Dragonmeet 2023 Convention Report!

Memory fails me - this was either my fourth or fifth time attending Dragonmeet, the UK’s largest RPG focussed gaming convention. If there was ever a reminder that the actual experience of the roleplaying game scene - in person, away from jaded ironic scrawls on computer screens or the sickly glow of pathetic social media beef seeping out of your phone – is a very different and far more reasonable and friendly world than the one on the internet, Dragonmeet is (mostly) it, so I’d been looking forward to this for a while.

I bucked my usual trend of waking up too late for gaming conventions and marched through the freezing morning to get an even earlier train than planned, and was soon inside the grim concrete and carpet edifice that is Hammersmith Novotel West, coffee in hand and half an hour earlier than I needed to be (8.30am). I visited the trade hall pre-opening hours to meet Dan, Other Dan and Shuyi at the Melsonia and Iglootree stalls where they were setting up shop.

Wares

This was to be my second iteration of the con under the aegis of Melsonian Arts Council. Last year I was in-situ with my drawing board and materials as I worked at inking in some artwork for Troika character backgrounds, which was simultaneously a good confidence building exercise and also furnished a perfect opportunity for minimising eye contact, but had the perhaps mixed blessing of feeling like I was at the convention for only about fifteen minutes because I was concentrating on drawing. This year I elected to simply bring some original artwork along for sale in a binder, picking from (hopefully) well known pieces such as Drigbolton, Old-School Essentials and Dolmenwood. In the event there were no sales (although I did shift several prints) but some of the better-known pieces were certainly a crowd puller and I had a couple of people contact me about future potential sales. A middle ground between actively drawing and displaying stuff should work better next year.

Assisting the guys at Melsonian Arts Council and Iglootree with some unboxing and ensconcing of merchandise, I had a very brief chat with Chris Bisette about the rebooted future of the ancient (no, older than that – no, older) RPG franchise <REDACTED> and how content made by its dedicated fanbase would fit into the terms of its new license. Vowing to come and investigate the new IP holder’s stall later for some answers (a vow I was to completely forget in the chaos the con), I realised I was late, and so quickly collected my materials and made my way to the day’s first major commitment – running Troika in the first booked RPG slot!

 

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse Play Report (0900-1300)

[!SPOILERS FOLLOW!]

Four hours of gaming incoming

First up, I was running the new Troika 1:5 adventure written and illustrated by yours truly, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. To up the ante for a convention game, I had set up a scoring system based on the number of pages the party was able to recover from The Manual of Operations, the arcane book of instructions to the Warehouse’s defunct transportation system. This may be the first time Troika has been run ‘tournament’ style! We should set up a leader board.

A Claviger, Monkeymonger, Necromancer and a Rhino-Man made up the party. Thwarted by the evil purple portcullis blocking the main entrance and its harmful resistance to Open spells, they decided to brave the Worm-Headed Hound tunnels leading beneath the warehouse itself. A quick and brutal fight with the squirmy dog-things meant a nasty mauling for the Rhino-Man, but skilful use of an improvised noisemaking trap by the Claviger scared off the beasts and allowed the party to delve into the urine soaked tunnels.

Emerging into the building proper, they encountered a dual-headed snake Cacogen of noble occult bearing and cut a deal with him to open some troublesome doors in return for a bundle of pages he had acquired. Giving the shifting Sphere Pool room a wide berth after witnessing the bizarre distance stretching properties it possessed and the weird machinery inside, they headed to the north through a room full of giantic spools of rope, and some deactivated-looking forklift automata.

"Waaah waaah the initiative system is so weird"

Another room contained a huge vat with a sparkly indigo puddle around it, dried to a magical looking crust. While some of the party took the time to eat some provisions and recover stamina, the Monkeymonger attempted to deduce the nature of this magical stain by lobbing one their more inferior monkeys onto it. A flash of light! A sudden forceful psychic assault on the mind Claviger! He made his Luck test successfully, but it was a near thing – a failed roll would have meant he’d swapped bodies with a 1 Stamina monkey. The unfortunate simian was fried to death by the magic.

Several more rooms were explored, including one so warped by the shifting energies of the building that the contents of its crates had achieved sentience over the centuries. The result of this chaotic magic? A pile of talking dried fish. A somewhat morally grey encounter occurred in which these tiny amiable delicacies were quizzed for information about the denizens of the warehouse (the rattling dusty creatures that lived to the north were described as carrying things ‘wrapped in paper’) and eventually, eaten for sustenance. Time was ticking on, lamp oil was running low, and still only a handful of pages had been discovered.

The scoring/reputation system

A room full of moisture draining black and yellow sponges floating amongst shattered wreckage was circumnavigated to discover some substantial rooms full of crated seeds. Investigation of a crack in the wall from which issued the very incongruous sounds of a battle in full progress was suddenly thwarted by an attack from two utterly bizarre monsters – Chaotic Spawnlets!

These horrors took the appearance of a gigantic crawling vulture’s head with eyes, ears and noses lining the inside of its beak, and a human torso atop a pair of skittering legs that ‘fired’ regenerating heads at range. This was a fairly frantic battle with the Monkeymonger managing to crawl up the legs of the skitterer and stab it in the torso multiple times, while the Claviger used his strength skill to haul crates into defensive positions and protect the vulnerable Necromancer. Skilled attacks from the Rhinoman aided the Monkeymonger and eventually the creatures were destroyed. An attempt by the Necromonger to reanimate one of them using the Posthumous Vitality spell unfortunately caused the corpse to explode instead, a very messy business.

Returning to the sounds of the battlefield through the crack, a battle between two sets of minute combats was seen, warriors no larger than a fingernail locked in mortal combat according to their allegiances – one side sporting red armour, the other green. Most importantly for the party, however, these armies had repurposed several pages as their battle standards! An unsuccessful attempt by the Necromancer to instigate a truce using his relationship counselling skill meant it was down to the Rhino-Man to wade in and snap off these standards to add the pages to their collection, though he took significant damage to his flanks from several tiny phalanxes of spearmen.

 

Worm-headed Hounds!

Passing back through the room of dessicating sponges, a final room was explored by the party - an area stocked with a collection of tusks taken from creatures of every shape and size. The place was inhabited by some loathsome Membroid Ghouls. A deadly combat atop the shelving units nearly made a nasty end for the Claviger as they were enveloped in a membrane and gnawed on, taking damage each time an initiative token was drawn. The Monkeymonger’s skill in climbing was used to advise the Rhino-Man of a safe route to the top of the rickety shelves to aid in the combat, and once the Claviger was freed, the remaining ghoul was hurled to its death off of the lofty shelves, down on to the sharp tusks littering the floor (previously set as a trap by the Claviger in a wise precaution). Amongst the foul creatures’ treasure – several Pocket Gods wrapped in pages from The Manual of Operations. At that, we called the game and tallied up the number of pages recovered.

The party’s reputation at the end of the adventure: PASSABLE NOVITIATES. Not bad!

Thanks to Will, Fifi, Damien and Axel for an excellent game! Everyone played their pregens to the utmost, creative play and use of skills, tactical thinking...everything you want in a con game!

Gratifyingly, the adventure has played out totally differently each time I have run it. Since non-linearity was a main design aim I think we can count this a success. Always lots of fun to bring old-school dungeon crawling procedure to Troika (complete with player mapping on graph paper). I hope this book inspires many others to get into location-based adventures for the game.

The adventure is now out in PDF and is currently a best seller on DTRPG for products under a fiver! The hardcopy books should be back from the printer soon.

 

Troika + Dungeon

 

Subsequently… (1300-1800)

After that, it was a matter of scarfing down a banana and a vile room temperature pre-purchased Tesco sandwich from my bag (Harissa and Roast Vegetables, essentially a salted sponge with a few extra calories), then availing myself from the dubious jar of mints provided by Hammersmith Novotel in their conference rooms before returning to the bustling trade hall to assist my Melsonian brethren.

The next few hours (between 1300-1800) are a bit of a blur, if I’m honest. Tons of delightful people came to meet us, and lots of old friends were spoken to.

However, one clear highlight did emerge – the opportunity to meet with Brit fantasy illustration legend, the almighty wizard Tony Hough!

If anyone is somehow unfamiliar with his work, this is the guy behind several iconic Games Workshop and latter day Fighting Fantasy art pieces (Genestealer Patriarch anyone?). His style somehow manages to encapsulate all of the murky grandeur of those old days, while still standing confidently unique, always pushing forward with his style and seamlessly incorporating modern technology. The man can depict everything from utter horror to whimsical madness, with crowd scenes a speciality. 

 Genestealer Patriarch by Tony Hough

Tony has done some work recently for MAC, as a result of his flyering the stall last year, when I sadly didn’t get a chance to meet him. This year, he was incredibly generous with his time and he tracked me down to show me a binder full of his original artwork. Trading tips and methods with old-school fantasy illustrators like this is such a help in combating the ever-persistent impostor syndrome and a hugely important part of these events for me. Favourite bit of advice from Tony? “Don’t show clients your thumbnail sketches, they don’t understand what they’re for and they’ll just start fucking saying things!”. What a guy! We’ve got a whole bunch of artwork in the chamber for some upcoming Troika books by him, and you’ll just have to trust me for now when I tell you they are incredible pieces of art.

Me and Tony just hangin' out

Some other fortuitous chats n’ meetings in the afternoon included Alfred Valley (yet another RPG person I hadn’t realised was a Londoner), Josh Blincow (author of the upcoming MAC adventure The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pludwick) who was lovely and so young-looking that I felt like a crumbling skeleton next to him, the always delightful Paolo of Lost Pages (Lasagna Con 2024 maybe!), JVC Parry and several others.

I also got a chance to meet the extremely friendly guys from Strange Attractor press, publishers of countercultural books, outsider art, weird music, occultism – a panoply of the esoteric and bizarre. Word is they’ll be organising some more RPG related stuff in future so keep a close eye. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to work with them soon.

 

After hours… (1800-2300)

One complaint I have each year is that the con tends to die down very quickly in gaming terms after 6pm – when the trade hall closes. My plan this year was to remedy this by running an off-grid one shot of Leo Hunt’s excellent science fantasy RPG Vaults of Vaarn, for which I had put in considerable prep for a toroidal 19 location pointcrawl (including a wedge of pregens), but alas it was not to be. Those potential players most interested – John and Stacey, organisers of Norwich Games Convention, Bruce Pennington Cunnington, and London RPG socialite Turran H all had reasons for not being able to play – a long drive home, lack of options to extend parking, and already being in their cups – not necessarily in that order. A quick game of Melee was mooted but in the end the decision was made to drink and nerd out instead.

Still, if I have a GM’s motto, it’s ‘Prep doesn’t have a use-by date’ so back into the folder this particular adventure (The Skewed Torus) goes, perhaps one to run for my family this Christmas, or simply as a one shot around one of London’s venerable boozers.

Somewhat pleasantly resigned, I settled in for a few hours of mildly bibulous socialising. Among the topics covered included X-Crawl, Lankhmar, funnels, weapon vs AC minutiae, inflated HP pools in Gamma World and its clones, vegan wrestlers, soil, dog skulls, buying books off people you think are a bit dodgy, the mummy vs mummified human remains terminology battle, Victorian bastards, lacquered dolphin skulls and much much more.

Special mention must be given to the delightful and hilarious company of the French translators of Troika, Pattern Recog Editions. The two gentlemen in question, Jack and Jean-Christoph, were sat in company with Frank (aka Mottokrosh) and Dave who publish the Hypertellurians RPG and we had a great time talking about Manowar disappointing French metalheads, Magma, French cinema, and dinosaur-related pornography. I’m not gonna explain that last one but it wasn’t my fault...

 Clockwise from left: Frank, Jean-Christophe, Me, Photobombing Barmaid, Dave, Jack

Each year, rumours circulate that this will be the last one in the airless chambers of Novotel West. We can only hope that this – or the next – will be the last one in these blasted halls. Not that it is difficult to get to, and it is clean and spacious, but the beer selection and bar service is, quite frankly, shite. When the bar was working ‘properly’ drinkers have the following bewildering selection on draught:

Stella Artois

Bud Light

Guinness

Orchard Pig Cider

Corona, of all things

I told you it was bad. Now, picture a scenario where you can not only wait 30 minutes to get served, but one in which every single one of those options barring Corona runs out. No, I would not like a stale lime slice in my pint of tasteless piss thank you barman. Still, good times were had despite the poor quality libations, and the evening passed by merrily.

Leaving the hotel around 2300 to grab some falafel (food of the gods) from the always friendly and stalwart Lebanese Taverna (which I actually will miss when/if the con moves location), I quickly consumed the enfolded fried chickpea snack en route to the station and headed home to chilly South East London.

So in summary, perhaps a more subdued Dragonmeet than last year, but a pleasant one as always. Next year I hope for some more prolonged gaming in the evening. Until then, see you all next time!