Gencon 2025 Recap: Pickup Games

I ran two pickup games at Gencon 2025 for some friends. One was a familiar game and scenario, one I had never run before.

Gencon 2025 Recap: Scheduled Games

My Disco Elysium outfit. I promised #monumenthobbies I'd post this to my socials in exchange for a bottle of their Gencon jungle juice paint
 

Rapid fire play reports from my Gencon 2025 games. The scheduled games were reruns of old mellonbread adventures, so I'll just post what happened without digging deep into the context. Click through the links to get the full story about the scenarios.

(I'll do a little editorializing after each one).

 

mellonbread reviews Shotguns vs Cthulhu

Shotguns Vs Cthulhu is a 2012 short story collection by Pelgrane Press, full of pulp action stories where humans fight supernatural forces. I won't be providing full plot summaries because I believe reviews like this are only fun for people who have already read the story.

Bonus Cleric Post: The Black Mariahs

Hutter

They looked ridiculous at a dead run. Sexless yet sensual with protective codpieces and pigeon breasted armor and thighs enormous from carrying it up endless flights of stairs and ramps and cornices. The crowd parted before them. Nobody wanted to get within arm's reach. Even brushing against them was enough to sever fingers, break bones, shave skin off muscle. Their falling bevors were peeled down so they could breathe easy as they ran and one of them had no lips and drooled steam through the gap in their perfect teeth. 

The largest one had no weapon and carried a dented shield painted with a woman embracing a barbed devil with the text HELL CAN'T BURN ME MORE THAN THIS encircling the act. The smallest wore a quilted jacket and had a carrion crawler wrapped around their shoulders like a stole. The bug held on tight with its tarsal claws but resisted the instinct to luxuriantly stroke the exposed mouth with its fluttering tentacles. To kiss and then to feed.

The middle one carried a gun. The inside of the barrel glowed, lit blue and purple by the charge rammed down the wide mouthed bore. An explosion already in progress held back only by the thin layer of sealing wax that kept the bullets from falling out.
 
Ahead of them was the terrace. The urban canyon that separated the Company neighborhoods from the wafer-thin alleys of red lit Elftown on the other side. The big one casually bundled the others into their arms without slowing. They both reached behind the giant's neck and held on to the dragstrap protruding between the gorget and backplate like a tongue of black leather. The brute pushed off with a single foot that left a cracked footprint in the yellow stone.

The moment held suspended in the air was a perk of the job, equivalent or better than the sex and potions and winning fights and the embrace of the Flesh God who drank the pain like water. To feel protected by armor and the thick body of the fighter. To fly. Over the Mulch at the bottom of the swale to the narrow balcony on the other side. Stumbling down the chute to another room that smelled like blood. Bathing, drowning in the heat and sweat of love.

Riverboat Gambler: Baradye the Blue

The edge of the old crater formed a ridgeline steep enough on both sides that the night creatures couldn't climb it. Norte sat on the edge and kicked his legs and watched the monsters crawl over each over like waves lapping at a cliff. They crawled and climbed and often managed to get a third or even halfway up the slope before the unliving pyramid collapsed and sent them all tumbling back into the pit.

He liked to imagine what the corpses did when there were no people for them to slaver at. If they rose out of the sand and stood and stared at the moons until the sun came up again. Perhaps they lived in ordered societies and spoke intelligibly to one another when nobody living was around to listen. He was a Man of the Forest by birth but he was first of his family to leave the path of flower and beast and tree. First to sail in a boat and shoot a gun and use coins dug up from the burning sands to purchase goods. It occurred to him that his father may have been correct regarding man and whether he was patient or plague. That here he was the interloper and the carpet of undead, however unnatural they might seem, were the rightful stewards of the place. 

Two shooting stars flashed before Norte's gaze. The air above the Plain was thick with them. Comets or ships in the void or celestial conflicts between elementals and the things that lurked outside the envelope of air that cushioned the world. The sparks flashed again, closer this time, a blue that hurt his eyes in the dark. Without taking his eyes off the spot he swept his hand across the snaplock of the long gun cradled across his knees. The sound, he hoped, would wake the others without the need to individually clout them to attention or hiss directions. 

Then she spoke to him.

Riverboat Gambler: Settlement Gazetteer

I wrote a bunch of desert tombs full of monsters who prey on the colonists swarming across the narrow habitable band of Hogman's Plain. Here's a basic taxonomy of colonies for them to attack. We can combine them with the river generator from Magical Industrial Gunboats to create the map.

Minidungeon: The Unquiet Tomb

In the distance, shimmering in heat haze so thick they may have been a mere illusion, a lounge of bright white lizards skated across the Plain. Their skin regulated the diffusion of heat and moisture, allowing the particles only to move one way and thereby letting them control their internal temperature in the lethal heat. By day they jogged across the dunes, legs thrashing like pistons driven by the strange energy of glowing crystals. By moonlight they climbed rock formations to sleep out of reach of the night creatures, and it was not uncommon for travelers on the plain seeking similar shelter to surprise such lizards and send them leaping out of rock fissures at top speed. Like the corpse leaping from the grave as the necromancer cast his staff in, soul returned to the place it once called home but thinking only of ruin and the necessity of flight.

The green men who called the Plain home showed the first adventurers how the skin of such a creature could be made into a heavy cloak that would protect the wearer from the heat, or a half-shelter or a tent to rest inside during the day. The adventurers built vast reeking meatcamps and slaughtered the lizards in the thousands to make garments that would permit their further expansion into the deserts of the frontier. The camps tinted the river red and blue and iridescent shades as the menu of creatures disassembled for parts expanded and the effluent from that biological pillage flowed ankle then knee deep. 

Coxinha stomped toward the jagged cliffs at the edge of the plain, wrapped in such a cloak. Her eyes were shielded by protective goggles made from the eyecaps of a Rhagodessa and smeared with a thin layer of smoke colored oil to dim the sun and stop them fogging. The cloak was wrapped around her face below the goggles to stop the superheated air from scorching her lungs. It cooled the air but the feeling of suffocation went nowhere. Slow death in a jar. A capsule confined to the airless void of space.

She couldn't see the ranger up ahead. His cloak was bright white like hers but never seemed to shimmer. Never gave up his position. Ahead of where she thought he was, the entrance. Low tide in the desert pulled the dunes away from the mouth of the cave. A tunnel without ornament but clearly artificial. Unplundered.

Unknown Armies: A Bed of Roses Playtest 3

The year was 1521. The place was Tenochtitlan, head of the Triple Alliance of the Aztec Empire. The island-city had just been conquered following a ninety day siege by a coalition of Spanish Conquistadors and their Nahua-speaking allies from neighboring city-states. Weakened by starvation and smallpox, the surviving Mexica were at the mercy of their conquerors’ insatiable lust for gold. 

Emmanuel Leutze

In a Pochteca Guild Hall, three merchants were confined to a storeroom amid sacks of cocoa beans and bolts of cotton cloth - the majority of the Guild’s liquid wealth, which the Spaniards had no interest in.

• Jumping Spider, Merchant and luxury goods trader 
• Two Legs, Merchant and spy
• Yellow Thorn, Merchant and far-traveler

Their hands were tied and they only had a moment to contemplate what they would do next, before a group of hairy men from the other side of the world hustled them out into the banquet hall.

The Test Firing 4/4: The Big Gun Down

it flew over the plain in a cloud of thinning dust and its beak was slick with carrion shellac and its wings ragged but still functional and its thoughtstream had already migrated on from the two prey animals it had swooped and pecked at and although it would recognize them again if it encountered them it no longer thought about them at all and it should have been unable to distinguish between people because none had existed in the ancestral environment but years of patient study compressed into a thin sheet of metal had taught it to recognize the sound and appearance of the man who carried it close to his heart imprisoned crucified on the wall of the barn where it had hung for centuries since the men posing with guns had holed its wings and smashed its bones and punctured its lungs and sent it falling out of the air and now in the air once again it detected the voice and the heat and the heartbeat of the man far below it and circled to plan its descent with the sun behind it so if he spotted it he would be unable to see

The Test Firing 3/4: Entombed at La Momia

Corporal Danny Obierika and Private Gerald Maw crouched behind the great gun, which shielded them from the worst of the skinning sand. Danny donned a welder’s mask, Maw had a pair of safety goggles to protect his eyes, and both wore condoms over the barrels of their loaded muskets. The cannon could survive a little sandblasting, though it might erode the engraved crowns and maple leaves and Southern Crosses and other symbols of empire decorating the metal. They were more afraid of deliberate sabotage. A “freak” dust storm driving off the crowd was just too inconvenient to ascribe to mere chance.

They couldn’t hear each other speak, and even with bandanas over their mouths it would have only have filled their mouths with enough dust to turn their teeth to powder. Private Maw had to elbow Danny to get his attention as he pointed his weapon to the sky. Though the cloud looked black as it came toward them it appeared red from the inside.

The Test Firing 2/4: Inch of Dust

Yazdegerd and Roxana stumbled toward the great shining house at the end of the plain. The horse had panicked and refused to go on and nothing he did could coax it further. Roxana and he were used to running on bare feet but they had fled with only the bare minimum they could gather. They carried horse blankets, a little water, a handful of nuts, a little vinegar, a clasp knife, a fistful of pilfered denarii and their six month old son, Julian.

(They told each other Yazdegerd was the father. Not one of the soldiers who regularly inflicted themselves on Roxana - and on Yazdegerd when they were drunk)

They were no longer on the border, that much was clear. The grasses and flowers were unlike any they’d seen. So too the black towers strung with rope. Strange fortifications dividing the lands into parcels with abatis of metal. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. When the soldiers got lost and blamed the scouts and the unfortunate local guides recruited at swordpoint and the “filthy fucking fire worshipers” who twisted the terrain and summoned visions of things that couldn’t exist. Its apparition was perfectly timed. The soldiers caught them fucking and decided to cut off Yazdegerd’s balls. Roxana endured their abuse, acted suitably chastised, then freed the stablehand before the smithy could heat the gelding knife.

The Test Firing 1/4: Do you have 500 pound balls?

Outlaw Journalist Namond Lick sweltered in his PRESS vest and bucket hat and scribbled in his notepad as the Redcoat told him the score. He was wired for sound and everything was recorded anyway, but people liked the notepad. They wanted to be remembered.

The guy who wanted to be remembered was Colonel Ravinder Bhoja of the 333rd Regiment of Foote. His living history troop was out in the Wyoming backcountry for a little demonstration of a project they’d been working on. Men (and, Namond noted, one woman) in red jackets fussed over bags and boxes, showed off their kit and practiced their musketry in front of a crowd of onlookers (mostly family and friends), firing live buck and ball loads from their land pattern muskets at improvised targets of stacked stone. Unusually for a reenactment group, especially from this period, there wasn’t a single White face among them, and it was that topic that the Colonel had chosen to expound upon.

Against Torches

You ever tell someone you don’t like [food], and they tell you “no you just haven’t had GOOD [food]”? So you go to the restaurant they tell you and order the thing they tell you and, surprise surprise, you still don’t like it? 

That’s me with tracking torches. For years I’ve considered it a waste of time. And whenever I tell anyone this they say “torches are good, you just have to make tracking light matter!”