Conpulsion 2000 was held in Edinburgh at the end of march and proved the most successful Conpulsion yet. Not only did more people come than ever before (300+) but we raised more than a 1000 pounds for charity at the auction, filled our rooms to bursting, and had one of our most popular star guests so far, John Wick.
John Wick was here for two main reasons, firstly as the creator of Legend of the Five Rings and secondly to promote Orkworld, a wonderful game which he ran demos of throughout the con. I was lucky enough to have both John and Jennifer stay in my house, and we had a great time seeing Templar ruins, touring Edinburgh and talking gaming, though its true that John had toothache so bad that we had to rush him off to my dentist only the day after he arrived for Root Canal Work! Luckily all went well on the dental front and I know John is now in love with Scottish dentists.
Because John was coming we planned more L5R events than ever before. Our main event was a CCG tournament, which attracted around 35 people, less than hoped I am sad to say but still a good turnout for us. Top prizes were clan swords and promos, many contributed by John himself who was selling and signing cards (and anything else he could get a pen near) for the whole weekend. Following this we had an open tournament, a pre-release tournament, and most popular of all a massive game of suicide (or booster) L5R, a local invention where matches are played with single boosters. We had a massive elimination game of booster L5R where winners took the looser's cards and four different heats came together in a giant multiplayer final, it was very popular.
Our other big 5 rings event was our LARP. We (that is myself, my wife, and our friend Justin) had been running a 5 rings LARP set in Dragonfly lands for a year, now it was time to bring it to a conclusion. More than 40 people flooded our LARP room, we ran out of characters... but it still somehow went amazingly well. John Wick took part of course, playing Bayushi Yojiro, and once again he was slain in character, cut down from behind by an angry Samurai (he did the same at GenCon 2000 as well apparently). By the end of the evening I had lost my voice and my ability to run the game... but everyone seemed to love it so it can't have gone badly.
Finally we had an auction full of L5R stuff as well, signed cards, unique promos, and lots of material for the Roleplaying game as well, the only thing we lacked was anything to do with Clan War, maybe someone needs to come up and show us why we should be playing.
David Donachie
DOJOS
Somewhere on my system (got a bit disorganised over the summer) I have a message from one of the Finnish people about Dojo's and structure. I was working on an RPG scenario featuring Dojo's (there is a nice map in one of the Turnbull books or the book on Japanese buildigns), but any other takers out there fancy a try?
Chris
MORE ANCESTORS by Dieter Elbrecht
"Are you interested in a table of homebrewed Ancestors for the RPG? When we've began to play we noticed that some Clans had more and better ancestors than others and so we tried to correct this." (I've only included the Scorpion ones this time. More next issue. Chris)
REACHING 40
Chris reached this ripe old age in July this year. So, time to shave off the topknot, and retire to a Monastery. Anybody got any more information about what actually happens other than the brief bits in the Samurai Sourcebook (Turnbull) and the Sengoku RPG?
Chris