Forge 2025
I attended Forge Midwest, a wonderful little con, this past weekend as I have every year for the past decade or so. It's not a very large affair, with attendance varying somewhere between thirty and seventy folks depending on the year. This smaller number allows the con to use a somewhat unusual structure: there are three time slots for gaming each day, starting at 10 AM, 1 PM, and 7 PM, with breaks in between intended for attendees to go have communal meals. At the beginning of each session, everyone interested in running a game gets up in front of the whole convention and pitches what they're interested in running or facilitating and which table they'll be commandeering to do so. Everyone else is then left to choose a game based on the pitches. There's a great mix of RPGs and other tabletop games and likewise of published games and things in playtest. This post features some brief summaries of what I got up to this year:
Day 1, Session 1: Inhuman Conditions
This is a delightful game inspired by Blade Runner in which one player takes the role of of an investigator looking to root out robots masquerading as humans while the other player takes the role of a suspect. The investigator must figure out via questions whether the suspect is a human or robot and has to use robotic tells or unusual behaviors in order to make that determination. I managed to kill a human at least once because they got careless and replicated the robotic tell multiple times!
Day 1, Session 2: Fear the Dark 1 - The Sky-Blind Spire
The first playtest session for my RPG! I ran Michael Prescott's The Sky-Blind Spire, a classic one page adventure, because I'd had some house maintenance problems the week before that prevented me from dedicating the time I'd like for prepping my own adventure.
This one featured the players trying to climb the outside of the tower but being repelled by pelicans, immediately decide that the sparks that collect as one traverses the tower in order were a sign of something horrible, make a deal with the undines to destroy the altar at the tower's peak, and studiously avoid ever encountering the giants within. Because they entered past the tapestry to avoid sparks, they had a bear of a time getting out once they'd finished their quest.
Day 1, Session 3: Translucent University
This is a playtest RPG about existing at a magic school of some form. My fellow player and I decided that we were at a graduate school in a setting much like the late 19th century which also featured space exploration. We ended up investigating the murder of a professor by invaders from Mars who were able to use magic thought impossible by human science.
Day 2, Session 1: Beeline -
This was a playtest board game about controlling a team of bees competing with other players to bring back the most pollen to the hive. It involves rolling dice with potential movements on each face and using those results to program in movements for each bee when they leave the hive. You're racing to beat other players' bees to the richest locations, but you have to watch out for the birds flitting around the map who are happy to eat any bee they come across!
Day 2, Session 2: Fear the Dark 2 - The Sky-Blind Spire
I ran Sky-Blind Spire again for a different group on this day. They were a bit more enthusiastic about collecting the sparks, but when the undines reacted with hostility to the sparks quickly reconsidered their initial plan. They made a similar deal with the undines to what the first group did, but then quickly stumbled into an encounter with one of the giants.
The giants very quickly told them they didn't care for the altar destruction plan and tried to persuade them to destroy the undines instead while also asking them to find whoever had been stealing from their hoard. Eventually, the players managed to find and capture one of the blue-cloaked goblins rendered invisible by the shaman's ritual and deliver the thief to the giants. They still headed upstairs and destroyed the altar while being attacked by pelicans, but managed to fast talk their way past the giants on the way back out of the tower.
Day 2, Session 3: Dread
This was another attendee's hack of Dread. The players were a group of strange aliens, each from different worlds and with very different physical features and emotional states. We had been thrown together in a strange space station that contained a gauntlet full of traps and puzzle rooms and made our way through before breaking out of the linear path and confronting the humans who were running the facility. We eventually discovered that the whole place was powered by a giant orb that granted wishes, which some used to destroy the place and those running it, others used to return home, and the last used to create a ship to explore the galaxy.
Day 3, Session 1: Tower of the Wizard Lord
This is another playtest board game, this time one in which the players are exploring a haunted forest, looking to discover the eponymous Tower of the Wizard Lord and claim its power. The map is made of tiles on a square grid which are shuffled. Players move across it and flip over the tile they end on, fighting it if it's a monster, flipping other tiles looking for specific types if it's a dungeon, claiming it if it's a treasure, and paying for it if it's a useful magic item. Each claimed tile is worth VP and whoever is ahead when someone claims the Tower of the Wizard Lord wins the game.
Day 3, Session 2: Fear the Dark 3 - A Litany in Scratches
For the final session of the con, I ran a third Fear the Dark playtest, this time using another of Michael Prescott's adventures, A Litany in Scratches, since I had some repeat players this time.
The players arrived in the High Uttvelt and ran into kobolds almost immediately who invited them to come meet the drake. The players did not like that idea one bit and immediately headed into the cave, but decided the barrier was too scary to go past. They headed back to the drake, who asked them to destroy the undead that his worshipers were too cowardly to fight, headed into the hole under the vampire tree, destroyed the crypt master's altar and disrupted his ritual, and then tried to sneak out without paying the tax they agreed on to the drake.
Unfortunately for the players, the drake was watching and confronted them upon their departure which ended up turning into a big fight! The players eventually got the drake to submit, but then one of them decided they weren't satisfied with anything less than a kill so the fight continued. Some of the characters took some nasty injuries and were knocked out of the fighting, but they managed to kill the drake and get away with their loot.
As always, Forge Midwest was a great experience. I'm already looking forward to next year, when hopefully I'll have a much more fully-featured version of Fear the Dark to run.