The Owlbear and the Wizard’s Staff 2025, St. Patrick’s Irish Club, Riverside Walk, Adelaide Road, Leamington Spa, CV32 5A.
Friday 12th -Sunday 14th September 2025.
This is Part 2 of my con and games report from The Owlbear and Wizard’s Staff 2025. Part 1 can be found here: The Owlbear and the Wizard’s Staff 2025 Con Report Part 1
Photo by Fabio. Me in action GMing my game at OBaWS25.
Part 1 covered the morning of the con where I ran my “Alien Remus” scenario for Fria Ligan’s Alien RPG for six players. We break in time for lunch, I pack away all my gear from the table to allow the players to eat at the table.
Lunch has been provided by the convention! Somosas from the local Indian Restaurant with a variety of dips and sauces. Very tasty and a very nice touch.
I have several meat somosas, vegetarian ones were also available, followed by coffee from the kitchen along side some biscuits and Jaffa Cakes. Absolutely marvellous!
Photo by Matthew. The somosas we had for lunch! Excellent!
After that, with still plenty of time to spare as the lunch break was an hour along, I went for a walk in the lovely September sunshine. There was a nice wooded walkway along side the River Leam leading away from the venue. That was nice to step into the relative peace and quiet of a sunny Saturday afternoon riverside walk away from the busy game hall.
I returned suitably refreshed to join my afternoon game table in the main hall. I was a player this time ( I’m normally a forever GM) and I was getting a chance to play The Electric State, a game by Free League based on the artwork of Simon Stålenhag. The game follows the more sublime elements of the Stålenhag artwork rather than the setting of the Netflix film “The Electric State” (2025). Though I own them game I still haven’t split the shrink wrap on the books so it was a worthwhile game to get into to play.
I was one of four players, plus a GM, for the game.
The GM, Jim, did a wonderful job of introducing the setting and the game to us, allowing us to pick our player characters from the four pre-generated characters provided. I picked Nancy, a troubled youth, a loner, dressed head to toe in black who loved Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The other player characters were Cade Draper, a musician and original lead singer of the band Bliss, Billy-Lee Harker, a troubled ex-US Marine with a 1,000 yard stare and a gun on his belt, and William “Willy” Carbone, a young runaway kid with life experience beyond his years and a ‘F*ck The Police’ t-shirt. We were all in “our” Buick Roadmaster station wagon heading through the Sierra Nevada mountains leaving the trouble in the cities and seeking some sort of future in the Exclusion Zone on the coast.
The setting of The Electric State is in an alternate 1990’s in an aftermath of another American civil war fought with robotic mechs and drones. Now people seek refuge in the Neuro-net landscape, a virtual reality that is accessed via Neurocaster headsets and helmets, very 90’s style. These Neuroscapes or dreamscapes are addictive as people spend their time inside to escape their mundane lives. Information, data, entertainment, and hacking robotic drones can all be achieved using these neurocasters.
Of course everything else, like utilities, infrastructure, and public services all starts to fall apart and decay as people cast their lives away in this virtual reality.
Photo by Jim. The Electric State GM screen, with official dice plus village map, villagers, and Matchbox™ Station Wagon.
Jim had a great table set up, The Electric State GM screen that had some nice artwork on the Player side showing a painting by Simon Stålenhag, a Matchbox™ village play mat with roads and typical village locations (a stand in for the township of Liberty where the Mystery takes place), little plastic figures of the villagers, a Matchbox™ model of the Buick Roadmaster, and the official The Electric State dice.
As we are travelling on the road we are stopped at a police roadblock, the police seem to be searching the area of land by the roadside. The police officer informs us that we can’t go on at the moment due to their investigation. Willy is driving with Cade in the passenger seat, Billy-Lee is laid out on the back seat, and whilst myself is sitting in the back trunk section at the rear window. As we can’t go on Willy cuts the engine and the lights and we wait.
This causes some confusion in the police officer who again knocks on the drivers window. He tells us that we can’t wait there and we need to clear the road. He asks us to move off the road. So Willy reverses the Buick, pulls off the road, and parks on the verge on the roadside. We start smoking and playing a cassette in the car.
Again this causes some confusion so the police officer calls for the Sheriff to come and speak to us.
The Sheriff steps away from his search and approaches our Buick. He introduces himself as Old Toby, the Sheriff of the township Liberty, the town we have just passed a couple of miles down the road. The Sheriff informs us that we do have to turn around and go back to the township of Liberty that we had just passed. We cannot go on due to their murder investigation. Our blatant civil disobedience isn’t fooling him though we all do maintain our air of innocence.
We try to get a bit of information from him, Willy uses his EMPATHY to get him to open up on what they are doing.
Now The Electric State uses the Year Zero Engine that are used in a lot of the Fria Ligan games like Alien RPG, Mutant Year Zero, Tales from the Loop, and Vaesen. However it just uses only the four Attributes that Year Zero Engine games use but doesn’t have the additional associated Skills, three per Attribute, to add scores to the dice pool. It only uses the four Attributes.
The four Attributes are Strength; that defines how physically tough and strong you are, Agility; your motor skills, coordination, and dexterity as well as your quickness, Wits; your intellectual capacity and awareness combined with the depth of your education, Empathy; your social and emotional capacity, how you interact with people.
All four Attributes cover what you will need to try and achieve anything, in very broad terms. Attribute scores are between 2 to 6 so the number of dice you roll is relatively fewer than in other YZE games. You do get bonus dice for situational modifiers, Talents, and gear. Gear will give you bonus dice that need to be differentiated from the base dice, either by a different style or colour. The official dice are red for base dice and white for gear dice.
You roll your dice pool and all you need to do is to roll a ‘6’ on just one of the dice. That is a success and you achieve what you were trying to do. If you get more ‘6’s then you get to achieve more, like you get additional benefits, you do it quicker, quieter, or you show off. In combat you will do more damage per additional ‘6’ rolled.
You can Push the Roll too, especially if the player is unhappy with the results. The player re-rolls all the dice except any that are showing ‘6’s or ‘1’s. This gives them a chance of rolling more ‘6’s but if they happen to roll any ‘1’s on the base dice then they lose that many points in Hope. If they roll any ‘1’s on the Gear Dice then they damage that item of gear, so gear is treated like it is ablative, that is has limited use, when it is used.
So the cost of pushing rolls in The Electric State is down to luck on dice rolls, other YZE games have a cost every time you push, either points gained or Conditions taken.
There are a few traceable stats in The Electric State; Health is your physical wellbeing, you lose points if you’re hurt or injured; Hope is your mental wellbeing, you lose points when you push rolls or suffer traumatic events, Bliss is what you accumulate when in the neuroscape using neurocasters, if Bliss ever equals your Hope you’re stuck inside the neuroscape, needing help to escape its clutches.
So the player of Willy rolls his EMPATHY that has a stat score of 6. He rolls six red dice and gets two successes.
The Sheriff opens up to us about what has happened. Old Toby informs us that there has been a murder recently and they are searching the body dump site by the side of the road. They don’t have any suspects yet or know anything. It’s not the first murder to occur here either. They have found an abandoned car not too far from the site with a local area map left on the drivers seat. There was a sabotaged neurocaster found in the abandoned car and a jury-rigged robot in the trunk. The robot was built to collect specimens of flowers.
He tells us to go back to Liberty for our own safety and we can even stay at the motel there, the Amador Inn, against his better judgment. He seems reluctant to recommend it to us against his better judgment but it seems to be the only motel in Liberty.
He says that when there are serious events happening some people take advantage and spread rumours and gossip and cause trouble. Some people aren’t law-abiding as others - we agree as we continue to keep our civil disobedience up.
So we turn around and as we do so, Billy-Lee looks back to see if he can see what they are doing. That calls for a WITS roll and Billy-Lee has a score of 3. He rolls three red base dice and rolls a ‘1’ on one of the dice. He didn’t get any successes. He could re-roll but he would only be able to roll the two dice not showing a ‘1’ and he would lose a point of Hope. The player decides not to re-roll and would only try that when he has more dice.
Nancy flips off the Sheriff through the back window and Willy sees me do that and pips the horn to draw attention to it!
We head to the township of Liberty that we had just passed and head to the Amador Inn, the motel in the centre of Liberty. Before we get to the township we see a metallic domed building, a SENTRE neuroscape hub, called a Neurosphere, that has many cables and links running in and out of its dome. A large SENTRE logo is embossed on the dome. More in PART 3!
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