More game-alicious fun over the weekend at Furnace, the Sheffield based roleplaying convention. In its second year, attendance was up from approx 40 in 2006 to just under 70 this year. Even with increased number, it was a fantastic weekend. I got to meet up with people I haven’t seen in up to a year, made some new friends, and represented the RP community’s female minority fabulously, if I do say so myself.

I played in several games over the weekend. Keary and Rik (a close friend of many years) were there representing the Kult of Keepers, and I took part in Keary’s Call of Cthulhu game on the Saturday morning. As in any good Cthulhu game, we ended up mad and indentured for eternity. The game overran a bit, so by the time I’d gotten myself something to eat, I was too late to sign up for an afternoon game. Instead, I spent the time writing up an adventure to run on the Sunday.

Saturday evening saw me in Dom’s Savage World’s 2300AD game, on a bug hunt in deep space. Station Arcturus had been taken over by aliens, so it was down to the US Marine Corps and French/Australian liaisons to get it back! Cue bad accents, blazing guns, and none too subtle references to Aliens. Lots of fun.

Saturday night I ended up lending my spare bedroom and living room to Steff and Keary, who needed somewhere to sleep for the night. Good guys, both of ‘em.

Sunday morning I was a bit nervous - after a couple of months of GMing on Thursday nights down at the Old Queen’s Head, I decided to try running a game of Scion: Hero. It’s one of the newer White Wolf releases, and I’d never run it before, save for a quick intro last Thursday night. I didn’t think I was going to get enough players to run it at first, but after a last minute round up, I got 5 people round the table - Tim, Matt, Graham, Ric and Russell - and ran a game heavily lifted from the book. Happily, it went very well indeed, and I’ll be running some more Scion from now on at the Thursday night sessions. Of course, as Graham told me, that means I’m now obliged to run more at Furnace 2008. At least I have a year’s practice ahead of me!

Sunday afternoon was Graham’s Fading Suns game - sci-fi and sneakiness as we tried to hunt down a jump key without the many other quick fingered villains getting their hands on it first. Might have helped if we’d been a bit more discreet about who we were talking to!

Great atmosphere all weekend - couldn’t have asked for a better time.

At work today, I was looking through the students record system to find information on PhD students - whether or not they’d completed their courses in the allotted time limit, that kind of thing. All records have codes against them that mean various things - successfully completed, left, fully registered, transferred, etc. There’s also a withdrawn code, for students who’ve left before completing their course, which is suffixed with a letter describing the reasons for them leaving - P for personal, M for medical, F for financial. Sometimes it’s a combination - PM for personal and medical reasons. I came across one this afternoon that I loved, though - a student with the code WD FP, withdrawn for financial and personal reasons. Looking at the further comments on their record, it read ‘Withdrawn - won £250,000 on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.’ And let’s face it - who’d want to carry on studying for a doctorate if they won that kind of money?