Enter the Magic – Furnace 2014

This year’s Furnace was a magical experience for me … exit reality and enter its warm rosy glow for lashings of AWESOME and WIN!

Arrived on time for once due in part of missing the Manchester rush hour. Then on to eattings and a well balanced evening of booze and chat. Good start to the con :)

Saturday

Slot 1: Fate Accelerated : Cowboys and Dinosaurs.
A full table of six players who very quickly got into the excitement of being Cowboys and Cowgirls of various flavours and the mystery of the Town of Nowhere. Lots of fun moments, and this scenario will go into the book when I publish it early next year :) As well as a fun game I had a big insight about Fate, which I’m still coming to grips with, and how the fate point economy really is the ebb and flow of the game and replaces Hit Points and other forms of bean counting in older games as a measure of player success.
Esteemed players: Brian….opps sorry Ryan, Sue, Andrew, Andy, Remi and Paul.

Slot 2: Project Darklight: Neon Knights.
Another full house +1 (we had an extra player in Malcolm who very quickly created a character and got stuck in) and what could have been a very dull “you are a Street Gang defend your Territory” game, was spiced up by the players who quickly groking Wordplay and running it with it. Two waves of attackers then taking it to the villian in his cyber fortress at the end of adventure with style and flair. Playing PD reminded me why WordPlay is one of my favourite games ever :)
Thanks to the players: Malcom, Peter, Harriet, Martin, Barry, Tony and Dom.

Slot 3: Tenra Bansho Zero: Lotus Blosum’s Bridal Path.
Ok this one could have gone really wrong. This was the “see that game you’ve never played before, but really want to? Spend a month or so learning it and then just run it!” game. I was working from a pre-written adventure, quite a straightforward Travel capper, with pre-gens and the basic system is reasonably straightforward ( a dice pool system ), but what I hadn’t groked during my quick run through 300+ world background and a 400+ rules book that the setting is basically Ninjas, Samurai and Sorcerers but each character type is a monster with Awesome Aweful Powers which they are fighting the use of to stay human. Take Keary’s character, on the surface it just another Ninja….but come combat the “worm” that has been implanted in his chracter turns him into Hulk like monster with a laser cannon on his shoulder. So character powers where the bit I hadn’t read and needed a bit of quick referencing/working out during the game. I had a very humble GM moment when I realised how well everyone round the table had pulled together to help me run the game. The best bit was when players asked me to run the game again :)
Many thanks to Barry, Tony, Martin, Neil, Tim and Keary.

Sunday

Slot 4: Mediyfal: Bad King John pt 1. Murder at Theford Priory.
Yet another satifyingly full table of players, playing ex-soliders, christian mystics, pagan beserkers, pole axe wielding witches and the most pious woman in England. A game of two halves with the first being a lot of really good roleplaying as the players found their feet in medieval Thetford and then the second shorter half when they tracked down the murderer and a short but viscous dungeon crawl ensued. I was especially happy that the players groked the 4 page d100 varient I was using, which allowed me to have all the character info on two sides of A4 and that they took to the weird fantasy 13th C England like ducks to water :)
My thanks go to Simon, Helen, Andrew, Richard, Keith and Simon H.

Maximum thanks to Elaine, Graham and Dom for organising and running, and to the rest of the attendees for making it such a lovely weekend :)

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Newt

Games Designer, Publisher, Web Developer, Dad.

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