Tobias blogs

Wow. What a weekend. Really great. I spent Easter in Denmark, attending Fastaval, the greatest Scandinavian con I’ve visited so far (if only I could have Ropecon with Fastaval’s scenarios, I’d be in heaven). The Swedish troupe consisted of me, Thorbiörn, Per and Olle (albeit counting him to the Swedish crew is doubtful, but since Dave is the Swedish guy, I might as well go ahead).

Anyway, the con was great. We played two indie role-playing games: “The Pool” and “In the Name of Love.” The first was OK, but didn’t really match the Jeep playing style (and I should add that we were teh suck, as we were all a bit rusty and hung over). By that I mean that we have long since had all that what The Pool brings to the table and tries to systematise through shitloads of dice. This only made things clumsy and damaged the flow IMHO. The “In the Name of Love” game was great, although a bit hard. Our host, Jonas, was a great guy, and the proud creator of the game.

Basically, the game was about what you would do in the name of love. Olle and I cast ourselves as playing nurses in a hospital in Congo, fighting for the love of a wounded old general in a hospital bed. Every turn, someone would pick a card and if its colour was red, got to tell a story about getting closer to the goal and if the colour was black, the opposite. Hearts meant the general had done something in favour of my character, diamond meant that I had succeeded more in seducing the general. Clubs meant that I had succeeded in damaging Olle’s relation with the general. Spades meant the same, but that I had also damaged my own relationship with the general in the process. Black cards went back into the deck and red cards were kept. The end game condition was when one player told a story that the other player thought was something he would never do for love. I lost big time, and was also the guy to tell a story that Olle was too good for.

A very nice game, but hard if you wanted the story to be good, and not just “play a game.” Since neither Olle nor me are into the thing about winning, I think the game would have been better if we had both had a hand of cards and could pick which cards to play at what time when we had ideas for a story. That way, the cards would have been more of a storytelling aid, than a random element. Or so I think. Our gamemaster, who thought we played slowly, afterwards said that we could have speeded the game up by just making up random, short shit, like “The general gives me a rose,” but that makes no sense for guys who are in it for the story telling.

The game was nice, but we were rusty. I’d like to play it again and experiment with the hand of cards. Luckily, I just need a card deck and a partner to do it. I’m sure for more gameist people, Jonas has a sure winner.

The Swedish crew was extended on Thursday by Jukka Seppänen, who said, when he arrived late after being surprised by a 3-hour train ride, “I of course flew straight to Copenhagen, thinking that Denmark was the size of a fucking pack of cigarettes.” Jukka is the only guy I know who would (which he did) choose to pack his mobile GPS rather than sleeping gear. The GPS actually came in handy when we rented a car to get back to Copenhagen later. Jukka is the man. And I know nothing about travelling.

Fredrik Axelzon and I had written a game, Tvivl (=Doubt), which was about relationships, player freedom, mirrors and allegoric game play. We game mastered it 5 or 6 times and the players were very happy, as were we. We placed 2nd in the “Peoples’ Choice awards”, to my surprise, so we must have done something right.

I was lucky enough to have two really great teams of players. In my first team, I had two men and two women, which made for some really potent game play which I think would be hard to achieve with just male players. All the players were very good, and went along with the scenario and some of the scenes were very strong. When Tom finally did cheat on Julia, we were all a bit surprised. I think even the player himself, or so it seemed. I was very happy. My second team was an all boys team, but they had an extremely good preparatory session which was high paced and didn’t at all feel like the almost two hours it actually took. We played for six hours and it felt like 2-3. That’s a tell-tale sign of a good session. And when Peter in the end finally lets out a roar, I was moved and felt a huge relief. We were all drained afterwards, which is another tell-tale sign. Denmark sure has some fine, fine players.

We played Frederik Berg Olsen’s Mødregruppen (=Mother support group) on Saturday, which was also a very good experience. Again, we weren’t good enough (playing in English can have that effect on people, and I was never a good player to start with). Frederik has written a really good game, that was powerful and disgusting. I’m sure playing it with a real bunch of mothers (to be) would be much better. One player upped and left during the introduction when the GM was talking about using scissors to [I’m not even going to write this down]. I saw his reaction and thought to myself, “he will probably leave,” and I was quite relieved when he did so. That was a great con moment for me. Although our gamemaster did very little, he did one of the most important things: he let us fail without trying to “save the game.” That was great. (Bjørn, I have lost your email address, please send it to me again!) And I’ve realised that I must ask for a raise so that I can hire Frederik to make the layout for all my games. Mødregruppen is one of the top 5 most beautiful scenarios I’ve ever seen. And Jeppe Norsker is a really good player. I’d like to play with him some more at some point.

Our major problem with Mødregruppen was that we played ourself into a corner — we played everything quite realistically, and arrived at a place where we were forced to play unrealistically so save the game. That always makes the game slow down while people are searching for the best way to do it. The scenario is bloody hard to play good with, which is by no means a bad thing.

I’m ashamed to admit that we overslept and missed a game on Sunday morning. This wasn’t so surprising as we entered an impromptu singing competition, Sweden vs. Denmark and didn’t get to bed before 7am. It was extremely fun, and one of the Danes, whose name I’ve forgotten, who had also played Doubt just before, turned out to have an awesome voice for songs of the days of old. I hope to sing duet with him again at next Fastaval. That was great.

I think we felt much more integrated with the Danes this year, and a lot less like those Swedes in the corner.

On Sunday, we attended the banquet for the first time. Frederik has been nagging us for years to do this, and I must admit that it was fun to finally see this event that I’ve heard about so much. There is nothing like it in Sweden as far as I know — hundreds of role-players really dressed up being civilised and nice and drinking and eating and drinking and awards handed out. As far as I can remember SydCon, never came close with the Emmis.

Fredrik’s (Axelzon) and my game won two prices (Otto’s they are called — they are golden penguins). The price for best story and the jury’s special price. As Fredrik could not attend due to too much underpaid work, I was forced to give two impromptu speeches in English on the stage. Half-arsed the first time and good (but cheesy) the second. (If I ever win an Otto for best scenario, I have promised Jeppe Norsker to sing a Swedish song on stage.) I was congratulated, and shook hands with a lot of nice people saying nice things about the scenario (Max Møller, Lars Vensild, Kristoffer Kjær Jensen, and others). Thorbiörn said that the highlight of the evening was seeing how uncomfortable I was with winning and having that sudden attention. I’m sure it was. Luisa never once stopped complaining about us entering the competition in the first place, keeping me real at all time, which I love her for.

And on Monday we found out that you cannot buy blank CD’s in the Danish gas stations. But you can buy port wine. I’ll never forget Jukka’s face.

I give this year’s Fastaval a 10/10 score. Sleeping quarters cold as hell as usual, but when the people are so great, who cares? Hats off for Joan, the Dirt Busters, the Cafe staff, information officers and all the rest of you who made the con great!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 1:22 am and is filed under Free form etc., English, Life, Jeepform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.