SYDCON 2009

SYDCON was really great this year. We had well over 100 people sign up before the con started, and plenty of people rocked up for a casual game during the con. Everybody seemed to have a good time, which means our efforts as conorgs were successful.

Ok, conorg hat off and player hat on. I only played two games this year, both freeforms.

First up was “Judgement of Change”, a Dune freeform presented by Luke Strotz and Grant chapman. I played the vile Baron Harkonnen, who was written in such a way that he succeeded all his goals with very little effort. I basically had to ensure that House Atreides won their bid to take over Arrakis. Doing that amounted to being my usual disgusting self and allowing a coalition to form around Atreides. The only catch was to ensure it didn’t look like I wanted to lose the vote, so I actually had to pretend to scheme. I didn’t feel as necessarily powerful as the main controller of Spice production in the universe should. The main reason for that was the GMs continually handing out Spice so that addicted characters weren’t forced to deal with those of us stockpiling the stuff.

The other game I played was also a freeform, the last in the A Colder War campaign by the Troika group. “Dancing in the Dark” was pretty heavy mechanically, with a number of mini-games. The one that I was involved in was a little broken, to the detriment of all players who were using it.

I was playing the character I had from the previous session, Detweiler Earthbane. Previously, I had left my physical body and transcended into the “Source”, an alien technology capable of huge acts of creation and destruction. In this game, I spent much of the game listening intently to the “programs” left to administer the Source and watching it get depleted time and again by the humans tapping into it. I eventually determined that since mine was an organic mind capable of much more flexibility than the AI programming, I should be able to reprogram the system to prioritise the source requests of the AIs.

When I confirmed that this worked, I took over its function and made myself the sole arbiter of Source in the galaxy. Then the universe ended, and pretty much everybody got a desired outcome from the game.

I had a great time with both games. Congrats to the designers and GMs for stellar efforts. I look forward to seeing everybody at MacquarieCon and then EYECON.