Hellfire club has nothing on the 2am club…..Grogmeet 2025 pt 1 (Spoilers, spoilers and more spoilers for Gatsby and The Great Race – a Call of Cthulhu scenario).

 

Where to begin with Grogmeet? Do you begin with the excitement as the tickets are made available? The excitement of submitting a game? The excitement of seeing the games offered and signing up? The excitement of using the Birtish railway system never knowing if you’ll reach your destination?

Whenever the excitement starts it gradually builds and before you know it, you are walking into Whitworth Locke venue in Manchester and play gets underway. Although in my case, the train I was due to get was cancelled so I made it into the Whitworth with about 10mins to spare……..

Gatsby and the great race – Call of Cthulhu, Friday 17^th January…

The first game I was involved with was the rather legendary ‘Gatsby and the great race’ written by Paul Fricker. I had heard of this scenario over the years. For those not familiar it is a multi-table scenario with several Keepers each running their own table. For ‘reasons’, players get to change tables during the scenario. This makes for a great playing experience, and tbh it was great fun as a Keeper as well. If there is a list of ‘things to GM before I die’, Gatsby and the great race is on it, so at least I can tick that off now.

In our game we had 7 tables, with 7 Keepers (technically there was two games – one of four tables and one of three). Each table had 6 players. So 42 players plus 7 keepers. There was then a host of supporting Keepers to enable movement of players between tables. There was also an extra dimensional space where players were taken blindfolded and had a physical and auditory sensory experience which as far as I could tell involved being tickled with feathers and having ‘weird’ messages being played loudly that had been pre-recorded by other members of the Grogsquad that couldn’t attend Grogmeet.

The game relies on time loops that the players gradually become aware of and there are mechanics to ensure players can move between tables with their character. They effectively ‘jump’ into the other PCs body at the new table but retain the same memories and stats as their original PC . This makes for interesting love triangles, face to face meetings with oneself in different bodies, and of course plenty of SAN loss.

The prep involved a relaxed online call the Sunday before where it became apparent I hadn’t done enough prep or knew what the hell was going on…queue some rapid reading and lots of head scratching. Luckily all the Keepers were in the same sanity vortex pre game. My top tips are

1. Concentrate on your table only
2. Watch The Great Gatsby (or cheat like I did and watch clips on Youtube) for insights in Gatsby (if you were literate, you would have or could read the book but I am not that well prepared).
3. Ensure you have a great organiser and supporting team at the event. Luckily Dirk the Dice done all this so we knew we were in safe(ish) hands.
4. Accept the chaos that comes with a game like this. That really does help. I felt this helped me to relax!
5. As Paul said during the preparation, as a Keeper you are basically playing Gatsby so revel in it and enjoy yourself.
6. Prepare your ‘events’ before hand. I had a few from the scenario plus I invented a couple of others for my table.

WTF is with the badgers?

OK so this has turned into a bit of an ‘in joke’. During the prep meeting Paul explained that at one previous play of the scenario Matt Sanderson was running a table and when Paul went to check in on the games realised that Matts players were in a shed fighting a Honey Badger (or similar). He had no idea why as this was not in anyway related ot the as written scenario. Fast forward to our game and after players had been to the extra dimension or been in other games they were fixated on a badger and wanted to find the badgers in the scenario. Of course, there are none and they have nothing to do with the scenario but the seed had been planted so you have run with it. One of my players spent at least three time loops trying to interact with the badgers. It was unfortunate that the player made the ‘Natural World’ roll with only 10% to find a badger set. If he hadn’t – no badgers and he could have done something else. Typical. So we played it out and eventually the badgers managed to eat some of his face off while he was summoned and his collapsed in front of the hungry badger…………..

Thanks to all the players that took part, particularly my table as they all played excellently and really threw themselves into the game!

The race is over….

This was an event that I feel very lucky to have been part of. The players were confused and it showed, but this just added to the enjoyability, and after a few time loops they figured it out, although how to end the time loops probably takes a bit more of the Keeper feeding some specific information purely because there is so much going on for the players to absorb and try and put the pieces together. And of course inserting red herrings in the form of badgers doesn’t really help….lol

Honestly if you get the chance to play or help to run this scenario, grab it with both hands and dive in.

The excitement got too much..

One of the most important aspects of Grogmeet is the social side of things. Now I made an error and didn’t play in the evening game on the Friday. I found one other Grog who also hadn’t signed up to a evening Friday game. We managed to find ourselves in the Las O’ Gowrie from about 6pm……time shifted and then it was 2am and the final beer was sunk and the 2am Grogsquad was born…..

That’s it for part 1 of my Grogmeet 2025 review, next time in part 2 of my Grogmeet 2025 review I’ll go over my thoughts and Handler tips for the for the Delta Green scenario Blacksat and heap lavish praise on the Dragonbane RPG…..that's it for now, remember Parrying is For Wimps....