Current mood:

tired

Warpcon
Slightly belated, but here's the story of all the goings on at Warpcon.



Flew out to Cork on the Friday evening in the company of time_for_tea, Janet, boxninja and ubiquitous_cat. Both boxninja and ubiquitous_cat were sporting rather natty new haircuts, with boxninja's being the most radical in terms of the change in length whereas ubiquitous_cat wins the awards for haircut most likely to be mistaken as that bloke from Erasure.

Cue flight in a WWII vintage aircraft. We were concerned when the pilot asked the tailgunner and bombardier to take position. Much humming of the 'Dambusters March' and the possibility of Messerschmidts diving out of the sun. Or perhaps not. Fast forward to the Old Bar at University College Cork, I think.

Upon our arrival we were met by a substantial crowd including (but not limited to, with some people appearing at various point in the evening): natural20, mytholder, fluffworld, hedgetrimmer, lordkilljoy, my_name_is_fiki, nesf, ildanach, magsoleary, jonnynexus, coffee_lifeform, lainey316, microgirl, muskrat_john, mistertarget and many, many others. Did reasonably well in the pub quiz, amazing many with my geekly knowledge. Perhaps that's not something I should be overly proud of.

We were staying for the weekend in the lovely, but bizzarrely named, Fairy Lawn B&B. Very comfortable, larger rooms than in many hotels, good showers, nice breakfasts. Highly recommended if you're staying in Cork.

Let may say that I awoke with a start on Saturday morning...loud noises were coming from the bathroom. I feared that Krakatoa had begun erupting in the shower. In fear for my life, I did what any brave man would do under the cirumcstances: I hid under the covers. Suffice to say it was merely jonnynexus engaging in his morning toilet. Veganism has a lot to answer for!

Anyway, vegan bowel movements aside, we set out for the campus of University College Cork for Day 1 of Warpcon. UCC has a lovely campus, even the modern buildings are not too bad. A nice old quadrangle and a view over the river. Really very nice. Had some coffee, met up with the Edinburgh crew, chatted, fretted about running my a|state game and so forth. I needn't have worried. Had a great group of players for the game (entitled 'Dangers on a Train'). Thanks to Andrew, Richard, jonnynexus and the 2 other guys whose names I forgot to find out (sorry!) for taking part. I had fun running it, hope they all had fun playing. Thinking my GMing duties were over for the day, I was suprised to find myself volunteering to run 'Dark Olden Days', a Call of Cthulhu game written by mytholder. Although it was run at about 20 minutes notice, it was a well written game and I had another great table of players.

After the running of games, we headed over to the Old Bar for the Charity Auction. As seems to be usual for Irish cons, the bidding was, at times, nuts. The eventual total was somewhere in the region of 12,500 euro raised for charity. Well done Warpcon. Thence, we decamped to Club Warpcon, held at A Venue Somewhere In Cork. Bizarrely, there were pool table where the dancefloor should have been. But people danced anyway. I question the DJs choice of music at times. Whilst 'Angel of Death' by Slayer is a good tune, I feel it was a fatal misjudgement to play it later in the evening, thereby totally clearing the dancefloor.

Day 2 seemed to have a few problems associated with it, mainly due to the disappearance of the RPG Co-ordinator and large, unexplained amunts of blood. But thats a whole other story. Poor Andrew related tales of woe regarding photocopying, game dropouts and disappointed punters. However, the staff did their very best to get things back on track and by the afternoon, things were going swimmingly. I had been asked if I could run a game of Call of Cthulhu D20. Now, I know nothing about D20, but was quite prepared to wing it. Had four good players for the game but sadly the adventure could not be shoehorned into a 3 hour slot. No way. In fairness, the amount of stuff contained in it could be used for an extened campaign (as the other GM and myself agreed later). Even with some judicious railroading and cutting of large parts of the adventure, we only managed to get through under a third of it after three hours. I must stress this was not the fault of the con, as they were given the scenario by the RPGA as an official D20 convention game. Still, we did have fun with what we did (apart from the poor, immolated farmer).

boxninja and myyself enjoyed a rather lovely kebab in the take-away (actually, we sat in) behind UCC. Excellent grub and most heartening to get a hot meal after a weekend of sandwiches.

Guess where we ended up in the evening?

The Old Bar, UCC.

Surprised?

No, didn't think so.

The closing ceremony was brief and well done, prizes were handed out, applause was given and glasses were raised. nesf kindly handed me some of the committee pizza. Hurrah! Free pizza! Much chat in the bar, most of it unrepeatable, but many good ideas were thought of regarding a|state, pillows, dogs, auction items and so on. A couple of pubs later, the con was over. Sad.

So, thanks to ildanach, magsoleary, nesf, coffee_lifeform and all the other committee members and staff who helped make Warpcon 15 a great success. Hopefully, I'll be able to have a return visit in 2006.

Cheers
Malcolm