RogerBW's Blog

Dragonmeet 2014 07 December 2014

On Saturday I spent the day at Dragonmeet, in its new venue at the Ilec Convention Centre round the back of Earl's Court. All images are cc-by-sa.

As a rule I assume that normal convention space in London is prohibitively expensive, and the trick here seemed to have been to pick a hotel in a dodgy area replete with pawnbrokers, cheque-cashing services and, um, fabric shops.

However, I was able to get in fairly promptly (some of the demo team were less lucky with transport), and got things set up before the flood arrived.

Slightly later I got a chance to look around a bit. Shadow Warriors were running Wings of War.

Dropzone Commander is still going strong. I have to say that this looked like a gimmick when I first saw it at Salute last year but it seems to have some legs.

The main focus of this show seemed to be the trading. Where previous Dragonmeets have had two double-sided aisles of stalls, this one had definitely expanded. And the punters turned up. People were already talking about a larger venue for next year.

Yes, there really is a Primeval RPG. Based on the TV series that's now been off the air for three years after truly ghastly ratings, and which shows no sign of being resurrected. Gareth knows his stuff and I'm sure he did a decent job, but… wow.

Yet more miniatures skirmish gaming. Miniatures skirmish is still apparently the Big Thing, either fantasy or SF, either way you don't have to do lots of fiddly historical research. (Me-ow.) Being fair to Spartan Games, whose Firestorm: Planetfall this is, it did look very good indeed.

Though I couldn't help feeling that some of the miniatures available for some games were, um, a bit specialised

There was also Dark Armada, a starship combat game. Didn't see it being demonstrated but the record cards make it look fairly lightweight and playable.

And of course Giant Pandemic.

Someone had bought this rather attractive dice tower. If I played at a table, and wanted a dice tower at all…

Of course, I ran quite a lot of games too. Revolution and The Stars Are Right are two of my favourites, and both of them got outings this time.

I got out around 7pm fairly wiped (wasn't feeling great before I got up at 6.50am to get there in time for setup and then spent ten hours mostly running games).


  1. Posted by Owen Smith at 01:21pm on 07 December 2014

    I watched Primeval and thought the first series and a half were quite good and showed promise. But then they started to lose cast members (the usual curse of UK TV series which don't lock cast in like US series do) and it went downhill rapidly from there. I also got annoyed that the model for how the portals opened which was briefly interesting got sidelined, but I guess hoping for a proper model of how it all worked was too much to ask for.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 01:26pm on 07 December 2014

    It had its moments, I agree mostly in the early series, but like most TV SF it suffered from not having a coherent setup from the beginning. I suspect that someone tried to retrofit one later on, but by then it was too late.

  3. Posted by Dr Bob at 01:56pm on 07 December 2014

    So the Primeval game is finally out, eh? My mate Mark has been waiting for it to stop being "coming soon" for years. I think he said that some Canadian TV company bought the rights to keep making it and did a season or two before it was cancelled again.

    Keith (of Stabcon) had a theory that the original palaeontologist was secretly a creationist who had blagged his way into a uni post with a fake cv, since he kept declaring things like "But that means evolution is true!" and shoving all evidence of prehistory back through the portals as fast as he could! :-)

  4. Posted by RogerBW at 02:05pm on 07 December 2014

    Heh! There's a scenario in that somewhere.

    Primeval: New World, which was a spin-off rather than a continuation, was broadcast in 2011 a little after series 5, but was cancelled after one series of thirteen episodes. I've not heard of any more recent revival plans.

  5. Posted by Owen Smith at 09:49pm on 07 December 2014

    There was talk of a Primeval film at one stage, series 5 was supposed to set things up for it.

  6. Posted by Ashley R Pollard at 05:11pm on 12 December 2014

    Of course you missed the great Ogre/GEV game being run with miniatures that some nobody of any great importance ran. ;-)

  7. Posted by RogerBW at 05:13pm on 12 December 2014

    It looked excellent, but I didn't get pictures of it. Fortunately somebody else did.

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