Back from Origins!

[Dextra]

Got home last night after an eleven hour drive and crashed, then had to rush off to work in the morning, so this has been my first real chance to update, so here goes...

First of all, a big hat's off to Crothian who let us crash at his swinging bachelor pad! Ever the impeccable host, he even laid in special supplies, yay! My biggest regret is not bringing my swimsuit! Here's my comments:

• The ride down: McDonalds didn't offer the deli sandwiches nor the oriental chicken salad. Sigh. And what was "up" with the flags at half-mast in NY?
• It was really odd attending a convention for which I did not have an exhibitor's pass! The concept of not being able to get into the exhibitor's hall before 10am was a totally foreign concept, as was having to dodge security at 6pm (when it closes) trying to maintain a conversation with an exhibitor.
• WotC's booth was TEENSY
• Mark from Guardians of Order is The Man. One cellphone call, and we're cutting lines and not paying cover to get into clubs Saturday night. This is one cool, clever, connected Canuck. When I grow up, I want to be him.
• Hot Find: Rezolution from Aberrant Games. Oh G-d, is this ever a sexy product. Think Necromunda, but more Cyberpunk/Shadowrun, but without experience rules (spoke with the creator- he wanted to include 'em, but it would've meant for a much larger book). The book ($25) is nipple-rubbing nice, plays well, minis nice, too. A starter box ($30) inlcudes a team of minis, a CDRom of tiles and terrain to print out and the rules. I ran out of money, but will be saving up my pennies to pick it up at GenCon!
• Enjoyed a Castles & Crusades demo. Decided to play a distinctively-C&C character, so decided to play a dwarven knight. Have decided that the "diggery-do" that's listed in the equipment section is not a mis-spelling of the Australian Aboriginal musical instrument, but is in fact a shorter version of the didgeridoo designed by the dwarves (more suitable for use by shorter races, especially in the tight confines of tunnels), that features a spade for digging at one end. Whenever the module gets released, I want to know what happened to the eyes (red herring?) and the holes in the ground outside (giant with a peg leg? bizarre halfling agricultural practices/tiger traps?)
• Went out for dinner Saturday night and met some ENWorlders. Very nice food, too bad about the crazy price, crappy services and distinct lack of dessert.
• If your organization is billed as hosting an event, say, Risk 2210 and expects to collect tickets for it, might I suggest actually having a copy of the expletive deleted game???!? Or having a record of the person who is supposed to be running it, and them being there before the game is scheduled to start? Just sayin'!
• Scored some great hug from Henry at Paradigm. Man, those guys are CRAZY BUSY at Origins running a gazillion RPGA events and doing customer support. They are what I consider to be a quality publisher. You may not see them on here too often anymore, but they deliver the goods in a big way elsewhere in the RW!
• Loved running into people whom I recognize, many of whom didn't recognize me (I have lost 50lbs afterall): Chris and Nik from Green Ronin, Monte Cook, Erik Mona, the Z-Man games krewe, Jim Zubkavich and Gal of Exalted Comic/Udon fame, Anthony Valterra, etc.
• Picked up lots of card games & accessories: I dropped $32 at Crystal Caste and walked away with a nice leather dice bag and a gazillion dice
• Looney Labs are the BESTEST- clever games, clever events, and great volunteers.

 

[HellHound]

Just a quick addendum about some of the games I played / picked up at Origins:

Had a great time, although we only stuck it out for 2 of the four days. I didn't play any acutal RPGs at the con (as usual), but played a bunch of card games, mini game demos, and spent a lot of time in the dealer room schoozing and picking up stuff. Crothian was an awesome host, and it was great to hang out with LrdApoc and Crothian and a few others for the two days we were there.

FLUXX
I'm an old hand at the IceHouse games from Looney Labs, but this year I spent a lot of time in the Big Experiment, and learned a bunch of games from Looney that I hadn't played before, and got completely hooked on "FLUXX" (a card game), bought a copy, and collected 6 promotional cards for the game too. Thus began the Box O Loot.

ICE TOWERS
I also got to play Giant IceTowers with the Looney Labs crew, which was a lot of fun, especially since its the first time I've played IceTowers outside of my family, and playing with the big cardboard pieces makes it almost a physical sport instead of an abstract boardgame. (The giant icehouse pieces are really cool - here's a link to see what it's like)

REZOLUTION: A DARK TOMORROW
I demod a minis game called Rezolution from Aberrant Games. It's a very cool CyberPunk-y minis game with great sculpts and very clean playability, designed for skirmish level combat (10-15 models per side, tops). The rule book is drop-dead gorgeous, I must add... the art is killer and my wife and I drooled over it for 15 minutes before playing the demo. Sadly, I cannot afford another minis game, and Rezolution did not make it into the Box O Loot, although I sorely want it, as does my wife.

CASTLES & CRUSADES
Denise played in a 4 hour C&C game and loved it. Very Convention-friendly as the rules set is a highly simplified d20 set, with a disctinct OD&D feel. While I don't have the love that some others do for this game, we do have the player's handbook for it in the Box o Loot.

BRAWL
The name of the website says it all... BeatPeopleUp.com.
Brawl is a card game released five years ago by Cheapass games (one of my fave companies). The were giving away a deck in each convention bag, and Denise and I played a few fun games. So I went to the cheapass booth and picked up a few more decks. It's fun because it is a no turn sequence game. A game takes roughly a minute and a half for us now, and the tournament games are usually over in 40 seconds. I have most of the Club Foglio and Catfight decks, but none of the other two sets (I think they are sold out). So I have a bunch of these in the Box o Loot.

DICE
Denise picked up a fresh set of the classic Crystal dice from Crystal Caste, the ones with the weird angles instead of standard dice. I picked up a very large set of white dice with black inking to loan to the player who cheats the most at the table, so I can see what he rolls. Oh, and there is a VERY nice large brushed brass d20 in the Box o Loot too, very sexy.

GLOOM
Back to the card game obsession - we checked out Gloom which is an awesome design for a card game, using clear plastic cards so that the cards overlay one another as you play them to produce different effects. VERY cool. And the theme rocks too. "you assume control of the fate of an eccentric family of misfits and misanthropes. The goal of the game is sad, but simple: you want your characters to suffer the greatest tragedies possible before passing on to the well-deserved respite of death. You'll play horrible mishaps like Pursued by Poodles or Mocked by Midgets on your own characters to lower their Self-Worth scores, while trying to cheer your opponents' characters with marriages and other happy occasions that pile on positive points. The player with the lowest total Family Value wins. ". What's also cool, is the game was created by Keith Baker of Eberon fame. Welcome to the Box o Loot, Gloom!

INSTANT WALLS!
While walking apst the Green Dragon Studios booth, I looked at the Dungeon Stamps once again and decided to pass on them, until I saw one of the booth babes drawing out a dungeon very rapidly using the wall roller. I was hooked right there. I only bought the one wall roller and the ink pad for it, since I don't mind drawing doors and other scenery by hand, but the wall roller is awesome and makes for nice, easy to look at walls without burning through my wet-erase markers on the battle mat. Heck, I may actually resurrect the use of minis in my D&D game because of this (my wife loves using minis, I don't bother 99% of the time). Welcome to the Box O Loot, Green Dragon Studios!

. . .

The Box O Loot contains much more, but I have to run off and do some work before I keep on blabbering about Origins.

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

Sounds like you had a good time. I had a great time with the exception of getting a face to face discussion with the Ohio Highway Patrol Sunday morning.

 

[Doug Justice]

[*]Mark from Guardians of Order is The Man. One cellphone call, and we're cutting lines and not paying cover to get into clubs Saturday night. This is one cool, clever, connected Canuck. When I grow up, I want to be him.

By any chance did you get a look at the Game of Thrones game either on pdf or sitting in on some demos?

Thanks,
Doug

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

FLUXX
I'm an old hand at the IceHouse games from Looney Labs, but this year I spent a lot of time in the Big Experiment, and learned a bunch of games from Looney that I hadn't played before, and got completely hooked on "FLUXX" (a card game), bought a copy, and collected 6 promotional cards for the game too. Thus began the Box O Loot.

I hereby challenge you to a best of 7 series of Fluxx at GenCon!

Excellent game, my deck travels with me everywhere, and has saved me & my wife's sanity during many hours waiting in airports for delayed planes.

 

[Crothian]

Fluxx ios very fun, I got to play with Hound Saturday night. It is an unusual game and the name fits the game so completely it is scarey.

 

[IronWolf]

Glad the two of you made it back safely!

Went out for dinner Saturday night and met some ENWorlders. Very nice food, too bad about the crazy price, crappy services and distinct lack of dessert.

We'll see about heading someplace else next year! Who would have thought there wouldn't have been a piece of key lime pie to spare!

 

[Ghostwind]

Sounds like it was a blast. Sorry I had to miss it this year. I look forward to seeing both of you two at Gen Con.

 

[HellHound]

You are SO on, Rich.

Mmmm... Fluxx...

My goal is to buy a BUNCH of blank card packs at GenCon this year, and to add an element of Mao to Fluxx. Every time someone wins a game, they get a blank card at random, add text to it (using a specific set of rules as to what can and cannot be allowed - No player should be able to be in a situation where they cannot draw at least one card during their turn, or play at least one card during their turn; no hidden state between turns; No tokens) and shuffle it into the deck. In time, I hope to have a fluxx deck that is at least 50% new cards.

Doug Justice - sorry, although we were quite impressed with the Guardian of Order's ability to get us into packed night clubs past the lineup, we weren't schmoozing about product much except for me once again raving about Ex Machina (the best CyberPunk RPG on the market - coming from a CyberPunk 2020 fanatic and someone who really dislikes the TriStat system). I didn't play in any demos or other RPG games, and Dextra only played the one C&C demo - we usually play board games and card games at Cons.

and now, back to the Box O Loot

ARCANA EVOLVED
I'm one of those people who was somewhat underwhelmed by Arcana Unearthed... although I have started looking to it for replacing the spellcasters in D&D in order to reduce the power level of high level spells (getting rid of some of the troublemakers like teleport). Well, AE almost has me hooked. This book is leaps and bounds beyond AU, and is almost enough to make me start running a game using its system instead of settling in to another Arcanis campaign. One of the items that is giving me this impetus, mind you, is the Arcana Evolved BattleBox, from Fiery Dragon. Very nice supplement to the game. Arcana Evolved & BattleBox, welcome to the Box O Loot.

BATTLE BOX
If you are into minis for your games, and don't have enough, Fiery Dragon has awesome boxes of counters that I've been using since the beginning of 3.0 basically. But the revolution came last year at GenCon with the release of the Battle Box, and the Counter Collection Gold. I picked up CCGold at GenCon last year (a metal tin full of die-cut 3.5 monster tokens), but the battle box was sold out. The Battle Box has little cards for all the major actions such as Bull Rush, Trip and so on, giving you all the rules you need to do it, as well as a nice little pursuit system and a bunch of templates for spell effects like fireballs, burning hands, lightning bolt and so on. I also have the Dungeon Tiles box, with a whole slew of 6x6 dungeon tiles by Ed Bourelle. Dungeon Tiles & Battle Box, welcome to the Box O Loot.

LEGACY OF DAMNATION
I'll admit it, I have a stiffy for Arcanis, the setting published and run by Paradigm Concepts. What I REALLY love about Arcanis is it gets more publisher support than any other setting right now - they publish a ton of adventures every year for the RPGA for their living Arcanis campaigns, and run huge events, day in and day out, at Origins. Legacy of Damnation is a book about the Dark Kin and the lands where the demons still run rampant. Dark Kin are humans tainted with demonic blood. Cool book, great flavour material, eagerly purchased and added to the Box O Loot!

MONSTERNOMICON 3.5
What more need be said? One of, if not THE best monster book released, now revised to 3.5. Welcome to the Box O Loot.

BELL-BOTTOMED BADASSES ON THE MEAN STREETS OF FUNK
Although Z-Man games was formed to bring back the old ShadowFist CCG, the real genius is the invention of a Canadian game designer - the B-movies card games. We've been playing these for a few years now, starting with the classic Grave Robbers From Outer Space and expanding on to Cannibal Pygmies in the Jungle of Doom and Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island... last year they released two new games in the set that I hadn't picked up yet - Skippy's Revenge (Grave Robbers from Outer Space II) and Bell-Bottomed Badasses on the Mean Streets of Funk. The release they are getting ready for GenCon this year? BERSERKER HALFLINGS FROM THE DUNGEON OF DRAGONS. It's not out yet, but the two from last year have been gleefully added to The Box O Loot.

BABY'S FIRST MYTHOS
I know I just finished talking about Z-man games, but hey, we bought a lot of stuff there. This is a cute speller book (A is for Azathoth...) of the Cthulhu Mythos. Must have. In the same theme, we also picked up the Cthulhu Colouring and Activity Book from another publisher. Ahh... Cthulhu for Kids, welcome to the Box o Loot!

 

[romp]

BTW, I just finished uploading a bunch more photos from the con, go to flickr and search for Origins, they will pop up.

Gloom sold out on Saturday, I was lucky to snag a copy of Friday, awesome game my gf and I are going to try ....