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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9371096" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading Robin D. Laws' <a href="https://atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG2702" target="_blank">40 Years of Gen Con</a>, which was published in 2007 by Atlas Games.Having been on a years-long kick to read as much nonfiction about our hobby as I could, I started this one several months ago, putting it down for some time right around its halfway point before finally picking it back up and finishing it. While I suspect it says more about me than the book, I found it fatiguing to get through, not because its contents were uninteresting, but because it was difficult to be drawn in by what was essentially a series of random anecdotes.Now, to be fair, they were absolutely entertaining anecdotes, but I want to stress that (other than the opening blurbs at the start of each chapter) this entire book is photographs and anecdotes, with short testimonials given by various industry notables on a variety of Gen Con-related topics (and sometimes on wider industry topics, albeit in the guise of how they affected Gen Con), moving forward chronologically. It's the sort of thing that strikes me as fun to read in short blurbs, but not something you'd sit down and read for 168 pages at a stretch, or even a series of shorter stretches.Of course, given that I found it much faster to read when I got to the parts of the book that covered years when I'd been attending Gen Con, I might be full of crap, so your mileage may vary. And also, there were several very interesting tidbits to be found here. For instance:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman came up with the name for their character <a href="https://dragonlance.fandom.com/wiki/Dalamar" target="_blank">Dalamar the Dark</a> from a guy they met at Gen Con whose actual name was Dalamar. They liked his name so much they used it in their novels. Tracy Hickman wondered if, in hindsight, they ruined that guy's life.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">TSR president Lorraine Williams apparently loved the (short-lived) Gen Con pre-opening tradition of employees from other companies "assaulting" the TSR castle (i.e. the large castle-shaped exhibit they had in the center of the dealer hall) with Nerf weapons. She regularly took part in it, finding it to be a blast. (This is, I'll note, the one and only anecdote I've ever found of Lorraine Williams being involved in any sort of game-play during her time at TSR.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Not being a Legend of the Five Rings player, I had no knowledge of the <a href="https://kolatinformant.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/1997-day-of-thunder/" target="_blank">Day of Thunder</a> that happened at the L5R tournament at Gen Con in 1997. It was apparently <a href="https://l5r.fandom.com/wiki/Day_of_Thunder" target="_blank">quite the event</a> for that setting, but what I found shocking was that it was essentially a player-directed metaplot, which progressed in a way that shocked the story developer at AEG at the time (since the two finalists, while they still played an exhibition game, previously announced their intention not to fight so that their characters could join forces against a common enemy). For those familiar with The Gamers: Hands of Fate (aka the third Gamers movie), this is almost exactly the same backdrop that the film makes use of, right down to having their "final tournament" take place at Gen Con.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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