No pics. Just Stories.
Crothian is -amazing-. Don't be fooled by his post-count, he is quiet and unassuming, but I'm sure he will back you up to the wall if push came to shove. He takes a ribbing and looks slightly embarrassed for a few seconds and then slides right back into conversation. He's my star of GenCon. At the ENnies, just before the show started, a voice rang out "Everyone stare and point at Crothian!" and everyone did. He looked like he was going to melt. "Look what postcount gets you!" (referring to being stared at, not to his position as an ENnie judge), and he grinned and tried to prevent himself from turning too red.
Oh yeah, his new name is either Naomi (the name he was registered at the hotel under) or Garth Vader (the name on his official GenCon badge).
Tefflon Billy. We spent a lot of GenCon last year hanging out with him, and this year we spent only a bit of time chillin' (and one good night of drinkin' and eatin', as shown in the photo where he is giving PKitty the "number 1" sign!). Billy is a class act and a lot of fun. "And a damn handsome man". Ahem.
Great spending time together. As for his admiration of our mad party skillz, even I was impressed with our endurance on Saturday night as we were heading out to the VALAR BOEF Promotional party Saturday night at midnight and ran into him coming home.
Psion. About darn time we got to meet. We've been chatting (mostly via the private messaging of various forums) since my introduction to 3e, long before I started publishing. Some great conversations, and it felt really 'cool' to have him ditch his game to come back upstairs to hang out with us.
Buttercup. An absolute sweetheart. No good stories (this year), I'm afraid...
Hal. What can I say? He kept his pants on to the best of my knowledge. Our hotel became a focal point because of the excellent free breakfasts, so I got to see Hal in the morning even though he didn't stay in our hotel. Mooch
Negative Zero. A cool man. We were chatting about racial stereotypes in games because he played in a pirates-based d20 game at a con where he played a very stereotyped "islander". The man SCREAMS Carribean to me. Cool yet excited at the same time. He also brought the ENWorld name tags for everyone which was awesome (and finally turned Garth Vader into Crothian).
Clay (AlSiH20). How wired can a guy be? All my mental images of him are as a hippy of course, so I think of him in terms of my father, the quintessential hippy. This involves being a LITTLE less hyper! Hyper hippies are a strange juxtaposition in my mind. Clay is awesome. The ENnie awards he made are awesome. And while my own haircut has made it so I am no longer the 'hairiest man in gaming', his certianly counters the old images of the Hairy Potter.
Joe Browning and Suzi Yee. What a blast. These two rock in a big way, and their releases are doing something to e-publishing that the industry needs. Rock on! And they TOTALLY buttered up my kids. That rules.
Maldur. I love this man. Maldur is the FIRST person I have ever met who stepped forward to declare his love of my cyberpunk website. I maintained
The Blackhammer CyberPunk Project for 4 or 5 years before turning to d20 publishing, and Maldur is one of my old readers. Maldur, if and when I get around to publishing Cyberpunk stuff, you are scoring comps. Maldur also traded Euro coins for Canadian coins with our portable baby-sitter, Half-Mad.
Sniktch. The rat bastard. Cheerful as hell. I think between Sniktch and Maldur, there were ALWAYS big grins going on 24/7. But with Maldur, the grin is going on seriously above yoru head (Maldur is TALL), whereas with Sniktch, you can see the grin in your face. Sniktch got to regale us with his status as one of the very first of the second-generation role-players, having been introduced to RPGs by his father long long ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Peter Adkinson. Who else shows up at the 'top secret' promo party for the BOEF in a lizard-man (ahem... 'Deep One') costume? The gaming mogul himself!
Mark Rein-Hagen. I'm an old Vampire fan, so meeting Mark was a thrill. Mark won't remember me. Right after we shook hands, he fell over backwards. It was a GOOD night.
So many more people... Will post more personal recollections later in this thread.
Events.
Turns out this year I was eligible to be a GenCon VIP as I had won an ENnie last year, but I only clued into this as we were leaving the Con and I was reading the VIP material.
You see, we get to be VIPs next year.
Not for an ENnie (don't qualify for those anymore), but because my lovely daughters (the gelflings) won the Talent category of the costume contest. THEY are the VIPs, not me. They were the stars of GenCon. We had a half-dozen people come up to get them to autograph the Kid's Colouring Book o Critters before the ENnies show. They won the Talent contest, and second place in the 'Best of Show' category. Rock On.
Risk 2210.
Our friend Half-Mad came along to GenCon to help us drive (16 hours) and to babysit the gelflings while Denise and I were at the Valar BOEF party on Saturday night. On Thursday, he signed up for a game of Risk 2210. He loves Risk. He loves Risk 2210 even more. We play it at my place about once every 3-4 weeks. He has never won. He rarely even manages to eke out anything above the lowest score each game. Good thing he LOVES Risk, or he would have given up in frustration years ago.
He got his butt kicked at the competition.
But he comes to the hotel room and describes the prizes. If you win a preliminary round, you qualify for the semi-finals. The winner of each of the 5 semi-final rounds goes on to the finals AND wins a $400-$500 plexi-glass version of the game board. He asks me to try to win also, as he only wants to win it to give it to me so we can play on it (he doesn't own the actual game).
So I go with him to the Friday game at 9am. We sign in and play at the same table. Not only does he win for the first time ever, but with the highest score we've seen at one of our games. I came in second with a score of 40 points, which is DARN respectable, and higher than many 1st place scores I have seen.
I tried again on Saturday morning and also lost.
But the organizer pulled me aside to say that the second place winners with high scores should show up, as they will sub in if any of the first-place players don't show.
So I show up Sunday morning, get to one of the tables, and manage to pull off a solid, quick win. Half-Mad was eliminated completely on the 4th turn on his table. So, I won the plexi version of the board, and progressed to the finals.
The finals were run at the WotC booth from noon - 4pm. It was great because TONS of people were watching, the game was REALLY tight, exciting and nail-bitting. I had both gelflings cheering me on, Dextra dropping by occasionally...
And I came in second.
Pretty darn respectable.
I'll post links to the pictures on
http://www.avalonhill.com/default.asp?x=welcome/op when they post them. I won a cool "Nuclear Commander" patch too. What made me REALLY happy was that the game remained friendly at heart. All five of us were there gunning for the board, not the bomber jacket (the prize for the champion), so we had already won what we had come for, the championship game was really just 'gravy'. Thus the game ran well and smoothly and no one got too antsy about it, even the gentleman jammed into last place for most of the game always smiled.
I have pictures from thursday night and will post them soon, how did it go saturday night? 
