U-Con 2023 - Sunday & Final Thoughts

Last day of the convention and I only had one game.  So I'll go over that, and then some final thoughts about the con overall.

The Cave of Our People 

This game was run by the same GM who ran the Great Egg Race yesterday. The adventure is for Primal Quest, but the GM was using a modified Cairn for the rules. 

The general premise is that the characters are a group of young people from a Neolithic tribe about to undergo the initiation rituals to become adults. 

The premise is fun and enjoyable, however I will say I found the adventure itself quite linear and not all that interesting. There was not a lot to do that wasn't just go from encounter to encounter. The GM himself seemed to struggle with it at times, having to pause to read through the booklet which did kill the pacing of the game on several occasions, but I think a lot of it can be laid at the module itself. 

It wasn't a bad experience or anything, but definitely the low point of the four games I played in during the convention.

Final Thoughts

So, if I had to describe my overall feeling of U-Con 2023 it would be "Good, but not Great".  The convention felt (and was) smaller and a bit less varied in offerings especially in the OSR side of games. It felt like a clearly diminished version of the convention I saw when I was there in 2019 for their 30 year anniversary.

Still, despite all of that, U-Con is an enjoyable convention. having the hotel and convention center be in the same building just makes things feel cozy and intimate. Would I wish there were more and more varied OSR games being run? Yes. Perhaps I should have run one myself, but I kept going back and forth on that and decided against it.

I would overall recommend it to anyone who's in the area and if I had the option to, I would likely attend it in the future too (But I won't, due to life).

U-Con 2023 - Saturday

So, Saturday. Today I went to check out the Vendor Hall. While U-Con didn't have a particularly big one when I was there in 2019, unfortunately this year the place was rather dire. Very few vendors, and most of them selling what could at best be described as "tat" - stuff that is vaguely peripheral to gaming, but that's about it.

Between the pandemic and the proximity to Thanksgiving, this year the convention is rather small and it feels like it. Still, the place where the vendor hall is located is hardly a large room to begin with, as the convention is just more focused on playing games than buying them.

And speaking of which, today I was only in one game. 

The Great Egg Race - Three Racoons in a Trench Coat

Finally made it to the eggs!

The game was run by Brett Slocum. The concept is simple - we divide into two teams of three, and each team is, in fact, three racoons hidden in a trenchcoat. As a friendly challenge we go into a human supermarket to get some eggs and abscond with them. The trio with the most eggs gets bragging rights.

It was a fun party game, honestly something very much in the style of Honey Heist. Our team went for a much more chaotic approach, taking jars off shelves and throwing them at the other team, at their cart and in the end - at the supermarket security! Not much to really say about it, except that it's a decent idea for a short con-game and worth running if you want something like Honey Heist, but with racoons instead of bears.

All in all a fairly chill convention day. Unfortunately with the vendor hall being what it is, there is not much else to do, except I suppose play board games. 

Last day of the con tomorrow.

U-Con 2023 - Friday

 Inspired by Warren's posting about ReaperCon earlier this year, I decided I'll try and post about my experience attending U-Con this year. I was at this convention once before in 2019 and really enjoyed it, so here we are for a second go!

U-Con in General

A small-ish local convention in Michigan, U-Con definitely has an atmosphere I can best describe as "cozy". It reminds me of some of the German cons I've been to, where it's a small group of people hanging out in the same hotel and gaming. 

The reason I like U-Con in particular is that it has a dedicated OSR/NSR track for gaming, and in fact I have signed up for 4 games this time. In 2019 the con was a lot more bustling and with a lot more OSR stuff going on. This year things are a bit more subdued, mostly for obvious pandemic-related reasons affecting numbers in the past few years.

Game 1 - Dr. Penderghast Must DIE!

First thing I played in was a DCC level-0 Funnel. Some teenagers from our local Carpathian village have been kidnapped by Dr. Penderghast, so off we go to form an angry mob and storm his mansion. The game was a fairly typical Funnel fare - lots of deaths, lots of traps and things jumping at you from places you would not expect them to (best one probably being a stained glass window depicting knights and demons animating those figures and coming down to fight us). 

The finally encounter with the doctor was a suitably dramatic thing - his Beast, a giant two-headed gorilla rampaging as we are desparately trying to free the teens and kill everyone else. The doctor, after being (seemingly) killed shooting lasers out of his eyes and his head splitting in half to reveal a floating brain with eyeballs that kept on fighting. Classic stuff, very much inspired by old Universal horror movies. 

All in all I enjoyed the funnel, even if I don't think it offered anything specificlly unique to the medium. The classic horror themeing works well with DCC Funnels though, so that was definitely a big plus! 

The game was run by Joshua Burnett, who is said he is planning on relesaing this eventually as a third-party DCC module. He has other things already published as well that you can check in the link I just posted. 

Game 2 - Hidden Hand of the Horla, 5th Anniversary 

The second game I played in (starting at 8 pm no less!) was an OSE adventure about exploring a giant hand-shaped tower of the Hand Mage (appropriate) which vanished some 1000 years ago and has now reappeared. 

The game was run by Ryan Thompson of Appandix N Entertainment who is also one of the U-Con orgnizers and the person in charge of the OSR/NSR track for the convention. 

We had 10 players in the game (would have been 12 except some people were too tired to join) and surprisingly we finished the thing in about 2 and a half hours of the 4 alloted. We fought many goatpeople, had a prolonged and frankly silly fight with some flying books (A fight which my fighter simply noped out of, since in the first round of combat 3 of the books rolled fumbles and managed to destroy themselves, so he decided this was not really something worth his time) and winged serpents.

The game was quite snappy, as the GM has plenty of experience running large games (he mentioned he'd run a game for 20 people at one point) and also the module itself was quite compact and clearly useable for a convention game.

That last part is not surprising to me, as the whole "5th anniversary" thing in the title is because this is the 5th year in a row that he's run this module at the convention! 

I really enjoyed this game, and in fact bought the module for it, which I plan on writing up a review of in the near future. The adventure works great as a one-shot, and also has potential setup for a longer, plane-hopping campign (there is apparently another module in the works that ties in with this one). 

Also the game was ran using the GM's own Gateway to Adventure houserules for OSE, including classes like very Gloranthan Duck people, a Leprechun and others. 


So, the first day of the convention was overall quite nice, I will post later today (hopefully) about my Saturday experience!