Roludothon Prep

I'm off to Montreal for the Roludothon Thursday, and my wife El and I have been very, very busy prepping for the games I will be running there. I always forget what a pain in the butt prepping for cons is. Normally my group will take a session to prep together, creating the characters and association, sometimes the worlds we are going to be playing in. For con games I only have three or four hours, and I have to use pregens, a set association/company, and a pre-made setting. Ugh! Anyway, that's what I have been doing for the last week or so instead of updating the blog.

For my StarCluster 3 game, If You Should See a Great Big Box, I created six star systems, in an area known as the Calyx Knot - a complex of eight systems with a jump 5 wormhole leading out from either end - treating one star system, the starting point, in detail. Why six? I have no idea where people will go or what they will do past the starting point. The Jump 5s make it very difficult to jump into or out of, with most traffic in the Knot staying in the Knot. The PCs are all Uplifted animals or Bio-constructs, and the vast majority of human settlement in the Knot is Diasporan Community. The DC has no guarantee of sapient rights for anything except humans and those aliens given that status by treaty. Constructs and Uplifts may be treated as chattel slaves by a member planetary society so far as the DC cares. PCs will have to tread carefully.

My Outremer game, Perchance to Dream, will start off in Damascus, 1560. The Association is the Mid-East Peace Association, which is a not-so-secret Secret Society - a la the Freemasons or
Rosicrucians. Their existence and some of what they have done is known, but they operate secretly throughout Outremer. Most people believe them to be a wishy-washy ecumenical trans-religious association of doo-gooders, though some believe them to be an insidious secretive worm at the heart of the social order. Unknown to most, they have an executive arm, amongst whose agents are the PCs. Most of the prep for this was done by El - she loves making characters!

I also got my pre-release print copy of Outremer saturday, and it looks really sweet. Illos and maps are clear in gray scale, and the color covers look great! No squiggle, you StarCluster 3 haters! :D

-clash