So is has been some time ago, but I don’t want to miss telling about by attendance at Conventus Leonis on April 28th 2018, the biggest and oldest Role Playing convention in Braunschweig.

It has been some years that I haven’t been at the Conventus for several reasons, but in the end I never go to Convention to play, only to run RPG sessions. And since I am Ambassador of the Elite: Dangerous RPG (EDRPG) this felt only right to hit my home turf to run a session or two.

I was disappointed that in early April the Conventus Leonis webpage still only held a placeholder and there was no official way to apply for sessions I wanted to run. After asking via their Twitter Account @conventusleonis without reply I asked by email and finally got feedback. After a day everything was sorted and I prepared two EDRPG sessions to be run on Saturday, April 28th 2018. For Sunday I wanted to show up, talking to people and maybe running a spontaneous session but I had to stay with my family because by daughter became ill.

Nonetheless I finally showed up about an hour early on Saturday with two prepared adventures, my own session hangouts, printed out books (the EDRPG Rulebooks haven’t arrived in time, Sourcebooks are about to be printed)  and lots on ambition to run EDRPG. It was a pleasure meeting some of the people I knew from older years or other events and so I set up my table in the hall (or auditorium) in the top floor of the venue. I chose that room and a table right in the from at the door since I wanted to present the game and promote it, otherwise I would have preferred a place more quiet.

The first adventure was an Espionage mission where four rookie spies had to infiltrate a Corporate Bureau in a Coriolis SpacePort to extract plans of a secret project. The catch was, that the spies employer had a mole on site and didn’t want him compromised or killed by collateral damage, so the theft should be a quite and low profile as possible. And a secondary target was the destruction/deletion of project data in the Corporate systems. The mission was to transport the data by Spaceship to a nearby Star System and rendezvous with an employers agent to transfer the plans. The players had 4 hours to complete that mission, that much time I had calculated until the next session was about to start.

Most players appeared early, so we had time to talk a little, as well as have a chat with some other people asking for the game. Hardly anyone knew EDRPG, a few people knew Elite: Dangerous (the PC/Console Game) but at least some of them when the Elite franchise from older versions, mostly from the first one. When we wanted to start the adventure a fifth players showed up, there was a hiccup with the entry workflow it seemed, but of course we let the fifth one in, taking an additional character from the next adventure.

The adventure moved slow, the players were very reluctant to start their actions. I gave them some more opportunities to get details and to allow them to use some unplanned approaches on getting to enter the facility. They seemed to have problems getting the characters focus and I learned what I will have to focus on the next time. In the end they got to the Research Center without much fuss, had a hard time with one of the Engineers would didn’t fall for their cover story and fled rather rapidly with the target data but without fulfilling the secondary target, but everything was fine so far. Since they needed way more time than expected and I didn’t rush them into anything I skipped a latter part of the adventure, which I wrote to have several points where I could adapt to the pace of the game. This lead to the characters not being thrown into a Space Fight, which was a pity! Two characters had being put into the group to accommodate for a fight, one on a Personal Level and one at the Ship Level. Both characters didn’t get their focus time, which was again a pity. I learned my lesson in taking more than four hours for that adventure, making a more time restrictive background story and keep an hour for Space Combat in the end.

As far as I could tell the players had a fun time and their will try EDRPG again in the future. I guess I did an okay job, especially in showing the gaming system and ED background.

Then without a break I moved into the next adventure, four new players with similar (low) knowledge of the ED or EDRPG background. This time a team of Search and Rescue agents had to look for a missing Exploration Ship in their Star System, a binary system with two suns and nearly 30 stellar objects. Their mission was to find out what happened, secondary targets where the rescue of the Pilot (should he still be alive) or at least an extraction of his exploration data to find out more about his mission. The players got a look into the complexity of navigation in a binary Star System with planets being like 70.000 Lightseconds apart, how to plan a right route and that they needed to find out what the Explorer wanted in this partly inhabited System. They investigated, checked Star System maps and then plotted a route to a Planet they thought to be the most interesting to the Explorer. They made a good job, bargained for better equipment that they needed for their mission but could not afford, made their way to the target, didn’t take any of my decoys and rescued the Pilot (there was a good chance of coming to late). They even got to something I didn’t think of to contact the Pilot when they were close, great job. In the end they departed, had to meet opposition I had already given hints to and could have reduced in strength by taking a detour earlier. I think they can be proud of their work, I certainly had my fun and enjoyed the game. We even had time in the end to show them the character progression, of course they advanced to the next rank.

All in all I prepared a lot for the sessions, being my first sessions as an Ambassador for EDRPG. In the end I had quite some experiences I will take into account before my Sonnencon 2018 adventure in July. The most annoying part was that I could not present any real books, only my printed versions. By now I have my two Core Rulebooks (and they deliver in quality!) and I hope the four Supplements will be printed, soon. And I hoped to get some promotional material like flyers and even made a proposal in z-folded flyers for the future to Spidermind. I hope to have something around in the future. In the end I ran the first Ambassador Gaming Session at a Convention as far as I understood, so there is room for improving for all of us.

So far my short report without much Spoiler from the adventures (I will keep them around for other opportunities). Feel free to comment if you have any questions or even played in one of the Games. I am always happy to get constructive feedback, one way or the other.