Gen Con '25 Recap: ft. Slugblaster!
Plus, The Conduit playbook for Masks
Greetings!
I had a lovely time at Gen Con earlier this month. Two of my games featured knights, two featured haunted space stations, and two featured disrupted weddings with runaway/kidnapped brides. My single LARP session ended with a high-casualty space pirate mutiny. It was great. I’ll dive into a particular highlight below. But first, some news:
The Conduit released!
The Conduit is now available on my itchio page. The Conduit is a fan-made playbook I’ve created for Masks: A New Generation, which a wonderful superhero game by Brendan Conway, published by Magpie Games.
The Conduit is a playbook about channeling terrifying cosmic power. It explores themes of power as a gift or a burden, and of inspiring awe and/or fear in onlookers, even other heroes.
The Conduit is an alternative to the Nova from the Masks core book. It is my take on the same type of characters that inspired the Nova (e.g. Jean Grey, Nico Minoru) but with a completely different mechanical approach. Instead of the Nova’s Burn and Flares, the Conduit uses a set of Moves (and an extra Condition) to capture this flavor.
I hope other Masks fans enjoy getting to use this playbook. I created it a few years ago, but I was inspired to polish it up for release by the news that a second edition of Masks is on the way.
To celebrate the release, The Conduit is available for 50% off for the next 48 hours. Get it now at itchio!
Gen Con Recap
Here’s a rundown of my Gen Con gaming:
Slugblaster, by Mythworks (see more below!)
Airlock, by Magpie Games
Masks, by Magpie Games (an eight-table Apocalypse Sonata extravaganza!)
Wicked Pacts, by Polyhedral Knights
Safe Mode: Disabled, by Boss Jellybean
Vow: Tales of the Knight-Aspirants, by Cloven Pine Games*
Gunslinger Knights, by Monte Cooke Games
No Planet for Old Pirates, by Espionage Party
Pasion de las Pasiones, by Magpie Games
Hypersleep Terminated, by Nerdburger Games
Played: Slugblaster
I had (appropriately) a blast with Slugblaster. Immediately after playing it in my first session of this year’s Gen Con, I went to the Mythworks booth and bought myself a copy.
The game is admirably committed to a unique and quirky vision. PCs are teens in a sort-of-90’s world where the hottest thing in teen culture is to sneak out of your house, hop through a dimensional portal, and do dangerous hoverboard tricks. Or, as the game’s subtitle puts it, “Kickflip Over a Quantum Centipede!”
In our session, our group of Slugblasters (SNAP-CRACKLE-POP!) heard about a cool party happening in the Golden Jungle, a tropical dimension lit by many suns. We did hoverboard jumps over a raging river, got chased by psychic alligators, and finally reached the party in the Mech Graveyard. There, our various party members cut it up on the dance floor (unsuccessfully), graffitied the back of a derelict mech (very successfully!), and tried to talk to a girl (semi-successfully). My gutsy hoverboarder sliced into the derelict mech to steal some gizmos to repair her board—which awakened a disembodied mech hand to chase us!
Slugblaster uses a slimmed-down Forged in the Dark system, with lots of fun bits and bobs to (optionally) invoke, like shouting “check it!” to turn your move into a Stunt—where you’ll earn XP (Style) if you land it, but take additional consequences if you biff it.
The book is a fantastic artifact, full of in-world ads that flesh out the absurd yet somehow relatable world of Slugblasting. I particularly like the PSA aimed at parents of youth at-risk for Slugblasting, and the Chick Tract warning of the dangers of Slugblasting right into Hell.
Till next time, may you inspire awe in others and always land your stunts.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi
*For the astute reader who noticed the title change above: Yes, my in-development game about aspiring knights questing to prove their worth in an Arthurian-esque fantasy world is now going by Vow: Tales of the Knight-Aspirants. (The previous title was Vow of the Knight-Aspirants.) I decided I could make the moniker a little punchier by trimming the title to one word and expanding on it in the subtitle. Sign up here to make sure you get notified when the game crowdfunds… which could be on the not-so-distant horizon!
