I went to Constellation SF Con 2003 which was Pegasus, I think. (you don’t know? ed.. //It was some mythological beastie on a t-shirt, who cares?// Some people do. ed..// Good point.). The City of Rednecks and Rockets, Huntsville, Al, hosted the event, and a very pretty Holiday Inn Express was the site.

However, as one noted SCA fencer put it upon hearing the rather cheap (which they did not pass on to the consumer) site price of 200-300$ if hotel rooms in the bloc are filled–”And its so close to the Super 8 hotel where there hasn’t been a shooting in at least a week.” I do hope he was exzaggerating.

The day pass for Saturday was $25 for me, and free for Corwin (until he gets to be four, and then I may stop going to cons.) But the consuite was very good and kept me and the “must run out of gaming room, and giggle by the door at the end of the hallway” child of his mother (me too) well stocked in food so that we didn’t have to hike down the street (away from the Super to the McD’s. (I bet that helped ease the sting. ed.//)

The very hot spiced chili (only for me), and the ham and hard white cheese sandwhich were good. Corwin had more cookies than in three regular days.

We started out with a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization based on the PC game which in turn was based on the board game. Very high quality board and tons of neat plastic pieces and a good bit of different card types. Game play seemed easy; maybe too easy. We got through three turns until a player got called away to play in a Spades tournameant. Grrr.

An hour and a half later, J. started a D&D game. He broke some basic rules of GMing, but it was okay anyways. We got captured in the first scene, and escaped prison in the second, and bargained our way past the dragon guarding the tunnels under the prison in the third.

Then it was Multiverser:

I had four players with an average IQ of about 2@5 which made me the dumbest person at the table. I had a MBA with a law degree, a graduate physicist working on his master’s theses, a genuine rocket scientist, and a fifteen-year-old kid with a 169 IQ.

We started in Naja World after an X-box got scrambled by a large coke being knocked into it, and versed everyone out. They took a semi-rig on the plains of Naja World, and took it down the road toward Umak Tek. Unfortunately, none of them had much experience driving a big rig, and so when they saw a large clam on the track, they flipped the rig.

This killed one player, and versed everyone out since I was using rules for everyone to be associated with each other. This seems to work better with con games. Non-associated works good on-line, and non also seems to work well with regular campaigns although a campaign founded on associated travel would be a nice experiment.

Then I sent them to Libertarian World. A 10 MM was a “girly-gun”, and a .75 magnum was a light pistol. George Washington was the “Great Enemy”, and “Hamiltonians” or “statists” deserved to be shot on sight. Americans landed on the Moon in 1940, and Mars in 1950, and small commercial spaceports are fairly common by 1981 (the date of the game). Marijuana is offered as an after-dinner dessert in respectable cafe’s. There’s very limited government in most areas, and some areas have none.

So they landed in a museum describing American history, and got apprehended by a security guard driving a hovercraft armed with a recoilless rifle. He traded a ride for to the nearest town, K.C., for a knife. One player tried to offer him a dollar, and he saw GW’s picture, thought “Hamiltonian’s!!”, and went for his gun. J. got him, but he got J..

A bit of patching at the local nurse’s house in her garage, and in a week he would be mostly fine after having a fist size hole punched in his shoulder.

They tried to sell the guard’s stuff to a pawn shop, and it was working good until they tried to sell the car. Now, they’d had ample warning that everyone recognized the car. The pawn shop guy called the rent-a-security, and in order to escape the versers stole a hovercraft and ran away from armed hovercrafts.

They headed South, and got to Muskego Starbuck’s Cafe and Spaceport in the Ungoverned Region in “Arkansaw”. The rocket scientist got a job as a rocket mechanic. The kid started teaching the cute waitress some karate, and the lawyer watched tv in the cafe. A bounty hunter caught up to him, and sent them all on to …

Philly 2007 with vampires. They met Gavin and Jackson. One person opined this was a dream, and they could just shoot anyone they felt like. So Gavin tried to offer them a chance to shoot his enemy for money, the priest.
So gunshots got sent at the vamps. J. had quickly surmised they were vamps, anyways. It was four versers with one a decent martial artists, and him with a bo staff (wooden) versus two poor vamps. And the versers had armed themselves if needed in Libertarian World. J. managed to bless the bullet that killed Gavin, and the kid staked Jackson.

They had a little more adventure going to the hospital because the kid had four broken ribs (Jackson punched him once), and the rocket scientist was spooked by meeting someone mentally controlled into claiming a serial killer had attacked her when she had classic vampire wounds.
The scientist shot J. to get out of the world because he did not like horror worlds.

They went to the Many-coloured Land, shot a brontosaur, and fought some aliens. The game ended at two in the morning.

One thing, I noted was that the kid, like in another con game, thought he could run the game without buying the book.

And I think that MV has some extra appeal to brainy people.

And then I drove home…

I had a great time and my adventures continue.

Eric