Chaosium Con, Australia 2024

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of attending Chaosium Con, in Melbourne Australia.

From the Chaosium mailing list, you can see me in front of the pillar, with steepled hands, playing Call of Cthulhu.

As I did not know anyone there at the start of the weekend, I was very happy that everyone I met was very friendly. Having the opportunity to get an evening meal with other con attendees at a nearby restaurant was also good. With 100-150 attendees, it was a nice intimate convention.

As the forever GM for my group, I was happy to play three games over the weekend. One of Call of Cthulhu, playing a scenario in Peru at the start of the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. There my reward for tactical acumen in blocking an exit meant I got pummeled both by the villain of the encounter, and by the PC who went mad during the encounter. I also played my first game of Pendragon, focused on events surrounding Arthur drawing the sword from the stone. I quite enjoyed how the GM portrayed Merlin as someone possessed of impeccable timing and sang froid. The third game was a Runequest scenario. This featured a cattle raid, or at least a search for lost cattle. It also illustrated that sometimes you are the hero and sometimes you are the redshirt. When attacked at night by what turned out to be a pair of large sabre toothed cats, I chose to put my armour on, rather than attack a creature that had three attacks doing 2d6 damage each, and it was all over by the time I had the armour on.

Chaosium News

I took a few notes at the seminar for what Chaosium is planning for the near future:

• Pendragon: The Grey Knight campaign for Pendragon will have a bridging scenario to the campaign in the Pendragon Starter set. Pendragon will be getting its own community content programme, the “Companions of Arthur”.
• Runequest: Solar book should be next, and then it would be nice to have Cults of Terror out in October. A new subline for Runequest, “lands of Runequest”, with the first volume focused on Dragon Pass.
• Cthulhu by Gaslight 7E: This will be a stand alone edition (ie you will not need the CoC 7E books to play). One change for this edition is to make lower social class PCs viable as investigators by enabling them to exploit their “invisibility” to upper class characters. The edition will cover more than London. There will be a reputation mechanic, but not as central as in Regency. The book will be hard cover, new colour maps, and have house plans for typical buildings of the era.
• 50th Anniversary of Chaosium: this is next year, and Chaosium is hoping to publish some 50th Anniversary editions, and reprints of White Bear, Red Moon / Dragon Pass, and Credo were mentioned.
• GENCON: Chaosium are planning their own dedicated games room, decorated with the theme of New Year’s Eve 1924.
• Call of Cthulhu: Order of the Stone will feature three scenarios involving Irish druids, high seas danger, and New England, with a uniting macguffin of three urns that hold something of interest. Chaosium hope this will be released in October. No Time to Scream will have three short scenarios designed around one to two hours of playing time.
• PAX AUS: There will be a Chaosium booth, lots planned (but dependent on shipping).
• Broad Hints were dropped about some things that might happen, including a campaign for Cthulhu by Gaslight, a supplement/adventure for regency, and a campaign for Call of Cthulhu set in ‘modern’ Japan (in the 1980s).
• Maps are a big chokepoint for Chaosium products.
• Rivers of London: aka “Cthulhu with hope” will continue to be supported. Chaosium hope to publish a USA supplement. No community content programme for this however, too many issues with IP and potential film/TV deals.
• BRP Design Challenge: I asked a question about how well this had gone, and whether it might happen again. Chaosium’s initial goal was that 50 entries would be a very good result, and the final total of 195 entries was fantastic – lots of good ideas in the various submissions. There will be a public vote on a short list, with the winners being announced at GENCON. Chaosium might do this again the future.

Long Form Campaigns

This was the subject of a seminar by Andrew Montgomery, with a lot of participation by the audience.

• Long form campaigns have different rewards and challenges for players and GM.
• Long campaigns are more of a ‘marriage’ than a ‘one night stand’. More commitment is required for the long campaign.
• System choice matters – some game systems are better suited for long campaigns. Basic Roleplaying is good for long term progression, but also has comparatively fragile characters (my current campaign features PC HP in the range of 20-30 HP, while weapon damage remains in the d6 to d12 range).
• The potential risk of character death or TPK means that part of the campaign commitment is a commitment to the story rather than the character. Pendragon has its explicit legacy system, with generational play leading to heirs replacing your original character. In a campaign where fataltiies are expected (eg Masks of Nyarlathotep) you should occasionally ask yourself the question “who is my next PC?”
• The long campaign is more about the world, and not about a specific group of PCs. The world will progress and evolve.
• Concept of the episode (from Prince Valiant), it is not a scenario, it is a one page encounter or scene. A building block for a larger session of play. Keep a notebook of episodes that can be pulled out as needed.
• Tight linear story paths tend to break (one of my personal disappointments with most of the 5E adventure paths I have purchased is how linear they were for the first 10 levels of the campaign, branches only happened close to the endgame of the book in order to keep the number of choices the players get to pick between to a small number).
• Clarity of game schedule is important for making sure games happen (for a long time I got away with “once every two weeks”, but in recent years I have had a lot of travel for work and its become more “any weekend we can get four players + GM”).
• Campaign structures that facilitate drop-in players can help (so systems where you can roll a new PC in ten minutes are good).
• Character arcs should have growth and change (not just bigger numbers).
• Character retirement should be possible.
• Troupe play is another option – multiple characters per player (some extended discussion on Ars Magica, but Deepnight Revelation is a Traveller campaign where troupe play is probably the best way to do it).
• Mechanics can kill campaigns – anything where the complexity increases over time increases the effort required by players and also the load on the GM (lots of discussion about high level D&D campaigns and GM burn out, I know I would struggle to run a 5E game above level 5).
• When does the GM break the rules for the PCs?
• Rotate the GM, Encourage power sharing, collaboration, share the work of laying track for the campaign with the players – incorporate player suggestions into the campaign.
• Some discussion of collaboration tools such as google docs
• One audience suggestion to keep combat to three rounds.

My shopping was curtailed by news of a leak in the basement at home. I thought I would be getting a broad range of stuff, but mostly I picked up a swathe of print on demand community content titles for RQ.

The post con survey mentioned the possibility of the Home of the Bold freeform being run if Chaosium Con is run again in Melbourne next year. It was also good to catch up with family while I was there. My half-brother has started playing D&D, but is interested in other systems, so I will try and bring him along if I can attend in 2025.