#RPGaday Topic 14: Best Convention Purchase

[Agemegos]

I'm doing RPG-a-day in August, as promoted by Dave Chapman (Autocratik). This is Day 14 of 31.



Best Convention Purchase

I've never bought a convention. I don't even recollect ever buying a game or such at a convention. Australian cons aren't like (what I understand of) cons in the US; we have almost no RPG industry here, so they have almost no trade-show component (though I did once play in a promo game of Hunter Planet run by the designer, and I GMed in a lot of Tonio Loewald's promo games for ForeSight).

So I'm going to write about something completely different. None of the topics lined up for this exercise relates to setting. So I'm going to take advantage of this here lacuna by addressing the topic : "Favourite setting for RPGs".


Favourite Setting for RPGs

Now, I have designed a few detailed and robust settings in my time. One I can no longer GM since reading Nine Parts of Desire. The other I tend to gush about, quite a lot. Having been designed by me to suit my tastes, it suits my tastes pretty nicely. But (in what I hope is a surprise) it isn't actually my favourite RPG setting.

No, my favourite setting is the real world, with or without the addition of a conspiracy here and a wainscot fantasy there, a couple of horror elements, or a dash of technothriller sci-fi. This is because, as Ken Hite puts it, "If you're creating a setting for RPGs, start with Earth. It's by far the most interesting and best-researched of all RPG settings, under continuous playtest for thousands of years, and the maps alone put other game worlds to shame."

Even the madly various Vancian colonial societies of my SF setting FLAT BLACK are scarcely more exotic than some of the real or real-ish places I have set RPGs: Rome under Vespasian, mediaeval Japan, Southern France in 1123, the Rwandan headwaters of the Amazon, yeti-infested Tibet, Cyprus a month after the fall of Acre in 1291, St Louis in Prohibition, western Massachusetts in the Depression, the Wild West, on ranches on the Uruguayan pampas (with NAZI clone armies!), and so on at greater length than I can recall.

[whswhs]

I think maybe I bought GURPS Alternate Earths at a convention. That would be my top choice, I think. Though I may have gotten the Miskatonic University supplement for CoC at Comic-Con, and if so, it's a contender.

As for favorite setting, I think that's a tie between Glorantha and Transhuman Space. In both cases, there's all kinds of stuff, extending far beyond the limits of what I need to run a particular campaign; and in both cases it includes some really weird stuff that's there as much to explore the conceptual structure as to enable direct adventuring—I mean, no one is going to set out to slay the Crimson Bat!

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I mean, no one is going to set out to slay the Crimson Bat!

One of my RQIII characters was a Heorting Humakt-worshipper whose village had been utterly wiped out after a rebellion (while he was off on a stupid quest). He had been enslaved by dragon-newts, fought his way down the Janube through the Kingdoms of War, slowly made his way through Ralios from North to South, and returned home to Sartar by way of Holy Country, as a horse-trader, with everyone else in the party replacing at least one character. To say that by the time he got back to Pavis he was hard-bitten would be almost as much of an understatement as saying that he hated the Lunar Empire. He fell short of qualifying as a Sword of Humakt only by 2 percentage points in Orate. And he had a stockpile of twelve Sever Spirit spells.

I think he would have set out to kill the Crimson Bat. Sure, it can make the saves. But can it survive the loss of attribute CON from all those successful saves? And even if he couldn't do it, he would probably try.

[simply Nathan]

Never been to any convention of any sort at all ever and probably never will.

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Favorite RPG setting? Not sure if it's Points of Light, Yrth, the implied non-setting of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, or the world I'm personally building for campaigns I'm probably never going to run.

[johndallman]

I don't really remember what stuff I have bought at conventions, which makes it kind of hard to decide what was best.

My favourite setting is the real world, somewhat jazzed-up; I'm very much enjoying a Weird War II campaign at present. Infinite Worlds gives you a large supply of real worlds at different dates and with variations that can be small and interesting, if one is prepared to be a little restrained. I'm also fond of Glorantha, and of THS.

[Agemegos]

A friend of mine working this exercise on this FaceBook page avers that the best thing he has bought at RPGs cons is Guinness. I have to agree that he has a strong point.