Sunday morning sitting in a Spoons and can barely talk! I think that’s a suitable to way start a blog about a “weekend” at the Uk Games Expo at the NEC Birmingham 2023. I say weekend as I came up to Brum Friday so we could spring board into the Expo early Saturday and I am going home skipping the convention Sunday leaving the more hardy to enjoy the extra day!

In the Blog I’ll tell you about the accommodation, the convention and the games I played. I won’t mention everyone I met as the list would be huge! It was great to meet you!

The Comedy Hotel

I really have to laugh as I look back on the maybe 10 hours sleep I’ve had this weekend. The quaint historical pub I chose to stay in is actually a lively City Centre pub in Birmingham with music till 1am and then the noise continued as cars cruised and people partied on. Not only that, the walls and floors just didn’t really stop noise and pulling the curtains to make the room dark I guess that isn’t a thing here? So noise reducing head phones over ear plugs were used and the bright sunshine at 5 am was blocked by balancing a sock on my face. Practical all the way! The room was very reasonable around £50 a night but adding taxi fare on (It was a train strike weekend) if I go to the con again I may stay on-site.

Here we go again

Many moons ago I said I’d never go to another convention because I can’t be doing with the queues – life is too short and the cons just seem to be all sell sell sell. I don’t pay to go into a shop to buy things so why would I buy a ticket to go to a convention? Fortunately Expo has a balance of good and bad. I don’t get why in the days of smart phones and bar codes there is the need for everyone to manually get a physical ticket at the venue. The queue wasn’t overly long but it still took out half an hour of the day and the ticket wasn’t checked after entry. Why not save the cost of all those folks sitting there all weekend handing out the same pass that could be posted out?

Inside it was the expected chaos where there was a queue for all the facilities and the aisles were packed. I was on a mission though to meet people so I squeezed passed all the games demonstrators and the stands but did think if I was coming to the convention looking for games to play then this would be a great place. If I had been there for three days, I could have been tempted to try out a game or two. Not sure I would want to sit on a bench in a sports hall sized room playing games all day, but the people doing that seem to be happy.

It’s okay to meet your Heroes

I went to the Expo to meet the Amazing Chaosium team! I see them on podcasts and played with one or two over Zoom but to meet them in real life was really fun! I had no idea what to say to them but it was really a pleasure to meet them. Speaking to THE Mike Mason about the curious characters he wrote for Cthulhu Cards was really great, if you know the character Uncle Giggles, you’ll know what we talked about. Very glad to hear their stock was flying off the stall which is amazing particularly as Chaosium printed some best selling Miskatonic Repository titles to be sold. Remember, these are the titles written by folks like you and me that have been professionally printed and are being bought by fans of the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

I went to the Syrinscape stand to gush about how good their sounds are and how useful their webplayer is – if you’ve not tried their sounds to enhance your game, you really should! I then unexpectedly bumped into Guy from how to be a great GM – Guy has 200 thousand subscribers! And later in the day I bumped into the legendary Dirk the Dice! It’s so nice just to be able to thank someone in person whether it’s for a product you use or a YouTube channel or podcasts you enjoy. Very unexpected and very welcome.

I also made it to a fun talk where Paul Fricker and friends each pitched an old RPG that should be brought back to life! If I can find the podcast episode I’ll post it here when it’s ready as some of the we stuff we used to buy was bonkers and it was a real pleasure to see these RPG aficionados take us back to the golden age of the RPG.

Friday night game

So I couldn’t do Expo alone and being part of the Miskatonic playhouse I had company for the whole weekend! The special thing was, we hadn’t met each other in real life before so it was odd and exciting to meet folks you’ve only spoken to online! We had come from all over the country and were finally able to find out, how tall we all are!

We of course took the opportunity to record a game of Call of Cthulhu and I’ll link the game here when it is ready. I was the Keeper of Arcane lore for a game of Cthulhu Cards! I took the Cthulhu Cards and improvised a game around them. I chose a curious character, an unfortunate event and a madness card as the starting point. I then picked another character to be the mission giver then allocated a curious character card to each player. I knew nothing about these characters which proved very humorous later on! The table was split so I had two teams of investigators and they each went to interview another curious character from the deck to discover why an Antique Dealer was found battered and babbling about an unspeakable promise they had made. As the game progressed, I picked other curious characters to be the NPCs and used the card information to shape my story. I was really surprised when one character out and out murdered an NPC! This was written on their card and to discover a character was more of a threat than the villain was hilarious!

The players were all very complimentary about the story I’d made and I was glad it all came together as at one point I was wondering how it was all going to end! Riffing off what the Cards said and how the characters acted gave me what I needed. They were also complimentary about me as a Keeper which was really nice as I don’t get to do it too often

Saturday night game and going home

I’ll write up a full blog entry for Clym Arnold’s 12 Black Feathers Gas light game but it was a new experience for me to play a game in person with a Keeper I didn’t know! The table was laid out with 12 Black Feathers which was a nice mood setting and we could have used them as a safety card. Clym was a great Keeper and seemed very experienced handling a group of wayward investigators! We finished after midnight having started at 7pm but we held it together to the end. Then it was a taxi back to the comedy hotel for about 1am for the ear plug assisted sleep. So whilst I have a long coach ride ahead of me, it will still be quieter than my hotel an I might get some rest! Edit – No the coach driver entertained us with pub quiz facts about the M5!