Gen Con AughtSeven

I had a really good time at Gen Con. I’m also doing a lot of thinking as a result of it, which is always good.

I promised some pictures - unfortunately, I lost my stone-age digicam half-way through the con (which is good, cuz I need an excuse to get a new one, but is bad, cuz I had some great pics on there), and my cell phone pix aren’t apparentely ready to come through the intertubes yet. So, there will be some pictures, but not quite yet.

I started doing this by day, but my brain is mush and it all runs together anyway. So, in very rough chronological order, bullet points

• I broke my (two-convention) streak, and didn’t meet anyone in the airport that I knew. Lame!
• We need better logistics at the booth - not to blame anyone, cuz we’re all volunteers, but we did a lot of waiting when we could have been doing a lot of setting up. That said, the load in went smoothly, ’specially cuz Bill and myself had Origins to train us on the equipment.
• The Diana Jones Awards, while fun with the free drinks and the….attentive…wait staff, was a little underwhelming. Maybe cuz I didn’t care about any of the three things up for it, maybe cuz there was little AC and little loudspeakering, maybe cuz I was exhausted, but I really wanted to have more fun there. Oh well, maybe next year?
• Seeing people is fantastic! You are all my friends that live in different places that I only see a couple days a year, but its totally worth it.
• I particularly enjoyed spending time with people that I kinda knew, and developing those relationships more. Kevin, Jason, Steve, Eric, Brennan, Bill, Krista, Paul, Danielle, Clint, Matt, Justin, Gregor, Julia, Ron, and I’m sure there’s some I’m forgetting - thank you for spending time, meals and games with me. This isn’t to say I didn’t really enjoy gaming, chilling with, meeting or bullshitting with the rest of you people, I just don’t remember your names at the moment!
• The dealers hall was much more manageable, probably a combination of me having experienced it before and it actually being a little less crowded this year. The Forge booth had plenty of space, and even with the increased electronic games presence, there was still a lot of unused space - like, the Segway challenge was in the dealers hall. Wierd!
• Free loaves of bread from the mall food court. A Dro sandwich ensued.
• Going to a sleazy underground bar with Kevin in pursuit of his spy game goal, and watching him win 100,000 in two hands of blackjack. I felt like a superspy, and I wasn’t even the one kidnapped. Unfortunately, we never did find the final clue, and Kevin failed to save the world.
• Going way off the beaten path with Kevin and Jason and Eric to relax and eat and have a great chat. Indianapolis has some hella cool buildings, and the extra 15 minutes of walking were totally worth it to get out of the con zone.
• Hatching secret plans & ideas for a booth next year.
• The booth was rocking, but exhausting. I was doing double-duty as IPR rep and Forge booth participant, and even though they were in the same physical location, I really couldn’t muster the energy to do well by the booth. I didn’t end up running a single demo of carry (though others did, thanks Ron!). I did run Primitive (which got recorded by Canon Puncture) and a couple of InSpectres demos, all of which were fun. I like running demos for other peoples games way better than my own, I’ve come to realize.
• Morning conversations with Krista, Brennan and Bill as we all got around and on the way to the dealers hall. These always put me in a good mood, and we had some really interesting talks in that hour or so every morning, not to mention some hilarious moments (f’rex, “Dude, I’ll punch you right in the sleep-hole”).
• Getting lost EVERY NIGHT getting back to my hotel. I’m glad I had a map. My brain is not built for directions.
• My hotel was neat! There was a train in it, and ghost people! I wanted to play Drifter’s Escape sitting between the train cars!
• Playtested Darkpages twice. The first was an incredible lineup of players (I ran it for Jared and Jason, the authors; Thor, the editor; Dave Turner and Mike Mearls, who have been following the games development for awhile, as I understand it), and was an incredibly productive playtest, I thought. I can’t wait for the game to take a final shape. The second was much more abbreviated (with Kevin and Alexander), but demonstrated that the previous playtest had pointed the game in a good direction.
• Played Roanoke. It was fun, but our story gamer brain damage got in the way. Kevin was hard on himself about not running it well; I think we had some expectation/execution dissonance in play that contributed, and I kinda went off in a weird direction with my character. Nevertheless, it was a good time for me, and I would play a game with those guys (Kevin, Clint, Jason, Eric, Matt Snyder) in a heartbeat.
• Playtested Acts of Evil, kind of. Well, we did, but we didn’t get through too much of the game. But what we did get through….this game is awesome, in the most literal sense. No less than three times I sat back at the table, staring into space and going “Holy crap, Paul. That is BRILLIANT and disturbing.” - about game mechanics. Oh yes. Oh yes.
• I am so incredibly glad that I stayed until Monday. Sunday evening dinner and gaming after the pressure of the BIG SHOW is off was really great, and I don’t want to ever miss it again if I don’t absolutely have too.
• Ron and Jason and Julia and myself had an interesting conversation about our games. A subject for another time, but…there’s something interesting happening in game design, and while I’m not sure that it’s a big ol’ deal, there are some fascinating implications to some of these games that are happening right now.
• I saw a lot of great costumes, and it’s really sad that I lost my camera for that reason alone.

So, in short, good times. Very good times.

Tomorrow: The World!

Gen Con tomorrow.

Excellent.

I’ve been promising others (and myself) to take plenty of pictures, and I’ll try to take some daily notes.

I plan to have a fucking excellent time. Anything that gets in my way will be crushed.

That is all. See ya in a week.

A Room for Gen Con (Edit: Taken!)

If anyone needs a place to sleep come Gen Con, drop me a line (n-dot-d-dot-paoletta-at-gmail-dot-com). I’ve some changes to my situation, and I’m leaving an open slot in an Embassy Suites room. I’ll get you in touch with the guy who’s organizing the room, but no promises (he’s looking for people as well).

Edit: And it’s taken. Good times!

Origins 2007 after-action report (Part 2)

And just in time for Dex Con…

Anyhow, when last we left off, I was sitting down with Alexander, Michael Miller, and Peter and Gary Adkison to play Ganakagok. I played the Arrogant Shaman, Michael was the Intrepid (or something) Whaler, Peter was the Youthful Explorer, and Gary was the Wise Stargazer. Though Gary had to retire after the first player-turn, he really put a lot of oomph into his character, narrating how he spilled out a glass vase (the only glass object in the village) full of wolves teeth to show the village how they were allowing themselves to be divided (by an argument between my character and the village chief). The Stargazer than went out into the frozen wastes, ending up in an ice chasm, confronting the spirits and the stars and allowing them to convince him that he had to go back to heal the rift in the village. It was really awesome, and I think we were all a little surprised to see Gary (an elderly gentleman with a mainly traditional gaming background, AFAIK) bring the awesome like that. It was good surprised!

Anyhow, after he left we managed to get through the rest of the game before it got too too late, and it was really fun. My Shaman ended up dying of a plague brought upon the village by his wayward apprentice, but in death he chose to follow his people and be their spiritual guide rather than rest with his ancestors. This was noble, but ultimately futile; the Nitu got absorbed into a southern people within two generations of leaving a melting Ganakagok, and with that my shaman’s soul was cast adrift in the void, forever without companions or anyone to watch over.

I love this game.

Saturday

Another less-than-intense sales day, though I tried to put more time in at the booth to make up for my wandering about on Friday. However, I did get to do some fun stuff. I did an interview with Michael Erb, a journalist who writes game reviews for a print newspaper. (Note: this may have happened on Friday. I don’t honestly remember). Audio will be posted at some point, I am led to understand. Later that day I crushed him in a demo of Burning Wheel’s Duel of Wits, which was fun! I love crushing!

Our Saturday was about as good as our Friday. After hours saw some solid hanging out and drinking at the Big Bar, including a big ol gang of people getting revved up for the Origins Awards ceremony. Earlier in the day I had been informed that Jake Norwood has never played Dogs in the Vineyard, and Alexander asked me if I would run it. I hemmed and hawed a bit (I’ve run exactly one game of Dogs, for one Dog), but finally decided to give it a shot.

Weevil Gulch

As the crowd swept their way to the Origins Awards, I got some dinner and started prepping a town, calling it Weevil Gulch (don’t ask why, I don’t know!). I ended up running it for Alexander, Jake, Thor Olavsrud and Ralph Mazza. We could have had a bigger group, but I was nervous enough about handling four players, so we kept it to that. Character creation and initiation conflicts went very well (Jake was the only one who lost his), and we went right into the town.

It was a simple enough town, and I did my best to just lay out the pertinent info. It was about 10.30 or so by the time we started playing proper, and I think we were all set to cut to the chase. A brief but exciting time later, we had a dead ruffian, a deposed Steward, and a quartet of Dogs that knew a little bit more about each others theological leanings. And gunplay skills.

My brain totally shut off right at the ultimate conflict of the town, and I just had the Stewards wife confess her sins to the Dogs, after which they narrated how they dealt with the problem, and we called it a game. It was fun despite my brain freeze, and Jake said that he had a good time, and that now he saw what all the fuss was about. So I call that one a win.

And The Award Goes Too…

Oh yeh, during the Dogs game we got word that Burning Empires won the Origins Award for Best RPG. So that was awesome.

And The Rest

The rest of the night was spent hanging out, shooting the shit, and generally basking in the reflected glory of Luke’s award. I stayed up till 4.30, got back to my hotel at 5, and left at 6am for my flight. So, that was the end of my Origins. And it was a hella-good time.

I’m definitely gonna be back next year.

Origins 2007 After-Action Report (part 1)

So I went to Origins for the first time this year. It was rockin’

I was staffing the IPR booth, alongside veteran taskmasker Alexander Newman, “real IPR guy” Fred Hicks, and dedicated foot soldier Bill Segulin.

Arrival

My roommate and I had thrown a…uh….tiny little soiree the night before, so my flight on the 4th was…less than pleasant. However, as chance would have it, Alexander was taking my connecting flight from NYC to Columbus, so I got to hang out with him and catch up. This continues my streak of running into someone for second leg of a convention flight (last year was meeting Clinton in Baltimore on the way to Gen Con). Somebody fun better step up for Gen Con this year!

Anyway, we got into Columbus in good order, checked into the hotel, then went over to the dealers hall. The rest of our motley assemblage trickled in, including Michael “The Pack Mule of the Revolution” Miller with the shelving, and we got everything checked in, arranged and stocked by the time we got kicked out at 6. I think we were all pleased with how the booth looked, with a semicurved velcro display wall and giant placards that you could see across the room. You can see some of Freds cameraphone pics here.

After getting that all done, we set out on the quest for food. The 4th of July is a bad time for getting a bite to eat in downtown Columbus, apparently. After asking a scarily friendly passerby, we ended up at a bar & grill that did us right with good beer and tasty burgers.

Finally, we retired to the infamous Big Bar on 2, and ended up playing a game of Kat Millers Serial (which I dunno if there’s any info about on the intarwebs). It’s a serial killer game where you play the victims and investigators. I enjoyed our session of the game, but it’s not really my style, in terms of subject matter or mechanical backbone. (Though, Dev, I bet you would dig it) My understanding is that Kat ran a bigger game of it on Saturday night and got some good feedback on it, which is great.

Oh! And, when going to the dealers hall, I was waylaid by a very friendly fellow who was looking to record accounts of peoples RPG characters, This American Life-style. I sat down with him and Mel White (of the Ganakagang) and talked about some of my characters, with diversions into how story-gaming developed and how actual play accounts happen and what they mean. I talked about my character from my Ganakagok game from last Dreamation (the one who ended up stabbing someone in the face with his scrimshaw tools, and then setting him on fire, and ended up frozen in the ice), and my character from Hare and Hound. It was fun, and I’ll post links when/if he gets the audio up somewhere. It may broadcast on a couple of local radio stations, which is totally neat.

Thursday

Thursday morning, 8.30 am. My mission is to find shopping bags, so we can actually give our wonderful customers something to carry their purchases in. Unfortunately, the area around the convention center is ill-equipped for such things, and I ended up walking around for over an hour, and finally getting a stack of Kinkos/FedEx bags from a friendly employee (oddly appropriate, neh?)

With tired feet but plenty of coffee, I got ready to greet the Thursday crowd. Thursday tends to be a big sales day, and this one was no exception. Alexander had to prod us to step up and draw people into the booth, but once I got my legs under me I felt pretty comfortable. I have some thoughts about sales strategies for another post, but for the most part we were pretty aggressive in terms of getting peoples attention, tho we respected people who weren’t interested once the initial contact was made. I hope.

Anyway, Thursday was long but busy, so it didn’t feel too long, and at the end of the day we had done more business than IPR had done all of last Origins. So that was a good feeling.

Towards the end of the day, the Burning Wheel Crew and Memento-Mori Army showed up (i.e. Luke, Thor, Dro and Jared, respectively). Jake Norwood of The Riddle of Steel fame was also in attendance, and it was cool to meet him. I saw some older friends and acquantances as well (Ralph Mazza, Mike “Papa” Holmes, Clyde Rhoer) and some internet-made-real friends (Jamey). I’m sure I saw, met and hung out with more people, but my brain was in ConMode - it all blends together, yo.

After-Hours it was back to the Big Bar on 2, and we ended up playing a rousing rendition of *jazz hands* Juuuungle Adventuuuure (a parsley game). Even tho Dro effed us out of a save point, we eventually got the treasure, and we only died about 7 times.

Someone proposed playing a real game, and we ended up deciding on InSpectres (cuz we like to have fun). I really wanted to play, cuz I’ve only ever been the GM, and we somehow convinced Dro to run the game. Hell proceeded to freeze over.

In any case, it was Dro running, me, Fred, Bill, Thor and Alexander playing. I was the CEO of the franchise, a division of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, and I ended up being inhabited by an Aztec Death Parrot which Alexanders character, an ex-Marine, ended up shooting with an RPG rocket inscribed with my name - because we, in the end, really loved each other. Due to the clever use of Confessionals, we actually ended the 25-dice mission up a couple dice, even tho Dro threw me about a million Stress over the course of the game, and it was, as always, a great time with InSpectres.

If anyone is wondering why we all spent the rest of the convention running around, flapping our arms and going “KA-KAAAAW!”, thats why. I apologize for any annoyance this may have caused, but really, it was that funny at the time.

Friday

Friday I had the pleasure - nay, the honor - of walking the 10 blocks back to my hotel from the Convention center because I forgot my freaking badge. So, another day, another solid 45 minutes of walking. I wasn’t in the greatest mood when I finally got the dealers hall, but Friday is quieter anyway, and we really didn’t need 4 people in the booth at all times.

I saw and/or re-met some more people (Paul Tevis, Ken Hite and Phil Reed among them), and generally got a sense of the hall. Origins is a lot quieter than Gen Con (duh), but it also has a pretty chill, family-friendly atmosphere that was pretty cool. I wandered over the Burning Wheel booth fairly often, and it’s always good times hangin out with that crew. We had an ok day sales-wise, which was pretty much expected, tho we did sell out of a number of titles of which we had only brought 5 copies.

At some point during the day, Alexander got in touch about playing Ganakagok that night, to which I was all “hell yes!” Ganakagok is really high on my list of favorite games, and this would mark the second time I’d get to play it. Turns out that this whole deal was happening because Peter Adkison wanted to get some story-gaming in with his dad Gary.

Well, once I stopped geeking out (playing a game with Peter Adkison! and his Dad! and playing a weirdo hippie storygame! whoa!), I got excited, and that excitement was not in vain. Alexander ended up running the game for Peter, Gary, Michael Miller and myself, and it was a total blast.

But more about that later…

DeGeeking Conventions

Conventions are our trade shows.

Our trade is play.

Dreamation AughtSeven, Part Deux

Whew. I’ve actually been, like, working on games the last couple days (not to mention real life work), so my desire to get this post written has ebbed. But if I don’t get it down tonite, I’ll probably forget so many things that it won’t be worth writing.

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes…

Saturday

So, with a solid 3 hours and 15 minutes of sleep under my belt, I dragged my ass out of bed and wended my way down to the game room for my 9am session of carry. Surprisingly enough, I had four players; Don, one of many Matt’s, Jeff (who has played the game before and in fact ran a session of it at a NC Gameday event(!)), and Greg.

Don played Daniel “Locker” Jones, with a Burden of having persistant shell shock and continually seeking releif in drink, drugs and faith; Matt played Efram “Chameleon” Osgood, with a Burden revolving about being scared to go home to his pregnant girlfriend who doesn’t answer his letters; Jeff played a trigger-happy and authority-hating Anaconda; and Greg played my favorite iteration of Cowboy so far, who saw the war as his ticket out of the pig farm, but now he was lost and adrift in a country he hated.

Our story ended up revolving around one of the Fodder characters, Elmo “Saint” Smith, and how his general irresponsibility and drug pushing contributed to the devestation and capture of the squad by the NVA. We had a lot of really solid Burden-addressing scenes and conflicts, and the first Action scene of the game saw I think the largest amount of fallout I’ve had yet - 31 points for poor Don to spend killing his own squad.

We had a really solid sequence in a Vietnamese village that started with Cowboy impaling a VC assassin on his bayonet (but he was justified in the eyes of the others!), and ended with I think all of the characters addressing part of their Burden’s and leaving the village peacefully.

Anyway, another solid game, and I was pleased that we managed to hold it together that early in the morning.

I grabbed lunch with Adam and Jeff (of the Sons of Kryos), who I kind of forcibly introduced, but we had a nice lunch talking game design, geek culture and all the wierdness that is the SCA.

I took a double booth shift that afternoon, and ended up talking a bunch with Shreyas and Bill White (Mr. Ganakagok). Sold some games, too, though I wasn’t pushing too hard. Dreamation isn’t a big sales con (or so we thought….), and I didn’t really feel comfortable trying to pitch people on stuff unless they obviously wanted to know more about a particular game. There was definitly a sale pattern, where sales would peak right before and right after the scheduled game sessions, as people either decided to pick something up before they forgot, or had gotten out of an awesome game and decided to grab it right away. During the game time, it was much more relaxed.

Oh, and did I mention that the first printing of carry sold out after my morning game? Which was unfortunate, because some people (Dave!) wanted to get it, but weren’t around until the afternoon, and it was gone gone gone. It’s the worse kind of good, and I should have more soon - but hey, I sold out! Hooray!

Anyhow, it was ticking down to my 8 pm slot, which I had scheduled to run Timestream. But, what with the no sleep and the sitting down all afternoon and the having two intense sessions under my belt already, I was really not feeling the good vibes, especially for a scenario that I haven’t run before and wasn’t sure was going to be fun. But I was all “well, only Adam and Shreyas are signed up to play it anyway, so I’ll cancel and we can playtest one of their games instead!”

Then I went up to my paper on the big board upstairs, and uh-oh…..4 other signups! The hell? After some waffling, I decided that it was actually more pressure to try and make a 6-person game work, and I just wasn’t up to it. So I tracked down those I knew, and made sure to talk to the other people when they showed up, and it was fine. Except one woman seemed really angry, but it didn’t feel like it was because of the game being cancelled, it was more that the game was cancelled. If you get me.

Oh, and the IGE party was in there as well! I ate Kat Millers With Great Chili… and chatted and was generally satisfied.

So, I cancelled Timestream, and played Shreyas’s game Snow From Korea with Shreyas and Adam and Russell Collins instead. The game is really fun, and once Shreyas makes it less broken it will be even funner. I really liked how once all the cards are on the table, you can look down and you feel like you’re in a Shogunate playing silly one-up-manship games until someone freaks out and kills someone else. It’s grand.

And then after that I took a couple minutes to regroup, and then sat down with Shreyas and Kevin Allen Jr to mock pretend playtest the skimpy beginnings I had for The Imp of the Perverse. I had character sheets (well, the idea for ones, at least), what more do you need to play a game? I mean, seriously.

Anyway, it turned into a cool mechanics jam where we played around with the Conflict Matrix until it turned into something that worked, and it really helped in unjamming my head for working on the game in general. I’ve been thinking about it and writing on it and chatting about it pretty much non-stop since then, and when it’s done it is going to be unlike anything we’ve seen so far.

Kevin is the little demon in my head that breaks down my inhibitions and shows me that I can go for it a million percent. Shreyas is the little angel on my shoulder that tells me I can actually do it. And they both lead by example.

Man, Saturday was long!

After Imping, we settled in with a big ol crowd of people and chatted, and we all eventually ended up playing Jared A. Sorensen’s Action Castle! (an implementation of his Parsley rules). It was….uh….”fun”

And then I went to sleep.

Sunday

Woke up, went out to breakfast with Mayuran and Kevin and Terry, who I had seen around but not really met, and it was nice to kinda talk to her a bit. Then I had to get stuff together, and track down Mr. Keith Senkowski and practically force money down his throat in order to buy a great print of one of the images on this page (4th from the right on the top).

And then a long string of goodbyes and promises to get down to NYC to see people in the not-so-distant future.

One 3-hour car ride with Ben Lehman later, I was dropping him off and picking up my girlfriend from the airport in Providence, and that was the end of my Dreamation.

Whew.

Dreamation AughtSeven

I wish I had a cord I could plug into my brain and just download my experiences into this magig box, because to adequetely capture the weekend will take a whole lotta typing.

First of all, pay attention to Judd’s Dreamation 07 link collection. Ok, good.

As per usual with these recap posts, I am simultaneously overwhelmed with how much I could say, and finding it difficult to actually write about anything. The weekend blends together so much, what with all the no sleeping and the seeing great people and the paying attention to stuff we’re making up together. But I’ll try to hit the most significant events.

Thursday

The drive was uneventful, and I arrived with plenty of time to hang out and say hi to those who were already there (pretty much just Ben when I got there, but over the next hour or so some of my “con friends” (Jeffery, Rob, Matt, and so on) starting trickling in). I had a game of 1001 Nights at 8, and it went swimmingly. 6 players showed up, well split between “I have this game and haven’t had a chance to play it” and “I have no idea what this is but it sounds cool.”

Because we had so many people, I determined that each courtier should take only 2 Envies, instead of all 6 (in the rules, you take one for each other courtier). This had the potential for suck, but we ended up creating two intersecting webs of envy, and the game played out just fine. A fine fellow by the name of Dan brought an audio recording device, so there should be audio of our stories made available at some point. Which is so awesome I can’t really even express it.

Hung out afterwards with people until about 3 am, then went to bed. It was really funny - because nobody took point on getting the complimentary con suite organized, everybody assumed it was full and got their own rooms. So it turned out that, of the two full rooms made available to us, I got a full room to myself for pretty much the whole convention. Hilarious! I volunteered to spearhead the room-filling effort for next time - if the Dexposure people are kind enough to provide it, the least we can do is fill it.

Friday

I got up early enough to hit the morning slot in case something opened up, but all the games were full and Brennan was just setting up te IPR booth, so I helped him with that and generally hung out. People really started rolling in throughout the morning, and it was really funny to watch the ebb and flow of people lining the railing opposite the booth. It’s like an indie gamer geek gauntlet of fun. Bret Gillan took a bunch of pictures, by the by, and you should check them out on Flickr.

This is the part where I say that I met a bunch of cool people (which I did!), but I don’t remember any given meeting in particular, because there was such a mob of rock that I can’t pick out details. But, if any of you happen to read this, link me to your blogs and LJs and stuff! People are fun.

Moving on - I played Ganakagok at 2 with Bret, Emily, and Jeremiah until the wise eye of Mel White. I really, really, REALLY like this game, and I would have bought a copy on Sunday except that Bill took them all away on Saturday night. Damn you Bill! We created a fabulous story, wherein my ivory-carving craftsman found love with Bret’s reluctant maiden, only to have her die in my arms at the hands of her jilted suitor. At which point I set him on fire (the suitor, not Bret), and then watched the end of the world frozen in ice at the top of a mountain peak. This was all while Emily and Jeremiah’s characters led the people to the southern continent and joined with the southern people, only for their descendents to lose all memory of their origin - a fate worse than if they had died with Ganakagok’s melting.

Tragic and cold and beautiful. Great game, and on my must-play list.

Then we made a crazy dash to get Vietnamese for dinner, and despite the best efforts of New Jersey urban planning and construction managed to make it. Good food, GREAT dessert, and the always wonderful company of a whole pack o’ cool people. We made it back just barely in time for my 8.00 game of carry.

So I ran carry for Adam Dray, Dave Cleaver and Joshua Newman. We moved downstairs to a free table in the atrium because the roleplaying room was so freaking crowded (woo!), and we ended up by a TV tuned a news show. I was sitting with my back to it, and about 2/3 of the way through the game Adam goes “wow, this is so surreal - they’re showing pictures of dead soldiers behind you.” It was a total moment.

The game went well, everyone was engaged and Joshua, in particular, was very affected by the events of play. His Burden revolved around a Vietnamese woman who he had raped and was now pregnant (though with his best friends baby, a fact that underlay a lot of their interaction but was never made explicit, even after the baby was born). Adam’s Burden was a conflicted mess about racism (he wanted to be accepted, but he hated the “white devil”), and he played Big White, who hasn’t ever been played in my games before. He ended up pretty much taking over the squad and drowning it in blood. Dave’s Burden was about his cowardice and how he wanted to live up to his father’s standard. He took Shirley “Temple” Jenkins, the newest guy to the squad, and he had a really great character arc wherein he dealt with his cowardice and decided that it was his responsibility to take care of the rest of the squad.

Despite the mechanical shakyness of the 3-character game, the session went very well, and everyone seemed to be very pleased.

Then I stayed up all night shooting the shit and talking about publishing with Luke, Judd, Joshua, Kevin Allen Jr, Rob, and assorted other folks. Another 4am bedtime.

Next up; the next two days, and I think I have some pictures…

Ah, Dreamation (Updates)

So there is no wireless code needed for this year - so me and my trust PowerBook are free to throw up tidbits of Dreamation goodness.

So far we’ve been through two event slots (Thursday 8-12 and Friday 9-1), and all 7 IGE events in those slots have gone off with full tables. I had 6 players show up for my 1001 Nights game last night (wow!); With Great Power…, Misspent Youth and One Night (the latter two being playtest sessions) all went as well. And there was a pickup of the Technolost playtest.

This morning was a Grey Ranks playtest, another With Great Power…, and a very large table for Burning Wheel: Artisia. I spent the morning hanging out and helping set up the IPR booth display. Holy crap, thats a lot of games.

In just a couple minutes, we have 9 game scheduled. As of 15 minutes until game time, only one of them has below th “minimum players” number, and all of them have at least one person signed up.

Totally neat. I’ll update later tonite, but until then - I got Ganakagok to play!

One-Year Anniversary

Of my first con experience ever. Woot.

Now that I have a couple of these under my belt, I’m feeling much less nervous. But, for some reason, I’m finding it difficult to remember that this one is all about play (as opposed to Gen Con, which is all about sales). My head has been solidly in “production” space for a couple months, and not at all on “play” space (which is a problem in and of itself), so….hopefully this event will jolt me out of it.

I’m really looking forward to seeing my friends, and meeting new ones. And playing games, dammit.

I’m going to be trying to take lots of notes on the weekend, for a couple reasons. But, one big one, is HOLY CRAP THERE ARE SO MANY INDIE GAME EVENTS!11!!Eleven!1! There are 70 scheduled events in four days of gaming.

And (puts on his nervous nelly hat) I think it will extremely interesting and educational info to look at how many of those games end up being played, and in which timeslots, and which games those are.

Of course, in a perfect world, everyone will be playing to a full table (are there even 14 tables in that room we usually get? cuz there’s 14 games in the Saturday 8-12 slot, plus non-IGE events). But, we don’t live in a perfect world. So….

Well, I hope we learn something.

…

Anyway, I’m looking forwards to a fabulous time with y’all. Let’s kick some ass, take some names….and play some games.