Tournament Module

Old School Convention Tradition
Gencon 50 is in the books. I attended along with four local friends from one of my two regular play groups. We were among the 60,000+ unique attendees flowing through the Indiana Convention Center last week. With the sell-out this year I expected bigger crowds, but that was not my impression. An email from Gencon which I received after the event said attendance was up 4% over 2016. That seems a modest increase to me and explains why I didn't really notice bigger crowds.
One of the joys of con attendance is trying new games. The dealer exhibition hall is a great place to do this, so we spent a few hours trying out some games that looked interesting to us. Among those that stand out is a monster board/RPG called Kingdom Death: Monster. The game has roleplaying elements, nation building elements, exploration and some super detailed miniatures you can customize for your characters. It also has a $400 price and they were sold out! Other, more affordable games we played (and purchased) include Tiny Epic Quest, Hero Realms, Dragoon, and Santorini. Tiny Epic Quest by Gamelyn is an adventure game on a mini scale with easy to learn rules which supports multiple strategies. Hero Realms by White Wizard Games is a deck building adventure game that plays like a combination of Magic the Gathering and Dominion. Dragoon by Lay Waste Games is a boardgame about dragon "goons" who oppress the population, steal gold from each other and accumulate the biggest hoard of treasure. Gameplay is innovative, fast and strategic. The metal pieces and cloth play mat are quality components which add to the fun. Santorini by Cool Stuff Inc. is a strategy game where you play petty gods building competing temples ala the Tower of Babel. It combines elements of a stacking game with board control strategies. Another fun, quick game we played is 5 Minute Dungeon, a cooperative dungeon delve card game that reminds me of PIT.
Other than viewing some new games (and making a few purchases) the convention is about playing games. A big con like Gencon offers several types of games to play including card games, boardgames, roleplaying games, and video games. The traditional fantasy roleplaying games appeal most to me.  As at Origins earlier this summer, I once again found myself drawn to the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG game offerrings. The Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG by Goodman Games is a fantasy RPG that uses modern mechanics (similar to 3rd Edition in many ways) in an old school play style that attempts to support games based on Appendix N sources. A hallmark of old school convention play is the tournament and my friends and I joined in for the DCCRPG tournament this year.
Tournament play is a bit different from the standard RPG experience. Death is expected and necessary for elimination so there can be tournament winners. Tournament modules are therefore designed to frequently kill PCs. They are often centered on dungeons so as to limit the playable environment and usually somewhat linear so that each party/team encounters roughly the same challenges. Many of the earliest published play aids were tournament modules, TSR's C-series (Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan), G-series (Giants) and the Judges Guild offerings Gencon 9 Dungeon, Of Skulls and Scrapefaggot Green and Sword of Hope.
Goodman Games set their tournament up quite nicely this year. The referee/judge we had was personable and fair. The challenges were entertaining and the dungeon definitely had the old school feel to it with several puzzles as well as critters.  Our table ended in a total party kill, but we laughed and had fun with it.  Tournament characters are pre-gens and not really anything a player is likely to be attached to. Goodman Games had a large gong set up in the room and as each PC died, the player rang the gong and the room cheered. It was fun.  Our party lost the cleric early on when the judge rolled back-to-back critical hits on him and from that point on it was just a matter of time as we bled away hit points with no means of recovery.
The G series (Against the Giants) were the first published adventure modules I owned and were therefore influential in teaching me how to design my own adventures. I was fortunate that the G series included a number of locations and I quickly came to imitate the multi-locale adventure concept in my own creations, inserting overland travel in between the "dungeon" locations. For good or bad, I also copied the deadly nature of the tournament challenge and many dead PCs would lie forever forgotten amidst the halls of my dungeon creations. I was not alone in this grim practice as many of the referees in whose milieu I adventured also learned their craft from perusing various tournament modules.
The convention tournament has largely been replaced by numerous living campaigns in which players play the same characters in a number of loosely connected sessions or modules and PCs rarely die. My friends and I play in those events at every convention and enjoy that style of play. The old school tournament is a different experience and enjoyable in its own right. I amusingly noted that what I was frequently asked by other players in the tournament was "in what room did you die?". Competitive, shared experience brought us together and gave us something to talk about, compare and occasionally boast. The fact that nearly all our characters died didn't diminish the fun at all.