I put up a site at Spreadshirt and we ordered some T-shirts to sport at Gen Con. They did an excellent job and it was very fast. If you want to buy one (there’s no markup), note that several of the designs allow you to customize the words and lettering.
We just got our button order from Busy Beaver and they look pretty great. Here’s what 100 buttons look like all at once, with a couple of size references. In this quantity they cost thirty cents each, but that drops precipitously as you scale up - I was nervous about the quality and my artwork, so I ordered the minimum. Shipping was free and the turnaround was ten days, including a holiday. You can’t see it but each button has our URL neatly printed on the edge - they look very nice, based on 300 dpi artwork I gave them. I’m very pleased! If you are reading this and will be at Gen Con, I’ve got a button for you.
We played the Shab-al-Hiri Roach at NC GameDay on Saturday and it went great with seven players! I had my doubts. I can’t really put it any better than Mr. Eric Provost:
“There was so much crazyness you can’t get it into a single bottle. There was an explicit pecking order of roaches at one point with the canine ‘Klaus’ at the top of the order. (The power of Klaus compells you!) There were holgraphic & mezmerizing lightshows gone wrong, there were board meetings that were staffed by Klaus, faceless men, and angry young girls. There was the replacement of the Catholic Church on campus with a Sumerian Temple. Which was built, by the way, with a vast number of slaves… all infected with the Roach. And then there was my own personal favorite… Regina Sutton as Barbarella, complete with Sumerian Death Ray Gun. Yes.”
It was a very strange game even by Roach standards!
The third and final game of the con went better than the other two and was really kicking. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it helped that all the players were very familiar with narrativist structures and played until the wheels fell off. After we finished we discussed the game, particularly the endgame, and came up with some really good ideas for improving it. I got excellent feedback from this and the not-so-hot session Saturday night as well. Good thing layout isn’t locked down!
Last night I ran an interesting game of the Roach. It was the first time the game didn’t really fire on all cylinders and I’m not sure why. There was not much mayhem (Regina was molested a little but never really used) and things were very sedate, and the endgame was pretty unsatisfying. What went wrong? We had six players - four Forge regulars and two old skool guys who were a little uncomfortable with taking narrative control, who struggled to frame scenes and passed a lot. I don’t think that player mix was the problem, per se. Eric suggested that nobody used NPCs to drive the action, which is true, and we didn’t roleplay very much - and this is, I think, the root cause of the problems. I have another session scheduled for 10 AM, and if it happens (not sure if I’ll have any people, no one signed up) I’ll really emphasize assigning opponent dice to people and narrating scenes.
