Gearing Up for the Online SummerCon

The TTRPG in Korea community is hosting their online SummerCon at the end of the month (Aug 29-31). I'm signed up to run a Classic D&D game during the con. Hopefully, I'll have time to play in a few other games as well. It's right before the start of the new semester (Sept 1), but I'm more or less ready for my classes. 

I posted about my idea for the con game a few weeks ago. And in the mean time, I've redrawn the maps, revised and switched around some of the encounters, and added a few puzzles/challenges for some of the extraneous monsters. I also updated the pre-gen characters that I posted about a few weeks ago. 

This weekend, I created a Roll20 game for the adventure. I also digitized the maps using Dungeon Scrawl (a crash course in that app, which I'd only noodled around on before). I've got the basics of that down now, and the maps in the R20 game look pretty good. Not professional level, but good enough. 

I spent a lot of time today creating custom character sheets for the pre-gen PCs. Roll20 has a BECMI (RC) sheet, and a BX sheet, but neither exactly fits my house ruled version of D&D. I'm not running full TS&R rules. I've still got Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling as classes for this game. But otherwise, I'm using my house rules. I've got all 14 pre-gen sheets done -- two for each class. I still need to make token images for them, and get the tokens set up. 

I've got the character sheets set up with macros to roll for attacks, saving throws, and things like Thief skills or Turn Undead. That way the players can just go to the sheet and press a button to roll, and all the math is done for them. It will save a lot of time dealing with new to old school players. Considering the types of games on offer (5E/Pathfinder games of course, some neoOSR games like Bastionland and BlackHack derivatives, Free League games, various story/indie games), I'm likely to get some newbies. 

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In other news, I've been playing at the cafe I think would be good for our face-to-face Busan Tabletop Con, and it is a pretty good place to play. Scott and Justin have both visited, and they approve as well. Scott is pretty busy right now with the SummerCon, but after that's settled, I think we'll get to work organizing our local event. 

I plan to run this same adventure, and maybe either a Flying Swordsmen 2E adventure or a Chainmail-based tabletop skirmish/dungeon crawl game. AKA, reviving my idea from last year.  Probably more Chainmail than Gauntlet, but similar. I'd need to get off my ass to prepare for either of these two additional games, but that's a good thing. It will keep me engaged with the ideas. 

WinterCon 2025

 The Discord group TTRPG in Korea is in the middle of their WinterCon 2025 online gaming convention. I got late notice of this event (last Sunday) so I didn't have a lot of free time this weekend. I've got my face to face TS&R Jade game this afternoon, and due to family stuff, I only had time for the afternoon session yesterday. And that meant I got to play another game of Mausritter. 

Looking through my old posts quickly, I don't think I blogged about playing Mausritter with Justin a few months back. We tried it, and it was a lot of fun. You roll up a mouse adventurer defined by your gear rather than by a character class or a truckload of skills to choose from. Besides your gear, you have three ability scores, hit points, and pips (money) to keep track of. It's a simple game, but it really gets you into the problem solving mentality. Yes, there is combat, but it's hazardous (Into the Odd style no attack rolls, if you attack, you just roll damage). You're also a tiny mouse. So problem solving and careful investigation is in order. 

Yesterday, our game was run by a guy who goes by Fakesauce John on Discord. Four players, myself among them, gathered and John went over the rules briefly while he led us through character creation. That took about 40 minutes of our 4 hour slot, but we had quite a few technical issues to work out. 

My character was Adrian F. Cheddar, blacksmith mouse with "delicate features" (a.k.a. the pretty boy!). My mouse joined up with Clara June, a bold take-no-guff mouse (player: Elizabet), Brutus, the big but dumb bruiser (Evie), and Nibbles, the snarky message-runner (Frankie).

After characters were created, we were given our mission (rescue Lady Cheddar who had gone missing in the mine). We did a bit of shopping, then took a quick break and got the tech issues sorted. 

After that, we were off on our mission. The mine was an interesting place to explore, with multiple entrances (we ended up taking one that John didn't expect us to take of course!), interesting encounters that didn't demand combat (but could have turned into combat), and a mystery to solve on top of the mission to rescue Lady Cheddar. 

John said he didn't have much experience as a game master, but he ran the session well. He kept things going, described things in detail, answered questions, adjudicated the rules when necessary, and managed to bring four mostly strangers together to form a team that used creativity and goofiness to solve the problems put in front of us. 

Chatting with the organizer Amae, I'd mentioned that when they do it again, with more advance notice, I'd be happy to run a game (or two?) the next time they do this. He said this has been a challenge, and he's not sure he will. But people seem to have had fun yesterday, and hopefully the games that happen today will also be fun, and they will make this a tradition. Amae did invite me to run games through their Discord at any time. So even if they don't do another online convention, I may take him up on his offer.