DunDraCon 2010

After this year's DunDraCon, I've come to the conclusion that it, in terms of good role-playing experiences, DDC is the worst of the three gaming conventions in the Bay Area. DunDraCon still sounds better than what I've heard of non-Bay Area cons, which seems to be fixed to 4-hour game slots in communal rooms rather than the local standard of 6-8 hour slots in individual rooms. And I plan to go next year. I've just realized that, for this and every other year I've attended, the games I've played at DunDraCon tend to be mediocre.

Once again, I almost didn't attend the convention. I was sick (so much so that my doctor sent me to the ER the previous week) and still have something (possibly a fatty liver) as of yet undiagnosed, but on the second day of the con, I was feeling well enough to go. So I only played in four games, and was never feeling 100% solid throughout the entire con, and that could be considered a factor in why I had such a mediocre experience... except that I've had a lot of mediocre experiences at past DunDraCons.

DunDraCon has a reputation as the premier RPG convention in the Bay Area, as it's the oldest, not just in Northern California but on the West Coast as a whole. It has more RPGs than KublaCon, which is considered more of a general gaming convention as it equally focuses on card, board, and miniature gaming. It also has more RPGs and number of attendees than PacifiCon, which has been an almost ad-hoc affair over the last few years. Nevertheless, PacifiCon has such fewer players that it's easy to get into your game of choice, and there's more of a feeling of "can do" attitude (or least, lowered expectations) that I almost always have a good time there. KublaCon is just always a great time: the hotel is gorgeous, the atmosphere feels vibrant as everyone is getting their game on with so many choices (even if there are less RPGs), and the slate of RPGs tends to be more varied than the usual Call of Cthulhu, Hero, and endless iterations of Dungeons & Dragons that make up most of DunDraCon's schedule.

Whereas KublaCon always feels fresh and new, DunDraCon always feels stale and old. Although the systems may change (often though they don't) gamemasters at DDC tend to run the same kind of games with the same kind of standards for the same kind of players they have, year-in and year-out. Whereas at KublaCon and PacifiCon, I've played in games where the GM put a strong effort to create a compelling story, cool handouts, or run a new kind of system, at DunDraCon, GM's tend to run something just good enough to fill 6-8 hours. DunDraCon also feels choked to death with mouth-breathing, neck-bearded, morbidly obese grognards; and while I myself may fit some or all of those descriptors, I don't wallow in it. The players at DunDraCon are often more likely to want to joke around at the table than to get into their characters and role-play out a story, whereas I often run into players at Kubla or PacifiCon that really try to create an exceptional experience. DunDraCon feels to me like it's become comfortable in its own mediocrity, and it shows in the quality of the games and gamers it attracts.

As for this year's games...

Tales of the Singing Skull: The Clipper (Call of Cthuhu)
We played actual passengers onboard the Hawaii Clipper, which disappeared in 1938. My character was a Chinese-American restaurateur bringing 3 million dollars to the army of Chiang Kai-shek. Since I was the only character expecting trouble, I was the only one armed when three black-clad "ninjas" armed with submachine guns burst into the lounge in mid-flight, took over the plane, and started killing everyone onboard once they found the two American scientists they were looking for. One of those scientists was the only PC not be killed (in the first five minutes of the game!), and then we were all resurrected by the Singing Skull, a skull packed in cargo containing the spirit of an ancient Italian sorcerer compelling us to take back the plane and bring him to Ponape where his "friends" were waiting to take him home. The "friends" ended up being Deep Ones, who we allied with so as to take over a Japanese patrol boat. The Deep Ones sacrificed the Japanese to power the ritual which sent the sorcerer home, while we tried to make for Wake Island with the captured patrol boat. As a Japanese destroyer barreled down on us, the Singing Skull returned to ancient Rome, causing everyone who had been resurrected to die, and the sole surviving PC got picked up by the U.S. Navy.

The Dirty Half-Dozen (Millennium's End)
The characters were American military convicts during World War II, assigned to blow up the air defenses and steal the experimental plans of a Nazi V-3 rocket facility. Completely ill-equipped and unprepared for the mission, we parachuted into occupied France, killed a bunch of guards at a checkpoint, killed more Germans who came down the road, and then, because the GM felt we were moving too slowly, got fast-forwarded to the secret Nazi base. After a rushed plan to ambush a couple of trucks with noisy explosives, and then infiltrate the base in our own (flaming) truck, most of us successfully got onto the base and started blowing up the anti-aircraft emplacements when the Nazis suddenly fired off six V-3 rockets that spun around and turned into cyborg "Iron Men." The Iron Men then proceeded to kill us all with great ease.

The Fight for Gailea (Star Wars Saga)
My character was a heavy weapons expert on a three-man Rebel squad assigned to disable the sensor station for the Imperial anti-aircraft defenses, then wreck havoc on the local garrison to keep the enemies' attention away from the other teams (a group of spies capturing the corrupt planetary governor, a team of local revolutionaries inspiring a popular uprising at the palace, and squadron of fighter-bombers). We pretty easily took out the station, and then, with a quad laser on the roof, we knocked out many of the AA guns themselves, as well as the communications array the Imperials were using to jam everyone's communications. This drew the attention of the elite 501st Legion, who we fought off long enough till the starfighter pilots could drop a danger-close bombing run on us and wipe them out. Then we were attacked by two "dark troopers" who nearly killed us before we whittled down their shields and cut them down. After posing with the corpses and broadcasting the footage over an open channel (still trying to draw the enemy's attention), we met up with a Jedi (a PC shuttling between the tables) and fought our way into the garrison, where she commandeered a vehicle to infiltrate a Star Destroyer now sitting over the city. With nothing else to do, we blew up the garrison, took control of an AT-AT, then blew it up to finally just end the game and wait for the other tables to finish.

Project ACORN (All Flesh Must Be Eaten)
As the last game of the con, I didn't take the time to write out a synopsis of what happened, which basically boiled down to black ops spies shooting zombies on a cruise ship.

So that was my DunDraCon for 2010. Like I said, I'll go next year, but with significantly lowered expectations.

Blood's a Rover

Even though Blood's a Rover, the conclusion of James Ellroy's Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, is not a bad book, there's no way I can recommend it to anyone that hasn't read the first two books. While it might stand on its own, it doesn't really do anything that American Tabloid didn't do better, and the book ends up working best as part of the greater work than a standalone story.

Taking place between 1968 to 1972, the novel moves from the cover-up of government and organized crime conspiracies in the assassinations of RFK and MLK (the subject of the previous novel, The Cold Six Thousand) to an attempt by the Mafia to set up a Cuban-styled wise-guy wonderland in the Dominican Republic while the FBI attempts to destabilize fringe black-power revolutionaries with undercover agents and heroin trafficking. Tying it all together is a 1964 armored car heist and the ubiquitous presence of the "Red Goddess Joan," a female post-Grapes Tom Joad with a mysterious vendetta against J. Edgar Hoover.

The protagonists include: Wayne Tedrow Jr., fresh off of murdering his Mormon racist publisher father in The Cold Six Thousand and now serving as a bagman to both the Mob and Howard Hughes; Dwight Holly, a minor character also from the previous novel transformed from a cardboard thuggish FBI caricature there to a conflicted leftist sympathizer here; and Don Crutchfield, a young L.A. wheelman/peeping tom who quickly becomes enmeshed in the various plots that permeate the book. A couple other perspectives are clumsily brought into the narrative in the last third of the book, but it's these three that fuel the story to varying results. Tedrow is basically a shadow of his character from The Cold Six Thousand, and his chapters make up more of an epilogue to that book than anything compelling new in this one. It also doesn't help that, in that book, Tedrow's character was most interesting in relation to the other protagonists, and here he's equally dry. Holly is the classic Ellroy "killer with the heart of pyrite," cut from the exact same mold as Kemper Boyd in American Tabloid and Ward Littell in The Cold Six Thousand, with similar results. It's a great character, but it's beginning to feel like Ellroy has come back to that well one too many times. Crutchfield is best thing about Blood's a Rover, not the least interesting of which is that he's an actual guy. Based on Ellroy's history (his murdered mother, his criminal record as a peeping tom), the Crutchfield character feels like the closest thing he's ever written to his own self, and the novel is at its most raw and original when it focuses on him. How Ellroy uses Crutchfield in the last pages perhaps speaks more truly to his own politics than anything the author's actually said, and how Crutchfield himself speaks of his own fate at the very end might have something meaningful to impart on the arc of Ellroy's own fiction from the L.A. Quartet to now.

Overall, I enjoyed Blood's a Rover, but it does have some problems. A voodoo murder that parallels the investigation track into the armored car heist comes off as flimsy and tacked-on, almost as if Ellroy were making some perfunctory nod to the L.A. Quartet books. The revelation behind Joan's longtime hatred of Hoover is rather pedestrian. The murderous LAPD cop character of Scotty Bennett that becomes a major character halfway into the book feels like Ellroy resurrecting a fatter, dumber version of Dudley Smith. The terse telegraphic style of prose from the previous two books is still here, but where it was intense in the rich story and characters of American Tabloid it only points out the less adequate elements of Blood's a Rover. Ultimately, Pete Bondurant's final scene in The Cold Six Thousand was an effective end to the Underworld U.S.A. story, while Blood's a Rover makes little more than a satisfying but unnecessary epilogue.

The White City

The White City by Alec Michod is pure shit. The author can't write: his characters act like he scripted them with Mad-Libs, the prose is equally turgid and confusing, there is no mystery, and he doesn't do anything interesting with the setting much less explore its themes. I could give a synopsis of the plot and explain, point-by-point, why this hack should never be allowed to publish anything ever again, but this book was so utterly lacking in value that I can't even muster the disgust to go into why. Let this simply be a warning to those that might care: do not read this book.

Dead of Winter 2009

I spent this weekend at the first Dead of Winter Horror Invitational, a very small gaming convention held at the Brookdale Lodge deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. My friend, Matt Steele, did an incredible job running this little monster, and despite a bunch of problems that could have wrecked any other con, I came away from Dead of Winter with a fantastic experience.

Just getting to the Lodge was an experience in and of itself. After getting out late and fighting through traffic to pick up my friend Basil in San Francisco, Google lead us astray and onto several miles of winding, mountain roads in hard, slippery rain, until we finally reached Boulder Creek for a good but late-coming dinner at the Boulder Creek Brewery Company (do not eat here unless you have hours to spare waiting for your food and resolving your bill). It was late by the time we got to the hotel, where we found most of the 30-or-so other DoW guests drinking it up in the bar.

The Brookdale Lodge, with a history of iniquity during Prohibition as well as a number of deaths (the most recent in September of this year) has a reputation for being haunted. As Basil and I discovered upon entering our room, "haunted" may simply be synonymous with "broken" or "code violations." Our original non-smoking room, for which we signed a document stating we would pay hundreds of dollars if we smoked in it, was filled with the stench of cigarette smoke. Also the lights wouldn't turn on. So we got ourselves checked into a new room, where the heater was covered by heavy-drapes but the window door to the patio wasn't (so morning light woke up whoever slept next to it), the lights worked (until Sunday morning, the bathroom light shorted-out in a rather explosive fizz... and the bathtub was made of steel, so no shower for us), and there wasn't a smoke detector in sight (speaking to others, they didn't have a smoke detector in their rooms as well). And these were the renovated rooms, as the un-renovated rooms had holes in them and windows in missing. All this might sound horrifying, but I actually had a decent time and, besides the shorted-out bathtub-of-doom that prevented showering on Sunday, was no different than any other room I'd stayed in at a con (for much mucho bucks).

I woke up around 8:45 on Saturday to receive my 8 o'clock wake-up call from an apologetic and addled front desk clerk, and, without any time for breakfast after showering, I made my way through the hotel (filled with buckets catching leaks and water-sogged carpets, past the electrical wires wrapped around a water faucet, and by the half-completed renovation of part of the hotel that burned down only recently). The hotel's main attraction, a long, three-level hall with a roaring creek flowing down the middle, was lovely in pictures, a bit worn-down and poorly maintained in person, and cold-as-hell in the rainy weather. Beyond that was the Log Room, a meeting room made like a log cabin (you could see daylight through the some of the slats) whose only heat was a large fireplace and the many space heaters Matt had place around the room (which went on-and-off intermittently as the outlets regularly shorted-out). This where we ran our games, and my first one was...

Silent Night (All Flesh Must Be Eaten)

It’s beginning to look a lot like TERROR, as a bunch of naughty department store Santas and their not-so-nice little helpers learn that the true meaning of Christmas is FEAR while trapped in a shopping mall full of last-minute shoppers and equally sinister things. You better watch out, you better not cry, and pouting won’t save you on this slay ride straight to HELL.

This was my game, which can more easily be described as Bad Santa with zombies. Absolutely the most offensive game I've run, the players got totally into it from the get-go, and everyone seemed to have a good time. AFBME was a nice, rules-light system for it, staying pretty much in the background, though I did feel that the characters were able to take down the main baddie a little too easily just with normal weapons. I liked the game, but I can't see it running it again (except for my regular gaming group next weekend) as it is so specific to the Christmas season.

Our catered lunch was surprisingly good, and was going swimmingly until just after the end of the session, the power went out throughout the hotel. This seemed fine as we had a two-hour break for dinner. Unfortunately, we all went to the Boulder Creek Brewery for dinner, so what should've been two hours stretched out into four hours as the place took forever to get us our food and then let us pay them for it. We were two hours late when all of us got back to the Lodge for the evening session, where it was discovered that the power was still out. This meant that we had to do everything - navigate the creaky hotel with the history of accidental deaths, go to the bathroom, and play role-playing games - by the dim, flickering light of candles or flashlights. In the "haunted" Brookdale and playing a bunch of horror-themed games, this was AWESOME.

The Night Tide (Basic Role-Playing)

Spring, 1721. Welcome aboard the privateer frigate Revenant. Crew: 261 Souls. The storm season has arrived with a fury and a venegance the likes of which no living sailor has ever seen. And while on a treacherous patrol through the dark heart of Kingbreaker Islands, the Revenant finds what she always seems to find: trouble and the unexpected.

My evening game was run by Jack Young, a great GM who I've had good experiences with in the past, and, despite the conditions (and kind of because of them), this game was no different. The game was set in his homebrewed world of a slightly fantasy version of 18th century piracy, where we played a cursed crew of privateers moving inexorably towards some watery doom of which we only had a vague foreboding. Playing all that in candlelight with a hard rain falling on a rustic cabin was the best atmosphere imaginable, but even after the power returned (by around midnight) it was still a pretty spooky game. BRP is the base system behind Call of Cthulhu, so it fared well for the horror game.

With the power back on, I slept easy through the night, woke early enough to get breakfast, and headed down for my last morning game...

At the Circus (World of Darkness: Mortals)

Dec. 15, 2000 - The small town of Circle Pines, Kansas, was shocked 18 hours ago when the horribly-mutilated body of local girl Ursula Wells, 16, was discovered. The shadowy Paranormal Investigations and Combat Bureau has noticed an unnerving trend, and is sending a team to investigate the cause and stop it before it claims more lives.

A solid and fun investigative horror game in The X-Files mold, this game played out well. I like nWOD as a system to play if not to run (the mechanic to spend Willpower to increase your chance of success is the only advantage I really find it has over BRP), and the investigative process ran smoothly. The GM, Travis Smiley, created a well-textured story of a German who shows up in the American Midwest after WWII, and creates a circus where accidents regularly happen and death toll strikes on a weekly basis. I liked how all the players, including me, immediately think Nazi occultism when we hear that, but it turned out to be something completely different. I played a hard-ass female ex-LAPD cop, and got to shakedown locals in a rough and abrasive manner. There were probably some things that we should've done differently, but the pacing was good and I had fun throughout.

There was an evening game slot, including a Jack-the-Ripper themed Don't Rest Your Head game that I really wanted to play, but I didn't want to drive home in the rain at 1 in the morning nor did I want to pay for another night at the Brookdale Lodge, so me and couple of others headed out in the afternoon. Even though it might sound like a nightmare with all the hauntings/code violations, power outages, and dinner snafus, Dead of Winter turned out to be one of the most fun times I've ever had at a con, and not in spite of all those mishaps. When the power went out at DunDraCon last year, there was a panic about how people would know what games they were in, much less how we would all play in the darkness; but, at Dead of Winter, there was a kind of glee in the air, as though it was all part of some (mis)adventure. That was the general tone throughout, and with such great players and GMs, and so many friends in general, Dead of Winter had a charm that just couldn't be beat. So long as it doesn't bankrupt him, Matt has to do this next year, and I am much looking forward to it.

Zombieland

This was a very stupid movie. An awesomely stupid movie. And, between this and being dragged to see G.I. Joe, I am now convinced that stupid movies tend to attract stupid audiences. Zombieland was no different, and as every zombie got killed and dismembered in an ever wider variety of cartoon violence, this audience of Neanderthals cheered it on like grape-gorged Romans screaming for blood in the Coliseum. It was mindless gore-porn, without plot or meaning or certainly anything approaching art.

I loved every fucking minute of it.

Sure, it can't beat 28 Days Later for nihilistic horror, or even Shaun of the Dead for managing to be both funny and a real movie with actual characters and plot. Nebbish Geek hooks up with Redneck Wahoo, they fall in with Hot Chick and Spunky Kid, they drive to Los Angeles, have a zombie celebrity cameo, do something really stupid to move the non-existent plot along, and then kill a lot of zombies. That's it. If you're pissed that I just spoiled the plot for you, when it comes to Zombieland, you're doing it wrong. Forget character, forget plot, this is about laughing at carnage and nothing else. It ain't much - but just as Tallahassee feels about Columbus - it'll do, pig.

Dr. Octopoid, Occult Detective From Beyond Space and Time!

Courtesy of Flames Rising's Horror Plot Generator:

A gigantic octopus with psychometry, whose home base is in a Victorian funeral home, wants to bring the Earth closer to the sun. Supported by falcons, the gigantic octopus appears to have one weakness - bat tongues. Interestingly enough, the gigantic octopus is from the not-too-distant future.

Sounds silly at first, but consider this rewrite: in the last years of the twenty-first century, as civilization collapses due to an apocalyptic Ice Age, a small band of scientists use time-travel technology to send the consciousness of one of their own back in time to prevent this coming catastrophe. Now trapped in the body of a giant octopus, the futuristic Doctor, armed with hi-tech psychic powers that allow him read the sensations of memory by touch and control the minds of lower life-forms (like his flying army of falcons), plots from his tank in the basement of a Victorian funeral home, where he builds, with a workforce of cadaverous conscripts, giant rockets underneath London that will push the Earth further towards the Sun and save mankind from an icy demise two hundreds IN THE FUTURE!

And he also solves crimes and shit with the help of his plucky monkey assistant and a hot corset-wearing suffragette.

And he's allergic to bat tongues.

Once I Lived For Hate...

... but now I live for suck. For years, my entire enjoyment in watching the NFL has been based on schadenfreude. Sure, I've rooted for the Pats and the Steelers on occasion, but what really gets me off is the annihilation of those teams and players I detest. I hated Peyton Manning, and I watched him win a Super Bowl. I hated his brother, Eli, and watch him hoist the Lombardi. I hated Brett Fav-ruh, and am watching him tonight prove true the douchebags of ESPN. I can hate no longer. I must choose a team and stick with it, so I flipped a coin to choose between my two "home" teams.



And, starting tonight, I am officially a fan of this guy's product.


May God have mercy on my soul.

At least no one will accuse me of being a fair-weather fan. The starting quarterback has a passer rating lower than some major leaguer's batting averages. The head coach could soon be up on assault charges for knocking out his own assistant. The owner is so batshit-crazy old, I think his face has literally begun to melt. But, hey, at least I can now say I am rooting for something. That's a positive thing, right?

Right....