Author Archives: Clayton Oliver

Con Report: CharCon 2025

This was my second consecutive year of attendance at CharCon, a small tabletop gaming convention held in Charleston, WV. My 2024 report is here, and most of my observations about the venue, vendors, and surrounding area remain applicable for 2025.

As noted last year, the venue is shared with a science center. Some clever individual in the con staff made the decision to put the cosplay tables (and photo backdrops) right at the main entrance so all the kids (and their parents) coming to the science center could encounter the cosplayers as soon as they hit the doors. Bonus points to the Twi’lek X-Wing pilot and whoever brought the life-size remote-controlled R2-D2.

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Ghostwriter

This one will probably show up in a not-D&D game sooner or later.

This is a magic item composed of two parts. The first is a pair of spectacles, or a signet ring, or a brooch, or a tie clasp – something designed to be worn easily and casually. The second is a quill or fountain pen, depending on the game’s milieu.

Words written by the pen are visible only if the reader is wearing the paired item.

Use for spellbooks, conspiratorial correspondence, or your teenage witch’s diary detailing her current warlock crush.

Fish Story

This one’s a story with Reverend X.S. Kinesys. Empty chair at the table for a fallen party member.

Some years ago, I was running a short Adventure! arc. The PCs were investigating, as one does. The trail had led them to a dockside warehouse. Rev K’s character decided to scale the outside of the building and peer in through one of the big ol’ industrial skylights.

Unfortunately, some bad rolls led to him plunging through the skylight. Always quick on his feet, Rev invoked Adventure!‘s dramatic editing rules and described landing in a skip of fresh-caught fish rather than plummeting to his death on the cement floor.

I narrated the narrow escape and Rev pulling himself out of the fishpile, flicking scales and slime off his suit. Rev added the detail of removing a wayward fish from his pants pocket.

EB, one of the other players, slid into the conversation with perfect comedic timing: “Huh. I guess you really do wear a codpiece.”

Can you hear me now?

The one Dragon*Con I attended was 1997. I didn’t intend to LARP there, but some of the Louisville Gaming Mafia was tight with the Liquid Dreams storyteller crew, so I sorta got recruited. “We need more werewolf players,” someone said, and jammed a character packet into my hands before running off to attend to a mass combat or some shit.

I opened the packet and looked at the sheet. Huh. Rank 5 Silent Strider Theurge? I can work with this.

Because werewolf players were so very few and far between, I wound up tying in with Little Sister and her attendant vampires, who collectively formed a long-standing and ridiculously-overpowered Sabbat pack known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The fact that they numbered more than four was irrelevant, as they kept adding apocalypses (my favorite was Grievous Bodily Harm). The fact that I, as a werewolf, should not have been anywhere near these walking atrocities was less than relevant – as a player, I had a choice between hanging out with friends and seeing plot, or being lonely and seeing no plot. Seemed like the appropriate decision at the time.

Because Little Sister was known as a player and her character was equally known as Someone With Whom Not To Be Fucked, no one questioned her or me when she brought me along to a summit of the Sabbat leadership. No one even checked to ensure I was a vampire. I made a couple of mental notes about security lapses.

Then the meet started. It swiftly became clear that the elder vampires had their collective cravats in a knot about an ancient mummy who had arisen and was causing no shortage of pre-apocalyptic problems for them. Huh. Mummy? Something in my character packet, which had been provided without explanation, suddenly became much more relevant.

In the back of the room, I raised a hand. “I know his True Name.”

I am not usually the loud type of player. No one heard me.

Little Sister looked at me sideways. “You what?”

I cleared my throat. “I know his True Name.”

No one paid attention.

Okay, fuckit. I raised my arms above my hand, wrists crooked, in the Mind’s Eye Theatre hand signal for transforming into a war-form. In game, this meant I was shapeshifting into the werewolf Crinos form.

Suddenly, in a room full of elder vampires, this nine-foot-tall avatar of Anubis in full mystic muscular mass murder mode stood up and managed to growl out, “I SAID… I KNOW HIS TRUE NAME.”

What Goes Around, Surprise Round

Not my story, but I’m batch-writing and scheduling a bunch of war story posts, and this one bubbled to the surface of memory.

Back in the early editions of Mind’s Eye Theate, the LARP engine for the World of Darkness, character stats ran on adjectives. The stronger your PC was in physical/social/mental categories, the more adjectives you had. The intent was that when you declared an action, you had to use a relevant adjective in a sentence. It was supposed to be more immersive. Most players ignored it.

Some, however, found ways to use it to their advantage.

Another amusing rule of those editions involved surprise. If someone declared a challenge, you had three real-world seconds to respond. If you failed to meet that time, you were considered surprised and could not resist the incoming hostility. I suspect the design intent was to keep play flowing quickly without a lot of the page-flipping and sheet-consulting and other usual sorts of dithering that happen when someone is yanked out of their Interview with the Vampire fantasy by some Near Dark action.

This story features NLP, and this is kind of representative of his LARP play style. At one particular RiverCon LARP at the old Executive West, NLP was in character, seated at a table, in negotiations. Negotiations were not going well, and it looked like the other party was about to call in her attack ghouls. NLP decided to get in a little preemptive revenge. Without raising his voice or changing his tone in the slightest, he palmed the item card for his character’s sawed-off shotgun, slid it under the table, and said, “I deftly shoot you in the gut.”

Cue wide-eyed crogglement. “You… I… what? Wait…”

NLP glances at the narrator who’s observing this and raises a hand, folding out fingers. “One… two… three, BOOM.”

“That’s surprise. Take two damage.”

“But I…”

“I quickly shoot her again.”

Three Stakes Carved from a Stradivarius

No shit, not only there I was, but I set this up.

When I run LARPs, I always write pre-gens so I can set up plot hooks and conflicts. Most players ignore the packet and just run around playing supervillains with fangs, so when someone latches onto a story thread and runs with it, I appreciate them all the more.

This one is from ConCave 2000, back when that western Kentucky con was still hosted at the old Park Mammoth Hotel in all its creepy-ass glory. To set the stage, I need to give you the character histories from two particular PC packets…

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Definitions

It occurred to me recently that I’ve been recording some TTRPG and LARP anecdotes and labeling them “war stories” without actually saying what qualifies as one. I should note that on this blog, everything bearing that label does so in a purely metaphorical sense. But as related to me, long ago, by a co-worker who had war stories in the literal sense:

“A fairy tale begins, long, long ago in a magical land far far away… a war story begins, okay, this is no shit, there we were…”

Shank the Sith

I’m not sure where to use this one, but while thinking about Star Wars RPG characters the other day, something popped into my head and wouldn’t come out. Somewhere in the galaxy, someone has gotten their hands on a mostly-broken lightsaber. It rattles and crackles, and when turned on, it hisses and heats up alarmingly. It works… technically. But it only manifests two or three inches of blade.

So now I’m wondering how best to make use of a lightshiv.

You’d Think It Would Be Obvious

This is yet another one from a convention LARP in western Kentucky in the late ’90s or early 2000s.

I was playing in this one, not running. The game staff did not share my view of having a coherent plot, so they were allowing players to bring in their own characters rather than providing pre-gens. I chose to run an Assamite (Child of Haqim to you new kids) vizier. I honestly can’t remember if this was before or after I was tapped to do the revised Clanbook: Assamite, but I’d roughed out a lot of the work I wanted to do on the castes a couple of years before that contract, on a late-night drive with Little Sister, so this was definitely a time at which the viziers were front-of-mind for me.

Old man rambling. May yell at cloud next. Anyway…

This LARP’s plot was the predictable and painful “Camarilla and Sabbat vampires put aside their differences in a neutral city run by a ridiculously powerful neutral Methuselah to deal with an existential threat to all vampirekind and/or consensual reality and/or the world.” I’d attached my character to the Camarilla delegation because I figured they’d be less annoying, if also less competent, than the Sabbat. They were glad to have me, because this was still a time when the player base assumed “Assamite == murder machine,” and I certainly wasn’t going to correct them by stating that I was here to study their dumb-ass antics. But I wasn’t completely defenseless.

So we’re wandering down the hall of this hotel when we come face-to-face with the Sabbat bishop and her retinue. Thankfully, by this time, the LARP scene had evolved enough that it was accepted practice to use index cards as item representations, rather than hauling around prop Kalashnikovs and Molotovs and battleaxes and whatnot in public. The bishop is holding a sheaf of index cards in her hand, but doesn’t say anything about them. Okay, whatever, that outfit doesn’t have space for her assets, let alone her inventory.

Dialogue ensues, and things are not too incredibly tense when the bishop’s player suddenly remembers that one of her item cards should be evident to any observer. But how she expresses this… is by brandishing the card toward our faces and announcing, “oh, by the way, this is a five-foot broadsword.”

Okay, then. My hand comes out of my pocket, where I’ve been holding one of my own item cards, and points a 3×5 straight between her eyebrows. “Cool. This is a .357 Magnum.”

Shield Wall: Smart Meat Weapon Systems

Originally posted to the CGL Battletech forums in 2018.

SOLARIS CITY, Solaris VII, April 10, 3062 – Even though I know the attack is imminent, it’s a shock when it comes.  I have no warning.  One moment, I’m anonymous in a crowd of revelers on Montenegro’s Amethyst Strip; the next, the crowd is scattering as a wiry man in red leather lunges for me with a knife.  I’m paralyzed by shock, seeing only the glow of neon on the blade as it plunges toward my heart.

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