Convention Report: Scotscon 2003

Scotscon 2003 By Nick Davison

Scotscon was great fun. The campus is attractive, with plenty of wooded areas, a loch, and swans and geese. Although our rooms were at the other end of the site to the Students Union where most of the events took place.

There were plenty of games, events, and talks. These included the ‘icebreaker’ treasure hunt, in which some of the items each team had to obtain were a swan feather, an inflatable dolphin, a Heriot-Watt gaming club membership card, and an item of women’s underwear (with a model to wear it). We now have a photo of Sandy Petersen wearing one of Gemma’s bra’s. He later named her the most valuable player on his team.

The main game was the “Evil High Priest” LARP with a Call of Cthulhu theme, written by Sandy. Gemma was Bethsheba Marsh and I was a hideous Shoggoth. We were both members of the Esoteric Order of Dagon (e.g. the Deep Ones faction). There were various other factions including the Starry Wisdom Church, and the Silver Twilight Lodge and the Plateau of Leng. Together with individuals playing Cthulhu, Hastur, Yog-Sothoth, and Sandy Peterson. A highlight was Amoeba Tag which I had to start, it involved forming human chains to tag others although you can briefly split to gather more victims. Apparently Sandy plays this at family reunions.

I also played in John Hughes, “Beak no evil/Baboon Rising” HeroQuest scenario. Great fun including Nick Brooke and friends roleplaying baboons concerned with troop hierarchy, dung throwing, horse eating, and mating. Nick frequently augmented with his Baboon Lurve ability. There were of course a good number of baboon impressions and bottom pointing salute at the end of the game. We ducks spent most of the initial game squabbling among ourselves and speaking with duck accents. One of us was able to use his flaw Despised by Nick Brooke in combat, which was fun. I was the Vingan warrior, Wedcrest.

Needless to say there was also much drinking, a Gloranthan sing-a-along, a pub quiz, storytelling, live action Trollball, an auction, and talks on Sandy‘s RQ campaign, Pamaltela, and the Eastern Isles; Sandy’s experience of signing computer games; and Trotsky’s work on the West of Glorantha. A new feature was the Grouse, in which people had five minutes to convince the audience that their chosen theory (e.g., “Gregging is a good thing”) was correct.

The weather was excellent, the only real rain we had was when we were coming back to the hall on Friday night. There was also a cash machine immediately outside the bar and nightclub, which was handy. Over 20 copies of HeroQuest were sold at the event. Not bad considering that there only 56 people there.

There are some great pics at http://home.freeuk.net/wimp/roleplaying/gg1/index.html. These were mostly taken by Neil Smith, although I think Gemma and I took some.

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