One experience I am fortunate enough to enjoy each year is to go down to Comic-Con in San Diego and immerse myself in all the sights, smells, colors, and costumes provided by that event. This year was no different and as usual I was able to snap lots of pictures of the myself alongside the various cosplayers who attend.
As an added bonus this year, I learned that Mario Torres was judging a session of Attack of the Frawgs being played nearby at Gam3rCon which was taking place that same weekend. I purchased a ticket for myself and my faithful Comic-Con companion Jim Graziano so that I could watch, and he could play!
I arrived around 6pm and due to a mix up in scheduling was able to enjoy some of the other offerings of the con including an art exhibit and a one-woman show entitled I Wish My Life Was an RPG performed by the talented Ashphord Jacoway. (I’m always impressed by people who can pull off a one-person play, and this performance was no exception… if you can catch it in your town I advise you check it out.) Once the play ended at 7pm, I picked up some snacks at the rooftop game area/stage/snack bar and headed into the bunker for some funnel goodness.
Game time
At 7pm the player’s assembled. The party consisted of:
- Mario Torres Jr aka Hrevelax on the DCC Forum boards (Judge)
- Jim Graziano (my buddy)
- Nate
- Bill Meyer
- Ron (aka R.S. Tilton on Google Plus)
- Cleo (who joined the game a couple of mins late, but early enough to have one of her funnel characters be the first one to perish in Frawgs.)
About the Game
Judge Mario did a good job preparing for the session. He arrived with a printed copy of Frawgs and several gaming aids : multi-colored tokens that would represent each funnel character… this was handy as each yellow token would represent the “yellow” player, etc. He also brought these “table tent name cards” similar to the ones that Joseph Goodman had at PacificCon last year, but these had a spot for each PC name along with each real person name. Finally, he had printed out several People Them With Monster’s DCC Reference Sheets and a pile of funnel characters (surprisingly enough not generated from Purple Sorcerer’s DCC party generator.) Aside it from being noisy as balls in the open gaming session (we eventually got to move into a quieter room which helped tremendously) everyone got off to a rousing start.
Watching The Game
I have to say, watching someone else DM your game is always an experience I recommend it heartily or any other authors out there. It’s always fun to see how DM’s make the story their own, and Judge Mario did a great job there. He kept the story flowing well and kept all of the gamer’s engaged. Towards the end of the game we’d actually lost 2 players due to the hour and I ended up taking over their characters. That was a really interesting experience: being a player for a module I wrote being DM’d by another.
Final Thoughts
I believe the game started with about 16 PCs between 5 players, and ended with about 7 PCs between 4 players (myself included at the end…) Some of the fatal highlights [spoilers ahead if you haven’t read/played Frawgs…]:
- Cleo’s PC barely surviving a gicastor (giant beaver/bear creature) trap, only be killed when player tries to pry trap off her leg and fails having it snap back down on her
- Nate’s “Red Hat” PC: having his head bitten off by an aforementioned gicastor later on after literally falling into its lair
- Bill’s “Mzrin” PC: having a character shredded alive trying to cross the gicastor dam (as a herder, he also lost his sheep in the process)
- “Blackwell the Gongfarmer” (and as anyone who’s played the funnel knows, it’s not a party until a gong farmer arrives) killed trying to scale a waterfall
- Ron’s “Bub” and Bill’s “Pando”, killed during the epic finale fighting off the dreaded frawgs
All in all, I think everyone had a really fun time. Judge Mario gave away the typical DCC RPG Road Crew swag of pencils and stickers. I was able to give away a couple print copies of Frawgs that I’d brought with me. I’m really looking forward to playing at the convention next year, and actually getting off my butt and DM’ing a few sessions of my own at the local San Jose conventions 🙂