Con on the Cob 2019 - Part II

You can read my overview of the Con itself here.

I ran five four hour sessions at Con on the Cob. I had a lot of fun and started losing my voice by the last session. Here's a breakdown of the sessions I ran.

Thursday

The Return of Reverend Pancake (Dark Places & Demogorgons)

Source

A group of teens in southern Ohio decide to get revenge on some bullying jocks. Unfortunately one of the jocks accidentally resurrects a puritanical zombie preacher (statted for DCC here). The premise behind this session and the setting were based on my hometown. The highlights of the session were when the nerd built a hard pretzel cannon (because he thought pretzels were the best source of salt) and the karate kid said they needed to get a boombox with Iron Maiden - 2 Minutes to Midnight because undead are weak against "pure metal."

Friday

After School Special (Vigilante City)
For this session I used premade VC characters and the pamphlet adventure Ninja Beat'Em Up!. I had a group of seven vigilantes but they were definitely challenged by the massive number of ninjas (though it probably helped that I was rolling like shit). One thing I noticed while running is that the super-soldier, mutant, and true vigilante seemed to be doing the most in the game (the first two because of their powers and the third because she kept critting). Still everyone had fun. I think if I run it again (and I'd like to), I'll make sure that all characters are non-powered.

Road Crew: The Arwich Grinder (Dungeon Crawl Classics)
A naked large man collapses and dies in an inn in the village of Arwich while grasping the bonnet of a local teen. Brave townsfolk must brave the weather and investigate, owing their lives to the family. This is a Lovecraftian funnel that I've ran before (notes here). However, this time it didn't go as expected at all! While some were injured, no characters died in this funnel. Not only that, but they took all of the cult family members alive to be tried, and killed Junior and the Sending of Sliggeth. It was an amazing session, but no one was ground but the horrific monstrosities. My friend from Columbus, Robert, played in this session too, which made it extra fun.

Saturday

Road Crew: Leopard Women of Venus (Dungeon Crawl Classics)
The Humanoid Coalition recruited grunts from the various human tribes on Venus for an importation mission. The setting is coming to Kickstarter soon and you can read more about it here. I loved it and wanted to show it off. Josh gave me his notes from the after hours GenCon session of Leopard Women of Venus game he ran and I used those and my pre-Kickstarter zine to run the session. Most of the group was made up of the red meat eating, gun-toting, God-loving Otram. The most memorable character was little Billy. He was a displaced human school kid whom the Otram adopted. Billy gained a shotgun during the adventure and used it to take out quite a few foes, before his unfortunate death by animated Martian pudding.

Road Crew: Glow-H-I-O The Museum at the End of Time (Mutant Crawl Classics)
My original plan was to run an original funnel for my new Ohio-based MCC setting. I didn't get it finished though, so I ran The Museum at the End of Time instead. I had another large group (seven players total). We had some experienced MCC and DCC players, a couple that had never played the systems, and one player than had never played a tabletop rpg before. I have to say this was my favorite session of the whole con. Everyone got into character as their primitive tribesman. There were some interesting deaths and and I even had one character who ascended to godhood and became the Star Child.

Swag
I also wanted to show off the non-Cob Crate swag I picked up. I grabbed four of these Grimtooth D6'
s. I love the character, want to use him more, and it also seemed fitting after the recent passing of Rick Loomis. I also grabbed several fan-made Critical Role buttons, because I'm a critter and I liked them. I didn't get all of the characters, but I grabbed my favorites (and a cool Zombae button).