Sunday, November 18, 2007

Ambercon Northwest 2007

Ambercon NW happened again this year, this time it was the first weekend in November (they've moved it up to accommodate another scheduling conflict). Once again, it was held at the glorious McMenamins Edgefield, and incredible hotel, with what looks like 9 restaurants or bars on site. This is the best convention I go to all year, and a decent part of that is the Edgefield.

This is the first year that I managed to get another person (besides myself and Lee) to come to North West, Keith joined us. This was Keith's second Ambercon and I think he really enjoyed coming to this one.

The big event of the con turned out to be the plague. Evidently Guy (one of the con organizers) got a bad stomach virus right before the con, and before he knew he was sick, managed to infect several people. This provided merry fun as games had to be canceled or combined with others due to missing people, and in general it seemed like every 3rd person you talked to was either sick or getting there. There was even a story of one GM trying to run his game from the bathroom! I managed to avoid it, though Keith did not.

But besides the plague, the con went very well, and I got to play in a lot of very cool games. The most memorable were:


  1. Monster Mayhem III - Run by Lee, this is the continueing moster movie themed game that I had played in twice before. I played a very fun character "Robert Noble (, yes I am)" and his sidekick "Pippy" a tweleve year old girl. Actually a horde-quantity 52 pt item, but you get the idea. There was much frivolity, and Pippy managed to get killed at least 13 times by player characters, the first one before character description!
  2. Giants in the Playground - We played a game-within-a-game with the elders playing DnD with Order of the Stick characters. This was hilarious! All the sniping between elders and all the grittiness of DnD. The game was made especially good by (I believer her name was) Susanne, who played Dara, the mother of Merlin the GM. It was priceless, and a lot of fun.
  3. To Trip the Light Fantastic - I ran a game of Persona cyberpunk, and for once a con game by me went well. There were only 3 plaerys, but I think they all enjoyed themselves a lot, as they got to experience the craziness that is persona in all its glory. At the end of the game, humanity evolved into a group mind and left earth behind... Very Cyberpunk.
  4. OMG!! We're like totally BFFs! - Ah yes, the Best Friends game. Or more appropriately, the game were Ben, Leslie, Chris, John, and Pol get to play snarky backstabbing high school girls. It was awesome. Leslie started us with the idea of all playing girls with T names (Tina, Trisha, etc), and Chris expanded that to be all variations of Kristen. So we had: Keirstan, Krysten, Christina, and Kristeen. Oh, and June. June had replaced Kris (the villian of the story, sorta), whom we had had a falling out with last year after she stole a boyfriend or some such. We had a secret sign and a load of puns, like Kris-tastic, Krissy Council, Krissy Quorum, and the best, Krys-tastrophy (which must be said with a frown, and very sadly). Additionally we had I believe no less than 3 or 4 boyfriend stealing events (the game started with one), a car accident while trying to make a subtle get-away, and one girl getting herself drunk to seduce someone. It was glorious.


As always, I had fun with all my games, those were just the highlights. We are now looking forward to ACUS in March. Oh, also, I even managed to win an Obie (think Oscar, only for ACNW) in the category of "The Prince Brand Memorial Award for Necrotic Merit" for Pippy. ;)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like quite a Persona game. Did you get thoughts on the system from the assembled crew? And did you ever run persona with leslie and chris for their thoughts?

Ben said...

I did run for Leslie and Chris, the same game actually (and for once a re-run went better the second time).

Leslie, Chris, and Andi all liked persona, I'm pretty sure. I think they might've been a little off put by the extreme stunting and perhaps by the foo-foo-ness of it, but I'm pretty sure they liked it. Chris strong encouraged me to run a Persona game at ACNW.

The ACNW crew also liked it, though its always difficult to get a clear read on a game. I thought it went very well, and they said they liked it, but its hard to get anything concrete.