Quick Report on the 3rd Anniversary INJU Con

Well, I'm back from the Con, and the after-party, and it was a really good time. It was held in the INJU (the national institute of youth) and thus in a way sponsored, so entrance for participants was free.  The event was organized and hosted by 2d4orcos.com.In the process I ran Dark Albion, with the Appendix P rules, and using some of the material from Cults of Chaos. It was very well-received.

I also learned the following during the course of the day:

-popular games in Uruguay right now, stuff that was played at the Con (aside from Dark Albion) included D&D 5e, DCC, Hunter, Vampire, Paranoia, and three or four Spanish-language games.

-There is a sort of generational divide happening in the gaming scene here.  Other than myself, there were very few older gamers here. The crowd was all very young (teenagers and 20s, mostly) and of all the old-guard of Uruguayan gamers who I had known from the past 12 years, many of whom  I know are still active as gamers, were not showing up at the Con scene.  I think it's interesting that there were no tables for D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder, both of which are more popular with that old-guard.

-I've definitely become more of an RPG-celebrity than I was ever used to being locally, with this younger crowd. Maybe because these kids didn't know me before I started with the blog, website, and writing games.  People have heard of Dark Albion and a few asked me about buying it at the con, but to Uruguayans the game of mine they still absolutely adore above all others is Lords of Olympus. Man do Uruguayans love this game.  I must have had a dozen people come thank or talk to me about it, about games they have played in or run of it.

-I've also discovered yet another totally unintentional introduction to the local scene thanks to yours truly: DCC.  It turns out, without me having heard about it until today, that a few of the many many players that have come through my very Gonzo DCC campaign (where I've been way way more loose and relaxed about inviting people to play and having players come and go than usual) have liked the game so much they got their own copies and started running it.  From the sounds of it, I think I may have scarred some of them badly: the way people all described their DCC experiences, it seems that the High-Gonzo style I run it in has become the Uruguayan norm.  I'm fine with that, but crazier still is the fact that some people who I don't know at all but were introduced to the game via people who first played it with me came to believe the game is meant to be really grindingly brutally high-mortality.  It seems that my proteges played the game in a way that was more aggressively lethal than I do, and their proteges in turn played it even more lethal still.  So now DCC in Uruguay is just a brutal old-school grindfest.  One guy spoke with pride of a session at one of the regular gaming-night get-togethers of a local club where 27 characters were killed off in a single session!

Anyways, it was great fun, there was delicious cake, one of my players won himself a set of dice, and I was awarded a Dorctorate of Game-Mastering from Orcvard University, courtesy of 2d4orcos.  Very nice.

Pictures may be forthcoming.

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