Icon 2010, Friday

So, in the company of Simon, Adrianna, Mike & Beth, I went up to ICON. I flew up with Simon and Adrianna on Thursday evening, and, with some "not quite following the GPS" navigation (which included a loop around the block in a series of confusing one-way streets, where we may have ended up going the wrong way down one), we made it to the F1 hotel and met up with Mike and Beth.

Friday got off to a bright and early start. Early successes were finding a decent coffee shop for breakfast near ICON, and a source of wasabi coated peas.

I duly signed up for two role-playing modules. We were informed that two modules, one of which I had been considering playing in, had been canceled due to "severe technical weaknesses".

Before role playing started, I got in most of a quick social game with two Pretoria players and Simon. I was playing my Unnamed bleed deck. The game was interesting, as, with the unnamed bleeding, I ended up with a surprisingly large amount of pool without actually doing that much damage. I also had my Enkil Cog DI'd and my Metro Underground Suddened, which left me feeling a bit picked on.

The first role-playing module was more than a bit dire. The group I was in took some time to find the actual character descriptions, which were cunningly hidden as a couple of lines amongst walls of stats and system descriptions. The module itself wasn't much better, as it was equally sparse and lacked essential elements such as a basic plot. Our GM, Naas, took us seriously off script to add some structure - it ended up playing more as a Call of Cthulu module, but ended up being reasonably enjoyable.

The afternoon module was probably less dire, although it was a close call. The character sheets were more fleshed out, but the module was again lacking in basic plot and the characters lacked any motivation for acting in the way the module writer clearly intended. This weak setup also made it almost impossible to do any sort of real horror, and my group played it a bit for laughs, so it was quite entertaining, but not, I suspect, the module the author had intended.

Given the poor quality of the modules on show on Friday (the second afternoon module was apparently also a bit dire), the quality of the scotched modules was a source of some speculation.

Between the modules and the evening LARP, we went to the Edenvale Spur. They were having a very busy night, so this resulted in a quick dinner dash becoming a leisurely, frustrating dinner dash, and us getting back a bit late for the LARP.

The LARP was quite fun. The plot involved nearly every applicable daytime soap cliche, and several that weren't strictly applicable, but were thrown in anyway. My character came quite close to achieving his objectives, largely by presenting a completely false face of reasonable sensibleness, before dying from an unfortunate series of events - it started with poisoning and went a little odd from there, to end in a case of spontaneous human combustion.