiton Mound to appear to be such a place on the surface, but with a horrific cruelty concealed just beneath.

-Ethan