My Day at the Cow

Concrete Cow 23: 18th March 2023

Mar 20, 2023

Concrete Cow is a one-day RPG convention, taking place twice yearly (March and September) in Milton Keynes. There was around 40 attendees on Saturday (the most there’s ever been was about 90 people, but that felt pretty crowded), with about 6 or 7 games running in both morning and afternoon slots.

The entry fee has remained low, increasing by only £1 over the 17 years (yep, started in 2006!) the con has been running, to a modest £5. Game allocation is done via pen and paper sign-up sheets, just before each slot. All attendees get a numbered ticket, and newcomers and those offering to run a game get a golden ticket. Golden tickets get first choice of which game they wish to play. Random numbers, zero to nine, are then called out and those whose ticket ends with that digit are called forward to sign up for the game of their choice (the order is reversed in the afternoon). This system works smoothly, and avoids the unpleasant frenzy of elbows that many of us have witnessed at other cons over the years.

There’s always a good selection of games on offer, including Kult, Call of Cthulhu, Starforged, and Honey Heist, to name but a few. There are three game slots: morning, afternoon and evening.

Leisure Games were there, with boxes and boxes of games for sale. A charity Lottery takes place in the evening, and there’s always good gaming prizes donated.

It’s worth noting that the con is close to Wolverton train station, and has shops and restaurants nearby.

The New(ish) Website

Neil Smith, the founder of both the convention and the Milton Keynes RPG club, has created a website for the con. Much like this very page, it has a subscribe button, so if you have even the vaguest inkling that you might wish to attend a future Cow, get on over there and subscribe — do it, do it now! That way you’ll get email updates and all that good stuff:

Concrete Cow Website

My Day at the Cow

In the morning, I ran a Call of Cthulhu game, The Dreaming Ward, for five players. The scenario was written by Matt Sanderson, who was also in attendance. Matt ran two Call of Cthulhu scenarios from The Blasphemous Tome fanzine, The Hero Affirmed (from issue 4A), and Educement (from issue 10), with a full table of players morning and afternoon (both these scenarios are freely available on PDF to all Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast Patreon backers).

In the afternoon, I played Starforged, a space-faring version of the Ironsworn RPG. Starforged can be played solo or as a traditional RPG for a group. My friend Robin was in the GM’s seat, and he sure knows how to run a fun game. I think the story was largely (perhaps wholly) improvised. We began by rolling randomly for our character race — an astral elf, a robot gnome, a halfling and me... a beholder! Yes! Did I mention this was a Spelljammer version of Starforged? Our starship had a cool design, based on a spider — oh no, wait, it was a spider! A sentient ship inside the body of a giant space spider — what could go wrong? We found the remains of a cosmic dragon on a platform floating in space. Apparently the fire-bladder of a space dragon is a valuable commodity. However, the kobold community that inhabited the platform and worshipped the dead dragon, weren’t keen on us removing parts of their god.

Starforged is a PBTA game, but in place of the usual 2D6, it uses one D6 and two D10s for every roll. You roll the D6 and add a stat, then roll the 2D10s to determine whether you have a weak success or a strong success — what we had was a lot of failures! There are a lot of moves, far more than I’ve seen in other PBTA games. We seemed to spend a lot of time rolling dice, choosing moves and selecting options, but Robin did a good job of keeping the pace up, and it was a fun session. Not sure it’s something I’d choose to play again, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

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