The End of the World 2018
It has been years since I joined my Ohio friends for their annual three-day RPG micro-con called "End of the World" or EOW. They have literally been doing this event for 29 years, and have it down to a science. This past weekend was EOW, and I was able to make it out to Ohio to join them for three days of gaming one-shots all featuring their homegrown (and somewhat suspect) system.
One of the cool things about EOW is that you can end up with a pretty wide variety of scenarios, each run by a different member of the group. The first one was a post-apocalyptic adventure where a group of villagers have to travel beyond the valley into the greater, scarier world to try to find a cure for a plague killing off their tribe. The second was set in 1959, with the PC's being a combination of FBI and CIA agents and the staff of a powerful congressman trying to prevent an attack by satanic Nazis on Nikita Kruschev's visit to Disneyland in California (a visit which nearly happened, but was called off for security reasons back then--Google it). The third was a more wargame-ish scenario where the PC's played a team of Morrow Project agents sent back in time to prevent another faction from changing the history of Europe's colonization of the Americas (we can debate the ethics of this story later, but I found it a little troubling given that we were doing it on Columbus/Indigenous People's Day).
A few things of real note about this group. As I mentioned before, this group has been gathering once a year for the past 29 years, which is remarkable in my mind. They also have always been a much larger group than normal: each of the sessions at EOW had nine or ten players. Keeping a group together that long and with those kinds of numbers is a testimony to both commitment and intention when it comes to maintaining a gaming group.
One of the cool things about EOW is that you can end up with a pretty wide variety of scenarios, each run by a different member of the group. The first one was a post-apocalyptic adventure where a group of villagers have to travel beyond the valley into the greater, scarier world to try to find a cure for a plague killing off their tribe. The second was set in 1959, with the PC's being a combination of FBI and CIA agents and the staff of a powerful congressman trying to prevent an attack by satanic Nazis on Nikita Kruschev's visit to Disneyland in California (a visit which nearly happened, but was called off for security reasons back then--Google it). The third was a more wargame-ish scenario where the PC's played a team of Morrow Project agents sent back in time to prevent another faction from changing the history of Europe's colonization of the Americas (we can debate the ethics of this story later, but I found it a little troubling given that we were doing it on Columbus/Indigenous People's Day).
A few things of real note about this group. As I mentioned before, this group has been gathering once a year for the past 29 years, which is remarkable in my mind. They also have always been a much larger group than normal: each of the sessions at EOW had nine or ten players. Keeping a group together that long and with those kinds of numbers is a testimony to both commitment and intention when it comes to maintaining a gaming group.
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