After Action Report: Week in Rokugan 2021

It has indeed been a full year since I attended a con in person. The last one was Weekend in Rokugan 2020 Before everything wnet sideways... I remember it fondly.

Fast forward another year and WiR was upon us again. I had vacation time lined up and getting excited about an in-person con. Alas, WiR2021 would not be the first in-person convention of a restarting world...

What the crew of Heroes of Rokugan did was pretty clever, I think. Instead of cramming all the games within a Friday through Sunday timeframe, they moved the con throughout the week with the newt adventure AND an open library event evening. In short, there were at least three tables running every night. Since there were two new adventures and a battle interactive on Saturday night.

I got to play one of the catch-up adventures on Monday night GM'd by Cory-M, on what is typically my gaming-free night. My writing night, if you will.

On Tuesday, I was out with ActionMan for his soccer night in Dekalb County - a surprisingly distant trip! ActionMan is improving and he still enjoys playing.

Wednesday night, we had to cancel the Akhamet campaign and I canceled my True20 campaign to join one of the new events (#50) GM'd by Jason Beck. It was interesting playing as an Emerald Magistrate in an adventure where you have to deal with a fellow magistrate who is effectively a total jerk, but he does outrank me, so I must obey...

Thursday, I picked up the second new adventure, #51 run by the author and campaign master himself, Chris-W. This adventure led directly into the Saturday night battle interactive. A special thing I did: I killed two oni, the first kills I did in at least twenty adventures! My specialty is protection and healing, not damage. I was able to buy up my Willpower to 4, a major and useful investment

Life prevented me from playing anything on Friday.

Saturday morning, I played a non-L5R game of Dark Heresy. I am digging that campaign too, even if it may be a tad too simple. Now we could've done better, but our dice rolls were a complete pile of garbage. I mean constant fails.

Finally Saturday evening came the big event, the Battle interactive. It was a battle in the Shadowlands. A terrible place filled with even worse things to face. I mean all the undead, rotting, squishy, nasty, venomous, bile-filled nasty things. Fear is the order of the day. Whenever you go beyond the Great Wall, you never come back quite the same. This time, I should have been in command, but I defered command to one who was more skilled and had experience fighting the Shadowlands, it turned out to have been a very good decision in the end.

We were able to tackle two of the heroics: We fought a horde of zombies, Lost/revenant samurai, and a force of maho-tsukai and undead knights. The first combat was easy, the second was effectively won on us rolling ridiculous initiative, and the final fight had maho-tsukai and bone knights. The final battle was quite a major challenge as our initiatives fell and this one got really hairy. We lost our commander because I failed a spellcasting roll for being too ambitious with it. In the end though, we all survived (thanks to a well-used cert). Two heroic encounters were an interesting challenge as we cleared out the enemy siege engines.

In the end, I thought this was a very clever way to run events and make sure people got to play the games leading up to the big battle interactive. Really mad props to Chris, Cat, Cory, the GMs, and the writing team.

A big thank you. I will be back next year, whether in-person (hopefully) or online. Oh! And I will be at Gencon too!