Hire and Salary at Carnage

After urging from several directions I decided to make a try at GMing something at Carnage this year. This'll be my first time GMing at Carnage, though I've GMed at LoreCon a few times (and way back when at I-Con). Judging from the schedule, this wasn't the year they really needed me to GM -- the roleplaying section has a lot more offerings than previous years, and every slot has many choices. I might actually not get to play any board games this year.

I'm a little nervous about whether the game will go off since I've offered games a few more times at LoreCon than I've succeeded in running them. Several times I got a slot booked only to have no one show up -- not even one person. This has to be at least in part because I have run games with homebrew and offbeat game systems. Not that that's a death sentence: Charlton Wilbur has made a name for himself running odd game systems and they usually fill up.

I will probably take a lot of successful sessions running more mainstream games before I have that kind of reputation, though. For that reason I considered running this session using the officially published Serenity Roleplaying Game, but since even that's not that widely known, it probably wouldn't've helped. Still, maybe one day I'll be able to run a session of RealTime at a con, but probably not for a while. I'm not going to try again any time soon, given how completely shut out I was the last two times (and how much work I'd put in to prepare).

The adventure I'm running is one I've run twice before, once at LoreCon (fairly successfully), set in the Firefly universe. I originally wrote it while the show was still airing; when we played it, we hadn't even seen Out Of Gas yet, let alone the movie. I will probably need to make a few small adjustments, but not many; nothing in it really depends on the things we learned in later episodes. Since there may (or may not) be reavers in it, I'll probably set it before the movie, but even setting it after the movie wouldn't change much.

I have made pregen characters this time. At LoreCon we made up characters, and with RTC that's easy to do really fast, but people seem to prefer having pregens, or at least they find the idea less intimidating. Plus it means more time for the story.

Even if the game doesn't happen, I won't have done that much work to prepare since it's an old adventure I'm dusting off and brushing up. And I'll still get the discount (once I can find out what that is) even if I don't get to do anything. I'll just go downstairs at that session and play a board game if no one shows. (There's an interesting variant on Ticket To Ride running that session with a homemade board that would be nice to get in on.)