So this last weekend was RuchtCon '09 - our own little gaming convention in honor of our friend Rucht's birthday. Festivities formally started friday afternoon and went till sunday at about 6pm. It went down a little like this:

The first official 'slot' began at 9pm on Friday night. This was when i ran my Little Fears game. That was awesome. I was a little worried going in since i'd been a little sick for the previous days and also hadn't had quite as much prep time as I might have liked (largely due to VBS), but I would say it went as well as it possibly could - aside from some drowsiness on our part toward the end of the session.
The game was incredibly fun. The system is very, very simple but plays very well. The players all did a fantastic job of getting into their roles as children - which they all seemed to enjoy immensely. I think my story came off just about exactly as dark as I wanted it to, and it seemed to me that the session did a great job of portraying the quintessence of the game.
I would definitely be interested in running some more of this, perhaps beginning with the resolution to this scenario - which we weren't able to finish.

The other table on Friday was ran by Patrick doing his Star Wars game. I obviously wasn't able to play in it (unfortunately) so there's not much I can say about it, but Sheri said it was a lot of fun.

On saturday afternoon Rucht ran his 40k Dark Heresy game while some of the rest of us decided to play board games.
Specifically, we decided to learn to play Talisman - a Fantasy Flight game that my mom (yes, really) got me for Christmas last year. This presented a fairly major challenge as 1) none of us actually knew how to play the game and 2) the game is (now) put out by Fantasy Flight - a game company that's notorious for amazingly complex games. *Good* games mind you, but complex ones.
It took us about an hour to get through the rules and setup. The game really isn't that hard, but when you're trying to understand it with absolutely zero foreknowledge and using only the rulebook, things take a little while. Once we got going, it went pretty fast. We didn't actually finish it, but we got to the final phases. I thought it was a pretty cool game. I look forward to playing it again - when i don't have to be constantly trying to figure out what we're doing.

Saturday night was the first session of Rucht's Witch Hunter game and also Robb's Werewolf game. I had opted to play in Robb's game. Granted I haven't played whitewolf in quite a while (except Exalted), but the new edition seems to have streamlined some things. We didn't actually make it very far into the story, but it was still a very enjoyable game. We got to do a bit of roleplaying (though i think i was feeling a little off), a bit of combat, and all of us got to use our respective character's niche strengths.

Sunday morning was still technically part of the Con, but it was pretty informal - i think those who were present played the Battlestar Galactica board game. The official sunday afternoon slot was another session of Rucht's Witch Hunter game.
I was really looking forward to this. I'd heard great things about the system, and it was particularly cool to get to play under one of the game designers (for those who don't know, this is a game that Rucht actually helped design). I mean, that has to be the most authentic experience, right?
This game was lots of fun. It's a solid system - similar to whitewolf in some ways, but considerably different in others. Also, it has some very interesting mechanics. The premise for the world and the game is very detailed and interesting as well and the modules Rucht ran were excellent narratives. I'd love to play some more of this - esp if Rucht wanted to run a campaign at some point. That would be awesome.


In addition to all the fun games, we had tasty snacks, plenty of great people, and just a generally great time hanging out. A fantastic way to spend a weekend. Some of us have definite intentions of putting something like this together again sometime - and have even talked a little about what we might do the same and/or differently.


~PS