Stentor's Origins Roundup

I'm back from a super-successful Origins and battling a bit of con crud. Here's a roundup of what I was up to:

Sales: We had Bunny Money Gunny for sale at the IGDN booth. I don't have the final numbers, but it was pretty clear that this game sells when Cheyenne is demoing it.

Purchases: I kept it light this year. I picked up The Quiet Year for my own enjoyment, and a copy of the Fate Accelerated book and a bunch of Fate dice for use in my Economic Geography class this fall.

Played: We'll start with the games I ran -- three sessions of Laser Kittens.

I've got extensive notes, and I'll try doing a longer writeup of each later. For now, I'll just give summaries.

Game 1: This session began with Professor Julius administering the Cat Oath to all of the kittens. They spent some time learning about the ethics of laser use, then had to face a midterm exam in which they were attacked by a mysterious black cat. Luckily, it turned out to be Professor Siren's doppelganger, as she had the "two two two" laser.

Game 2: The kittens dedicated themselves to getting human Joe in trouble. Since they couldn't get up the stairs to his room on their own, they summoned a herd of emus (using the "zoo zoo zoo" laser) and rode them. One kitten had a terrifying prophetic vision of a post-apocalyptic future if they killed Joe (using her "view view view" laser), and so another kitten decided to simply erase Joe from history as if he had never existed (using the "shoo shoo shoo" laser).

Game 3: The kittens were on a mission to attack the neighbors' dog. Concerned that the rabbits in the house were helping the humans to steal the kittens' poops (and thus their powers), the kittens invaded the rabbits' secret lair behind the paneling. A battle ensued, which ended in victory for the cats when all of the rabbits were teleported (using the "shoo shoo shoo" laser) into the neighbors' house, which got the dog in trouble as he was blamed for the sudden appearance of a bunch of bloodied rabbits.

Since there was so much interest in Laser Kittens, I never got to run the other game on my menu, Dread: Dinosaur Edition. You can grab the character questionnaires here if you'd like to try running it yourself.

The first game run by someone else that I played was Microscope. We created the story of the encounter and ensuing war between Earth and the Uktar, an insectoid alien species, told from the Uktar's point of view. We had political intrigue, the rise of an Uktar-worshipping cult, and the eventual development of Uktar-human hybrids.

Next, I played a game of The Warren. I've run this game before, but this was my first time as a player. Our game was set in ancient Egypt, and we had established our warren on a small island in the river to protect ourselves from the desert hares. However, the humans had built a dam to divert river water for irrigation, making it possible for the hares to invade. My character had to bait the River God (a giant crocodile) into attacking and smashing the dam in order to save the warren.

The last game I played was A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune, a hack of Kagematsu set in regency-era England. This is not a setting I would have chosen if my options weren't so limited by the time I got to the front of the line at Games on Demand, but it was incredibly fun. In our game, we were three daughters and their governess of the head British official in Bombay. We had to win over the new governor who had been sent to replace our ailing father so that he would protect the city against a French invasion.