I ran four sessions of my Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Solomon Kane adventure and aside from one session, I think they went fantastic. Almost all of the players, from every session, walked away with nice things to say so I was pretty stoked. I've been in some pretty bad game events in the past and I, as a DM/GM, try very hard to make sure my players enjoy themselves at the table. There is nothing worse at a con, than signing up for an event and wasting 2-4 hours of your time in something that just isn't fun. One of the highlights for me was the Sunday session in which the group broke the mold and managed to do several things that previous players/sessions did not. This added to the enjoyment greatly and have no shame in saying this group was my most favorite to run. One of the guys, Ross, playing the mercenary(berserker) managed to pull off an amazing attack on the final big bad, doing 103 points of damage in one round, 151 points total (in two rounds) which accounted for about 3/4 of the total HPs it had. However, it was only with the help of the party that he was able to pull this off, showing how the players all worked together, doing a fantastic job.
I skipped out of two sessions throughout the weekend. One session was OD&D, Friday morning, I was feeling a bit tired from lack of sleep the night prior and since the table had 8 players total, I didn't think missing would be too detrimental. I spent the morning grabbing breakfast, hitting the dealer room, and generally just walking around and checking things out. The second was actually one I had been pretty interested in initially, a Call of Cthulhu game dealing with the lost colony of Roanoke, but when I got to the room the Keeper was severely sick and could barely speak. My own throat by Friday evening was getting pretty bad so I just made the choice to sit out and told the GM this time that I was going to miss out and apologized.
Of the remaining sessions I played, only one turned out to be something of a dud, that being an intro to playing The Dark Eye fantasy rpg. TDE is the leading fantasy rpg in Germany and during the latest edition via Kickstarter, it was cleaned up, updated and translated to English. I've had a general interest in the game, mostly due to the sheer amount of setting fluff available so this was a chance to give the system a try. Unfortunately, this GM didn't do it justice and the session just came off as a big joke. The adventure imo, was just terrible, I hope it was something he made up because otherwise, it doesn't bode well for other official modules. The system resolution mechanics are a bit cumbersome, primarily you're rolling three d20s, one for each of the three stats tied to a skill. For example, for the Running skill you may have DEX/DEX/CON, which means you roll a d20 for Dex, twice and once for Con. You have to meet or roll under your current stat for each of those to be successful. You also have a number of SPs (skill points) tied to each skill that you can spend to succeed. Let's say you have 4 SPs for Running and on your first Dex roll you roll over by 2 points, you can spend 2 from the SP pool to bring your failure down to a success. If you spend all SPs and still fail any of the three rolls, then the skill check is a failure. If you pass all checks and have SPs unused, then these become QPs, quality points, which then tell you how well your skill succeeded.
Overall, the system isn't terrible, but coming from D&D and other d20 systems, I think the biggest complaint is that if feels unnecessary to roll so much since it seems to allow more chance to fail. Other parts of the system are similarly cumbersome, like with magic spells and casting. I think with the right group the system and setting should be no problem but for others, KISS is the way to go. At this point, I doubt I would pursue the game system any further.
My first session Thu morning was an AS&SH game, taking place on the frozen tundra of the Plateau of Leng. Our group had to break out of a strange compound and traverse a frozen tundra to get to a fallen ship and retrieve a crystal. We encountered insect men, piping saytrs, woolly mammoths, Thundarr the Barbarian and his two companions (we killed them) and finally a shoggoth. I enjoyed playing, our thief died an hour and 20 mins into the session due to bad dice rolls which was somewhat comical. The adventure didn't make a lot of sense but it didn't come off as being lame or anything, so I had a good time playing. This one was actually run by a guy who is a player in Jeff Talanian's (author of AS&SH) home games, which was kinda cool.
My second session on Thu was a Savage Worlds game in the setting of Solomon Kane, but unlike mine, we played other adventurers. We were assisting a family now settled in south america, whom we had known from a prior adventure dealing with Roanoke, according to the GM (I did not play in that one). Some jaguar men, part of a local tribe from a hidden city deep in the jungle, had kidnapped a boy and began taking him back to their city. We tracked them through the jungle, back to their hidden city and attempted a rescue. On the way, our group encountered a giant snake, a creepy ass little girl/witch creature, and then some of the jaguar men. Eventually we were led to the shaman at the top of a volcano, who was attempting a ritual to bring back the avatar of one of their evil gods by sacrificing several kidnapped children. A giant bat shaped creature made of bone and fiery flesh was rising from the lava as the shaman was slowly bleeding the kids into the volcano. We engaged the shaman and the remaining jaguar men, defeating them and then turned to attack the partially formed demon-bat-god-thing. After enough blows from our weapons and firearms the bat fell back into the volcano, defeated, and we ran down before the explosion destroyed the hidden city.
This was one of my favorite sessions of the con. The GM, Paul Dundee, did a great job running and the adventure, while pretty simple, was entertaining enough to hold attentions for the full four hours. This is my third or fourth time playing Savage Worlds and the more I play, the more I really like the system. In the past I've read criticisms for various reasons, and I can see those based on experience with other game systems, but if you just sit back and make up your mind to just kick ass, chew bubble gum, and have fun, then the system will let you do just that. It also helps that the systems has a TON of settings available.
I skipped both my games on Friday, on Saturday I had The Dark Eye session in the afternoon, which I mentioned prior, and an Amazing Adventures game that morning. Amazing Adventures is a game from Troll Lord Games that uses the Siege Engine from C&C but designed for pulp action adventure instead of fantasy. It's classes are taken from hero characters of the 1930s pulp era, like the Shadow, Indiana Jones, and Sam Spade, etc. In our group I played Tennessee O'Malley the renowned archaeologist, others included a voodoo queen, pugilist, two detectives, cat burglar, gadgeteer, and a psychic. Our mission was to find what I thought was the location of some ancient gate in the jungles of south america and find out why the Cult of the Serpent was interested in it. So we head into the jungles and during the first night get into a gun fight with some of the cult members, finding a map that then leads us to a cavern deep in the jungle. While in the cavern we encounter some sort of giant acidic snake thing then find a room with the gate. In the room however are these shadow, mutant, underground, humanoid things which we dispatch and then some serpent men who come out of the gate. Travelling through the gate we realize we're on some other planet or in some other dimension and encounter little grey aliens who try to use psychic abilities to over come us, but then are set upon by crab people and driven away. Before we can do much exploring we realize the session is almost over (we ended up starting almost an hour late) so we just decide to go back through the gate and blow it up so that none of the nasty critters from the other place can use it to travel through to our world.
The session was just ok, imo, bordering on a dud. Compared to Savage Worlds, Amazing Adventures feels, mechanically, more cumbersome. For pulp adventure, I think the simplicity of SW shines through. However, I will say that AA has great fluff in it's books which is one thing I do like. I could see using the setting of AA but with the system of SW. Some of the character sheets had typos or were referencing incorrect abilities, or even missing info all together. Another disappointment was that the session was being run by the author of the game, however he admittedly stated that he'd not run the game in several years, during the game this was apparent. I'm not sure how that happens, I assumed since this was his game that he wouldn't have to look up rules and specifics, etc. but during the game it happened a good bit.
I also didn't like the way he ran certain scenes. For example, when we were approaching the room with the gate, he said it was a circular, domed room with four exits, one at each of the cardinal points and from the north a faint light could be seen shining through. I was in the lead, with a flashlight, and asked if there was anything in the door way, looking for traps or anything that might be a problem, then asked about the floor and ceilings inside the room. He said the I saw nothing anywhere other than some drawing of a constellation on the ceiling. So I step into the room and to the right to let everyone else in, as soon as everyone is in the room, iron gates fall down at all four exits sealing us in the room and then the the mutant humanoid things come out of the walls and attack. He just looks at me and goes, "Yeah for some reason you just didn't see anything in the doorway."
... 
IMO, that was just piss poor GMing right there. There were some similar GM calls like that throughout the game that kinda just rubbed me the wrong way so in the end, like I said, it was ok, but the adventure seemed a bit weak and the GM not having relevant knowledge, being the one who wrote it, I just expected better. Initially I thought I might pick up a copy of AA but after the session, I decided I'd be better served using SW for running pulp, so I didn't bother.
All in all, I still had a great time. We managed to get into a late night Aliens: This Time It's War board game Sunday night, with some other friends, which was a great way to end the con. I have some pics I'll post further down along about an RPG, Ragnarok I picked up while there. I think it was the only purchase I made the entire time I was at Gary Con, but I dropped a little over $200 to get just about everything that is currently available in print and that was with $40 as a discount.
