UK Games Expo Fringe 2026

 

Escaping from weekend activity centres is no longer a sport! Any prisoner found sneaking out for a curry or a pint of overpriced beer will be shot on sight!

After last year's inaugural Expo Fringe there was little doubt that once more we would be spending a weekend behind the barbed wire of Stalag Luft Ackers. It really is a gem of a place, once you get past the spartan nature of the accommodation. Now that we knew what to expect we were mentally prepared for the bunk beds, harsh lighting and bracing showers, and the place felt quite homely, with an upgraded kitchen and new tables and chairs for the inmates.

The drive down on Friday morning wasn't too bad, roadworks notwithstanding, and after unpacking my gear I set up for the game of Cörk Børd that I was running. This is a an adaption of the Mörk Borg rules from Paul Baldowski of Cthulhu Hack and Dee Sanction fame and I was looking forward to seeing how the rules played out at the table. 

The theme of the game is Nordic Noir detective fiction, with a team of variously damaged investigators unpicking gruesome crimes in a harsh landscape through dogged police work and the occasional lucky break. The scenario is broken down into scenes comprising sites, suspects and situations that have to have their complexity whittled down by the team applying their skills and using their fibre. This is roughly equivalent to the hit points, attributes and damage rolls of a traditional fantasy game, but the fun here is in the narrative that comes from the dice rolls. An investigator might make a good roll only to be thwarted by a delay (aka armour) leading to the case stalling.

Scenes are linked as the case is solved and I used a physical cork board with pictures for each scene and red tape to link them using pins. We tracked the remaining complexity on a scene with dice so the team could see where they needed to focus their efforts and added evidence with extra post it notes. The delays on certain scenes caused frustration (as intended) but I think when I write some more scenarios I'd build in keys to clear the delays and speed things up (such as splitting up suspects to interrogate them separately). The players did manage to get to the tragic conclusion with only one of them cracking under the pressure. Excellent fun!

Friday night was curry night with a takeaway from the Balti Mile - loads of delicious food with plenty leftover for lunch the next day. The weather was warm too, and once more we were able to sit on the balcony enjoying a beer or three and setting the world to rights as police chased boy racers on one side of the canal and trains chugged by on the other. Simply perfect.

After a night in the bunk beds I needed to go for a walk to stretch my legs so headed off for a stroll along the canal path. If you ignore the large waste incinerator chimney then it was very pleasant with ducks and geese for company. Even the graffiti was vibrant.

Saturday morning's game was Symbaroum - another Free League game that has been on my wish list to play for a while. This has a very different feel to the other fantasy games from the Free League stable, such as the free wheeling Dragonbane or the wilderness survival of Forbidden Lands. I really enjoyed playing a shape shifting changling duellist in conjunction with a rogue treasure hunter and a goblin witch searching for proof of a noble woman's true heritage in a monastery that was home to something very nasty. Cheers to Dave (aka Bagpuss Grognard) for running with aplomb.

Another change of pace for the afternoon with Martin Cookson running Lex Arcana - an alternate history where the Roman Empire hadn't fallen but instead had persisted with teams of Custos sent to the far flung corners of the empire to investigate and fight supernatural threats to the Pax Romana. An initially straight forward case of missing shipments from a mine on a distant windswept island turned into something much weirder with attacks from nightmarish creatures that had possibly been summoned by the Pictish druids. Yikes!

The use of latin names for the skills really added to the unique atmosphere on this one and the final denouement was suitably tense.

Saturday night saw us visiting the Hilton bar for food and a drink, but it was something of a mistake. It was hot, noisy and crowded and the beer was both overpriced and not particularly well kept. We just stayed for one pint before making our excuses and leaving. We'll not be doing that again.

It was much better to sit out at Ackers again and I don't think I've laughed quite as much for ages with a lovely bunch of people with many rambling topics of conversation (and appalling puns). I can't think of a better way to spend an evening!

Sunday morning was breakfast on the balcony and an efficient clean up operation, before setting off for Expo proper. Even after a coffee I was flagging whilst walking round the huge halls packed with gaming goodies. I didn't spend too much this year but I did find a copy of the Pirate Borg starter set and a gorgeous dice set with accompanying dice bag. Definitely one I'm looking forward to running!

Home now, with sore feet and aching knees, but well worth it for a memorable weekend of gaming and camaraderie - thanks once more to Steve (aka Orlanth Rex) for organising! 

North Star 2026

I’m still not entirely sure why SF based RPGs seem to be a minority interest at most UK games conventions, but thankfully North Star is here once again to fill the intergalactic void! This year saw 44 games on offer with systems ranging from the venerable Traveller to Alien, and pleasingly both Space:1999 and Space:1899!

Slot 1

I was running Things from the Flood for this slot, which is the teen angst sequel to the more kid friendly Tales from the Loop. I’ve wanted to set a game in Sheffield for a while, so this was the perfect excuse that allowed me to use real life locations that were just outside the Garrison Hotel where we were playing as well as the iconic (and little known) Sheffield Megatron, a cavernous storm drain hidden below Sheffield Station. I based the pre-gen characters on a set of young adults from The Archers on BBC radio 4 which provided some nicely intertwined back stories and an appropriate level of teen angst.

The players all leaned into their characters as they ventured into the hazardous flood zone around Meadowhall, facing toxic spores, dangerous terrain and robot guard sharks, to solve the mystery of why robots in Sheffield suddenly seemed to be malfunctioning. I also made use of a mock up of the Sheffield Star newspaper to give the players a set of plot hooks to follow - this had worked quite nicely in my Tales of the Old West game previously.

Cheers to the players - Amelia Francis, Guy Milner, John Ossoway, Döerte Böhler and Udo Kaiser!

Slot 2

For this one, John Ossoway was GMing and served us up a classic Alien scenario based on William Gibson’s abandoned script for Alien 3. We were playing a crew of UPP operatives returning to Rodina station to find that everything had gone dark. The story followed the expected cinematic beats, starting quietly and ending with a nerve jangling confrontation and some shocking betrayals. Some lovely use of Lego minifigs for props in this as well. 

Slot 4 

Down in the cargo hold for this improvised Traveller game, where I was playing the captain of a high class cruise ship The Darthanon Queen, dealing with needy passengers, malfunctioning toilets, bolshy engineers, bomb scares and a cargo of supposedly fossilised giant arachnids. Congrats to Jane Polwin for directing the improvised chaos and especially for the giant crocheted spider that made a guest appearance - yikes! Amelia also surprised us all when her character let out the loudest scream I have ever heard and had a standup row with one of the NPCs. 

Lunch

The Garrison hotel usually do a nice Sunday lunch, but this year they seemed to struggle with bringing the food out on time, even though everything had been pre-ordered and paid for in advance. The meal itself was very tasty, but I was starving by the time it arrived. Some people were still waiting for puddings by the time the raffle was due to start, so Dom improvised a live linkup to broadcast the draw!

Slot 5

Another change of pace for the final game, with Neil Gow adapting the vampire hunting RPG Night’s Black Agents into a Babylon 5 setting with a suitable level of intrigue as our agents investigated a missing data crystal that held a deadly secret about the outcome of the Earth-Minbari war and hints of … things … lurking in the shadows. It’s been a while since I watched the show but this makes me want to start from the beginning again!

Another great weekend of gaming and a chance to catch up with friends old and new. The usual thanks go to Graham, Dom and Shachar for seamless organisation.

Grogmeet 2026

For the second year running, Grogmeet took place in January in Manchester, this time in the new venue of the Brickhouse Social Club. On the plus side, it's really nice to have something positive to look forward to in the middle of a gloomy January but the downside was that (not surprisingly) it was flipping freezing! In fact the weather very nearly derailed my travel plans with heavy snow across the Pennines cancelling a swathe of trains. Fortunately I was able to cancel my original tickets and take an alternative route via Leeds which was fortunately snow free. 

I checked into my hotel and dropped off my bag before heading to the venue which is conveniently located almost next door to Manchester Oxford Road station in the heart of Little Ireland, apparently written about by Engels as the most deprived area in England at the time with a life expectancy of 18. The arrival of a large number of grogs in the area must have pushed up the average age of the currently mostly student population by a significant number though. The venue was on three levels - a central bar area serving some nice beers and pizzas throughout the day, a downstairs club room with suspiciously sticky floors and subdued lighting, and an upstairs roof terrace which was a bit chilly with the patio style doors letting a draught through. Still, there was ample space for games which was the main objective of the weekend!

My first game of Friday afternoon was a classic Call of Cthulhu scenario from White Dwarf called The Bleeding Stone Of Iphtha, run by Jim McCarthy of Raspy Raven fame. The opening section was set in the old area of Jerusalem in the 1930s with twisty streets and untrustworthy contacts, before moving on to an ill fated archeological dig somewhere in the desert where things got suspiciously squamous. As the daylight faded outside, the bar staff switched on the light over our table which turned out to be very like the Colour from Out of Space!

Rolling back the stone

What dread horrors lie within 

The tomb of Iphtha?

A quick bite to eat and then onto the next game which was an epic multi-character scenario from the twisted imagination of Kehaar involving terrorists hijacking a non-stop train from Aberdeen to Penzance, with mystery viruses, escaped mutants, numerous suspects and various problems to overcome on a meticulously plotted blueprint of an authentic British Rail train from the 1980s which stretched the length of a bar top in the corner of the room. 

We alternated between scenes on the train of our crack squad of UNIT commandoes taking out the terrorists with backup support from the analysts back at headquarters radioing in advice as they checked the passenger manifest for clues. Excellent fun, and the bar top was a good excuse to enjoy a pint or two as things got steadily more chaotic.

UNIT assault squad

Code: Cassandra Protocol

Storming the night train 

I headed back to the hotel and eventually managed to make sense of the instructions for the room heating and got some kip. A fortifying breakfast and then a quick walk to the venue where the queue of (let's be honest) not exactly young grogs were waiting in sub zero temperatures for the bar staff to open up and let us in. Fortunately we were able to start more or less on time and I unpacked all the bits I had bought for the game of Tales of the Old West I was running.

It was the second outing for High Stakes in Silver City and I managed to set the pace on what is effectively a mini sandbox setting with various options that the players can follow depending on how they want to tackle the problem of an impending foreclosure on their ranch from a silver tongued bank manager. I'm still planning to write this one up properly and have a couple more ideas for tweaks to make and maybe give a few more options for the prospector character to choose from. Cheers to Jim, John Ossoway, Chunky Duff, Cottonmouth MCR and Aerkane for getting stuck into their characters and knowing when to take risks which led to an appropriately tense showdown at the poker table and ensuing gunfight.

Would you trust this man
Charlatan, carpet bagger
Stephen B Elkins

The final game of the weekend for me was Shiver run by Debbie - this involved a visit to a new theme park set inside the hollow earth, like a cross between Jules Verne and Jurassic Park. It was very atmospheric with some great game mechanics involving custom dice and a ticking doom clock. I particularly liked the dinosaur themed table cloth too! I was struggling a bit with the low light levels in our corner, so I think a portable lantern might be an idea next year. 

Golden ticket kid

Exploring the Hollow World

Wow! A dinosaur!

Saturday night was rounded off with a nice Italian meal and then a pint in the traditional snug of the Lass O' Gowrie in the company of friends old and new year, and a toast to those we have lost. 

Cheers once again to Dirk, Blythy and everyone else involved in organising yet another excellent meet. See you all next year!

Furnace XX

Furnace has now been running annually at the Garrison Hotel in Sheffield for an impressive twenty years, and this one was was bigger and better than ever. The huge amount of behind the scenes prep work from Dom, Elaine and Graham really paid off as everything ran smoothly, even with the inevitable last minute cancellations of some games due to one thing and another. 

The dining area on the main floor of the hotel was opened up for games for the first time, with eight tables available plus the trade stalls from Patriot Games and All Rolled Up. Everything was nicely spaced out in a bright and airy space, in addition to the usual tables in the upper jailhouse and dungeon, allowing for a noticeable increase in the attendance. Everybody was given a commemorative dice tray and I also managed to snag one of the very smart themed messenger bags which are perfect for carrying notes, rulebooks and dice.

This year I was running Tales of the Old West in slot 1 with a scenario that I had written as an experiment as a sandbox setting with various plot threads to pull at, hinted at in a handout newspaper. There was surprising little violence as the players got stuck into the challenges of keeping their ranch running, but I made the mistake of losing track of the time and had to rush the ending to get to a suitable conclusion. I'd definitely run this one again, I think.

A charming neighbour

Pays a social call with an
Ulterior motive 

Looking for an ace
High stakes in Silver City
Never bet the ranch

For the afternoon session I went for a game I'd never heard of called Dialect run by Sarah Dovey. We were playing as robots, abandoned on a dying Earth, waiting for humans to return. The twist with this game is that you get to invent and use new words to narrate the experiences of your characters, played out in short scenes. I decided that I was playing a simple maintenance droid tasked with cleaning dust from the windflower turbines that supplied power to our colony and my daily chores became the ritual of Chorly. The conclusion of the game was thought provoking and surprisingly moving.

Abandoned robots

Following their programming
As language evolves 

A simple machine 
Windflower Chorley complete
Hope of membrance 

Sunday morning was a play test of a forthcoming Kaiju Fighting game from Gav Thorpe, with a strong emphasis on teamwork and a nifty playing card based resolution mechanic. I think this is definitely one that I will be looking out for when it's announced officially.

Alpha Base attacked
An unknown Kaiju menace 
Team Force assemble!

Cryostasis breach
Major biohazard threat
Decontaminate 

The final slot was a chance to play Tales of the Old West instead of GMing for a change. I relished the opportunity to play an impulsive young gunslinger and we managed to track down the outlaws and even the odds by some tactical play. Excellent fun - a tip of the stetson to Dom for running!

Bobby Garrick shot
His wife Annie’s been kidnapped 
Damn Corrigan gang 

By dawn’s early light
An outlaw caught with his pants down 
An easy bounty 

See you all there next year!

UK Games Expo 2025

Expo is big. Like, really big. I mean, you might think that Dragonmeet is big but that's just peanuts compared to Expo. Figuring that what we really wanted was a chance to play games with friends, eat curry and socialise, the very lovely Dave Paterson (aka Bagpuss Grognard) proposed that we rent somewhere nearby and have our own Expo fringe event instead. 

Thus it was we turned up at Ackers Adventure Centre which is more used to dealing with groups of youngsters wanting to go canoeing and climbing and the like. The accommodation was a little spartan, consisting of small bedrooms with cramped bunkbeds, but on the plus side there were two large social areas with enough room to set out tables and play games, where the adventure was strictly dice based. The site itself was a little oasis hidden behind spiked fences and barbed wire, sandwiched between the A45 and a railway line, with its own little bit of canal, resident geese and a nice view of the Veolea incinerator in the distance.

Friday afternoon saw me playing Golden Heroes for the first time, one of the original old school superhero RPGs from back in the day. Characters are generated with powers being randomly rolled for on a table, with the challenge being to construct a back story that made sense of them. I ended up with animal senses, quick reactions and claws, and invented the persona of Billy Smith, a cub reporter for the Bradford Telegraph and Argus who had been bitten by a wild cat with glowing eyes, and was determined to use his powers to FIGHT CRIME!. The scenario was set in an alt history 1920s Britain, with much biffing of goons, a spot of investigation and a showdown with a villainous cult at the end. Crikey!

Friday night saw a visit to a curry house (conveniently we were near Birmingham's famous Balti Triangle), with onion bhajis the size of ostrich eggs and naan breads like duvets. Yum! 

We returned to Stalag Luft Small Heath, and sat out on the balcony with a beer or two before heading off to bed. It wasn't the most restful night's sleep I've ever had with the bunk bed feeling quite claustrophobic, but at least the shower in the morning was hot and a nice cup of coffee woke me up.

Saturday morning's game was Ronin, another Borg-alike game, and highly enjoyable. As I was playing Miuyki the Poet I took notes in haiku form:

Mighty heroes clash

Dice clatter on the table

Theatre of the mind

The frozen country

Kage Nō Shima under

Permanent eclipse 

Aiko the willow

Dancing through the crimson snow

Backstabbing bandits

Takeshi the monk

Inspiring peasants with the 

Power of Sake

After many trials

We finally see the face of

Akuma Saizo

So close, defeated

By the hostile dice gods

Total Party Kill

Saturday afternoon saw me running Tales of the Old West, with another run through the scenario Patience is a Virtue. I've played this once as a player in an early play test of the system and now run it as GM three times, each time with events playing out differently. This scenario is a really good introduction to the setting and system, with gunfights being a risky proposition and some tricky moral dilemmas to view through modern sensibilities. Oh, and we found out that a sharpened hat pin to the back proved to be surprisingly effective!

Saturday night was a trip to the eye-wateringly expensive Hilton bar but at least it was a good chance to say hello to some gaming pals. I was flagging a bit by this point, but we didn't stop out too late and our uber delivered us back safely for another nightcap on the balcony, where we were treated to the sights and sounds of a steam train chugging by at one point.

Sunday morning saw us packing up and putting rather a lot of empty bottles into the recycling bin! We still had undrunk beer to bring home though! After coffee and a bite to eat, I set off for Expo itself. As expected it was big, and even though my watch told me I'd walked over 11,000 steps I'm pretty sure I missed a whole trade hall somehow.

Highlights were meeting Matt and Dave, designers of Tales of the West who gave me some lovely bits of swag, including a Sheriff's badge and a limited edition dice tray, a quick chat with Paul Baldowski of All Rolled Up and a chance to see the new edition of Tunnels and Trolls in action. I bought a few things, including Ronin (see above) but was ready to leave by mid day. A final goodbye to friends, and a reasonable drive home followed by a much needed nap in my own bed!

Let's do it again next year!

NorthStar 2025

Northstar is always a highlight of the gaming year, featuring SF games that simply don’t get played anywhere else. This year seemed to be suffering from a higher than normal amount of dropouts, requiring some last minute schedule wrangling from Dom and Graham, but in the end everyone was matched with games in every slot.

My first game (continuing the Wild West theme that I’ve been on recently) was Cowboys vs Xenomorphs, a mash up of the familiar Mongoose Traveller rules with a western setting and (naturally enough) a fine selection of xenomorphs too. The rules are comprehensive enough that you could probably play this as a straight western game, and indeed that’s how we started with our characters moseying into town, finding employment (or new guns) and settling down, before meeting with an old prospector who seemed to have been driven crazy by the unusual metals and gems he had panned out of the river. Then there was the mysterious sounds as if something was flying overhead, screaming like a banshee. Of course, things went south pretty soon after that with a mystery to unravel and a satisfying shootout. Excellent fun!

Sandwiches from Morrison’s for lunch and a chance to catch up with old friends round the tables in the bar, before setting up for the afternoon session. For this, we were down in the Cargo Hold, which was pleasantly cool on a warm day.

The game was an x-files style investigation into a ufo shot down over a small Texas town using Cypher system. Our objectives were to recover any evidence and make sure that everything was appropriately covered up. I was playing as an expert mycologist whose eagerness to inspect a mysterious rash on the arm of a young witness nearly lead to her being infected by a virulent alien fungus. There followed a race against time to track down the wreckage before anyone else was infected, deal with a crazy religious cult and Mexican drug cartels across the border. It was a close run thing, but we pulled it off with the rest of the world none the wiser.

Sunday morning was a new spin on a Star Trek game, using the Unicorn Next Generation rules that I’d not played before, run by Paul Baldowski of All Rolled Up fame. This proved to be an intriguing and fast paced investigation with a great crew, and everyone playing their roles to the full. The conclusion was an appropriately technobabble group effort to thwart the bad guys, and for once I wasn’t playing a Klingon so my voice was intact.

I had my traditional Garrison Hotel Sunday lunch and was pleasantly stuffed, nicely set up for the afternoon game, a player improvised game using the Ironsworn Starforged rules. Everything was generated using random tables and cards, setting us up as representatives of a religious faction searching for a new messiah after a misjump into an uncharted area of strange space. It was supposed to be grimdark but turned out to be somewhat more lighthearted, with a screaming ostrich hunter and a space rhino with its own custom vacc suit. We faced biological horrors inside a monstrous space conch that was an ancient religious weapon. An excellent end to a weekend of out of this world fun!

Seven Hills

Seven Hills was probably the smallest of the Sheffield Garrison cons and it was always a treat to attend, but alas this was to be the last one after running from 2014 (with a year off for the pandemic). At least it all went off with smooth efficiency, organised by Guy Milner and Jag Goraya. The theme this year was Generations and it was interesting to see how people interpreted that!

I ran Tales of the Old West for my first slot, using the scenario Patience is a Virtue from the rule book. I created pre-gen characters using the life path system and then tied them together as a found family with old prospector Grampaw Pete, his daughter Clementine, her pardner Angel, and two youngsters - Lady Felicity (apparently an English heiress) and the Revd. Sam, a preacher with a dark secret. The players all leant into the brutality of the Wild West, with shoot outs, a hanging and a showdown at high noon - yee haw!

Saturday afternoon was the Laundry Files, a new system and setting for me, being urban fantasy where we were playing as members of an occult investigation division of the secret service. The hook was an unusual flash mob seen in Edinburgh with a crowd of people suddenly bursting into a perfectly synchronised highland reel, performed with such gusto that several of them were injured. Strange things were obviously afoot! My slacker occultist started off well, managing to shoot one of the bad guys in the head but things rapidly went downhill when I got on the wrong side of a suspicious Hebridean islander and then dropped a flash bang grenade at my feet when faced with a horde of Jacobite zombies. Ooops.

Sunday morning saw us boldly going into the Neutral Zone where we played a crew of Klingons on a mission to defuse a tricky diplomatic situation (because Klingons are noted for their tact and diplomacy). A junior Klingon Star Fleet officer had been accused of committing a dishonourable act by firing on a Klingon vessel and a faction of ultra-traditionalists were demanding that only Klingon justice would be sufficient. We proceeded at full warp to get there as quickly as possible, getting severely damaged in an ion storm on the way. I played the Captain who had to balance the demands of the engineer wanting to repair the ship, the bloodthirsty weapons officer wanting all power to photon torpedos and a helmsman deciding whether to chase our target into another ion storm. 

We were all itching for a battle, so when a Bird of Prey uncloaked behind us I immediately told their captain that his mother had a smooth forehead and all hell was let loose! Enormous fun with much growling of Klingon insults, thumping the table and demands for a duel to the death. In the end honour and glory were satisfied! Kudos to GM Remi for explaining a complicated system succinctly and getting us straight into the heart of the action.

After spending some money with All Rolled Up and enjoying a Sunday lunch (with a beer bought with a token that was included with our passes for the weekend), I settled down for the last game of the weekend - a Young Avengers scenario using the short lived but interesting looking Marvel Heroic Roleplaying system. I found the convoluted dice pool system a bit difficult to get my head around, with a combination of the warm sunshine (and the Garrison heating being on for some bizarre reason) and it being the last game of the weekend contributing to a muzzy head. I did finally manage to smash MODOK in his big, stupid face playing as Hulkling though! 

Farewell Seven Hills and onward to North Star!

Grogmeet January 2025

Grogmeet this year had been pushed back from its traditional November slot to a chilly January in Manchester, but the same mix of games and socialising were all present and correct, based in the twin venues of Whitworth Locke and Fanboy Three.

Friday afternoon kicked off with the multi-table Call of Cthulhu scenario Gatsby and the Great Race, written by Paul Fricker. The game started as we introduced our characters, all being guests at a garden party hosted by the Great Gatsby himself, and enjoyed some champagne and idle chatter on the lawns of his mansion, listening to a horse race on a wireless set wheeled out by the butler. 

At the conclusion of the race Gatsby seemed to be acting strangely, and then things took an extremely bizarre twist. I’ll not say too much more for fear of spoiling a unique experience if you should ever get the chance to play this at a convention, but I will not forget in a hurry my blindfolded journey to … somewhere else! Talking to players from other tables showed that everyone had experienced events differently with many theories of what was actually happening. Part traditional table top gaming and part LARP, it was by far one of the most chaotic and enjoyable gaming experiences of my life! Many thanks to everyone involved in co-ordinating and GMing this!

After a quick bite to eat and something to drink, my Friday night game was the free wheeling Spirit of ‘77 where an unlikely team of a gonzo journalist, a kung fu stuntman, a bionic glamour model, a good old boy driver and a military veteran found themselves driving a disco ambulance to an increasingly bizarre series of accidents and emergencies, competing with a rival crew, fighting off a chocolate covered robot gorilla and uncovering a diamond smuggling plot with a surgical twist. Many death defying stunts later, we somehow tied everything together with a final blast of Donna Summer. Cheers to Gav for his deadpan GMing on this one!

It was only a short walk from Whitworth Locke to the famous Lass O’Gowrie pub where there was much enjoyable chatter (and a couple of nice pints) until closing time. It was nice to put some faces to people that I’d only previously known online, which is one of the really nice things about an event like this. The games are really just the excuse to meet up with like minded people from near and far.

After a decent breakfast and two cups of strong black coffee at the hotel, I was ready for another taste of squamous horror with a run through of the Lightless Beacon GM’d by Tom. I played a lot of Call of Cthulhu back in the 80s (and still have my original boxed set) but it was good to get this introduction to the 7th edition rules. The scenario saw a disparate group being washed up on a small island after a ship wreck in a storm, investigating why the lighthouse there had mysteriously gone dark. Needless to say, things quickly turned spooky with the tension building to a suitably gruesome conclusion.

I switched venues to Fanboy 3 for the afternoon session, which was running a little late because of some amendments to the schedule. This game was run with the Liminal rules, set in 1966, where we were investigating the mysterious theft of the Jules Rimet trophy from a locked cabinet, supposedly under guard. GM Mark Willoughby introduced us to a wide range of NPCs, both real and fictional, with leads to chase down and a deadline to meet. Of course, there was a supernatural twist to proceedings with the showdown drawing from the real history of the case. It was especially enjoyable to interact with the Kray Twins, although now we owe them a very large favour! The original 1960’s street map of London and a miniature trophy were also nice touches, although I did wonder what the various shoppers wandering around made of our outrageous mix of cockney and Belgian accents.

Saturday night started with a fabulous meal with friends from our Tuesday night Dragonbane group and a final meetup with the Grogsquad at the Port Street Beer House for socialising and beer. Even though there was no music on, my watch was warning me of the volume levels in the room, and I was even more croaky than normal by the time we left. Fortunately I was able to get an earlier train home the next day and for once, everything ran to time! 

All in all, an excellent weekend of gaming, overseen by Dirk the Dice of the Grognard Files, with good friends, good vittles and great games! 

Shadowdark - No Small Crimes in Lankhmar

This game was run by Shannon Ferguson as part of the Grogmeetish 2024 online convention using the Shadowdark rules - a new one to me, but easy to get into using the Roll20 interface. After a few glitches setting up the chat on Discord, we were away to Lankhmar!

As the title gives away, we were in Fritz Leiber's legendary city of thieves in the middle of a heist of the forgotten house of an ancient Lankhmarese nobleman called Lord Suttar who was rumoured to have stashed away a horde of gold and other secrets. Using the roll20 interface we were able to case the joint, making use of the inbuilt lighting effects to show what we could see as we cautiously edged around the boarded up building. This was a feature that was used to great effect several times during the adventure as our limited supply of torches would be extinguished at inconvenient moments, plunging us into gloom while our enemies could see in the dark.

The twist for this adventure was that as soon as we had broken into the supposedly empty house we were reduced to the size of rats, transforming a simple burglary into an epic fight for survival against a range of common household creatures. If you have read any of the Lankhmar stories then you will guess one of the plot threads here, but there is plenty to do in each room where half the battle is simply climbing the furniture or examining giant sized (to us) scrolls.

We didn't quite finish the adventure in time (only exploring the cellar and the ground floor), but we had a lot of fun and reached a suitably dramatic point to bring the story to a close. This was a whole lot of thievish fun and well worth playing if you see it on offer at a convention!

Furnace XIX

It's a credit to the organisers of this excellent gaming con that they are now in their nineteenth year and still going from strength to strength. This year saw nearly 70 people playing in fifty different games over the weekend, making use of the armoury, the dungeon and the jailhouse of the magnificent Garrison Hotel. It really is one of my favourite locations for playing games, without some of the noise issues of larger cons in big halls. 

After an introduction from organiser Graham, everyone found their assigned tables with minimal fuss. I was down in the armoury running a game of Tales of the Old West from the Quickdraw rules. I'd billed this as a potentially gritty setting, but the players leaned into their characters and had a great time. Using poker chips to track faith points, playing cards for initiative, and a toy gun to demonstrate how the shooting rules worked really added to the atmosphere. They picked up the rules quickly and I was able to improvise a few additional elements on the fly with no problems. The scenario was a tale of revenge for a murdered compadre and built up to an epic showdown with the bad guys, using a lassoed cougar and a fistful of dynamite.  Yee-haw!

Table bling

Your friendly neighbourhood gunslinger

The posse!

After lunch from Morrisons, the afternoon game was the intense and unique Alice is Missing, hosted by Peanut. This scenario involves a missing teen in a Pacific North West town in the middle of winter, and the responses of her five friends as they talk to each via text messages on their phones. After a explanation of how the game was going to run and setting up a WhatsApp group chat, a timer was started on a laptop with music playing. At ten minute intervals, different players would turn over their event card which gave instructions on revealing locations, suspects, clues and secrets to bring into the narrative. As the clock ticked down, the conversations became quite intense as the situation became increasingly desperate and the conclusion left us all emotionally stunned as the in character voice mails that we had sent to Alice were played out. This is something that everyone should try if they get the chance.

How it started ...

How it ended.

Sunday morning was The Temple of Artemis, run by Sue Savage, one of the best horror GMs around. She set the scene of a run down Edwardian country house that had been inherited by one of the characters and the ghastly secrets that were hidden within. The rules were simple using the Cthulhu Dark D6 system, but the atmosphere was like an MR James ghost story as we unravelled the story. Her softly spoken narration made the jump scares all the more effective when she dropped them on us. Sue is working on this one for publication and it's worth looking out for if you want to be spooked on a dark evening.

The final game was a run of one of the dungeons from the Dragonbane starter set, GM'd by Debbie taking great glee in unleashing monsters on our unsuspecting adventuring party. I really do enjoy this system and setting, and the maps and figures included in the box are of excellent quality. The final battle with a giant water serpent was a close run thing with half the characters reduced to zero hit points or being knocked off the raft we were trying to fight on and nearly drowning. An excellent conclusion to the weekend!

All in all, another amazing weekend of gaming, thanks to Graham, Dom and Elaine for organising it all! See you next year!

Kehaarcon

 Andy Clarke aka Clarky the Cruel aka Kehaar is one of the stalwarts of the UK grog scene, so it was only fitting that his 50+1 birthday was marked with some gaming and celebration. The drive over to the Wirral was reasonably smooth, apart from a diversion through the back streets of Manchester thanks to some roadworks. I found the pub where we were meeting and settled down for an excellent game of Traveller 2300 GM’d by Tim Farnworth. This was a new setting to me, with a near future hard SF vibe, although the rules were still familiar from the days of the little black books of the original Traveller box set. 

The scenario opened with a crew of survivors from a previous game (actually run in 2019) who found themselves with a cargo of stolen drugs to off load while staying under the radar, literally and metaphorically. We made our way in-system, running quietly when we were pinged with sensors, and choosing not to raise the alarm. This might have been a mistake. When we arrived at our destination we found that it had been attacked by alien raiders and we were now in the middle of a war zone and an ongoing refugee crisis.

We weighed up our options for offloading our cargo and went with a group of Texan mercs who were offering a hefty up front payment in gold. Our contact set up a meeting where we were double crossed and everything went south very quickly. Some very lucky rolls saw the team escape with the gold, minimal radiation burns and a cargo hold full of refugees willing to pay for transport off world. Hopefully the story will be picked up sometime soon!

The evening do was a proper shindig, and it was an honour to be there with oodles of cake, beer and an entertaining live band. We’ll not talk about the overnight accommodation, but I will remember to check the one star reviews on Trip Advisor in the future!

Owlbear and Wizard’s Staff 2024

This mini con in Leamington Spa organised by Matt Broome is an annual highlight for me, and well worth the trip from Sheffield. The train journey was reasonably pain free and after checking into the Regent Hotel (remarkably grand for a Travelodge) it was just a short walk to the Royal Pug where the grog squad was assembling. I bumped into my pal Susan en route for the first time in real life after playing Dragonbane together for a year and then enjoyed some nice beer at eye watering southern prices. It was nice to see a couple of younger faces who I think had heard about the con via the student community and came along to say hello and introduce themselves.

Another short walk on Saturday morning to the St Patrick’s Irish Club overlooking the River Leam which is a great place to play games, with bright, airy function rooms and very reasonably priced Guinness on tap. My morning game was a Doctor Who game called Paradise Lost run by Blythy . We were playing as fifth Doctor era characters (the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough and me as insufferable maths nerd Adric) getting chased by dinosaurs and investigating a mysterious domed community. I really enjoyed the way the system emphasises talking and creative puzzle solving over combat, with companions getting extra story points to spend to tip the odds in tricky situations. Lloyd Gyan was a standout star as the Doctor, saving the day with impassioned speeches and judicious use of the sonic screwdriver. 

Lunch was the now traditional endless supply of samosas with a choice of chicken, lamb and vegetable fillings with plenty to go round and a welcome boost of energy for the afternoon session. I stuck with the sci fi theme, playing as a Klingon in Steve Ray’s Star Trek adventures game which featured timey wimey shenanigans for our crew seeking the blessing of the fabled Oracle of Bar’koth Reach. The system uses a balance of momentum and threat levels as we shot, sliced and diced our way though our enemies. We were given a choice of Klingon phrases to shout at appropriate moments for a bonus, which left me with a very croaky voice! Great fun and a system I certainly want to try again.

Back to the hotel for a quick nap before heading out again for more beer, food and chat at the White Horse. The pub did seem to get quite noisy after 8:00pm so I was struggling to hear anybody talking - one of the perils of getting old, so I called it a night. 

I wasn’t playing anything on Sunday morning, so I just went to St Patrick’s to say farewell to people before heading home, enjoying the glorious September sunshine. Cheers to Matt for running and see you next year!

UK Games Expo 2024

This was my first time at Expo. I’ve avoided previous years because of the size of the event and the expense, but I had a day off and some overtime money burning a hole in my virtual wallet, so I girded my loins and went for it.

The drive to Birmingham wasn’t too bad, although the directions around the NEC seemed to have changed from those on Apple Maps. I found the designated car park and parked up, checking that I was in the right place for my pre-paid ticket. There seemed to be plenty of people in geeky attire so I followed the crowd and found the main halls.

A sign for the Hilton saying This is The Way

The first surprise was the size of the queue to pick up tickets. I’d assumed that there would be self service scan machines for pre-booked tickets, but it seems everyone was in the same line which snaked through a maze of barriers and back out into the main concourse. It did move pretty quickly though and took about half an hour to get to the actual ticket tables. I was glad that I’d been to the loo after my drive though!

Badge, lanyard and maps acquired I headed for the panel that I wanted to see on The Psychology of the Traitors, which featured three psychology professors and Ivan Brett from series one of the UK Traitors discussing the optimal strategies for social deduction games like Werewolf and Blood on the Clocktower. The conclusion was that in order to win you have to make a good impression, be popular (but not too popular) and be a good liar (or at least be consistent). It also helps to be picked as a Traitor!

Ivan Brett on the Traitors panel

After this I ventured into the main halls and was immediately gobsmacked at the scale of the event. It was huge but at least it didn’t feel too crowded as the stalls were spaced a reasonable distance apart so you could avoid the busy areas. I headed to All Rolled Up first to say hello to Paul and Fil who already seemed a bit croaky but looked like business was brisk. 

One corner of one of the trade halls

Some sort of space marine dude

I pottered around the stalls buying bits and pieces before bumping into gaming pals Kat and Tim just in time for a cup of coffee and a nice sit down. After a chat we headed back into the second hall where my next stop was Bad Squiddo games where I met Annie chatting to Doc Cowie. More money spent, then Doc and I teamed up to trawl the rest of Hall 2 chatting about gaming plans. 

Cute Wall-E animatronic robot

I was on my last legs by this point, and checking my watch realised that I’d done over 10,000 steps just going round the halls, so I headed back to the car park (another trek) passing a pop up Viking encampment and some angry geese before setting off for home in time for Friday night pizzas.

Baby goslings and grumpy parents on a grassy bank

I think I might splurge on the whole weekend next year, so I have the opportunity to play some games and spend a bit more time socializing, although I think I prefer the smaller RPG cons at the Garrison, and of course Owlbear and Grogmeet.