NTRPGCon 2024 – My Second and Likely Final

I’ve just returned from my second ever NTRPGCon! This year ended up being quite the mixed bag for reasons I’ll get into, but I do want to say that every game was well run and every GM I had put forth tremendous effort. The games themselves can tell the story better than I can, so I’ll just jump right into it.

Swords & Wizardry – GM Matt Finch

I was lucky to get into one of Matt Finch’s S&W games this time around, and it was an absolute blast. I would expect nothing less since he’s the creator of the game, but it definitely went above my expectation.

We delved into an underground cave system and spent our time poking around various hallways looking for the quickest way down. After some time, we came to an underground goblin encampment and bartered for safe passage only to find ourselves descending toward a series of interdimensional doors that lead to various locations.

Eventually we settled on the third door we encountered (the first to being what sounded like a dragon and a portal to the feywild) and barreled right into an encounter with nine ghouls. The combat was long and brutal, but thanks to our two clerics we were able to just barely squeak out a win. As the party’s thief I was also the MVP when it came to huffing poison gas traps, but thanks to some last-minute healing I was able to make it to the end alive.

Matt was a very fun GM and was extremely generous with his time after the game, signing our books and chatting with us.

DCC: By Mitra’s Bones, Meet Thy Doom

I ran this game! It was my second time running it and my entire table was made up of first time NTRPGCon attendees. Like many repeat games the players this time around chose a very different path than my previous group, which let me explore the side of the module that went neglected when I originally ran it.

I did do both groups a bit of a disservice though. This module states in the opening pages that it’s really two sessions worth of material, but I had already scheduled both games (the one before the con and the one at the con) before I found that bit of information. So, a little on-the-fly reworking of things to save time and speed things along was necessary.

In the end this group found themselves facing off against Geb, the Father of Snakes. In the final few moments, they hatched a desperate scheme to collapse a load-bearing column in the room to crush Geb and bury themselves alongside, but the column wasn’t quite enough to bring down the chamber.

Thankfully their wizard, back at the entrance, was in the final throes of betraying them and casting a spell to destroy them and join the ranks of the dark god Set. Unfortunately for the Wizard his spell misfired at that moment, generating an explosion that collapsed the opposite pillar from the one they had destroyed. This was enough to bring the chamber down, crushing both friend and foe alike. Despite being a TPK, it still felt like a victory for everyone involved and made for quite the cinematic moment.

TMNT: Mutant Mayhem – GM Je shields

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this game. It listed the ruleset as a modified version of Marvel Super Heroes (1984), which I’ve never even read. We arrived to find an entire city block diorama painstakingly built out in miniature by hand. Our GM gave us our character sheets along with handmade turtle masks and plastic weapon props to set the mood. He even thought to give each of us a list of TMNT vocabulary for anyone unfamiliar with how to throw around a nascent “Cowabunga!” With that scene set I was excited to get roleplaying.

The rules explanation just kind of rolled off me. The system was extremely tactical and included cross-referencing chart systems and hit location dice for every attack. Definitely not the kind of game I normally go in for. But our GM was excited, and he kept things rolling right along and was very helpful with rules questions.

Strangely enough as the game rolled on we slowly discovered that outside of the GM, myself, and my friend our remaining three players had zero familiarity with TMNT. They seemed to have shown up on the promise of the Marvel Super Heroes rule system, and a lot of very basic TMNT related information had to be laid down for them including who virtually all of the characters were. It wasn’t exactly upsetting, but it did feel a little odd having over half the players not know who Leonardo or Splinter were. It took a little bit of momentum from the game.

The game itself unfolded with us tracking stolen goods across the city and encountering Krang, Bebop, Rocksteady, and Shredder himself. But it was nearly four solid hours of almost nothing but end-to-end tactical on-grid miniature combat, which just isn’t my favorite way to play RPGs. The GM did a beautiful job building a TMNT diorama fit for a window display, but I was hoping for a bit more on the roleplaying front.

Hyperborea: Citadel of Ukaz – GM Zach

Note: Will’s name has been changed to maintain his anonymity. I might not have enjoyed being around him, but he doesn’t deserve some random dude calling him out on the internet.

I was very excited for this game. Hyperborea is not the kind of game that I generally go in for with its hefty, crunchy rules system. But I ended up in one of Zach’s games last year and had a blast, so I was eager to repeat the process this time around.

The adventure itself had a fun twist: we were actually two different parties of adventurers, one good and one evil. We met up at the location in question with the same goal of procuring a long-dead wizard’s magical goods, but with very different motivations.

The game itself was also run in a private board room, complete with a bathroom, leather chairs, and refreshments. I was getting very excited waiting for things to start.

It’s worth stopping for a moment and saying that I really, really don’t like singling out players for bad behavior. Conventions are long, many of us don’t sleep well in hotel rooms, and often when we encounter each other it’s after many, many hours of brain-burning game sessions. I try to be kind and understanding when someone is a bit strange or snippy at the table. It’s okay to have a bad day. But Will was a lot more than just a bad day.

Will arrived with his two kids and sat down to play. He was definitely a pretty loud presence in our little private room, but I can also get a little loud myself. But when we started playing Will began quarterbacking the game, ordering people around, and shaking his dice over his head before slamming them full force into his wooden dice tower. Throughout the game he proceeded to correct, challenge, and whine at the GM about things like not strictly adhering to the rules or a D20 touching his soda can needing to be invalidated as a roll. At one point he complained that the GM’s dry erase drawing of the dungeon wasn’t accurate enough to the space it was meant to represent and told him “if you drew it that way it should be that way!”

But, again, we all have bad days. It was an 8am game, maybe Will hadn’t had his coffee. Maybe he slept bad the night before.

By the mid-point I had noticed that any time his children tried to speak at the table he would interrupt them to repeat the information they were conveying to the GM. The strange part was that we could hear them fine, and they were playing great. There was no need to be constantly re-stating everything. But, to each their own. These are Will’s kids and far be it from me to ever imply how he should act in their presence.

When we tried to descend deeper in the dungeon I asked if we could go explore a suspicious bronze door before going down. Will interrupted the whole game to lecture me at length about how this is a convention game and we don’t have time to explore every door, how the point was to get as deep as possible as fast as possible.

Very well, down we went. Despite all this, Zach still ran the game masterfully. He’s a great GM that knows his stuff and the dungeon was a wonderful mix of sci-fi and fantasy. We wormed our way down to the bottom of the complex before coming to a massive room with no other exits. I checked my watch: exactly one hour left, this must be our final encounter! The room was a massive dome lined with coffins, one of which had a series of tubes and cables running down into it.

Then Will stopped the game. He roped in the next oldest player at the table, and they started hatching a lengthy plan to use a fly potion to cut the tubes and cable leading to the primary coffin. Every single detail and angle was being accounted for. I checked my watch: it had been six minutes since Will began hatching his plan. No one was allowed to enter until it was complete.

Finally, impatient, I said that we had less than an hour left and this is clearly the final room and stepped in. Will loudly insisted that I do not, but I was done waiting on him. If ghouls ripped me apart it would be my own fault and they could simply shut the metal door.

When I entered nothing happened. No alarms or tripwires. Two more followed while Will continued with his plan and we started looking around, careful not to touch anything.

Will was furious. He started shouting at the next oldest person at the table that he was planning with and pointed at me, yelling “Well you better figure out what you’re going to do in one minute or else he’s going to ruin it!” A little extreme, nothing had happened.

Will’s plan sprung into action. His partner flew in the room and started cutting wires and tubes. It instantly set off the alarm and wights sprung forth from the coffins. The final battle ensued and despite Will’s temper we triumphed. Not even a single player death!

At the end of the game, I asked what was behind the bronze door. It was an alchemy room, full of various types of useful potions.

Needless to say, that while Zach ran a wonderful game and everyone else at the table was a great player, Will spoiled the experience a bit for me. Right at the end of the game we learned that our next game was cancelled.

Cy_Borg – GM Andrew

Note: Jack’s name is also altered for aforementioned reasons.

Andrew and I went to the counter to try to register a game for our now-empty slot and after being interrupted multiple times by people shoving their way in front of us to simply chat with Jack (one of the con’s main organizers) we asked if there was a free space to post our game in. Andrew had come wanting to run Cy_Borg and this seemed like a great time for it.

Jack looked up and simply said “no.” Then paused a moment and said he’d look. He found Sunnyside Table 3 and said we could have it anytime after 4pm. Great, we ate lunch, posted the game, and went to sit down at 4pm.

Another group was in our scheduled table, so I asked when they ended. They told me that they were supposed to be at Table 1 but they went to Table 3 (our table) by mistake. No worries, we could take the table they were supposed to be at and everything would equal out.

So we set up. Myself, Andrew, and our friend Luke who flew in from Maryland to meet us at the convention. It was just the three of us but before long we were well into the game and laughing ourselves to tears. I thought this was the turning point, the moment when things get back on track after a lackluster TMNT game and the Will Incident.

Two hours into the game Jack wandered in and asked us if we were supposed to be there. We explained the table swap situation and that we had the game scheduled. We were asked to vacate with the game half over because he had “a thing.” On the way out of that section of the hotel we saw several empty tables that we had to pass by to get back out to the main walkway. I’m still not sure why we had to be cut short. We decided to wait until the famous NTRPGCon midnight auction instead of trying to restart the whole process.

The Auction

The midnight auction at NTRPGCon is mostly a group of longtime friends making in-jokes and auctioning off silly items like AOL discs and poor condition RPG items with fake signatures. It’s played for a laugh and it’s a good time. But front and center and central to many of the jokes at the auction was none other than Will himself. I learned that he’s not just an RPG fan that likes to powerslam dice into his dice tower, he’s a central figure at the convention and in the hobby.

I tried to enjoy the rest of the auction but the one-two punch of having to deal with Will, having our game cut short, and having to stay up to midnight for it was just too much to bear. I cut out before the finale.

The next day we simply woke up, packed our things, and left. We had one game scheduled, but the wind had been taken out of our sails and I just wanted to go home. Over dinner we were trying to figure out why this year felt like such a letdown in the second half, and the only conclusion that we could come to is that last year we had zero interaction with any of the NTRPGCon “inner circle” people. This year we had multiple interactions, and Andrew played a game with several of them that was also a bit of a turn off for him.

I’ve been told before that NTRPGCon is insular and cliquish, but that simply wasn’t my experience last year. And, perhaps, this year we just caught people at bad times and had a string of chance encounters. A conflicting sample size of two doesn’t exactly make for compelling data. But, with all that said, I think next year I’ll be swapping NTRPG out with a different convention in the same timeframe.

Alternatively I might simply hit a single day for more of Matt or Zach’s games and then go home after a trip the vendor hall. I want this to be a big four-day blowout for me and my friends that we could plan for every year, but, honestly, I just felt a bit unwelcome after the events of this year.