Tentacles 2001 was held at Castle
Stahleck in Bacharach 1-4 May 2001. My gratitude goes out to all who
worked to make it as much fun as it was.Tentacles 2001 ReportI first heard about Tentacles last year, at Convulsion, in Leicester. Some people we knew had attended it the previous month and the consensus was that it had been great. Questioning them further, we discovered that Tentacles is held every year in Germany in a castle on the Rhine. That sounded incredibly cool.Looking for an excuse to attend - as we were, because Australia is a long and expensive chain of plane hops from Germany - we decided that if it were at all possible, we would aim to release our Corum supplement for the Elric! game in time for this convention. And that, to cut a complex story down to size, is how Liam and I found ourselves disembarking a plane in Frankfurt at the end of May this year. The small picturesque town of Bacharach is a couple of hours out of Frankfurt by car. This we know as we drove down there with our hosts - Fabian, Eini and Hahn - along with "major" guests Sandy and Greg, arriving sometime in the midafternoon of the day before the convention. Eini and Hahn had met us at the airport the previous evening, not knowing us from Adam but luckily were very quickly united with us by displaying a sign with the words "welcome Liam and Judy Routt". Fabian had generously put us all up for the night in his parents' house in idyllic Dreieich. Within the first few minutes of arriving at Castle Stahleck, we ran into people we knew - friends from Australia who had just moved to Ireland. This definitely set the tone for the weekend: we were reunited with people we'd met and loved at Convulsion the year before; we hooked up with great people we hadn't met before, but hope to see again next time we're bumming around Greater Europe. Like Convulsion, Tentacles truly is a social convention. If there had not been a single minute of actual roleplaying, I still would have had a great time. And the whole idea of a residential convention - 170 roleplayers locked in a small town (and literally locked into the castle at night) for a long weekend - it adds to the sense of community. Sleep? Who needs that? You can play Cheapass games with a revolving cast of converts all night. And when you do crash, you're stacked in dorm rooms of various sizes with like-minded people you hopefully know by now and love. Drinking? Pass me that beer (or wine, or whiskey...). Breakfasts are a time you earnestly talk across trays of hostel food (which was not at all bad) about games, ideas, life. Dinners you bravado about your roleplaying conquests from during the day. Lunches are optional - this is Germany: there is always more food than you can eat, and it's always rich. You get to feeling that the people you know and like around you are close friends, like family. And the venue is inspiring - you're looking down from the battlements of this medieval castle perched on top of a very steep hill (many stairs between the river and the castle - very many!) looking down onto a fairy-tale town, and then there's the river snaking off into the distance, and the sides of the river valley look almost quilted with the rows of wine grapes that flourish there. And some way down the river you can see, perched on top of another hill, a crumbing ruin of a castle or tower, where presumably some robber baron set himself up, allowing himself and his men plenty of notice to spot any approaching ship and raise chains across the river, impeding its progress until money or goods changed hands. As to what many people might consider the important part: the games I played I really enjoyed. Unlike the majority of conventions I have been to, most tabletop events were organised very casually - times were determined by GMs up to a day before, and you could sign up for anything that was going at the moment. Sandy's marathon Cthulhu, which from all accounts was great, had its places allocated by auction. Freeforms were pre-scheduled and pre-booked, but I think most still had places you could sign up for at the convention. The House of Malan might have been the exception here: although it was large, it also had good word-of-mouth from the many times it has been run previously. Talks by guests of honor were also pre-scheduled. I only attended two, and I kinda cheated by going to Liam and Loz's, where I knew what the content was going to be (the Corum book, mainly), but I thought Sandy's horror one was pretty interesting. It's nice to know Sandy's been influenced by German expressionist films of the '20s too. Moments of note from my Tentacles include Sean Varney's good advice on work matters, and for that matter the endless amusement we derived from Sean's deranged nocturnal activities on our first night at the castle, including the Inadequacies of German Roadsigns speech. Also, talking about birds with the very knowledgeable Colin Driver while sheltering from the rain with Melanie and Claire. A hilarious game of the Big Idea on the last night of the con: Paul's Surprise Lotion: "So you open up the bottle, and it could be absolutely anything" (maybe you had to be there), as well as just about anything David Scott said during that game. Watching Fabian and Hahn being crushed decisively in Age of Empires by a quietly triumphant Sandy (probably being game designer helped somewhat). Torturing the easily tortured Danny Bourne. Throwing mock protestations at Hahn who took photos of some of us getting progressively drunker on the first night, every half hour precisely at first, and then whenever he felt like it later on. Freezing my ass off when the House of Malan moved outside into the wind and the rain for the duration (or so it seemed to me) of the first Storm Festival. It was stormy - oh yeah! Fabian, Eini, Hahn. Feeling terrible when Paul and Claire left at the end of the convention because it was clear that we should have become really good friends before they moved from the suburb next to us, half-way around the world to Dublin. And my wish list for next time:
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