NWARG Game Day

The Northwest Arkansas Roleplaying Gamers puts on a quarterly game day. It's sort of a one day mini-con where people throw out pitches for one-shot RPG sessions they'd like to run, and then if enough people express an interest they run them. From what I've seen on the boards there's usually only a couple of games being run, but the people who attend always seem to have a good time.

This past Saturday was the first time I was able to attend, and I am glad that I did. There were two games being run, one was "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!" (shown above) and the other was "3:16 - Carnage on Pandora." I don't know anything about the former other than the name and that it was being run by a guy I've gamed with a couple of times who is a fun guy to game with. I played in the second, which was a sequel to the recent movie Avatar in which we played part of a force sent back to Pandora to secure unobtanium, and teach those blue monkeys a lesson!

The game went quickly, but was a lot of fun. Lots of mindless mayhem which ended with our winning the day for the forces of capitalist imperialism in something close to a replay of the finale of the film, but with us grunts better prepared to deal with traitorous grenade wielding avatars than was the previous garrison.

Once again, a complete session of the game went by in about two hours. If you have limited time for roleplaying then 3:16 just might be the game to try given how quickly it plays. It's a straight up bug hunt at the beginning, but after a couple of plays I'm starting to see how it could develop into something a bit more interesting by the end of a campaign, with characters really starting to question just what it is they are doing.

If you want to participate in a future game day you can check out the NWARG forums.