This past weekend was Gamestorm 2012, which I like to call “Portland’s Annual Gaming Convention in Vancouver.” You can read about the convention in my post history and on its own website, so I’m just gonna skip on ahead to the highlights.

For me, the biggest and most awesome parts of the weekend were the two first-ever public playtests of Motobushido. I finally got to put my newest creation in the hands of total strangers who had never heard of it before. The results were pretty powerful: after two full sessions of play, I walked away not only with pages of rules tweaks and updates, but with some damn fine gaming memories as well. I found it interesting to see how the same basic scenario idea was so drastically altered between the two different groups. I’ll definitely be fleshing that one out a bit more and including it in the core book.

Aside from those demos, I really spent most of my time at the Indie Hurricane booth in the Dealer Room. I met some great new local gamers, and had some good discussions about gaming-related ideas that opened my mind to new perspectives. Some thanks and acknowledgements:

• Many, many thanks to Hans Otterson for the rides to the convention.
• Even more thanks to Joel Shempert for making the Indie Hurricane booth run smoothly, and for putting the whole effort together.
• Thanks to the guy at the FaceEater booth for finally teaching me how to play this game. It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to more games with my local pals.

I walked away with some cool swag from the GM Gift Room – namely a copy of Feng Shui, which I’ve been meaning to grab for some time now based on the recommendations of many. And of course, after the con, there was much sleeping.

I’m really eager to build some new semi-regular game-nights with those of you that I’ve just met. Let’s make this happen, folks!

The problem is that PAX brings together people who think they share the same passion, who believe they are all part of a collective culture that they have defined individually. Then they encounter each other for three days in lines, in restaurants, in panels, and in game rooms and discover something intensely alienating: they can’t stand each other.

In the “Lasting Impression” subsection of my two-parter PAX 2010 recap post, I lament this very issue. Socially, PAX is the convention-grade equivalent of a deck-building card game. At its core, the convention is like a whole mob of people playing solitaire in the same room, and only within the PAX “expansion sets” (mostly the non-video-gamey hidden side rooms) do you really partake in any level of actual human interaction – aside from the booth people who are trying to sell you things, anyway.

If PAX is representative of any so-called “gamer culture,” I have yet to absorb any of it in my two years of attendance, both as con-goer and vendor alike. The majority of its attendees seem to share many personal traits, including a deep enthusiasm for the things they love and (frequently) nigh-worship, but what they predominantly lack is any developed personal medium for the transmission of thoughts about these traits and passions. The identities exist and are proudly portrayed via costume and fan-wear, yet few of them actively share those identities with one another.

That being said, I’ll see you again at PAX 2011.

The Tabletop Gaming Experience

In stark contrast to the Big Media Sensations of the Expo Hall and its surrounding environs, the tabletop gaming sections were focused, subdued, and full of intense interpersonal connection-driven energy. Everyone was talking to everyone else about the games they were demoing, and it was obvious that most of those doing the shilling were knowledgeable about and affectionate towards their games of choice.

This atmosphere of mutual enjoyment was the main reason why I kept finding myself drifting back towards that cramped room on the third floor after each of my progressively-shorter rangings back into the larger fray. I kept seeing the same pleasant faces lit up with the joy of their current game, kept hearing the same awesome voices raised in moments of imaginative excitement. Despite various moments of personal exhaustion and disconnection, the energy in that gaming room kept bringing me back to myself. That was where I wanted to be, in the end, and where I felt I most belonged.

The Cel*Style Presence

In the recent months past, I have teamed up with a collective of like-minded gamers called Cel*Style. One of my big reasons for being at PAX this year was to help promote the Cel*Style concept and current catalog, We partnered up with a Seattle-based gaming store called The Dreaming, who let us promote our games through their own vendor-area booth. I wasn’t expecting much from the endeavor, simply because we hadn;t really advertised the products much there, and few people knew anything at all about the titles.

In the end, we sold out of almost every book I brought up there, and I had numerous con-goers tracking me down to find out how they could get more. If anything about PAX lifted my spirits, it was this.

0 Hunters

I was glad to see Tyler’s still-in-the-making “0 Hunters” game make an appearance, and did my best to wrangle up some interest from a number of passers-by. I got to playtest this back at Gamestorm 2010, and I enjoyed it greatly. I’m still waiting on my test copy, Tyler! Gimme!

As a side note, I’m still not 100% sold on the game’s newest name I found the previous name of “Upright Criminals” to be more up-front descriptive about the game’s concepts and focus, but that’s not my call to make. I’m sure there’s a good reason for it in the game’s context, but numbers stuck into product names for reasons I don’t immediately grok always rub me the wrong way. They remind me of those terrible bands with numbers in their names, like Blink 182 and Sum 41 and their ilk. 0 Hunters is of course nothing like those bands, but my discomfort with its name makes it difficult for me to then pitch it to others. Still working on getting over that bit.

Lingering Gaming Thoughts

At least one big idea came out of my time on the gaming floors. A previous post of mine covers the subject in greater detail, but in short it’s a combination tabletop-LARP based on convention cosplayers. I’m a big fan of games which incorporate both players and environment directly into the games’ rules and flow, and I am hoping to see this one further. Look forward to more posts on the development of Cosplay Costume Combat/Gaiden!

I got to play a short pick-up game of Gun Thief, by Joe McDonald. I found it inspiring, especially in light of my recent design block on my current “big project,” Billions and Billions of Bullets. Gun Thief was great, and I really enjoyed it, but for me the best part of the experience was learning exactly what I didn’t want to do with B³ullets. That realization hit me like a brick to the face, and it was glorious. One of my biggest problems with game design is wanting to do too much with my projects, to make systems and games that present more options than necessary. Having seen and joyed Joe’s game in action, I was able to see a more perfect vision come true, and it greatly assisted my own design mindframe. Awesome.

Delicious Sustenance

Over the weekend I ate at two places to near-exclusion. The first was Dragonfish, which was convenient enough to be downstairs in the same building as our hotel. While their happy hour specials were fantastically-priced, the primary draw for me was their use of real actual wasabi, as opposed to that fake green horseradish mixture that cheaper sushi places use.

The second place was a shining gem of healthiness in a sea of pizza and burgers. Right there on the second floor of the convention center was a placed called Juicy Cafe. They specialized in healthy foods, from veggie bowls to spinach-tofu breakfasts to the most delicious smoothies I’ve ever had, ever. If you find yourself at the Washington Convention Center in Seattle, stop by the Juicy Cafe and get the “Mango Madness” smoothie. You will not be disappointed.

Lasting Impressions

I came out of PAX with half a notebook full of new ideas for the improvement of my life. Sure I wrote a lot of notes on ways to enhance my gaming, and I spawned some ideas for new game development projects, but the majority of my notes are on self-improvement. I had something of an existentialist crisis at the convention. At various times I found myself wandering the floors, lost in the chaotic flow, mutually invisible with the mob of nerds with whom I was growing to feel more and more disassociated. There were moments wherein I felt like I might have been depressed, but then instead realized them to more truthfully be moments of epiphanous dissatisfaction. Throughout that ennui-driven haze of identity crisis, I was able to pinpoint things in my life that needed changes, things that needed discarding, and projects that could definitely use improvement. Coming out of those moments was cathartic, and I see good things in the coming days, both personal and creative.

I have already touch upon this next bit last year, but this past weekend’s experience really impressed upon me the fact that PAX really isn’t a social event. Despite the crammed-full occupation of the disappointingly-small tabletop gaming rooms, the vast majority of PAX’s mass of attendees go for the media experience – a form of Media which is still quite anti-social. It is true that video games today often promote online-interaction components, and a large number of attendees likely play massively multiplayer games like Lord of the Rings Online and EVE Online, but what many of those people lack are good real-life face-to-face social skills. Despite the increasing emphasis of multiplayer in today’s games, the Video Game Experience is still largely an extremely personal one, and even when it isn’t, most of the inter-personal gaming experiences tend to be intensely competitive, and are often characterized by insults, racial slurs, and sexually derogatory language.

When these same players are exposed to each other in person, they shun all interpersonal interactions save those that are most required. They rarely actually talk to other con-goers unless they are asking to take pictures of cosplayers, and even that is usually half-mumbled only loud and coherent enough for the cosplayer to get the basic meaning of the request. Perhaps due to the enormity of their own online personalities, I sense that some con-goers might avoid interaction on purpose, so as not to ruin or expose their digital reputations. All this is just me observing and musing, mind you, but I imagine there’s more than one good sociology thesis to be written on this and related subjects.

This is my second year in a row attending PAX, and my second acknowledgement of these same feelings of convention-encouraged anti-social atmospheres. This is quite the opposite from my many experiences at DragonCon, back in Atlanta. DragonCon has always been for me an intensely social event. It’s an experience by, for, and about fans, and those fans make it work on all three levels. Everyone at DragonCon talks to everyone else, be it on the sidewalks, in the registration line, at discussion panels, or at the plethora of room parties after hours. In contrast, PAX attendees rarely communicated with anyone but the Booth hosts, didn’t advertise any social gatherings of parties, and stuck to their little cliques in the waiting lines.

While the weekend as a whole has left me with good experiences and fond memories, my hope next year is to return to DragonCon. I said this last year, yes, but I needed to have the hammer strike the nail one more time to truly commit to it. I’ve heard from a few people that DragonCon these days isn’t what it used to be, that it’s less fan-based and more party-based, and it is more heavily mobbed by outsiders and non-fans wanting to gawk at the costumed geeks on parade. I’m okay with that. I’m an odd character, in that while I’m pretty balanced between my need for alone time vs my need for social time, I’m also pretty damn intense on both sides. At PAX this year, I felt like I needed some intense socializing, and what I got was fun but ultimately unfulfilling. I hope Dragoncon can quench that thirst next year. Until then, there are a few other more party- and social-driven cons to attend.

Conclusion

I want to give some mad props to the previously-mentioned Joe McDonald, who really rocked a damn fun session of Apocalypse World. I have to tilt my hat to that man for inspiring me in so many exciting ways to amp up my own games. Your on-the-fly MC skills humble me, mate.

Another shout-out to Ogre, who needs to come to Portland far more often. I’ve never gotten to actually game with Ogre (and if I have but have forgotten, then I apologize deeply), but every time I cross paths with him at various conventions, we have some awesome conversations. I look forward to our next encounter.

In closing, here’s my favorite picture from the weekend. Me and three awesome ladies, showing off our nerdly obsessions with entirely home/custom-made outfits:

Since this post was getting way too big, I’ve broken it into two parts: Video Games, and Everything Else. Read past the cut for more.

The Expo Hall Experience

While everyone goes to these cons for a different reason, my biggest draw was the expo hall. Contrary to what some may claim, PAX is one gigantic industry trade show, where the biggest names in electronic gaming make an appearance to show off their latest and greatest creations. While it’s more customer-focused than mediacentric (like the more well-known E3 event), the convention is still very much a trade show, complete with big displays, never-before-seen products, and the ubiquitous booth babes who never seem to actually know anything about the products they are advertising.

I spent a large part of the con freely wandering through the massive expo hall, letting the milling crowd slowly take me where it wanted me to go. I visited a lot of vendor booths, too many to detail here and ever hope to get this post online. Instead, I’ll showcase the ones I found to be most memorable for both positive and negative reasons.

Best Booth: Dead Space 2

When we visited the Dead Space: Extraction booth last year, we met some really amazing staffers and fans of the game. This year those same people were manning the Dead Space 2 booth, and they returned with the very same levels of enthusiasm that made them so awesome last year. The two ladies I went to the booth with were both cosplaying as characters from previous games (Lexine from Extraction and Nicole from both Extraction and the original Dead Space), and the folks at the booth were just plain wowed. We got swag galore, and chatted with them for a good long while.

The Dead Space 2 demo was hard. As a veteran of the original game, and a fan so enthused that I wrote a spoiler-free walkthrough, I went into the demo expecting to kick some ass and take some names. Instead, I got repeatedly face-raped by a horde of new child-like necromorphs called the Lgion or the Swarm or some such. After being killed by them 7 times (I blame the old demo build for not letting me modify the look control sensitivity), I set the controller down and moved on. Don’t misunderstand me, though: that was awesome, and I will definitely get getting it when it comes out.

Later that same evening, wandering drunkenly around town, we randomly stumbled into Christopher Shy, the artist for the new Dead Space series of graphic novels (as well as the cover for the new novel). Wandering around with him was quite a pleasure, and really capped a long night of awesomeness with Dead Space-related fangasms.

Those guys were spot on awesome.

Best Booth Runner-up: Tera MMO

After meeting the Dead Space 2 booth folks, I donned my Lone Wanderer costume and went for another slow stroll through the hall. This time, my goal was simple: approach as many side-set smaller booths as I could, and ask them to tell me about their games. A few of these were disappointing, mainly due to uninterested staffers. But one of them was really surprising. At the booth for the upcoming Tera MMORPG. I met two people who were really excited about their product. One lady seemed almost surprised to have someone take such a direct interest, so she took me to a console and guided me personally through their fully-functional demo setup.

In this demo, I played a Popori, which is essentially an ass-kicking chipmunk-badger-rabbit-thing – yes, I always find the small, strange races to be the most alluring. Man… this game is just plan gorgeous. I was pretty wowwed by the environment within the demo, by the grace of the character animations, and by the synchronization between the characters’ movements and their surrounding landscapes.

Tera presented to me two major differences between it and the current crop of mainstream MMOs. First, all actions and commands are real-time and based primarily upon player skill. Combat was far more involved than pressing a few buttons and waiting for the actions to execute. In this game, you have to move around, keep your targeting reticle on the enemy you want to hit, and keep executing your commands. The few battles I tried were very engaging, even against piddling low-level enemies. I can only imagine the player-vs-player experience.

Second, the arrangement of actions and commands in the interface made it very easily playable by a standard current-gen game controller. Being a player who frequently likes to switch between controller and kayboard, I like this, a lot. This is a game that I will definitely be checking out when it gets closer to release.

Worst Booth: Dragon Age 2

Dragon Age 2 was definitely my biggest disappointment of the entire PAX weekend. I’ll turn this one into a list:

• All over the web they advertised that David Gaider, the lead writer, would be there from the start to meet fans and talk and sign books. Nope. He wasn’t.
• The intro video announcer obviously wanted to be somewhere else. His completely lack of enthusiasm wasn’t quite Ben Stein in quality, but it was depressing
• The playable demo was extremely buggy, and crashed on me five times.
• None of their demo staff would actually answer any of the questions I had.
• The female Hawke’s voice was… irritating. I swear it was the same voice as that damned annoying “Can I get you a ladder…” line from the first game, and it made me cringe. Male Hawke gets to be a total bad ass, while female Hawke has the voice of a delicate snowflake.
• The graphics of the game were seriously crap. I felt they were worse than the original one, which itself looked dated by about 5 years. The facial animations were poorly matched to the voices, too.
• Thanks to a complete conceptual artistic overhaul of the game world, Darkspawn now look like Putties. I don’t think they needed a change at all.

The combat system was slightly improved, though. Still, I would have loved to have gotten to see it on PC instead of the PS3. So far I’m unimpressed. C’mon, Bioware, you can do better. These may all sound like piddling complaints, but with this being my biggest draw to the con in the first place, it left me feeling very sore.

Worst Booth Runner-up: Bethesda

Having been completely unimpressed with their showing at PAX 2009, I wasn’t expecting much from them this year. Good thing, because I wasn’t disappointed in that expectation. Their booth staff was unenthusiastic, bored, and almost entirely ignorant of the company’s products. While waiting in line to play Fallout: New Vegas, the guy watching the line repeatedly told everyone who asked him anything that he “was just hired to watch the line” and that he “had probably played less of the games than everyone else.” Way to impress your fans, Bethesda. You won me over with Oblivion and Fallout 3, but your attitude really stinks.

I would have given them first place in the worst booths, were it not for their t-shirts. Gaming t-shirts are probably the most popular common swag acquired at PAX, but usually the shirts are kinda low-quality, and quite obviously nerd-shirts. I have to give Bethesda some props in this area, because the shirts they brought were not only of good quality, but they were well-designed with the “stealth nerd” in mind. They look like something you’d get on Threadless or Shirt.Woot, in fact, and would most likely only ever be recognized as gamer shirts by other actual in-the-know gamers. Kudos for your awesome shirt designs, Bethesda, but major Booooooo to you for your completely apathetic booth staff.

Expo Hall Cosplayers

Like any good nerd-con these days, the cosplayers were in full force at PAX. Here are some other pics I took while walking around the Expo Hall:

Our game was called Laser Mummies.

The following rules are those we came up with on the fly during the design contest. So, without Further ado…

LAZER MUMMIES!

So there’s a board like the one above, a numberless generic spinner, and a 20-point game round tracker. There’s a bag full of slothing size tags, labeled 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, S, M, L, and XXL. There’s a die from the Heroquest board game. There are two doorways from the Heroquest game. There are four Shield tokens, with numbers 1, 1, 2, and 3 on their backs. There’s a ruler to use for movement direction. And there are three Mummy figurines.

So there’s two players. Each has a mob of dudes they control, including a large handful of footmen, three elites, and one signature Big Hitter (these pieces were from Lord of the Rings Risk, I believe). Each side has two laser turrets.

GAME SETUP:

Each side places their Portals on their sides, and then places three of their footmen anywhere in their zone.

HOW TO WIN:

To win, accomplish any one of the following:
* Destroy Two Mummies
* End round 20 with the most points
* Direct a Mummy to destroy enemy’s gate; if enemy has no gate and no units in play, the enemy loses.

GAME FLOW:

Game flows in 20 rounds. In each round, both players get a turn. On a player’s turn, the player rolls a die. The die has three results, which do the following:

* Shield – Flip over a shield token, and gain that many Unit Points which must be spent immediately.
* Skull – Either add a new mummy to the field and immediately move it, or move all current mummies on the field.
* Black Sigil – Place a new laser on your side, and then ALL lasers on the board fire at the same time.

At the end of round 20, if no one has already won or lost, then use the points to determine winner.

UNIT POINTS:

When you flip a shield, you will get from 1 to 3 unit points which must be immediately used. A unit point allows you to move any single unit on the field in a straight line. Take the ruler and make a bee-line towards your target anywhere in the board. The moment the unit comes into physical contact with anything, it is halted. If the obstacle is an enemy unit, roll combat.

You can also use unit points to add new units to the board, placing them anywhere in your field. The cost in unit points is equal to the unit’s Value. You have unlimited footmen, but can only ever have a max of three elites and one Big Hitter on your side at any one time.

When all shields have been revealed, flip them back down and then mix them up, so they can be used again.

UNIT COMBAT:

When a unit encounters another unit, both sides roll dice based on that unit. The results:

* Skull – deal one normal hit to the opponent
* Shield – block one normal hit from your opponent
* Black Sigil – Poison hit! Deal a shield-bypassing hit to your opponent.

When a unit takes hits = it’s toughness, it is killed. When you kill a unit, you score points and that unit is returned to your opponent’s general unit pool.

MUMMY MANAGEMENT:

When a mummy is placed on the field, it begins in the center circle, and then immediately moves in a random direction. When a mummy moves, spin the spinner and then choose which mummy to move. The mummy then moves in that random direct until it hits an obstacle or encounters the game board edge. If it hits an object, it destroys whatever it hits, including other mummies. If it hits the edge, it stops moving.

If there are multiple mummies on the board and you choose to “move” instead of “spawn” when the Skull is rolled on your turn, then you must spin separately for each mummy currently on the table, and move them one at a time. You can spin before choosing which mummy to move.

FIRING THE LASERS:

When a black sigil is rolled on your turn, you can place a laser on one of your two corners of the game field. You have at most two turrets you can place. When a laser is placed, after placement it and all other lasers fire. Your lasers fire first, applying a hit to anything they contact (except portals). If you shoot an enemy laser, you destroy that laser before it can fire. After yours are fired, the enemy’s lasers also fire.

Don’t cross the streams! If either of your lasers crosses streams, both lasers explode. Crossing streams with your opponent’s lasers has no effect.

SCORING POINTS:

You score points by killing enemy units. Footmen, Elites, and Big Hitters destroyed earn you a number of draws from the score bag equal to the unit’s value. The numbered score pieces are kept and added up to determine your point score. The lettered score pieces give you extra immediate unit points. S = 1, M = 2, L = 3, and XXL = 4. Lettered pieces have no score value.

UNITS:

Footmen – Roll one Die, Toughness 1, Value 1
Elites – Roll one Die, Toughness 1, Value 2
Big Hitters – Roll Three Dice, Toughness 3, Value 3
Laser Turrets – Deal 1 hit to everything in it’s path, including mummies; destroys enemy turrets
Mummies – Destroy whatever it contacts (including portals), Toughness 2, can only be hit by laser turrets

This past Gamestorm (GS11) was host to many wonderful moments of gaming, and I am proud and delighted to say that one particular game rises above all others of my recent memory in sheer awesomeness. That session was the Jesus Camp Massacre, a demo game I ran of Cannibal Contagion.

This post has taken me a long time to get up for a variety of reasons, one of which is that I keep coming back and re-editing and re-writing it. It has to be perfect – the session was just that awesome. So now, several months later, I’ve decided to re-write it one last time, and come hell or high water I will be posting this AP review today. I’ll warn you all now: This review will likely offend some people. Read at your own risk.

For GameStorm, I designed three distinct demo games to run, and Jesus Camp was the last of the three. In this game, I set up the Contagion based on a supernaturally-infused variant of the infectious contagion that is Jesus’s Love. In this scenario, I decided to set up seven pregenerated characters and put them through the horrors of a twisted Jesus Camp. Six players showed up, but fortunately one of the characters was easily left out. The results, as you will see, were awesome.

The Six Survivors:

• Sadie – The Goth Girl, in love with Bross
• Missy – A pregnant Cheerleader, In love with Devon (the kid’s father), dating Bross
• Bross – The Football Hero, dating Missy, in love with Devon
• Devon – The Reformed Ex-Gay, worshipper of Jesus, father of Missy’s child, in love with Bross
• Mitch – The boydyke outcast, in love with Missy
• Zeke – the gamer nerd, secretly plays D&D with Bross, in love with Sadie

I created them each with loving care, and set up a pretty complex network of relationships. As you can see above, there’s a lot of conflict, and the extra work I put into setting up these interactions and backgrounds beforehand really made the game all that more fantastic.

The game was played out over the span of five mostly action-and-drama-packed scenes. I’ll give a quick run-down of them, with some highlights of the things that I loved the most.

Scene 1: Drunken Masters

The game opened on the last night of Jesus Camp. Tomorrow morning would be the Grand Revival, followed by refreshments and then everyone being picked up by their parents and taken home. The Goal of the Scenario: Survive the Night!

When the curtain opened, the players were just leaving the Saturday night revival. All the prayer groups were old to go find somewhere and reflect together upon the evening’s lessons, and their group (the Exodus group) snuck off to sit around a distant tree and drink some snuck-in beer with their buddy Pablo (an Ally, also part of the prayer group). They had barely cracked open the case, however, when the bitchtastic all-girl Genesis prayer group showed up and caused a ruckus, threatening to “tell on them” to Youthpastor Cody (the director of Jesus Camp operations; aka “YPC”).

Led by the gung-ho Mitch, the team proceeded to beat the everloving shit out of the Genesis girls – killing one of them, in fact. That really set off some major tremors among their group. As the remaining Genesis girls ran off screaming in bloody fear, some of the Survivors tried to find a way to deal with the body, some cried, and the lovely Devon went to go tell YPC what happened.

Devon didn’t get too far, though. Just a short job from the Tree of Death, he saw the genesis girls get surrounded by dark figures which came out of nowhere. They were quickly subdued and taken away. Devon tried to follow, but was shortly surrounded himself by these figures, which he realized were the members of the all-boys Ecclesiastes prayer group. Their eyes were all fucked up and their skin was dark and veiny. They looked pissed. Devon tried to talk them down, but they didn’t liste, and quickly jumped him while he screamed like a girl.

The other Survivors heard the scream and ran to the rescue, and once again Mitch’s boots kicked some ass and helped save the day. The Ecclesiastes managed to get away after a few rounds of cards, but they also took the Genesis girls with them.

The scene ended with them all running off to find YPC. By the end of the scene, half of the Survivors had already descended to the second stage of Madness, and a few had taken wounds. Nice!

Scene 2: Cody’s Cabin

In this short scene, the Survivors met with the always-pleasant Youthpastor Cody in his small office. They tried to convince him that there was violence going down, and that something was wrong with Ecclesiastes and Genesis. He seemed pleasant and unshaken, and assured them that he would contact the nearby sheriff’s station to send Ol’ Jake Hornsby down to check on matters.

I seem to recall there being some joke with one of the characters being nicknamed “Penis” and that being a hilarious moment during the radio chat with Jake Hornsby, but the specifics now escape me. Anyway, this scene primarily served as a segue to the next one, with a bit of situational establishment and intensification of the background conflict.

Scene 3: Stalking the Vestibules

The scene opened with the Survivors in their “vestibule.” Now, Imagine, if you will, a Jesus Compound. Rows and rows upon rows and rows of bunkhouses, veritable streets and alleyways between them, each on cinderblocks and lacking windows, with a lock on the outside of the door. These were the vestibules of YPC’s Jesus Camp, each containing another prayer group.

The characters had been escorted to their vestibule, and shortly afterward a couple of junior Youthpastors showed up, requesting to speak with the girls (Mitch, Missy, and Sadie) separately. The gals were taken off, and a moment later the boys heard the sound of their vestibule being locked from the outside.

A few moments later, there were two major simultaneous conflicts. The Ecclesiastes showed up again, this time far more disturbing than before, and tried to take Mitch and Missy out into the darkness. Meanwhile, Sadie had run back to the vestibule to let the boys out, but was stymied by some creepy monster-looking girl grabbing at her from under the vestibule. Several rounds of cards later, Missy is much further down the depths of lunacy, Mitch is covered in blood, and the rest of them have gathered outside the vestibule to try and help the dying girl underneath it. Turns out, it was one of the escaped girls from the Genesis group, and her belly insides look as if they’ve exploded everywhere.

They made a plan to escape, and the scene ended.

Scene 4: Moonlit Lakeside Romance

Oh my. This truly epic scene involved a dramatic argument while treading water in the middle of the lake, a thrilling motorboat chase, multiple people getting whacked with oars, an attempted drowning suicide, and more. But the best part? Definitely the time when Sadie tried to drown herself, and Zeke rescued her, and tried to turn mouth-to-mouth resuscitation into a hardcore makeout only to be punched in the face by the now-conscious Sadie. Oh no, it was when Bross and Devon admitted their gay love for each other and missed on the beach. Or was it when Mitch called Missy an evil bitch and an insult to women everywhere, and Missy slapped her for it, and then they had violent lustful angsty teenage lesbian dry-humping on the waterfront?

Oh wait, it was all three of them, because they all happened at the same fucking time and provided the perfect end to the scene.

Scene 5: Golem Jesus

In the Grand Finale to the game, they face off against Youthpastor Cody’s grand creation: Golem Jesus. The giant Buddy Christ statue in the middle of the grand pavilion broke apart, and from it stepped a gigantic flesh golem made from the bodies of all the other Jesus Camp attendees.

By this point all of the Survivors were either quite insane or very close, and as such the battle was quite intense. There was head-biting, people-eating, fist-pounding, flying kung-fu dyke combat-boot flying-monkey face-kicking, and more. Missy went nuts and gave birth to a demonic Jesus Spawn, while the belly-less corpses of the Genesis Group tried to strangle everyone with their flailing intestines.

In the end, Golem Jesus killed everyone and stomped off into the sunrise with Baby Demon Jesus perched on his shoulder, although it’s rumored that Sadie might have somehow survived.

Aftermath

Seriously, Fuck Yeah. This game was so awesome that all other games in the room with us were visibly jealous. I think we annoyed a lot of people with our loudness, but sweet golem jesus above, it was worth it. I made some good personal connections with fellow gamers in this session, and look forward to meeting up with them again in the coming days.

The Future

Coming to GameStorm 2010: Jesus Camp Massacree 2 – The Rise of Golem Jesus!

It all got started after the fabulous-amazing Jesus Camp Massacre session of Cannibal Contagion. After leaving the scheduled gaming room, I ran into Nick and Gilbert, and we all three had about an hour to kill. I blurted out “let’s play Quad” without thinking, and a few moments later we had started on in. After a few minutes of deliberation over what number-generator to use – for some reason they were both hardcore against using dice right then – we settled on a deck of cards. The built-in random scenario generator quickly laid out the basics:

• Setting: Ancient Earth (we decided Egypt)
• Location: An Institution (we decided a Temple of Training)
• What starts it all off: A natural disaster (we decided on an Earthquake) kills all the priests in the temple leaving only two survivors

The characters were created quickly enough, each being only a small list of good and bad Merits. One was a fairly inept acolyte conman, the other was a Pariah being beaten for the crimes of heaven or some such. I like to call them Harold and Kumar, as their dynamic was equally hilarious.

Once the core scenario’s conflict was established and the characters introduced, we quickly went to town. Nick and Gilbert were both experienced story-gamers, and thus took to the game’s mechanical concepts quickly. Within a few minutes, the mechanics were in play and more conflicts were introduced. I think for the purposes of the Pick-Up style of game play, the simple mechanics worked very well to move the game quickly along.

The temple guards took both the characters into protective custody, and one of them quickly managed to convince the guards that he was the Chosen One and the other character was his faithful Companion. A series of Sacred Rites of Testing were then undergone, which included eating (and stomaching) terrible foods, surfing the back of alligators while blindfolded, an epic game of Madden BC-199, and more. My favorite of the trials was definitely the game of Five-Card Draw, played with giant stone slab cards carried on the backs of teams of slaves. Each time a card was discarded, the stone was smashed to bits and the slaves carrying it were thrown to the crocodiles.

And there was much death by crocodile in this game. From Nick’s character’s lost arm to the gobs of sacred virgins they fed to them post-coitus, the crocodiles played an unexpectedly crucial part in the session. In fact, at the very end, when Gilbert’s character castrated himself to prove that he was in fact the REAL Chosen One (claiming the title by default, as he prevented Nick from winning), he was then fed to the crocodiles to appease the angry gods.

Within the span of an hour, we had run a pretty damn awesome game session, consisting of at least a dozen hilarious conflicts and a large handful of scenes. For me, the hardest part was actually coming up with the Seven Sacred Rites, but once the game started moving along, those came pretty easily too.

All in all, a damn fantastic session, one which all three of us have laughed about many times since.