Gaelcon... Probably The Greatest Convention In The World

Saturday

The next morning, after feeding and showering (including my usual confusion over the bathmat) we set off for the convention.

Now I should probably pause a moment at this point, and explain a bit about the timetable that Gaelcon runs on, the way that you prebook for the convention, and the price. It's a bit boring, but it's stuff that people thinking of attending next year's Gaelcon will probably want to know.

Click here to skip the boring stuff.

A standard ticket for Gaelcon cost 25 Euros, with each gaming session costing an addition 1.5 Euros. Alternatively - and this was the option we picked - you could pay 35 Euros for a full ticket, which got you entry, three games, and a Gaelcon T-Shirt. You could either pay on the day, or you could prebook, both for the convention itself, and the games.

After a fair bit of discussion, we decided that we would play the same games, but that we would try, if possible, to split up into separate groups, so that we had a chance to meet, play with, and possibly sleep with*, additional people. (Note:- The way Irish conventions do things is that they run multiple tables of the same scenario).

* Actually this wasn't a reason we came up with, but I think it's a damn fine one, and actually I have to say that Gaelcon had a much higher "totty factor" than any other convention I've been to. (And no, we didn't get lucky. We never do.)

We also decided that we only wanted to play one game per day, which fitted in nicely with the 35 Euro ticket. The games we selected were:

Saturday afternoon - Call of Cthulhu: Frostbite

Sunday morning - The Albatross Crime Club

Monday afternoon - Sorcerer: Letters Never Sent

This was where we encountered what's pretty much the only nitpick I can draw with the Gaelcon organisation, in that there isn't any provision for payment either in currencies other than Euros, or by a currency neutral method (such as Visa or Mastercard). The only option given on the web site was to send a cheque or postal order in Euros. Since this wasn't possible for us, because our bank accounts are in pounds sterling (and before the rest of Europe jumps on my back, I'm in favour of the UK joining the Euro) I emailed the organisers to ask if they had any advice.

Apparently, this wasn't a question that had been asked before, but the options we eventually arrived at (after exchanging a few emails) were either to pay by Euro bank draft, or "prebook" by email, but actually pay on the door when we arrived.

We picked option 2, since it involved less work. But next year, after this review, it might be that there will be more Brits and perhaps even 'Mericans heading for Gaelcon (although that might be delusions of grandeur on our part) so it might an idea to have a further think on the subject.

My suggestion is to allow those who wish to pay in pounds or dollars to do so, but charge a slight premium to cover the additional costs. (For instance, if I paid a Euro cheque into my bank account, the bank would charge me either �5 or 5%, whichever is higher). 35 Euros works out at �22.27. Personally, I'd have been more than happy to pay �25, say, and �2 a game. After all, we were paying loads more than that for flight and accommodation (and booze come to that).

And if people didn't want to pay a premium, then they could just visit their bank and get a Euro bank draft.

I also ought to briefly mention how the timetable works, because it is quite different from the timetables I've encountered at UK cons. The typical timetable for a UK con is to have four hour gaming slots, and to have three slots a day - morning, afternoon and evening. Typical times are:

Morning: 10 am to 2 pm (or 9:30 am to 1:30 pm)

Afternoon: 3 pm to 7 pm (or 2:30 pm to 6:30 pm)

Evening: 8 pm to 12 pm (or 7:30 pm to 11:30 pm)

Irish conventions appear to take a much more relaxed view of things. Their attitude appears to be that yeah we're roleplayers, and we're here to roleplay, but in moderation, and we want to do all the other things that having a good time involves, like meeting people, drinking, having lie-ins and just generally socialising.

So they have only 2 slots a day, the slots are only three hours long, and the day starts later. A typical day might be:

Morning: 11 am to 2 pm

Afternoon: 3 pm to 6 pm

The evening is then taken up with some kind of special event, which I'll describe later.

We arrived at the convention a little after ten, and joined a longish (but moving) queue of people for the sign-up desk. After a minute or so, our bit of queue had moved through the hotel lobby into the bar (the sign-up desk was at the far end of the bar).

I have to be honest and admit that at this point, I was just a little bit worried about what to say when we got to the desk. The obvious thing to say would be something like: "Hi! We're the guys from Critical Miss. I understand you have tickets for us?"

But that would be to invite the crushing response: "Who?"

So, I was thinking that maybe I'd just mutter something about how I'd been emailing Fergus, and I'd booked with him, but not actually paid, etc. etc.

But as it happens, while we were waiting there, chatting, one of the organisers (who turned out to be Fergus, the bloke I'd been emailing) came down the line asking if anyone had prebooked.

I said something like: "Err... We've sort of prebooked..?"

And he said: "Are you guys Critical Miss?"

"Err... Yeah!"

And then - and this was the really good bit - he said: "Follow me" and then proceeded to lead us past everyone standing in the queue, straight to the desk. All right, it's probably a bit sad and pathetic, but it felt really cool at the time, like we were celebrities or something. (I think it even won me some kudos from the guys, who normally are forced to take the piss out of Critical Miss, rather than admit that something I've done might actually have merit).

As it happened Fergus had temporarily mislaid the envelope of tickets he left out for us, but he remembered what we wanted, so he told us to go on through to the trade hall and he'd catch up with us. Which he did, a few minutes later. He also sorted out a T-shirt for each of us (part of the 35 euro package).

The trade hall was pretty much what you'd expect, with a good number of stalls selling pretty much anything you'd want. I'd managed to forget my dice, so when I saw some on the Leisure Games stand I grabbed them. Since they're a UK company (it turned out that they and their stock had driven all the way from London to Dublin, via the ferry) all the stuff was priced in pounds, �4.99 in the case of my dice. I was standing there, watching as the bloke hunted through a printed sheet giving the conversions in Euros, when I suddenly thought, "hand on a mo, I've still got UK cash" and asked: "Would it be easier if I just gave you five pounds?"

It was.

At the time I thought this was really funny, but now, writing it, it seems remarkably boring. Oh well. I've typed it now.

Our game wasn't starting until three in the afternoon, giving us some time to kill, so we decided to check out Dublin city centre. It was pretty easy to get there. Just walk down to the main road and pick up the 130 bus. (Actually the hardest bit was the fact that when you get on you have to feed the exact change into a box at the front, and we were still a bit confused by the currency).

We didn't do much in the city centre, other than walk around and get a feel of the place. (Although we did find a health food shop, which enabled me to pick up a few vegan snacks to supplement the suitcase full of snack bars I'd bought with me).

Then we got a cab back for the game.

Game 1 - Call of Cthulhu: Frostbite

We split into two groups for this one, me and Evil G. in one group, and Bog Boy and Mark in the other. Bog Boy and Mark didn't enjoy their game very much, because the GM was apparently not too good. I was a bit surprised when they told me this afterwards, since at one point I'd looked up and seen Bog Boy being taken aside by the GM for a chat, and he - Bog Boy - was grinning hugely. Turned out that his character had just been killed, which he considered to be something of an "escape".

Anyhow, G. and me really enjoyed our game. Although the scenario was notionally Call of Cthulhu, it was very different from your standard CoC fare. The player characters were the crew of an American B17 "Flying Fortress" bomber (well six of them, with four NPCs rounding out the crew).

Now I have to say here that although the GM was very good, his grasp of history was a bit rocky, which was a bit of a problem for me since I'm a bit of a history buff. He began by saying that it was 1943, and that with the success of the landings in Normandy, the war was leading to a close, but that the air war was still being waged with all vigour.

"Oh, so is this an alternative history setting?" I ask.

"Sorry?"

"You said the Normandy landings were in 1943."

"When were they?"

"1944."

"Okay, it's 1944."

Date and setting established, we took to the air and set off for Germany.

At night.

(Note: To those who aren't history buffs. Unlike British bombers, that flew at night, navigated themselves to the target, bombed the shit out an entire city, and called it a result, American bombers flew by day, in a single huge formation, and bombed a precision target such as a factory. Well actually they often missed. But at least they had some idea of what it was they were missing.)

Now I thought that was a bit weird, but it wasn't my problem, because I wasn't playing the navigator. Hell I wasn't even the Captain. I was just the co-pilot. So I kept quiet about our radical change of tactics.

A little while later, our escort of P47 Thunderbolts/Thunderbirds (they seemed to change name a few times) peeled away, because they'd reached the limit of their fuel range, and the long-range P51 Mustang had not yet been introduced in this history.

And then, on cue, the bad guys arrived.

"Are they Fokkers?" I asked.

Yes, it was a immature attempt to recycle the classic Polish fighter pilot joke.

The GM obviously hadn't heard the classic Polish fighter pilot joke, since he replied yes, and spent the next twenty minutes, as we played out wave after wave of fighter attacks, referring to the attacking "Fokkers".

The final slight historical inaccuracy came when someone asked how the Fokkers (I have a real temptation to type "fuckers" here) could see us if it was at night, and how could we see them. Obviously, this was a bit of a problem, since if this had have been a night battle, then the answer would be "they can't" (they'd be multi-crewed night-fighters using on-board radar to intercept us).

The answer was that we could see them, and they could see us, because we all were displaying running lights.

"Can't we turn them off?" someone asked, which did seem quite a sensible idea.

"No."

Anyhow, lit up as we were like a fucking Christmas tree, the Fokkers kept on coming back, and one by one crewmen started to get killed. First the tail gunner, then a waist gunner, then the flight engineer and finally the ball gunner.

All of whom were NPCs.

Funny that. :)

After the tail gunner got turned into a strawberry milkshake, the bomb aimer (a PC) had been sent back to clear up the mess, followed by the flight engineer (an NPC) who was ordered to take over the gun. At this point it got into a very funny farce over the horror that they were seeing, and the stench they were smelling, a stench that pretty much spread to us. It was "sanity / resist vomiting" rolls all around, rolls that most of us failed. We all ended up wearing gas masks. (Probably another historical inaccuracy, but who cares?)

Finally, as we made our bomb run over the target, a fire broke out in the corridor behind the bomb bay. One of the waist gunners had been killed, and the flight engineer, who'd previously been overcome by the stench, was lying unconscious in the fire. I, the co-pilot, volunteered to go back to fight the fire and tried to pull him clear, but I failed my resist stench roll, and also fell unconscious.

It was for this reason that I was henceforth blamed for the death of the flight engineer.

In an effort to avoid the still attacking Fokkers, the pilot flew into a "mysterious" cloud that had appeared. We managed to lose the Fokkers, but in the process appeared to lose ourselves.

A few minutes later I regained consciousness, and stated that I was standing up, just in time for the plane to fly into a mountain that the navigator insisted wasn't there. I ended up with a busted ankle and various busted ribs.

We - except for the ball gunner, who not surprisingly, given that his turret was basically a goldfish bowl on the belly of the plane, had been squashed - crawled out of the wreckage into the snowy landscape and began to bicker about what to do.

The main options were:

Get the hell out of there to avoid any Germans that might turn up.

Tell the navigator what a fuckwit he was for flying us into a mountain.

Eventually, we settled on both options and began to move down the mountainside. Evil G. (playing the waist gunner who hadn't died) had salvaged a Browning heavy machine-gun, so at least we had some firepower to back up the pistols the rest of us carried. The poor navigator was meanwhile insisting that this was impossible, since there simply weren't any mountains near where we had crashed.

It turned out that the area we'd crashed into was separated not only by geography, but by time as well, since it had been the early hours of the morning when we'd been shot down, but it was now early evening, just before sunset. (With the benefit of hindsight, this temporal shift was actually caused by the fact that the scenario writer and the GM were operating in different timezones, the scenario writer on a daylight raid, and the GM on a night one).

So we settled down to camp for the night, taking the usual watches.

One of the characters (I think it was the radio operator) got spooked on his watch, and woke us all up. Then something attacked us. We couldn't quite make out what it was, except that it wasn't human. It grabbed the radio operator and dragged him into the forest. For a moment there was a silence, then the GM told us that something bloody and unrecognisable was coming back out of the forest at us.

I suggested to G. that he "introduce him to Mr Browning" and he did.

At which point the GM told us that the "thing" had in fact been a rather battered radio operator (and was now, following his encounter with "Mr Browning", a rather pureed radio operator).

I was henceforth blamed for the death of the radio operator.

Things basically went from bad to worse from that point on, although I won't go into more details because I don't want to ruin the scenario in case the Irish guys want to run it again. But suffice to say that everyone died except me. By some dumb luck I survived to be rescued by some Russians.

In conclusion, it was a very fun scenario, and the GM (barring a few historical cockups) really kept the game flowing nicely and sketched a vivid picture.

We then hooked up with the others (after a few drinks) and went back to the guesthouse to take a break before the evening's main event. The quiz.

Pub Quiz

Mark, G. and Bog Boy arrived late for the quiz, having gone to an Indian restaurant for a bite to eat, but as luck would have it, the quiz was late starting. We grabbed four chairs at a table alongside three guys from Northern Ireland, who turned out to be Crucible Design. They were a good bunch, and we had an interesting chat, both on gaming, and on northern Irish politics and life.

Now I have to admit here that the quiz was not what I was expecting. I like quizzes, and fancy myself as being quite good at them. The rest of the guys still whine about the team game of Trivial Pursuits we played several years ago, one team consisting of the six of them, and the other team consisting of me. A game which I won. In fact, they got so upset when I got the final question right that Bubba started throttling me.

So I was quietly confident when it came to the quiz. Not confident that we would win, since there would be teams there comprised entirely of experts, while the Critical Miss team consisted of me and the muppets. But I figured that when it came to our team, I'd be doing the answering, and the muppets would be providing moral support and a supply of alcoholic beverages.

Fat chance.

See this quiz didn't have questions about history. Or geography. Or science. Or even sport. This quiz appeared to have two subjects. Gaming. And cult TV shows.

So we're getting questions like: "What was the name of the giant red robot in Super Silver Robots V?" and while I'm going: "The Fuck???", Bog Boy's saying: "Oh that's Bambot!".

I was not amused.

But it was quite a laugh.

Sunday...

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