1999 Con of the North Report

Con of the North is a small (400-500-person) convention run by a group of volunteers in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. I've been one of those volunteers since the first Con of the North (CotN) in 1992. I've also played in and run some great games there. I've been on the Board of Directors twice: once as head of Programming and once as head of Operations. This year, I was just an ordinary volunteer. I'd helped with mailings and so forth before the convention and planned to volunteer onsite as well.

We were at a new site this year, the Ramada at I-94 and White Bear Lake Road, but I had no trouble seeing it from the highway. I arrived too late to help the Operations committee to set up the registration area, so I put up signs, which gave me a chance to look around the hotel. We had much of the first floor, both large function rooms and individual hotel rooms and suites, which was all stretched along a single winding corridor and a few rooms on other floors. I ran into several people I now only see at conventions, either because they've moved away from the Twin Cities or because they're ordinarily too busy to game. I also looked at the areas being set up for various kinds of games: miniatures, card tournaments, role-playing, computers, and live-action role-playing.

After the signs went up, I checked out the vendors. Mostly it was Magic cards and board games, but there were a couple of people doing Tarot readings and selling tambourines, and John Nephew of Atlas Games had some stuff he was remaindering for $5 a volume. He'd been planning on selling Vampire: the Masquerade rulebooks (1st edition softcovers) to the Russians back when it looked like they'd develop a consumer economy (or any economy, for that matter). So I picked up one of those, a Cyberpunk supplement, and a couple of Ars Magica supplements.

Registration started to get busy at that point, so I went down there to hand out tickets (only for game sign-up; CotN is too little to get away with charging for games) and answer questions. The RPGA had turned out in force, and some of their members wouldn't try other events once RPGA games had filled up. Once the 8 PM games started, things quieted down and I fled the registration desk for the volunteer party. The inimitable Jeff Tidball and Peter Hentges were presiding over the sodas and chips. After a snack, I wandered over to the Midi-Maze room. Jim Beecher had networked twelve Atari computers together by their midi ports (actually more, but only twelve worked at any given time). He then put on a big hat and set up a game on the network that involved each player being a happy face that hunted the happy faces of other players through a 3-D maze and shot them. I got roped into a tournament and got whomped.

I ended up going home to sleep but I was back by 7:45 the next morning because I wanted to play in an Amber game that Linda Duncan had recommended to me. It was just as well because when I got there, a bunch of distressed gamers were huddled around the registration desk. The cashbox and pre-registration list had been taken away and there wasn't a volunteer in sight. So, I called the Director of Operations, told him what was going on, and got permission to hand out tickets. So I had gamers filling out registration forms and handed out tickets for 8 AM games as fast as I could. Another volunteer noticed the situation and hurried over, which made it possible for me to make it over to my 8 AM game.

The Amber game, "Uncle Fox Returns" run by Jim Holthaus, was a long one, but lots of fun. The other players were all people I knew and good fun. Most of the characters we came up with were self-centered kids who refused to take things seriously at first. But the plot started off as an intriguing mystery and became suspenseful. Eventually, we were all involved. But the big room full of role-players that we were in became very noisy toward the middle of the game (especially once Mike Miller's Paranoia game got going). So we went and talked to the folks at the registration desk and they assigned us one of the hotel rooms to finish the games in. I'll definitely have to go back for the sequel next year.

After eight hours of role-playing, I was pretty frazzled. The hotel's concession stand was pretty affordable (except the soda, which they reduced in price by Sunday). So I ate a slice of pizza and wandered around. The other computer room had a PC network and people were playing Quake, Starcraft, and Age of Empires. I took pictures of all the cute volunteer babies at the Con (there were three). Dave Ackerman showed me his sketches of the very cute animal-people player characters for his game that evening, which I decided to play in. I also took pictures of the incredible Victorian costumes and spiffy masks of the players in Elizabeth Sloan and Gerald Dagel's Castle Faulkenstein Royal Masked Ball.

Dave's game "Nor Snow, Nor Dark of Night" was a GURPS fantasy game with lots of combat and only a single human character (played by my friend Albert Choy) in the whole game. I also got to game with Roadkill, who's a wonderful role-player and thoroughly in his element as a minotaur officer. We had lots of fun clobbering aboriginal wolf-people and finally coming up with a peace treaty (although Roadkill deserves the credit for that one). My character was an otter inventor who had a napalm-dispensing hopping robot that was a great help to us. It set a forest on fire during a night ambush by wolf-people that allowed us to see the wolf people and shoot them full of crossbow quarrels. Unfortunately, we were blind-tired by midnight, so we really weren't as scary as we could have been.

I was back at Con of the North before 9 AM on Sunday. It occurred to me that though our GOH Ken Hite's games had all filled up in pre-registration, people often didn't bother to turn up for Sunday morning games. So I recruited Roger Streeter, a terrific role-player and a friend I see too little of, for Ken's Alternate Earth's game and wandered over myself. I'd enjoyed the GURPS Alternate Earths that Craig Neumeier had run for RPSIG, our gaming club. Ken's scenario followed much the same plan. The PCs were a team of operatives dispatched from a more advanced version of our Earth who were sent to alternate realities to make sure that they couldn't travel to ours and do it harm (purely defensive, I assure you!). Instead of the GURPS rules set, Ken used Chaosium Lite, and his PC operatives were a somewhat harder-edged bunch than Craig generally had us play: good practice for the afternoon game as it turned out. We were sent to a nasty little world that had never developed democracy, and only in the 1980s were monarchic nationalism and mercantilism beginning to crumble. Roger didn't get to hijack a zeppelin until the very end.

I wandered about and socialized for a couple more hours, then turned up to Nate Nolan's Feng Shui game, "Maximum Impact Force". The PCs were a bunch of maverick cops and ex-cops out for justice at any price, a là the tackiest Hong Kong action film you can think of. There were loads of wacky stunts and police brutality. Nate is just the guy to run Feng Shui because he knows exactly how much slack to give the role-players and when to push them. At one point, we were questioning some captured bad guys in an interrogation room at a Hong Kong police station. They were clawing at the one-way mirror shrieking: "Somebody heelllp us!" By the time we had defeated the master villain, Operations had already dismantled everything and it was time to go home.