In my area, there is a mini-convention called FAT MAGE, which stands for Friday After Thanksgiving Miniatures and Gaming Expo.  It usually gets a decent turnout, maybe fifty people or so at any given time.  There’s a few local vendors selling items like used games and 3D-printed items.  Last year I got kind of burned running games there because I ran my first game, Prowlers and Paragons, but no one showed up for my second game and by the time I realized no one was coming it was too late to join another game as a player.  That left me gaming out and ending up playing a board game with *another* GM who ended up having no one show up.

The thing to realize about the convention is that Dungeons & Dragons is king.  Everyone running those games are packed with players to the point they are turning people away.  Call of Cthulhu is second.  There is no third–you’re scraping for players for anything else.

Which is why I was wary when I agreed to run games again, and the organizer again asked me to run something different.  I told him I would consider running Traveller or something else.  I picked Traveller because my old gaming group in Ohio runs a variant of Traveller and I had been thinking about how much I might like to try to run something in the sci-fi genre.  But I was also thinking about Troubleshooters or Scum and Villany or Marvel Multiverse RPG.

Which is why I was a little confused when the organizer, Colin, contacted me asking if I was still running something and when I asked what other people were running he said, “you’re running Traveller, aren’t you?”

Which is weird, because I thought I hadn’t committed to that, but maybe he misunderstood.  So I agreed and put together a “haunted house” scenario that was a little trope-heavy but one-shot convention games are good for that because you don’t have the time to get people up to speed.  I even put together audio bits, background music, etc. for the game.

So when I got there and no one signed up, I was disappointed.  Moreover the confusion I experienced earlier was explained when it turns out there was another guy with the same first name who also committed to running Traveller so now there are two Traveller games happening at the same time.  And he had two players and I had two, so I decided that we should combine efforts and I would play in his game in the morning with my players (bringing it up to five) and I would run an afternoon session that he and his players would play in and hopefully we would have two games to happen.

I won’t get into the morning session too much; he admitted that he was just making it up as he went along, and brought like twenty pre-gens, many of whom had little to offer the scenario.  But it was a gaming session, we all laughed and had fun, and that’s all that matters.

The downside was that three of the players in the first game went elsewhere in the afternoon session, so I had two people in mine.  I ended up pressganging the organizer himself into playing (I’m not above guilting people) to be a third player.  I actually had a great time running a sci-fi horror/suspense game because it was so different from what I normally do.

The guy who did sign up for my game in the morning had played in the game I ran last year, and wanted to see me as a GM again, which was very flattering.  He also hinted heavily that he was looking for a regular game, and while my current home game is pretty locked, I have been considering running a second and if so, would definitely invite him.

Will I run another session at FAT MAGE again?  Probably, but it is going to be hard not to run either D&D or something D&D adjacent like Daggerheart.  I didn’t like putting a lot of my precious into something and then literally begging people to play in the game.

Thanks for reading.  More to come!