The Summer of '17

The title feels almost like a Bryan Adams song; enough so that I put Summer of '69 in the background. But seriously, I may one day look back on this summer, and remember it as the year I started gaming with the Gauntlet.

Let's see... what games?

Breakers: (GM: Robert Ruthven) Playing mercenary looters on Earth with rift type events where alien (magical) worlds temporarily collide with our own.
Chaos Monks: (G: Andrew Shields) Shao-lin style craziness in a world of crab creatures and other strangeness. (also that session regaled in this blog post!)
The Watch: (GM: Michael X. Heiligenstein) Fighting the Shadow, a creeping force that is overtaking the clanlands and corrupting the men, leaving the rest of us to fight for our survival. My character: Lollec the Raven from clan Richti.
Stay Frosty (Death Force Doom): (GM: Tom McGrenery) Using a rules-light system for emulating stories like Aliens and Predator... but as storm troopers exploring a haunted Jedi temple on Hoth.
World of Dungeons (3+ sessions!): (GM: Tom McGrenery) Using this simplified OSR-ified Dungeon World hack to play OSR modules, I play Adjo, an exotic mercenary-of-sorts with high aspirations, in a close-knit group of adventuring misfits. We're currently playing B2: Keep on the Borderlands.
Cthulhu Dark: The History of Mercy Falls: (GM: Jason Cordova) A session in a series exploring the strange and mostly horrible history of this little isolated town in the northwest, in this case a strange "performance art" festival in the late '60s, using the recent (and refreshingly simple) Cthulhu Dark system.
Velvet Glove: (GM: Rich Rogers) Being a member in the '70s girl gang of The Black Roses, playing as Mauli Greenwood - the newbie and a bit of an instigator - and rising tensions with the Crystal Crows and various boys.

All of these games have a level of participation and player presence which rivals many of the better convention games I've played in recent years. Everyone is trying to hit those notes of a good story, whether sad or glorious or slightly silly, in a manner which is collaborative in approach. Games are generally 3 hours, which means that side chit-chat is minimized during play. Everyone has great online-game decorum, knowing how to wait for their turn, which isn't difficult considering the caliber of GMs and games that involve quickly rotating spotlights, so you never feel like it's too long between your turn to contribute.

I can't recommend this community enough if you are into story and indie games and want to play some great online table-top role playing games. All the GMs play and run plenty of these games, and it's apparent that improving their craft is a high priority.

And to that end: Gauntlet Con!

Because the Gauntlet hit a Patreon stretch goal, the first Gauntlet Con will be running October 20-22, 2017. Initial sign-ups are for Patreon members (as they're the reason the convention is running) but soon other community members should be able to sign up. The level of games here is unreal, to the level of conventions like Big Bad Con (which precedes this convention by a week).