contingency2027/docs/schedule.md

Contingency 2027 — Schedule & GM Load

Wed 27 – Sun 31 January 2027 · Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton

Running times

Slot times below are placeholders. Contingency 2026 ran three slots a day (morning / afternoon / evening). Confirm the 2027 published times against Warhorn before printing anything, then update this table.

Session	Assumed time	Play budget
Afternoon	14:00 – 18:00	3h30 play + 10 min break
Evening	19:30 – 23:30	3h30 play + 10 min break

House rule: 3h30 of play in a 4-hour slot, planned to ~3h15 of actual content. Session clock counts play time only and pauses for the break.

The grid

#	Day	Session	Game	System	PCs
1	Wed 27	Afternoon	ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP	VANITY	6
2	Wed 27	Evening	AFTERIMAGE	Blade Runner RPG	4
3	Thu 28	Afternoon	BLACK SUMMER — Last Flight Out	Walking Dead Universe (modified)	5
4	Thu 28	Evening	DEAD AIR I — Ash & Concrete	Call of Cthulhu 7e	6
5	Fri 29	Afternoon	THE FAVOUR	The Dee Sanction	5
6	Fri 29	Evening	DEAD AIR II — The Quiet City	Call of Cthulhu 7e	6
7	Sat 30	Afternoon	THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY	Vaesen	4
8	Sat 30	Evening	DEAD AIR III — Full Volume	Call of Cthulhu 7e	6
9	Sun 31	Afternoon	Reserve	—	—
10	Sun 31	Evening	Reserve	—	—

Why the slate sits this way

• DEAD AIR owns Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Same session, three consecutive evenings: a player who wants the whole arc books one time of day and never clashes with themselves. Night suits it — this is the bleakest material on the slate and it wants a dark room and no daylight afterwards. Each part is written to stand alone for drop-ins.
• The trilogy runs at 6, the biggest tables of the week. These are document-heavy investigations; more hands means more of the archive gets read, and every Act Two is built to split 3+3.
• Wednesday opens light. Another Bloody Treasure Map is the arrival-day game — a loose comic dungeon crawl for a table that is half strangers and entirely unsettled — and AFTERIMAGE follows in the evening needing no prep at all, because it is already finished.
• Afternoons carry the variety. Zombie survival (Thu), Elizabethan horror (Fri), Nordic folk horror (Sat) — each one a complete change of register from the Cthulhu that follows it that night.
• Never two bleak games in a row on the same day is now impossible to fully honour, since every evening is Dead Air. The afternoons therefore do the balancing: Thursday's Black Summer is the only other genuinely grim game, and it sits before Part One rather than after it.
• Sunday is deliberately empty. People leave, energy drops, and two reserve slots absorb overspill demand or a re-run without new prep. If Sunday evening never fills, that is a feature.

GM load check

Day	Games	Prep-heavy?	Notes
Wed	2	One (ABTM)	AFTERIMAGE is a port — read-through only. Gentle opening day
Thu	2	Both	Black Summer, then Dead Air I. Heaviest day of the week
Fri	2	Both	The Favour, then Dead Air II
Sat	2	Both	Mr Parker's, then Dead Air III — the arc payoff, needs the most playtesting
Sun	0 booked	—	Reserve

Consequence: three consecutive nights of six-player Cthulhu is a demanding run for one GM, and the three afternoons before them are all new material too. The trilogy shares a setting bible, NPC lineage and art direction, which is what makes the count achievable — treat DEAD AIR as one production with three outputs, not three productions. If anything on the slate has to give, it is a Sunday reserve, never a playtest.

Prep deadlines (working back from 27 Jan 2027)

By	What
End Sep 2026	All eight scenario drafts at v1. Trilogy bible locked.
End Oct 2026	Pregens complete for all eight (three sets of six for the trilogy). First desk playtests on DEAD AIR I–III.
End Nov 2026	Playtest fixes applied (v2). Handouts and art briefs written.
End Dec 2026	Art generated, handouts laid out, GM console modules built.
10 Jan 2027	Print pack produced: sheets, handouts, GM screens.
20 Jan 2027	Read-throughs done. Everything marked convention-ready.

Open logistics questions

1. Confirmed slot times from Warhorn — the table above is assumed, not verified.
2. Table size at Searles: three of the eight games seat six. Confirm the game rooms take a six-player table comfortably, or the trilogy drops to five.
3. Whether the DEAD AIR trilogy can be flagged on Warhorn as a linked series with booking priority for players taking all three nights.
4. Power/table space for the GM console tablet in the evening rooms.