x-posted from CM.
Wednesday
Flight leaves at around noon or so. I'm surprised by how much my flight attendant looks like Ellen Degeneres. No gamers spotted.
I have absolutely -zero- layover at O'Hare. Walk from one flight and immediately board the next.
ing awesome. I start playing "Gamer/Not a Gamer" on this flight. Hint: a derby hat will give it away every.
ing. time. Note to dude wearing the "Gen Con" t-shirt. You're not even making this hard on me.
Grab a ride to the hotels with some other gamers. I walk to the ES from their stop. It's only a few blocks. Crash in the hotel lobby. See Underpants Gnome who looks suspiciously like Crothian. He doesn't even let me in on this relatively obscure fact. Bastard.
I see Reveal wandering around, and meet him. I'm trying to find Stebbins so I can get a room key. I ask the front desk, and he's in the system, and apparently has checked in. That's reassuring. He's not answering his phone.
I call Nareau and he comes over and gives me his room key so I can dump my
off and go eat. What a guy.
8:00 - Nareau's room. Riggs and are I by ourselves in the room just shooting the
. Lamest CM party ever? Well, at 8 o'clock it was. By 9 o'clock, the place was standing room only.
Holy
. I met so many people. My head's swimming trying to get it all straight.
Thursday
Head downstairs and join Reveal's DCC game. Apparently there's an empty slot. I write down a wonderful quote. "We're staying in initiative because of the sheep." When you're 0th level, sheep matter.
Grab a bite to eat.
Head to the dealer hall. I step into it at 1:40 and have to work the ENWorld booth at 2:00 and then I realize I don't know where it is. Ooh - my first quest! After a few minutes of searching, I recall someone saying something about 1500, so I finally found it on that row. So, I made my wisdom check to recall some information. So that was handy. Worked the booth with
Hand of Evil who is a swell guy. Xath is frantically running around putting out fires, and then we get the weirdest one of all - apparently Dave Arneson hadn't been invited to the Ennies, and was upset. Some "handler" guy came up to us to express Arneson's frustration. I was a little confused, because I wasn't even aware that Arneson was there, or that he was receiving an award. Cause I was like "anyone can come to the Ennies - he's welcome to come." But then the guy tells me about this award. A few moments later Dave actually arrives at the booth in his wheelchair with his nephew and Xath comes by and basically personally invites Dave to the Ennies. For whatever reason, the people the Ennies staff had been in communications with never bothered to tell Dave that he was invited. Very strange. But, fortunately it all got worked out, and Dave seemed cool about it in the end. Whew.
Eat.
At 7:00, I have a seminar on "Impromptu GM'ing". Funny thing is, I'm running my Round-robin GM game at 8:00 so that seemed like a perfect segue. Worst. Seminar. Ever. I can't begin to describe how annoying the guy was, how unprepared he was, how pompous and idiotic he was, and how the seminar mostly had extremely little to do with impromptu GM'ing. I knew it was going to suck when he bragged at the beginning that he had no notes and was going to improvise his seminar on improvisation. Holy , was I right. One curious thing though, was at some point he asked "by show of hands, how many people in here dislike 4th edition as much as I do?" and in a room of roughly 60-70 people, I bet about 70% of them raised their hands. Surprising.
At 8:00, someone from ENWorld, a Beldar-something who had met me during my stint at the ENWorld booth wanted to play in my game. I apologize if others were trying to find it. Seems maybe Brent Nall signed up, but I hadn't bothered trying to take a list of players for it, since I'd assumed (incorrectly) that there would be an ENWorld sign-up book for games, and I could manage it through that. Oops. So, he headed to the pick-up area and found 3 others to play. A good time was had by all. Plot synopsis: We had to stop a mystical key from opening up a gate to the elemental plane of water by getting an earth elemental to eat it. The most brilliant part was when the guy tied the "coins from an island nation" we'd found in the first 30 minutes of the game to the location where we needed to go to find the earth elemental. Brilliant.
Friday
Never again will I schedule 3 games in one day. . What a chore.
First up, Belen's SWSE, Not Star Wars game. What a groovy ride this one was. My favorite line was when I told Fraisala that "I was just ing around" in my thick Indian accent. Wonderful.
Rodrigo's Winter Witch game was brilliant. I'll forgive him for using 4th edition. It was an interesting experiment, though I'm not entirely convinced it creates the perfect mood for the game. It worked, though, and wasn't an issue. He's a great story-teller. I particularly liked placing a bear trap on the troglodytes scrotum. Good times.
Head back over to the lobby for Dire Wolf's Steam Tunnels game. Fortunately, I think we were all pretty loopy by this point, and boy did it show. I played a football player LARPer, and I decided the only logical reason my character would LARP would be to get some tail. So, he was the tough guy who ended up getting attacked *almost* as much as the bad guys did. I never saw the pepper-spray coming. Amazingly, we managed to actually finish this scenario in a respectable amount of time. Kudos to Dire Wolf and his truly inventive scenario. Very clever.
Saturday
I'd told Marcus Americus that I could play in his Saturday morning game since I knew it had openings, and I was free all morning. I think some other folks were trashed, and had little interest in wanting to play that early on Saturday. I can certainly understand. I wasn't terribly upset when he decided to cancel it. I don't care what other folks say about Marcus, he's a super nice guy, and I was glad I got to hang out with him.
So, I headed to the dealer hall instead, which was nice, since I'd not gotten to spend very much time there up to this point. I ended up picking up some decent deals, and a few interesting things.
Dread, signed by the author.
CAPES!
I picked up WoTC's Sandstorm (desert book) for $5 at Troll and Toad.
I picked up the Planer Handbook from the Pinnacle booth for $5. Too good to pass up.
I ended up stopping by the XRP booth and chatting with Joe and Suzi for a bit. I'd been meaning to pick up their Monster Geographica line, and at $5 a pop, I couldn't resist all 4 of them. Apparently, I got the last every print copy of "Forest". Yay me!
I picked up two foam swords from the Everquest booth for my daughters. Free swag!
I bought two family games from the Simply Fun booth - one called Handy which is basically described as "Twister for your hands" - you have to hold these foam balls between your fingers. More on this later.
I also picked up a game called Walk the Dog where you try to collect sets of little dogs. It comes with 7 sets of 9 dogs (63 total). My kids will probably just end up playing with the dogs. My oldest seems to like it.
I also got some good swag from working the ENWorld booth. I'd actually forgotten about that. More free stuff!
At 3:00, I hook up with John Crichton and his Escape from the Cronus game. I played the starlight, Azure with her pet disintegrator rifle Schnookums. I spent twenty minutes coming up with movie quotes. Hopefully JC will post them. They seemed like a big hit. Though admittedly some were corny. My favorite movie title "Drill me Hard - A love story." What a great game, and great players. Holy . Can you guys come to my house every week and entertain me like this?
At 7:30, I bolt a little early from the game (which ended up running 5 hours) to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's production of "Video Games Live". I'm not going to bore you with all the details. This was OK. I heard the U.S. Premiere of the theme music to Diablo III (impressive) - but my favorite was probably the music to Zelda. A bunch of the games I wasn't entirely familiar with. This was almost as much rock concert as it was "orchestra" as for the latter songs, one of the guys brings out his guitar to play a few pieces. Highlight: The announcer begins to announce the game and he says "the company is Square Enix, and the game is", and at that point, someone in the audience shouts, "over-rated". Holy crap. After the show, I stood in line like fan boy to talk to the composers, and actually got to meet one of the guys who did a lot of the dialogue/plot writing for Baldur's Gate, NeverWinter Nights and SW:KotOR. What was amazing about talking to the composers and this guy was just how absolutely ing arbitrary it was that they ended up with these careers. The composers hadn't even majored in music, and neither of them even set out to be composers. The one guy who was also the MC actually ended up in the business by being in a music store, wearing a computer-related t-shirt, and meeting someone who was in the video game industry who needed a composer. ing crazy.
Sunday
The picnic was great. I actually don't completely suck at throwing a frisbee despite how ever many years its probably been since I've last done that.FickleGM was awesome for helping organize that, and I'm pretty sure Sidereal Knight helped as well. Great guys. It was nice to just sort of wind down, and take it easy.
On the way to the airport, I actually see Rel and Riggs and we all share a taxi ride together to the airport.
On the flight out of Indy, I just couldn't help but love how everyone was reading game books. That was awesome.
What was even more cool was that I ended up meeting a guy who runs the only game store in Tulsa I hadn't managed to find yet (apparently it's mostly card games) and we chatted quite a bit in our 2 1/2 hour layover in O'Hare. Nice guy.
My wife's friend's husband actually picked me up at the airport, whom I'd never actually met. Turns out, he's also a huge gamer, and we spent the entire trip home talking about gaming. Crazy! So, my Gen Con didn't officially end until I hit the sack at about midnight Sunday.
Whew!
