(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I am back home from Dublin and Worldcon! I didn't get to see anywhere close to everything I wanted to, and it was still an incredibly memorable and amazing week.

I got in Wednesday morning, wandered around Dublin for a while. I saw St. Stephen's Green, where I admired statues of Joyce and Rabindranath Tagore (!), I walked a bit of Trinity College's campus, walked alongside a bit of the Grand Canal. Then I crossed the Liffey to the bike rental shop to pick up my bike. I rode through Phoenix Park and then parked my bike at the Jameson Distillery for the tour. Afterward I crashed out in my hotel for a few hours and met a couple of Dublin native Worldcon newbies who'd posted on facebook that they were looking for teammates for a scifi pub trivia event at Dublin's geek bar. We placed sixth out of about twenty teams, after a rough start in the first round.

Thursday morning I biked out to Howth, which was amazing even though it fucked up my legs for the next two days. I got lost in Dublin's working port on my way out, which, oops, but once I got on the road I was supposed to be on it was a beautiful seaside ride and I had a great time.

Thursday afternoon I ran my first rpg of the con, the Zoo adventure. It was scheduled to start at 3PM, at 3:05 I was sitting at my table with zero signups... and then suddenly I had 5 signups and we blasted right into it. I had two veteran roleplayers and three newbies at the table and everyone seemed to have a really good time. I don't think Dungeon World served the adventure as well as 5E did, but it's such a rules-lite adventure that it didn't matter, and the Dungeon World rules took the story in some pleasantly unexpected directions a few times.

I've run the adventure three times... This marks the second time it ended in disaster when the players deliberately smashed the padlock on the Demonarium. WHO DOES THAT?

Thursday evening I met a non-Worldcon friend for dinner and then spent some time at the DC in 2021 party.

Friday morning I did the stroll with the stars and then spent the rest of the morning at the business meeting (grr). Then I went to see the panel on Jewish fantasy, which involved Benjamin Rosenbaum, Laura Ann Gilman, Jenny Rae Rappaport, and Gillian Polack and was really satisfying and enjoyable even though I could talk about Jewish fantasy for much longer than 50 minutes. I caught Rosenbaum afterwards to talk more about Jewish fantasy and ended up going to lunch with him, his Danish translator, and some other friends. I don't really remember what I did the rest of the day... I guess I went to marina's panel on the Hugo BDP nominees and then made kiddush and went to sleep. There might've been another panel in there somewhere.

Saturday morning I went to the business meeting (grr). In the afternoon I went to three great panels: Naomi Novik on the panel on what genre writers can learn from fanfic writers, Seanan McGuire on a panel about how ridiculous plants are, and Brandon O'Brien, Afua Richardson, Rivers Solomon, and Maquel Jacobson talking about the concept of Afrofuturism.

Sunday, I went to a bit of the business meeting (grr), but left early to make it to the panel I was on about fanfiction and community. It was so much fun! Great co-panelists who listened carefully to each other, an enthusiastic audience, and I really appreciated that I could drop fanfic jargon and not have to explain myself. Worldcon is capable of doing so much better than it does at having transformative fandom programming- the audience is so clearly there for it.

Then I had lunch with such_heights and raven and soupytwist, where we talked about vids and the mundanity of MI6, and then I got to facilitate Benjamin Rosenbaum's A Dream Apart, which was sooooo much fun. I developed a Shabbos-friendly variant using a magnetic board for mapping, and that worked out really well. It was mostly just satisfying to be able to tell Jewish fantasy stories in a way that felt natural.

Afterward, the Hugos. The auditorium was not big enough for the con, so they were distributing wristbands earlier in the day for all major events. I'd missed the window to get a pass, but there was a desperation queue an hour or so before the event to pick up any wristbands turned in by people who realized they weren't going to use them, and I lucked into a pass after waiting 45 minutes. I do not regret the wait- the Hugos were so fun and memorable, from Jeannette Ng's fierce anti-Campbell speech to Naomi Novik's inclusive acceptance speech on behalf of the AO3. I finished the night with another round of SF pub trivia, this one organized by the group that hosts the Satellite convention in Glasgow.

Monday morning I caught marina's presentation on women writing war SFF, focused on contrasting Lowachee's Warchild, Novik's His Majesty's Dragon, and Hurley's God's War against the classic tropesetting war SFF novels of Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Martin, and others.

I then called it quits for the con. I took the train out to Sandycove to see the James Joyce Museum and Tower, located in the Martello Tower where Joyce had lived for about a week, and where he therefore located Stephen Dedalus for the opening chapters of Ulysses. Afterward, I laid low in my hotel room vidding and reading and watching TV until my flight the following morning. It turns out they have Schitt's Creek Season 5 on Irish Netflix!

Comments

[jack]

Oh, you ran the zoo adventure again! That was such a great premise for a one-shot.

And glad you managed other good worldcon things too.

[sanguinity]

Hooray, you're home! I've been waiting for your con write-up ALL WEEK.

This marks the second time it ended in disaster when the players deliberately smashed the padlock on the Demonarium. WHO DOES THAT?

Two-thirds of your players, apparently!

[seekingferret]

I can't argue with math like that.

[bookherd]

I think part of the appeal of D&D for many, especially in a one-shot, is that it allows you to make Terrible Decisions you would never actually make in real life. ^._.^

[wendylove]

"I developed a Shabbos-friendly variant using a magnetic board for mapping...."

Ooooh. I got the game book/PDF & think it looks great but haven't played it, in large part because all the people I'd play it with are people I only get to hang out with on Shabbat. Can you share your variant?

[seekingferret]

Sure. I have the exact same problem, the people I want to play with are people who most easily have free time to play on Shabbos afternoon. So when I ran the game at Worldcon, even though we were playing on Sunday and most of the players were goyim, I asked if they were okay with playing as if it were on Shabbos, to try out my ideas. I also talked to Benjamin Rosenbaum at Worldcon and he said that he and Avery are working on an official Shabbos-friendly playkit.

The basic problem of playing A Dream Apart on Shabbos vs. D&D is that when I run D&D on Shabbos, I can do a lot more planning ahead of time. I can make maps, item cards, NPC stats, secret notes for players, etc... ahead of time, so the only challenge is stat tracking, and that's a relatively solved problem. Whereas A Dream Apart has a mapping phase that is communally done at the table, after character creation... I needed to figure out a strategy for doing that when you can't do writing, everything else is basically straightforward.

So I created a bunch of magnetic tokens with the various shtetl features from the Shtetl playkit page on them, as well as a number of additional locations of my own. When we got to the shtetl mapping phase, we spread out the tokens and discussed how we wanted to place them on the map. It worked really well, everyone got involved in moving pieces around... actually I think it probably worked more collaboratively than a mapping exercise would have if just one person were holding the pencil. We were also able to easily move things around a couple of scenes in when we realized that a different geography would help the story more. I can PM you my token sheet later.

The other thing that involves writing is marking your character sheets and setting element sheets. We didn't do any marking, we just declared our choices out loud. That mostly worked out, but Ben says they're talking about creating a new version of the sheets with all the choices on the edge of the page so you can mark them with paperclips or something.

[juliet]

Really glad you enjoyed being on the fanfic & community panel so much! It was a good one to moderate :)

(I swear I am still recovering from post-con exhaustion...Worldcon is a LOT.)

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I am definitely still recovering from Worldcon. But this Shabbos put a dent in my sleep debt. :)