Gencon 2026 Recap: Scheduled Games

Special thanks to the free painting table and to my friends for painting with me
 

I ran two ticketed events at Gencon 2026. All the players did a great job and we finished both sessions early, a little over two hours in a three hour slot.

 

Appendix N 2026 Bonus Dungeon: Hung Over and Harassed

 

In His Majesty The Worm there are a lot of city events that, if taken seriously, would be an entire adventure in themselves. The book chides the reader not to play out these adventures because it could turn the campaign into a “town game”.

Guess what we’re doing today?

Appendix N 2026 Bonus Adventure: Mines of Magog

 

A Work Relief Archaeology dig at an American Indian mound unearths a “red sarcophagus”. It disappears in the night along with several excavators, most likely looted.

A “bald cougar” attacks Civilian Conservation Corps workers, who chase the beast off with thrown rocks. The bite is unlike any the camp doctor has ever seen, like the man was stabbed with a sword.

A rancher wakes up one night to a group of men stealing his sheep. The confrontation turns violent and he shoots one, chasing the rest off. The body is an ape-man.

A teen boy tires of neverending agricultural hardship and hunger. He tells his sister he’s going to meet the yellow woman he saw in his dreams and runs away from home.

It all leads to one place:

THE MINES OF MAGOG

Into The Odd: Clerics of the Carmine Dawn

 

The Brilg and Spowegg expedition to Hogman's Plain was going great. The desert was lethally hot by day and infested with undead by night, but the gunboat cared not for either as it motored up the River Hog. When the sun rose over the mountains and stayed trapped there for sixteen hours, bathing the desert in perpetual dawn light, Captain Yarrow of the Rent Seeker wasn't fazed. He sent four of his handpicked explorers ashore to investigate the tower on the horizon, in case there was some connection to the otherworldly weather.

• Dimitri the Aleman and his Mule
• Skar Disanto, Disgraced Detective
• Cassie "Castle", Ax Woman
• Barb the Barbarian, from the lands outside Bastion

It was a bit of a hike to the tower. The sun didn't go anywhere. 

 

Appendix N 2026 Dungeon: Clerics of the Carmine Dawn

The Clerics of the Carmine Dawn have tidally locked the planet. The sunlit side will boil. The nightside will freeze. Only a band of twilight will remain habitable unless a scratch team of heroes can infiltrate the Clerics’ Tower.

Appendix N 2026 Bonus Adventure: The Flickering Hope of Fusang

 
The first Emperor of the Qin Dynasty in China, in search of the magical herbs of longevity, had ten great ships built, and the Court Magician Xu Fu with five hundred virgin boys and girls, carrying treasure, food supplies, and equipment, set out for the Eastern Land of Fusang.

Appendix N 2026 Bonus Dungeon: The Essence of Eblis

 

Before God taught man the divine art of water creation, the desert was ruled by the Djinn. They called storms as they pleased, bringing rain to their worshipers and drought to those who defied them. One such Djinni was Eblis.

 

Fallout: Yellowstone Masterpost

Berann

 

Your prairie village in the Montana wasteland has been struck by plague. A burrowing creature with a glowing belly bit a child, who fell ill a few days later. By the time the town doctor noticed the swelling in the kid’s lymph nodes, the disease had already spread among the populace. You were spared the ravages of the plague. You’ve been sent south into the seething cauldron of Yellowstone to find medicine to save your town.

Dune 2d20: Whalefall Masterpost

When a Bene Gesserit sister's escape pod lands in the tryworks outside Harko, she has two options: get out fast, or be butchered with the whales. On Giedi Prime they use every part of the animal.

 

Riverboat Gambler: Epilogue

 

The mantis Colored Shell leaped from the slab and fell atop the bounty hunter Senthrax Blackmath. Somewhere the tribe did the same to the Orc and the Amazon and the others. They might have been within the reach of a claw or in line of sight or far away. Colored Shell didn't notice or care after her forelegs closed around his body. She clasped him tight and he struck her four times for every one bite she took from his head. The first rasping cut from her mandibles caught the spikes of his helm and injured her. The second too. 

 

Wanted! Reward: CC 10,000: Blood on the Dancefloor Solo Playtest

Bozo the cyberharlequin emerged from hiding to catch the Gouged Petunias when they played a set at the Eggshell. Lone bounty hunter Just Ice seized the opportunity to take the killer clown down solo. Bozo and his girlfriend Columbina grabbed a table at the center of the bar, under the skylight. The Petunias ran through a cover of Night of the Assassins while Just Ice mounted the side deck and climbed up onto the roof. He wanted to drop on top of Bozo through the skylight and apprehend him before the clown could deploy cybernetic enhancements, drugs or heavy weapons.

 

Dune 2d20 Whalefall - Playtest 2

DrFaustusAU

 

Bene Gesserit Sister Wilhelmina fell. Her shuttle down to Giedi Prime exploded in flight and her sealed capsule fell out of the sky, stuttering descent barely slowed by the sporadic activations of the emergency suspensors. The suspensors failed entirely and the capsule fell the rest of the way. She was ready for the impact but an unsecured object left by the flight crew struck her in the throat, crushing her hyoid bone at the most inappropriate time. She was at no risk of suffocating thanks to her excellent physical control, but the injury prevented her from using the Voice.

The first thing she noticed was the stink, like a thousand animals being melted in a giant vat. She calculated that the shuttle must have been flying over the megafarms outside Harko. She levered the door open and was confronted with the reeking whalefields of House Texoco, confirming her suspicions. Cetaceans dangled from enormous derricks, penetrated with tubes that siphoned precious bodily fluids through pipelines to an enormous tryworks in the distance. The rendering plant sent up enormous clouds of foul smelling smoke, mingling with the sooty sky that reflected sunlight from all angles like a greasy mirror.

Chaak Tlaxxon, son of the Jaeger Katl Tlaxxon, and the Jaeger's Spymaster Vagar watched the falling star from a sniper tower overlooking the whalefields. Vagar called it in to Brine, Captain of the Guard. Brine promised the militia would ventilate the escape pod with bullets, killing anyone inside so that they wouldn't be tortured to death by their overlords in House Texoco. Chaak immediately dragged Vagar into his hotrodded grain hauler and swooped down to the crash site, heading off the massacre.

 

Unknown Armies Adept Tactics Part 4: My Schools

Here are some caster schools by me for my Unknown Armies 3e Adept tactics series. This is how casters from the school respond if attacked when they aren't expecting it, casting spells to either quickly eliminate the threat or open an escape route. If they expect a fight they bring backup, weapons, magick items and preprepared buffs, in which case you should dig into the full spell list rather than using this quick reference.