Gen Con Mega Game: First Blood(fields)
75 Players, 15 Tables, 1 Epic RPG
This issue of The Many Sided Newsletter features a guest contributor: Cameron Stritmatter.
For Gen Con 2025 Cameron, GM and co-creator of The Panic Table, took on the task of organizing, not just any con game, but a Mega Game consisting of 75 players across 15 tables. And what better adventure to choose for such a battle royale than The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station? The Mothership 1e compatible zine, designed by Christian Sorrell, put Cameron at the helm of an incredible playtest opportunity designed to incentivizes choices that are weird, wild and, above all else, make for great entertainment.
So, without further ado, here’s Cameron with an after-action report of this insane mega game.
A Post-Mortem on The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station
It’s more or less The Hunger Games. 15 tables of 5 players, each table a team, and only one team could win. We wanted to give the players the opportunity to tell outlandish and legendary stories, experience hunting each other for sport, and test the scalable limits of a massive multiplayer game of Mothership RPG.
The game we built became one that incentivizes player actions based not necessarily on morality or bloodlust, but on what players collectively believe will be the best possible television for an imagined audience within the fiction of the world. The outcomes of those actions were varied, colorful, and generally insane.
What we didn’t want to build was a love letter to commodified violence; at the time of writing this, I’m uncertain if we dodged that particular bullet.
Either way, it worked.
The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station as a Gen Con Mega Game was huge and messy and unbelievably fun… but something lingers beneath the enthusiastic after-action reports. It’s a question about resonance.
What does it mean that a reenactment of this bloody, televised spectacle connected so deeply with so many players?
Up until Gen Con 2025, The Panic Table had only ventured into a handful of prestige seasons of Mothership RPG actual play on YouTube. We were itching to get our feet wet in the live event space, and we figured if we were going to do it, we ought to do it as big as we possibly could.
Mothership’s soul is one of intimate creeping dread, ideal for high cinema. It doesn’t naturally lend itself to sprawling mega games as combat is brutally brief. After cycling through concepts from flotilla combat to a Starship Troopers-style siege, we landed on The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station, a zine by Christian Sorrell of MeatCastle GameWare that offered the perfect fit: a dystopian televised deathmatch in a shrinking maze.
What’s not to love?
On its surface, it seemed perfectly scalable—obviously, we’d just replace the virtual player teams with actual ones. We had six-ish weeks and we were optimistic. I’d like to take a moment to underscore that none of this could have happened without Silviana Russo, ARG aficionado and story producer for The Panic Table. After calmly explaining to me that most megagames take eight months to prep, she selflessly threw herself into the fray. It was an act of intense and slightly mad expansion, built on the already-tasty chassis of Sorrell’s deep-fried laserpunk zine.
We divided the game into phases, initially forbidding PvP to serve as a tutorial before opening the world to slaughter. We gave each player a backup clone to soften the system’s lethality and rigged a “Likes” economy where dramatic actions and corporate ad-reads earned currency for absurd power-ups like single-use unicorns.
Gen Con was a blur.
I spent half the convention at FedEx in a frantic haze of last-minute logistics and earnest prayer, printing maps and binder amendments. Fifteen minutes before the doors opened, we gave our 15 incredible volunteer Wardens a crash course on the (gorgeous, sensible) Warden Handbook Binders. Then came a moment of surreal release as I stepped back and realized that, other than embodying the unhinged emcee “Wren Sinclair,” the game was now entirely in their hands.
We tempered our expectations. It was, after all, the maiden voyage of a massively untested format.
It was truly bewildering, then, to watch the afternoon unfold. Players were literally on the edges of their seats. Wardens were climbing on tables to narrate climactic moments. The stories drifting between tables were bananas: outrunning Mecha-Gators, launching a jury-rigged monorail car at the Pteraceratops Rex, playing cat-and-mouse with a sniper in a field of shattered solar panels.
What games would you pick for a Mega Game format? No reason, just ‘cus…
As we moved into Phase 2, the dreadful awareness that teams could begin hunting each other was palpable. It electrified the atmosphere of the room. One of the most fascinating outcomes of the game is that (with a single exception) every attempt at cooperation ended in spectacular bloodshed.
Of course, there were rough edges. Mothership is loosey-goosey with its encounter design; when a dozen people are shouting about whose cyberdog bit whom, you discover some laces that could be tightened. We expected 15-ish players in the grand finale; we got a seething tangle of 40. But these are solvable problems of mechanics. The more arresting question is one of content.
In our own circus of a culture, one that often seems to revel in both real-world violence and consumerist abandon, what is the impulse that draws us to pantomime its most extreme, most absurd caricature?
If I had to take a stab at it, my hope is that this bizarre, shared expression of imaginative adventure became a way to metabolize the ambient dread of the real world; a ritual for pressing back against its horrors not with silence, but with a defiant, collaborative, and gloriously bloody story.
The ease with which the players inhabited their roles, the fluency with which they performed for the invisible cameras, made it clear that the most important rules weren't in our playbook. The core mechanics were already understood by a player base looking for a way to confront and control the horrors of our time, even if only for an afternoon.
It's a disquieting thought that the grammar of spectacular violence is so intuitive, but it's also a powerful one. We gave them a stage for cartoonish violence, and they gave us back a space station packed with stories of passionate survival and bewildering loss. For now, I cannot wait to return to The Bloodfields… and I suppose there are much worse games we could play.
— Cameron
🗞️ News Worthy
My First Dungeon: The Wildsea earned seven nominations at the New Jersey Webfest! (P.S. If you want to try The Wildsea for yourself, use our promo code MFD2025 to get 20% off your entire order at Myth.works)
🎲 Brennan Lee Mulligan announces he will take over as GM for Campaign 4 of Critical Role, as well as a new 3-year deal with Dropout. (Vulture)
🧙 Worlds Beyond Number releases the finale of Book 1 of The Wizard, The Witch, and The Wild One.
🏳️⚧️ CGE, the boardgame manufacturer behind Codenames, shared an apology for recent Harry Potter game release and noted plans to donate profits of the game to pro-trans causes.
💥 DIE returns with new comic series and Comic RPG Quickstart. (Rascal)
🦸 Jeff Stormer announces Kickstarter campaign for Mask of the Masks podcast that fuses actual play with audio drama.
🎲 What We’re Bringing to The Table
🎥 Watch: BE/HOLD Radio - 24/7 Cinematic Instrumental Mysic for Gaming and Reading
📚 Read: Quinns Quest - Interview about Combat with Mythic Bastionaland Designer Chris McDowell
🎙️ New From The Studio
My First Dungeon: Last Train To Bremen Talkback (Thursday, August 14th)
Talk of the Table with Nevyn Holmes and Quinn Morris of Dragon Reactor (Monday, August 18th)
My First Dungeon: Slugblaster Campaign Talkback (Thursday, August 21st)
News From The Many Sided Network
Tales Yet Told is doing a Community Showcase and Q&A event with Diversity Saves on Twitch. Tune in on Friday, August 15th at 7 pm EST for a showing of episode 3 of Voices in the Wood, then again Saturday, August 16th 5:30 pm EST for an interview with the cast and creators.
Dice Exploder continues its new miniseries on love, sex, and romance mechanics in RPGs featuring guest co-hosts Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas! Tune in for the latest episode, releasing today, all about “roll to seduce” and the quantification of romance in tabletop and video games.
Mage Hand High Five is celebrating its 2-year anniversary with a live stream on Wednesday, August 27th! The crew will be doing live stream full of announcements, a Q&A, and much more! If you’ve got questions, feel free to reach out to them on any of their socials or shoot them an email. The stream will be live on both Youtube and Twitch. Hope to see you there!