IntroCONso 3: Prep

I'm still coming down off the high that was IntrCONso, a minicon named for the glue of our gaming group James Introcaso. The inaugural IntrCONso marked the first game I ever ran and I've been adding onto it ever since. Due to a shortage of refs for this iteration and an incredible amount of enthusiasm for some recently purchased games I volunteered to run three sessions.

I don't know what the hell I was thinking.

In a short period of time I had acquired Blood in the Chocolate (BitC), Troika!, and Maze Rats and I was way too excited about running all of them to only commit to two sessions. BitC stands alone enough that I just needed to prep the adventure (which sort of ended up being true) but I had no idea what to do with Troika! or Maze Rats. I started collecting adventure locales and maps to get inspiration and dropping them into my Trello board for the con.

Aside: I know others have said it before, but Trello is a really nice tool for RPG prep.

Prepping Troika! and Maze Rats wouldn't have been as big of a deal if I didn't like running more open ended things. I figured to make it easier I would combine them into the same mini point / hex crawl area with the gimmick that the events of the Maze Rats game (played first) would have an effect on the setup of the Troika! game. Shortly thereafter, cecil howe kicked out a lovely beta for Hex Kit maybe two weeks before the con. Trimmed down my list of adventure locales and came up with this map:

"Came up with" should really be "spent incredibly too much time on" but here we are. The seed of the map crystalized around The Ytroth Larvae of Scarsea Cliffs (with the town renamed to "Wormroot") and a whole mess of PDFs from Gus L. I threw in The Cave of the Druid and The Hand of Dominion from Arnold K., Dyson Logos' Goblin Gully, and Tales of the Scarecrow just in case.

0102 - Hel's Crow's Final Rest
0205 - The Cave of the Druid (unmarked for players)
0305 - Goblin Gully (unmarked for everyone, it seems)
0404 - Tales of the Scarecrow
0406 - Brittlestone Parapets
0503 - Wormroot, town that hosts the worm delve every 50 years
0505 - Prison of the Hated Pretender
0603 - Shanty Town of Worm Explorers
0705 - The Hand of Dominion
0804 - Wormsign! (Ytroth Larvae)

With the map more or less set I got to work trying to convert everything to Maze Rats and Troika! stats. I got through Ytroth Larvae and halfway through Prison of the Hated Pretender. Close enough! I also decided that I wanted to try out Logan Knight's usage die rules for light that I'd pulled from Last Gasp Grimoire (bit down the page). It only really came up once but I'm interested to expand it a bit and see how it shakes out during more play. I liked it, at least.

Sort of prepped, tons of material, 2.5h late driving because I spent too much time at Kinko's. Next time I'm ordering ahead the night before.

Next post is going to be a play report from Maze Rats, the first game I ran.