[Games] Necronomicon Ideas

[jordangreywolf]

It might seem a little early to be thinking about a convention in October, but these things take time. (Also, the time I spend on them is fairly intermittent, since "real life" takes the priority.)

I have a few priorities in mind for what I run at Necronomicon this year:

• 1) I'm going to try running things on one of the smaller, round tables this year, rather than getting two big rectangles and setting up a HUGE play area. My hope is to make things a little less cumbersome. Hence, I'll be covering a *smaller* play area with terrain and minis. (2'x2' is probably about right.)



• 2) I would like to support Dog House Rules and their Frontier Towns revision for Savage Worlds. (The writer lives in Tampa, and the cartographer might make an appearance at the convention.)



• 3) I'd like to NOT be hauling huge bins full of terrain. If I could get reuse out of scenery pieces across multiple games, that would be cool.



• 4) I plan to run 3 sessions. (I COULD do 4, but that's probably overkill. But then, last year I didn't have much at all to do Saturday evening and sort of regretted not running a 4th game. Huh.)



• 5) I'd like to NOT just run the same adventure 3 times.



• 6) I picked up an Ertl "Town & Country - Cowtown" set -- or major parts thereof -- consisting of three plastic "wild west" town buildings: a saloon, jail, and blacksmith barn. I was thinking about refurbishing them as "Deadlands" scenery. It'd be nice to make some use of it.

So, toward that end, here's what I'm toying with for vague game scenarios:

• a) Wild West - Fort Griffin: Something happens in Ft. Griffin, Texas. A bank robbery, perhaps? I suppose I could go with something supernaturally weird, but it's just a 4-hour scenario; I don't know if I could do justice to an "investigation," Call-of-Cthulhu-style, crossed with a western. Anyway, the main action could unfold on "Main Street," so I could use my buildings, plus some dusty-looking Tablescapes tiles for the street and scrub-brush. Hmm. I wonder if I could make some tumbleweeds?



• b) Weird West - Savage Ghostbusters: Ghostly gunslingers are shooting up a "Wild West" tourist attraction! It's up to the team to see who's the fastest draw (with a proton pack or slime-blower). Maybe have a ghostly cattle stampede, for giggles. (I just need a few glowing cows.) This might work for a Friday night game -- light on the plot, heavy on the spectacle.



• c) Wasted West - Savage Fallout: A group of scavengers rides an automated Nuka-Cola truck as it rolls right up to Dry Rock Gulch -- one of the parks at Nukaworld, near Boston, Massachusetts. It's a "wild west" town, except there are radioactive ghouls, ads for Nuka-Cola, and the "sheriff" is a Protectron with a cowboy hat. Oh, and there are these nasty worms that burrow around underground and pop up under-foot to chew on unsuspecting surface-dwellers.

That should give me something to start with. I think I have a few undead gunslingers, and plenty of folks with proton packs for the Savage Ghostbusters games, but I might need to do something for ghost-cows. For Savage Fallout, I should probably kitbash a cowboy hat on a Protectron, and paint up some "bloodworms" to pop up from underground, and print off some cardstock "Nuka-Cola" stand-ups to help decorate the scene. For the conventional wild west, I've got quite a few cowpokes and other wild-west denizens. (It might be nice if I could fashion a stagecoach, though.)

It's a start, at least.

Comments

[tuftears]

Are you set on Wild West? What about setting up a chunk of London-esque city? Maybe a park with buildings/shops on three sides, a river on the fourth, and various reasons why there might not be anything accessible outside the area.

Then your three scenarios become:

1. Midnight in Hyde Park - the players are Victorian-vintage investigators or people with various errands to perform around a park that's being stalked by a dread killer of some kind. Is the killer a mortal man or some dread experiment of science, or still worse, a thing of the night?

2. The Show Must Ghost On - a group of re-enactors have dug up what they claim to be a lost play of Shakespeare, and are determined to play it -- but after their first rehearsal is plagued by accidents and apparitions, they have called in the Ghostbusters! Can the Ghostbusters save their opening night or will it be a BUST?

3. Keep a Stiff Upper Lip Glued On - after the Bomb, the survivors of London meet up to do business and exchange the necessities of life... and vote for the next Mayor of London! Can the players get their candidate elected, or are they doomed to bomb?

Heh, oh, I see, you acquired a Wild West set. Well, maybe those will be relevant ideas anyway. :)

[rowyn]

Hee, the Wild West tourist attraction haunted sounds like fun! 😄

[jordangreywolf]

Plus, Ghostbusters would give me an excuse to be extra silly.

I'm imagining stuff like getting a few plastic cows from one of those "Toob" sets I can find in craft stores, using some putty, and making "ghost cows," then painting them in bright "ectoplasmic" colors. (One of the fun things about Ghostbusters is that it seems ghosts come in just about ANY color, so long as it looks like it's glowing under black light.) These ghosts go "MOO!" instead of "BOO!" And, in a way, those proton streams ARE rather like lassos, so we could do a bit of a supernatural round-up. Yee-haw!

[rowyn]

Yes! Ghostbusters are delightfully goofy. :D