Gary Con XI

Another Gary Con is in the books.  Sticking to tradition, I roomed with the same guys as last year (Judge Jeff of Spellburn and Appendix N, weird illustrator David Hoskins), and this time we were joined by David's friend Harry, who was attending Gary Con for the first time.  This year I decided to run games as well and signed up for three games.  A bit naively I chose to run three different systems, so I lugging way too many books into the Con.

MCC: The Arrival

 Goodman Games launched their kickstarter for Mutant Crawl Classics on June 24, 2016.  Fulfillment was originally estimated for fall 2017 but after backer feedback on the pdf drafts, they decided to delay printing to correct some mistakes and their new estimate was May 2017.  They posted a few days ago that shipping had begun, but they made another mistake - not everyone got their backerkit tracking numbers correctly.  So it when my apartment mailroom notified me that I had a delivery waiting, I got a nice surprise.  Photos ahead.

Gary Con X

The Seat of Honor

Day One

I arrived at Gary Con X around 3pm on Wednesday.  This is only my second con to attend after going to NTRPG last June.  It's a significantly larger con but still nowhere near the size of the big cons.  Whereas at NTRPG I carefully booked all my time, I only scheduled a single game each day, hoping that I'd be able to find enough extra stuff to do to fill my time.

MCC: A Fallen Star For All

We continue our adventures in Terra with A Fallen Star For All, a level 1 adventure by Tim Callahan.
From the cover:
A meteor strike in the taboo crater country opens up a huge chasm in which lies a largely intact city of the Ancient Ones.
The resulting mad, mad, mad land rush to go claim the newly available cache of ancient artifacts draws interested parties from all over Terra A.D., and at the direction of your tribal elders, that includes you and your Seeker team!

MCC: Assembling an Apocalypse

Welcome to Terra AD.  While Dungeon Crawl Classics had a lot of implied setting baked into it, Mutant Crawl Classics has gone further and explicitly named and presented some facts about the base setting.  The great disaster the resulted in its current state is left unanswered, but a hothouse climate and a world of overgrown jungles filled with mega-fauna and glowing deserts beset by raging storms is described in brief.
Aside from the bestiary, which includes mutated dinosaurs, intelligent cyborgs, alien dimensional travelers, and enough other weirdness to populate your world, the Archaic Alignments probably offer the most setting information.  These alignments are factions operating in the world of Terra with their own rules for joining and their own conflicting goals.  The Gene Police work to eliminate mutations from Terra while the Children of the Glow actively seek out radioactive areas in order to accelerate their mutations.  The Curators worship ancient technology, the Chosen of Zuu believe manimals to be the next stage in evolution and humanity to be a dying breed, while the Clan of Cog - the default starting faction - believes in respect and cooperation between all sentient beings.
Patron AIs also provide a lot of insight into the world of Terra AD, both past and present.  The AI descriptions give the original intent of each entry - including a security protocol for gaming networks, monitoring weather systems, galactic invasion surveillance - as well as their current goals in the post-apocalypse world.  These entries actually give the most firm view of the world prior to the Great Disaster and generally describe a world not unlike our own in some sci-fi future.
Outside of the MCC rulebook, backers of the Kickstarter have already received 8 supplements - mostly adventures - which give additional information about the setting.  I intend to run through all of these adventures with my game group (we ran through Hive of the Overmind recently and have begun A Fallen Star For All).  I wanted to craft my starting village to be consistent from the start.

Spoilers follow.

MCC: Hive of the Overmind

Put my usual DCC campaign on hold last night to run through Hive of the Overmind for Mutant Crawl Classics.  This is a 0-level funnel adventure released as one of the first stretch goals from the MCC kickstarter.  Written by Julian Bernick of Spellburn fame.

From the cover:
Younglings on their Rite of Passage are shocked to regain consciousness with no memory of how they came to be in a gigantic insect hive so far to the north of their homelands, laboring as drone-slaves of the savage ant-men.
In a land where an "insect revolution" has taken place, the PCs must contend with insectoid mega fauna and a maze-like underground installation before facing the ominous Overmind: a building-sized insect queen cybernetically linked to an ancient Chaotic AI.