I attended FallCon 32 this year as a guest host running Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius Games as part of the RGP Alliance group. Despite living in Calgary my whole life and being into gaming since high school, I have never attended FallCon before. Partially that’s because it’s main focus is on board games and I’ve always been more interested in Roleplaying Games, which they have just added in the last couple of years. Also, I was just never that interested in going to conventions of any sort.
Friday was the first night of FallCon, I didn’t have anything booked to do that night but I thought I would go down and check out the layout, figure out where my assigned table for my Saturday and Sunday games was, and pick up a couple more items from Galaxy Gaming Gear to add to my collection of wood miniatures and terrain, which I’m a big fan of.
Things didn’t get off to a great start as I got stuck in a traffic jam on Glenmore Trail, it turned out there was an accident just before the turnoff to Crowchild, completely blocking one lane.
It took over 30 minutes to get onto Crowchild, which normally only takes around 10 minutes. But, after that it was pretty smooth sailing down to SAIT where FallCon was taking place. It was set up in the big gyms there and covered the whole area. The greeter in the kilt at the door is named Brent, which was pretty easy for me to remember. Despite having a lot of people there, the space is so large that I didn’t really feel crowded.
Vic Ster, the organizer for our RPG Alliance group was running a “Rocket Age” game Friday night so I swung by her table to say hello. Everyone was having a great time. It’s basically a pulp era Sci Fi game in the flavour of the old Buck Rogers/ Flash Gordon serials.
I then spent a little time just wandering around, looking at a few of the games that were set up, played a round on the Artimis Space Simulator that the U.S.S. King Edward StarFleet group had set up, picked up my Galaxy Gaming Gear items from Jeff Carefoot, having a good chat with him as usual including a discussion about Rolemaster, HARP, and a few other things around the games by Iron Crown Enterprises, which I had done some work for in the past, and have a separate website devoted to, ICE Webring.
I didn’t hang around for too long, as I wanted to be there early on Saturday, and wanted to assemble my new minis to use in my game on Saturday.
Traffic was much better on Saturday, and the snow had started but wasn’t really bad yet. I got there by about 10:00 A.M. and helped Vic look after our community table.
The community table was interesting, we were right next to the check in and check out table for the Games Library so we had a lot of traffic going by. Vic also had extra Rocket candies and small water pistols from her Rocket Age game as give away’s so I think that drew in some people as well. We were promoting the RPG Alliance Convention that is coming up on October 20th. We also talked about the games that members of our group were running at FallCon, and about the X-Card, which is a tool developed by John Stravropoulos for ensuring everyone at a game table feels safe, respected and having fun. I may do an additional post on it and similar tools and my thoughts on them, it is an interesting topic..
Most people were quite interested in it and there was only one person who expressed that he “thought it was a stupid idea and would never use it at his table.” He then went off on a tangent about how “Stan Lee would be rolling in grave if he knew what some of the comics were doing with Spiderman these days”. It was a very strange conversation, and one of the hazards of putting yourself in a position where anyone can come up and talk to you. I felt like “X-Carding” him, but I figured he wouldn’t appreciate the irony in that 🙂
At 2:00 pm, I ran my first session for Star Trek, using the “Signals” adventure that comes with the Quickstart Rules. I ended up with a full crew of six people and it went really well. It ran just short of the four hours allocated to me, and everyone had a good time. No one in the group had played the game before but caught onto the rules quickly and seemed to like the system. And, as usual, I forgot to get many pictures of my game, but I did get a couple:
I hung around for a little while after my game, which ended at 6:00 pm, but didn’t stay too late as my voice was shot after talking all day and trying to project to the whole table for four hours, and I knew I needed to be back on Sunday to do it again 🙂
Fortunately it didn’t snow as much overnight as I had feared it might, so I didn’t have any problems getting there Sunday morning. I made it in by 10:00 which gave me an hour to get set up. I didn’t actually have anyone signed up for my 11:00 session, so I wasn’t sure if it was going to go or not. Fortunately, Vic had been talking to a couple at the Community table that thought it sounded interesting, so she came over with them and decided to take a break herself and play as well. It was the same adventure as the day before, but with only three people, and a decision to not get sidetracked by one of the possible encounters, the game went faster. It also helped that Vic was familiar with the game system and was able to help out with explaining the mechanics and available choices. And, I remembered to take a more photos this time, including some of my Galaxy Gear Sci Fi crew member minis. I now have three sets and have done them up in red, yellow and blue shirts.
After the game, I spent another hour and half chatting with people, packing up the community booth, and of course, buying a game 🙂
Overall, I had a really good time. I’m always a little nervous going into these sorts of things, but so far I’ve been enjoying them. I think I will consider restricting myself to only running one game instead of two at future events, but we’ll see. The RPG Alliance Con is still coming up, but it’s only a single day, and I’m only running one game and playing in another so I’m looking forward to that. It’s also the event that I attended last year that got me into doing all the gaming that I’ve done in the past year and introduced me to a great new group of people. Speaking of which, to finish things off, here are a few photos of the games some of those members of our group ran at FallCon and will be running at RPG Alliance Con. Chis was running Star Wars, then the Expanse (which I didn’t get photos of). Keith was running Conan, and had fantastic props as usual.
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