I'm eventually going to blog and flesh this out...but here are some notes before I forget if you are interested...
Prologue
After settling into our hotel my buddy, Ray, and I headed into the city to grab some food at the Old Spaghetti Factory, but after parking we noticed all the GenCon bags roaming around. Realizing we were close to the Convention Center and freebies might be lingering we popped over and were able to get some administrative stuff out of the way (like picking up my badge and tickets and grabbing some generic tickets) and grab a bag off goodies. The goodies bag included a GenCon 2008 die from Crystal Caste and a random Q-Workshop die, some coupons, a deck of magic cards, and some other stuff I am sure I am forgetting.
We then decided to walk over to a party that had been posted on the Paizo boards, After walking around for an awfully long time we decided we really needed to get food. We were heading back to the Old Spaghetti factory when we changed our minds and dipped in to a Sush restaurant to drop some cash and grab some sushi and saki.
We decided to make one more attempt to find the party, so we picked up the car, armed with a GPS and finally found the hotel. We had actually been no more han 20 feet from it earlier but had turned around before we caught sight of the sign.
We got to the room which was packed by at least 30 people (more were in the lobby and halls) and were immediately greeted by the hostess Nam who invited us to a game of Heroscape. I’ve seen this game in stores but never played it. We were pretty loose with the rules and we gradually rotated people in. I started with a faction of magma men. Since I didn’t know what the hell I was doing I managed to start on the furthest point from the most strategically advantageous point on the map for me (the volcanic area). I tried to build an alliance with Ray’s dwarven army (since he had also not played the game before) figuring Nam’s angel troops were going to kick our butts otherwise. Well it worked briefly when Ray decided that he wanted more of his guys to attack and he couldn't reach Nam’s forces. Trapped between Nam and Ray, I built an alliance with Nam (we had beat each other down pretty severely) against Ray. A fourth player popped in at this point and started snipping all of us. I ended up surviving with one creature while Ray and Nam’s forces were completely destroyed. I found myself at the most disadvantageous spot since he was across a lake actually better in the water than where he was) and well Water is my weakness. He also had ranged attacks and I did not unless I reached the Magma fields which meant that I had to head into his firing. More players started joined in as well as Ray and Nam with new forces. The factions consisted of everything from a mighty barbarian, a dragon, gunslingers and lost more stuff I can’t remember.
While they were battling I was just trying to elude them and get to the magma fields. We ended up getting kicked out of the room before we finished, so I had the only starting character that survived.
We headed back to the hotel room around 11pm
GenCon Day 1
I started my day off at the Pathfinder Society Scenario The Silent Tide. I’m not going to include any spoilers so feel free to read on.
This was one of the two slots, Ray and I would be teaming up.. I was playing a spiked chain fighter and Andoran exile, Fyodor Hobbes. In case you are interested here’s Hobbes’ story
We grabbed some lunch at the Old Spaghetti factory which was a place I discovered when my wife and I went to Sacramento earlier this year. Great deal, you can get an bread, entree, salad or soup, drink and dessert for $10. That made up for the sushi and saki dinner the night before.
We took a look at some of the vendors which had everything from rows of dice to some incredible furniture and art. I saw the dude who played Chewbacca but didn't go get his autograph, because well...come on...if you’re Chewbacca all you had to do was be tall and run around in an ape-ish costume. Beside I am sure I heard he died a few years ago and by the looks of it I'm not so sure he didn't. In any case, he was scary in a homicidal muppet sort of way.
I found a gaming table by Geek Chic that I really like for only $10,000. I was planning to build one for $200 so now I have to reassess because after all I must have the coolest game room in the world. Honestly, it was nice and functional. It was built for wargaming in mind too, so it is not optimized for role-playing in my opinion. Plus it’s 10 grand...ridiculous.
I bounced around the Paizo booth quite a few times which is strange since I pretty much already know their product line by heart and own most of their products. I picked up a few missing items like the module, Into the haunted forest, the print edition of the Pathfinder RPG beta rules, Rise of the Runelords dice set, and the Limited edition cover of Pathfinder #13. Good thing I grabbed the Beta Rules when I did since they sold out quickly. They were also making it available as a free download and 1000 downloads occurred within 1 hour.
There was a chic in a chainmail bikini; I believe she was one of the actors from the Gamers:Dorkness Rising movie. She was pretty much all over me until some epic-level geek (there is irony there but you won't get it unless you are in fact versed in geeky ways) came by and tried to get her to remember him from another conference years ago. Like the chainmail bikini chic is going to remember one geek of the thousands that fondle her every years. Anyway Ray was taking a picture of the chainmail bikini chic all over me but he didn't get the picture, the uber geek comes and screws up my game and then Ray snapped the picture. She was all over me...Really.
Ray and I went to the Paizo delve which was a scenario where you and three other adventurers are trying to survive for 15 minutes while waves of undead come to destroy the village of Falcon's Hallow. You gained keys through three goals: Find a sacred book, survive for 15 minutes and find hidden villagers. You lose a point if one townsperson dies and all your points if more die). The particular undead you are fighting was determined randomly, so we ended up fighting 12 zombies and 6 cult adepts. I was actually pretty confident since Zombies are slow and I had lots of turning. I expected if we could wipe out the cultists, I could destroy the undead easily. Well didn't really need to worry about that since our Seoni's well placed fireball hit all our enemies and easily destroyed all the zombies and caused havoc on the cultists. At that point the fighter (Ray) and the rogue ended up wiping out the enemies while I kept my channel ability going to keep them alive while causing a little damage to the cultists. In any case we were the first to win all three keys. Out of all 12 keys (three per party member), only one of mine opened the Paizo treasure chest. I ended up winning a map pack. I tried to give it to the MVP of our team, but she didn't want it so I kept it for myself.
While wandering around I met Wolfgang Baur. I have been intrigued by his open game design line which is a throwback to the old days when people wrote books because people sponsored them. In this project, you contribute money to help advise on the development of a publication. Typically only the sponsors get the book (or the full book or get it exclusively for the first few years or something). Anyway we chatted for a bit and he seemed like a pretty cool guy. I need to pop back to get one of my books signed.
At about five-ish we headed over to a seminar on writing for Paizo which was a bit less informative than I expected (glad I didn't pay). It could have been summed up with: We are not ready for submission, but things are coming.
GenCon Day 2
I knew this was going to be a hell day. I had events scheduled from 8am Friday to 1am Saturday.
It started off with Murder on the Silken Caravan. (Still no spoilers coming). which was definitely the toughest of the scenerios. We barely avoided a TPK partly due to tough opposition in one battle and party due to a utterly stupid mistake on my part which knocked me out the first round.
Browsed more of the vendor area, I checked out Wizards. Crystal Caste, Hirst Arts, the art show, Dungeon Forge, Fat Dragon and quite a few third party publishers. I was still tempering myself so I didn’t over-purchase. I will say there was probably about $400 worth of minis I wanted, a few hundred dollars worth of dice about $150 of Hirst Arts molds and maybe $1000 of Dwarven Forge stuff.
I also headed over to see the movie the gamers, but the movie schedule was all screwed up...so I ended up ducking into “A Great Disturbance” which was a mockumentrary following five Star Wars fans around a convention. Hilarious. One of the funniest things I’ve watched in a long time.
I ended up having to head back to the hotel room since I forgot the tickets to Ascention of the Drow. This also meant I missed one Paizo Seminar: “Sticking with 3.5, and the future of Paizo”.
I got back to the Con and went to the Paizo room. Ascension of the Drow was a semi-LARP/semi-Tabletop RPG with 126 people playing different characters in a one night battle to crown a new king as demanded by the patron Demon Lords.
Possible very minor spoilers (I really don’t know):
The event was incredibly chaotic (some ways good, some ways bad). There needed to be better reconciliation of how alliances and battles were done, because the character sheets was actually pretty useless during most of the game. Our GM (Clinton J Boomer, one of the RPG Rockstar final four and a contributor to Pathfinder Campaign Setting) was INCREDIBLE. He was the best DM I played under and hopefully that will help me become a better one. In the end I had fun and hope the do it again. Got to the hotel around 2am.
GenCon Day 3
I was up at my Pathfinder Society event at 8am as usual. This time we played the Hydra’s fang Incident. This was my third session without a cleric so it was getting brutal.
I chilled a good part of the day and took pictures of some cool costumes. Finally went to the movies to catch “Gamers” but it had not started yet, so I stepped in to the room anyway and caught the tail end of a workshop where they were doing voice overs for an anime scene, They were using people from the audience and played the entire scene at the end with the audience’s voices. Pretty cool. Finally I got to see the “Gamers: and really was not impressed, especially after “A Great Disturbance”.
I also headed over to Chessex and after struggling with what dice set I wanted for a few days, finally pulled together my new game dice set. All black dice with either Gold, White or Red numbers. The Gold and Red set included one d20; one d12; two d10’s, one percentile, two d8’s, six d6’s, and two d4’s. The white numbered die have an additional six d6’s. I also got one white yes/no die. I actually have two more dice to finish this collection, but I am going to need to have the custom designed. This set was decided on because of ease of readability and the fact that the d4 has the number at the top of the die insted of the bottom. The regular sized dwarven metals also has this (but the small ones and Crystal Caste die have their numbers on the bottom of the D4). I also think the dwarven metals were too heavy; not to mention Iw ould have had to pay $250 instead of $25 to constuct this set. Can’t imagine the cost of getting customer matching dice.
I also spent a good amount of time hunting down autographs from paizo guys. I have a good number of them in my Campaign setting book.
Then I headed to the Pathfinder Preview seminar. Lots of good info. Lots of spoilers. The Paizo guys also solicited info from us regarding Psionics and Epic rules. Went to hotel around 7pm and chilled.
GenCon Day 4
This was a pretty light day. Once again, up for the 8am Pathfinder Society session (this time The Frozen Fingers of Midnight). My character had leveled up and, as had thee of my five party members. We also had a cleric and I had saved enough for some magical armor, so I expected to cruise through this one. The GM mentioned it was running a little short and said we should feel free to role-play more than we usually do. It was a great group dynamic and actually probably my favorite of the scenarios.
After that Ray and I went and picked up more stuff (combat maps and some minis for me) and about $200 worth of Pathfinder stuff for Ray (YAY!!! Another convert). Not much was going on so we decided to go head out, so we went back to the hotel and met up with my mother-in-law for dinner in Cincinnati before heading back to Atlanta.
Epilogue
It was a great time and a looong ride home. I am already planning to go next year and maybe grab more friends. A few things I will probably do different (1) GM instead of play, (2) Buy more stuff, (3) Get a hotel closer to the Convention center (we ended up paying 15-20 a day for parking anyway, not to mention gas and (4) bring more t-shirts or buy while I am there. I'll also take more pictures, go see more movies, and try to hook up with more evening games.
Things that worked out: (1) I picked out most of my must haves the first day, so I didn't miss out on anything and (2) had snacks and drinks in the backpack to reduce the amount of pricey food I bought.
