See some of you there! Be there the whole time for most hours, tons of games to play.
This is the first year I’m missing in the last 20. Wife is having surgery on Gen Con Friday. Hope to see some of you next year.
Couple pro tips.
The bathrooms in the convention center can get iffy as the con goes on. If you are as squeamish as me, crossing Maryland St. to hit a hotel bathroom is well worth it. (This used to be much worse but there are fewer catasses than there once were. The old Gen Con booklets used to implore attendees to shower during the Con)
The free play rooms from major board game publishers are quite nice, plus they teach the game. Fantasy Flight, Rio Grande, couple others.
Even if they are sold out, you can often crash an event with generic tickets when there are no shows.
If you don’t want to lug stuff, grab one of the lockers very early. They go quick. There are 2 separate locker groups and the western ones last longer.
As mentioned before, buy as little food or drink in the center as possible. High prices, mediocre at best. There is a ton of stuff in walking distance.
If you are sociable, it is not hard to convince people to join you in games. Bring a few small portable games and he’ll, you can play right in a hallway.
Indy can be humid as hell this time of year. Choose clothing and shoes wisely.
If you can manage it, it’s far better to get a light snack and delay dinner until 8ish or so. Zig when everyone zags, as they say.
It is a very cool, relaxed community at the con. No worries about anything bad or thieves at all.
I’m not going to make it either this year. Too many other trips, expenses and demands on my time these past 6 months. It was a blast last year, and I wanted to return, but alas, no dice.
I will add the following to the GenCon must see/do list:
Try to eat at least one lunch or dinner at The RAM, which is a block from the Convention Center just on the other side of all the food trucks. The owners there LOVE GenCon, and they create an entire con-themed menu every year, along with brewing special beers for the occasion. They also show sci-fi and fantasy movies on the TVs all weekend long, and most of the staff will come in cosplay costumes. Some of them really get into it, so it’s pretty awesome. Several companies also hold their GenCon events there as well, so sometimes you get lucky and walk into some con-related freebies/promos.
Steak and Shake is a great con hangout for after a late gaming session. It will be full of con goers all weekend. Also about a block or two from the convention center. You can also get to the Circle Center Mall food court without needing to go outside, and the food choices there are far better (and cheaper) than inside the convention center.
You absolutely need to hit the GenCon Auction at some point over the weekend. Friday afternoon or anytime Saturday are the best times, because you can browse the Auction Store (in the same room as the auction, but accessed through a different set of doors from the hallway). The Auction Store is where the stuff that didn’t sell at auction goes for consignment sale (or people can simply designate stuff direct to consignment as well). I have found some incredible bargains in the GenCon Auction Store over the years on everything from minis to CCGs to boardgames, to RPG books and supplements and computer games. It’s absolutely worth 30 minutes of your time to browse through everything, as even if you don’t find anything to purchase I can guaranty that you will find stuff you didn’t know existed and things to nerd out over. =)
Take 5 minutes to grab a con coupon book on your first day. Not only are there lots of discount coupons for various vendors in the Dealer Hall, but lots of publishers and developers put coupons for freebies in the book, stuff like promo cards, promo dice, or even free product when you purchase product. Some also do drawings for free product if you fill out a slip from the coupon book and turn it in.
Basically, relax, stay hydrated (and clean!), and have fun! Maybe I will see everyone there next year!
Connnnnnnn report. This year’s trip was a mixture of tragic bad luck, surprisingly terrible games, out-of-nowhere smash hits, and a GM I will never not try to play with at this con. Read on for more :-D
(Spoilers included for my three sessions listed above. If you think we might play them together some future day at GenCon, I’ll try to mark 'em so you don’t accidentally read)
((P.S. - Sorry for wildly swinging verb tense. This was written over about two days and I just can’t stand to edit it anymore))
Pre-Con Travel Madness - Meet the Cast and Set the Stage
Last year, my group numbered 4: Josh (a rail-thin cap-sporting electrical engineer who only recently started playing RPGs, now with a penchant for Starfinder and a hunger for new gaming horizons) and James (a beardy, burly boardgames addict who GMs d20 systems and can’t resist classic movie showings), two guys I met here in Raleigh right after I moved here at some Barcraft events James was running, plus his buddy Cord , a gargantuan viking of a man who loves painting minis, reading Warhammer novels, and playing powerful brawlers in games.
This year, we expanded the pool and pulled in more folks: James and Cord’s old friend Eric (a notable cosplayer and RPG/boardgames nerd) from Atlanta, another friend of the viking, Reese (who I still know absolutely nothing about), and three of my pals from the local RPG meetup group, Joseph , an aspiring game designer seeking The Hottest Tips from publishers at workshops, Nori , a lifelong nerd who’d held up GenCon as a holy grail item and wanted to do ALL THE PANELS, and Rebecca , a relatively new GM and roleplayer looking to RPG it up and catch a live show of Critical Role , her fave gaming podcast. Together, the nine of us managed to score two early slots in the housing lottery, letting us book rooms in downtown hotels–not skybridge-connected super hotels, but each was within 4-5 blocks of the ICC. Looking good so far!
Unfortunately, just about everything that could wrong for the new folks did. Nori got a promotion at their school and got delayed leaving by a full a day and a half, missing a ton of events. Reese was in the middle of moving apartments and the new place kept pushing back his move-in date last minute, chewing up his vacation time until he finally had to cancel his GenCon attendance with days to spare. And, eventually, Joseph, who was planning on flying in a day late to hit the show for the weekend, but tragically had his flight canceled last minute due to inclement weather here in Raleigh.
Despite the awful luck, those of us who could still attend at all managed to make it up in fits and starts, arriving in a wacky mixture of cars and planes. I drove Josh, James, and Rebecca up, and our lengthy 12-hour road trip was a grand adventure through the wilds of West Virginia and the desolated rust belt misery of Ohio. But there was Dairy Queen! With us we carried a mighty bevvy of snacks, including a healthy helping of PB&J ingredients to provide cheap meals in lieu of food truckish delights.
Wednesday - Lines and Pizza and Lines
After the road trip, Indianapolis was a sight for sore eyes. . . and butts. I can stuff a lot of people into my momvan-esque vehicle, but it’s not exactly fun for that long :).
We arrived at the hotels, dropped off our crap, and made our way to the ICC. I snuck off to grab my freebie GM badge (my reward for running 3 6-person, 4-hour sessions and cracking the 70-player-hours barrier), which was a 60-second task at GM HQ. Unfortunately, all my event tickets were still held at Will Call for reasons beyond fathoming, so I marched over to join my friends in line. Last year, we’d arrived maybe an hour earlier Wednesday night and got through Will Call in minutes. This year, there was a 45-50 minute wait stretching down the entire lenght of the convention center and out the door into the street. Horrified, we decided to skip out and go to dinner to wait out the line. Oh, how foolish we were.
Giordano’s has become our traditional first stop: a Chicago-style pizzeria a few blocks from the ICC. The wait was awful–an hour or more–but we stuck it out, because we were famished and it was delicious. To-go orders kept hopping the line and piling up, but we eventually got seated. Whereupon we ordered and proceeded to wait more than an hour and a half for food as our increasingly apologetic waitress plied us with beer and discounts. Now, mind, when the pizza came, we feasted like royalty, because Giordano’s is life, Giordano’s is love, and we tipped the poor waitress out the wazoo for sticking around almost an hour after close to look after us, but damnnnnn. . .
We made it back to the ICC by 11 and found that the line had, against all logic, gotten worse. The crew staying up at the Home2 Suites northeast of the con, Josh, Eric, and Rebecca, decided to call it a night and went to bed. James, Cord, and I stuck it out for an hour and were rewarded with our event ticket packets and a very, very sleepy trudge back to the Staybridge southwest of the Convention Center. I took the couch bed, with James promising me he’d bring me White Castle from the nearby fast food joint anytime I wanted if I let him have the bed all Con long. I told him I’d think about it and passed out around 1.
Thursday - My Minor League Evil Session, Plus Some Noir-y Savage Worlds and an Awful Pun-fest
After snarfing down a surprisingly decent breakfast at our hotel, showering, and shaving for the first time in a month so I did not look like the Neckbeard King, I raced over to the Crowne Plaza Hotel’s well-hidden back rooms to run Minor League Evil , a Fate Core-based session starring second-string supervillains trying to ensure evil gets done when their bosses in the Council of Hate vanish. I was feeling extremely tired and sore–the couch bed had NOT been kind and I’d barely slept at all–but figured I could soldier on through via the power of Extroversion–nothing amps me up like running a game!
My buddy Josh was in the game, along with another Fate GM who wanted to play more games of it and another couple. Of them, the wife in the couple was. . . let’s say extremely surly. Not outright rude, just extremely terse and clipped in everything she did and said. Two other players no-showed–a precursor for the event at large–and we kicked off with a mere 4/6. D’oh, so much for that energy bonus. . .
Spoilers for Minor League Evil
Josh had begged me to add a villain to the character pool based on the Devil from Charlie Daniels Band’s “Devil Went Down to Georgia.” I complied and he rewarded me by showing up in a full devil costume–for a quiet, kinda shy, no-nonsense kinda guy, that really took me by surprise.
The crew got off to a great start, robbing Capital City Savings and Loan with a violent ice tornado and by mind-controlling the manager into giving up everything including his grandfather’s watch. They then traveling to Capital City History where the devil bought no fewer than 3 souls from various patrons en route to their nefarious victory over Andro Cop 9000 and his mechanized guardians. . . they even made an old lady sad, and a group of schoolchildren decided the devil was super cool and proceeded to cheer him on the rest of the adventure.
But then we hit a bathroom break just when the mystery took a turn and they began to realize that the “heroes” they were fighting were secretly doing villainous things centered around the observatory outside of town, and the game kinda shuddered to a halt as I realized no academic or insightful villains had been chosen–just the bruisers and the devil. Doops. I eventually got them back on track, stifling yawns and herding cats, and the party made their way to the observatory, where the players learned the “heroes” were actually evil alternates who’d swooped in from Dimension Reverse when the bigbad villains had left our world to travel there. The player characters actually ALLIED with the evil heroes and helped fuse our world with their own hellish homeland, marking this as the first time a player group has ever taken the most evil choice possible!
I was a little frustrated with myself for letting the game slip off the mark a little in the middle as I wolfed down my PB&J in the lobby of the hotel and waited for the next session to start. James joined Josh and I–after I had “won” GenCon last year by hitting up a bunch of weird indie RPGs and having a blast while all my friends languished in overpriced, boring D&D 5E adventure paths, they had decided they’d just follow me into glory.
We walked back to the creepy Crowne Plaza rear rooms to find two other guys sitting there, leaving the table missing one, and started “The Night the Lights Went Out In NOLA,” a Savage Worlds adventure set in the noir-tinged world of a quasi-supernatural 1930s New Orleans using the Deadlands: Noir campaign setting. We were a motley crew of PIs–I, a voodoo practioner with a pile of debts, James a professional investigator with a keen eye, Josh a charming dilettante with a score to settle, and the other players taking on a crazy mad scientist with a laser gun and a filthy hobo with a penchant for trash-food. An old cop buddy of ours was being stalked and threatened, and investigation revealed that a series of gruesome murders were linked by the victims’ association with an old murder case. Unfortunately, about 30 minutes into the proceedings, the hobo’s player, who’d been disinterestedly tapping on his phone the whole time, peaced out, and the mad scientist’s player was mostly quiet unless he was getting to shoot things with his laser, leaving us at 3.5/6 for the rest of the night.
Nonetheless, we persisted, learning the victims had conspired to lock away an innocent man, and that his sister had raised his corpse with voodoo to enact revenge. Though none of us loved that she had murdered some people, we had a hard time denying that their deaths were pretty justified, and after putting down the zombie and convincing her to leave our cop-friend, who was innocent of wrongdoing, out of her vengeance, we. . . kinda let her go.
Which the poor GM clearly hadn’t been counting on at all. We sputtered through some jokey wrap-up for a good 20 minutes, but without his climactic fight with a voodoo sorceress to cap it off, the guy just didn’t seem to have much gas left in the tank. I left feeling a little guilty for having spoiled his adventure and for thoroughly “Randying” the session, as Josh called it–sometimes, when a table is low-energy and no one is giving much to the game, I’ll just dive extra deep into character and “make my own fun” to keep myself amused and keep things moving. At its best, its a charming extra addition to a game, but at it’s worse, it’s a little showboaty and rude, so I try not to let it get out of hand.
We grabbed a food truck dinner together–James and I foolishly opted for some painfully bland and poorly prepared Indian food, sadly, plus some not-terrible cupped cupcakes from Gigi’s.
Then, James, Rebecca, and I met up and walked over to the ICC for “A Muse-ical Adventure,” a Fantasy AGE game for 6. . . and were surprised to learn that we were the only 3 who’d shown up. The game was originally described as a quest on behalf of the Greek muses to gather holy artistic artifacts wherein “role-playing is heavily encouraged.” I developed a theory at this Gen Con that anyone who tells you that Role-Play is the most important thing to them / is vital to their session. . . is lying through their goddamned teeth to you. The GM told us he’d rewritten the adventure entirely, and that it was his very first con game. Well, here we go, right?!
We weren’t shown characters; rather, as we “slept,” the muses described all 6 options, and we chose among them, and then were ripped from our beds and deposited into a clearing a forest, surrounded by some dwarves, men, and a single troll. I took on the role of a daring and undefeated duelist who’d never actually killed someone (and was, consequently, not especially good at combat, which the GM described as a hilarious joke). James was a brave “support caster” (literal description) who could heal and buff but not very much else. Rebecca was a world traveler who had a gigantic cannon that somehow did much less damage than my wispy rapier.
Without really any introduction at all, the people in the forest all immediately began trying to murder and then cook us, so we set about dispatching these nameless vagrants while our characters continued to not know each other. As soon as we’d finished them off–which took about an hour and a half, as each foe had about 80 HP to weather our attacks that were dealing an average of about 10-12 damage–we were nose-tugged to a vast pink river with stones set into it. Our investigation rolls all told us a single thing: we’d need to jump across the stones, one by one, until we got to the other side. It turned out that falling into the pink water sent your character back to the original shoreline.
My duelist was well-equipped for jumping, while the other characters were not. After begging the GM to let us use some vines and rope to pull each other up when we fell, we made it across the jumping “puzzle” after about 45 minutes, entering a cavern and retrieving. . . a toaster? Whereupon the muses whisked up to Olympus, set us down on their gigantic dining table, and made us fight breakfast food.
Breakfast foods–about 9 different items–which each had about 100HP and a long list of very bad and alarmingly suggestive puns they would recite with each attack and upon dying. We spent two hours laboriously dispatching the cuisine and enduring the GM’s blissfully delivered puns before we were finally allowed to leave that unending hell around midnight, return to our respective hotels, and get some sleep.
I told James the White Castle wasn’t worth it and took the bed.
Friday - My The Final Performance of the Hellknights of the Underdark Session, plus Some Agonizing Mutants & Masterminds and an Amazing Fate Session
Friday dawns. The hotel has crispy sausage and barely reheated canned corned beef hash, and I call it a net win while scarfing down nutrients. I suit up and head down to Union Station, excited, as I’ll get to play with three friends from disparate parts of my life: Rebecca, con-caravan pal from Raleigh, Morgan, one of my closest friends from college, and @Vesper, an all around cool dude from certain internet forum places! As it happens, they were also the only people out of six original ticket purchasers who could make it (though I am compelled to add–to head off at the pass any attempts at guilt at all–that Vesper’s brother had to take care of something monumentally more important than gaming and is born exactly 0 ill will ever).
Hellknights Of the Underdark Spoilers
So, the Hellknights–a metal band in the fantastical made up realm of Metallicaris–suit up with naught but a Vocalist, a Keyboardist, and a Drummer. They find themselves locked in a run-down, shitty inn by the city’s magically enforced unhappy hours ordinance, and have to fight off the zombified kitchen cooks to retrieve their mystical weapon/instruments before climbing up a disgusting trash heap to freedom.
Thereupon they split up, with the drummer and keyboardist following a loyal fan toward a spooky warehouse district where rumor had it a gang of passionate fans–the Hellpages, half-orcs who cut out their tongues since their voices were so unworthy compared to the vocalist’s–had stolen their tour bus to host a party in. En route, they were accosted by bearded robber-halflings and accidentally-on-purpose killed one. At the warehouse, they were nearly hugged to death by the aggressively enthusastic Hellpages before convincing them that it’d be better to let them live and come see them live that night with front row tickets. Meanwhile, the vocalist returned to the venue to learn that their stage wasn’t setup and the venue had no booze. She took care of the booze situation with the help of three half-angelic security guards–it seemed that some succubi were seducing the stagehands to death–and got ready to redo the booze contract.
The rest of the band arrived, screaming like banshees as they desperately tried to pilot their gnome-built steampunk tour bus without the aid of their four-armed roadie, Rho’Di. They made their way to Distill Sproot’s Distilled Spirits to make a deal with the two headed troll mobster who ran the place. I turned out one of the heads had a childish fascination with tossing gnomes, like a baby with jangled keys, so the gnomish keyboardist distracted him while the others worked out a deal for his distilled spirits–literally raised dead ghosts turned into booze.
They made their way back to the venue, where they learned their opening band had sold their souls to a contract demon (and the Hellknights’ old manager) to buy their fame. They destroyed the soulstone disco ball the openers had rigged up and through a combination of badass musical aptitutde and about 8 Fate Points, they beat back the demon they were trying to summon–Mileystophales–much to the crowd’s pleasure.
Like the previous morning’s game, I just couldn’t help but feel like I hadn’t given it my all. I was tired, hungry, and sore, had a hard time ramping myself up after being let-down by being tucked away in a distant corner where I couldn’t recruit Generic Ticket holders to fill my empty seats, and just never quite got into the groove of things with the group. Morgan assured me she’d had a blast, but I just felt. . . let down with myself. Blegh.
So I hustle over to the ICC, wolfing down PB&J and meeting Josh, James, and Rebecca, who’d gotten out a little earlier than me while I cleaned up my game area to play a Mutants and Masterminds session called “Chaos in Promise City.” I play in a couple of M&M campaigns here in Raleigh and I truly love the system–its fun mixture of easy die rolls, over the top superheroic action, and in-depth character building really speaks to me.
One other guy was there, so we had an abbreviated group once more. I got a Crime Fighter generic PC, and asked the stranger what his favorite nocturnal animal was; he said snakes, and thus Black Snake, a painfully on the nose and ironically grimdark Batman ripoff, was born. James took on the roll of a Gadgeteer pretending to be a magician, Cord was a Paragon alien from space named Space Hunter, Rebecca was a patriotic Super Soldier named Patty, and the other guy was a Power Suit-equipped heroine named Quantum Steel.
I was initially encouraged, as we introduced our heroes by talking about our recent (made up on the fly) exploits that had earned us recognition by the city government. I began to Randy things a bit, as Black Snake described his victories over the Dark Serpent Gang, the Obsidian Cobra, and Sable Viper (though his beloved sidekick, Garden Snake, was killed by the latter). The GM hadn’t given the characters any Complications, which are the primary source of new Hero Points in the game, so I asked about adding some in; she. . . ignored the request, would be a polite way of putting it. The session was more or less run without Hero Points as a result, and they’re a pretty key mechanic in the game.
Suddenly rocks fell (well, meteors), and we jetted off toward the courthouse, where bright orange gorillas were shooting at the populace with laser rifles. Well, Black Snake didn’t jet–he grapple-gunned, dark cape fabulously visible in the 11AM sunlight. Here, we ran into some initial troubles. James’s Gadgeteer spent several rounds building a complicated Translator device with awesomely high Technology rolls, but the GM basically told him it accomplished nothing and kind of made fun of the idea in a weirdly meanspirited way. My character, specialized in skills like Stealth and Intimidation and without a very high combat stat, wasn’t proving very effective, so I tried to do a combo team attack with Quantum Steel, grapple-swinging off his leg as he flew around to powerkick a gorilla. . . which the GM again just sort of. . . ignored? And had me roll regular damage after making the exceedingly tough Agility check to not die in the attempt.
We finally polished off the gorillas and were immediately whisked to Central Park, where a big meteor disgorged a bright orange, 6-foot-tall mantis person, who we took down without much issue. Another appeared and grew to 60 feet tall, gaining a massive bonus to its Toughness stat. Quick tip for folks unfamiliar with M&M: when physical attacks hit a monster, they have a listed DC (essentially the attack’s damage rating), and the opponent rolls Toughness to resist. If they fail by 1-4, they take a Bruise (a stacking -1 penalty to further Toughness rolls), and larger failures apply worse debuffs, until a failure of 15+ incapacitates them.
Well, this mantis had +25 Toughness, and our best heroes’ attacks did DC 27 damage. Thus ensued a two hour fight against a single mantis monster that was too slow and inaccurate to actually hit any of us, but which we could only hurt if it rolled a 1 or a 2 on its damage soaking check.
Once more, we tried everything we could to use the system in different ways. None of the pregens had abilities that targeted defenses other than Toughness, so my character and Space Hunter tried to use my grapple gun to trip it, AT-AT style. It fell, wasn’t hurt, and got back up. Quantum Steel and the Gadgeteer made a gloriously complicated hi-tech electro-shock matrix powered by QS’s super suit and jolted the creature. . . to no effect. Rebecca’s super soldier ran loops around it to confuse and confound it. . . to no useful in-game effect, per the GM. Black Snake and the Gadgeteer tried to investigate the meteor to try to find a technological way of stopping the monster and were basically told no, in what had become by this point a deeply frustrating habit on the GM’s part. So we just had to slog through 2 hours of pinging away at the monster until it finally fell, because the GM also didn’t believe in teamwork assists. . .
. . . whereupon we had less than an hour left to finish the mission, rushing toward an alien space ship full of captured humans and no real threats. We dealt with more issues of the GM ignoring us attempting to use our powers in any interesting ways whatsoever, fought more enemies who could only be beaten to death slowly, and rescued some humans from what was probably supposed to be a puzzle that just opened before us since it was time to wrap up.
Now, dear readers, let me tell you that by this point, I am feeling HORRID. I’ve run two games that aren’t up to my extremely high personal standard. I’ve played in three more, one of which I ran off the poor GM’s rails, and two of which have been hellish, railroaded slogs through terribly balanced encounters run by GMs who seem to actively hate fun and encourage suffering and boredom. Moreover, I’ve brought my friends into this unending hell of shitty gaming, as they’d all followed me into my games where they could, trusting my judgment. During the hellish M&M game, we got the final text from Joseph letting us know his flight was definitely canceled and he wouldn’t be able to make it up. Also I was hungry .
We go outside, shellshocked and defeated. Things are looking grim. To console ourselves, we walk over to the mall with the rest of the group and grab some food court munchables; I opt for the deeply regrettable choice of Charley’s Cheesesteaks and make myself gloriously ill for the next few hours.
The party splits–most of them are going over to watch the Critical Role live session, and only Josh and I going to play in my last game of the night, “A-Hunting We Will Go,” run using the experimental Daedalus system, which slowly moves characters from Fate Core to Gumshoe and on to Apocalypse World as they grow increasingly disconnected from and suspicious of the false utopia they live in, New Hope City. The game had a Paranoia -esque flair to it, with the description stating that our morning infoblast had said a Subversive was in our midst, and I’d been VERY excited for it going in, especially since I love Fate .
So I muster hope one last time. Will my trip be mired in nothing but disappointment and agony, or will we finally find happiness and success?!
We sit down to a completely full table and learn that we will mostly be playing employees of a large insurance conglomerate, out on a corporate retreat at the beautiful Falling Water Resort outside of New Hope. Five of us were staff: myself, a marketing exec named LaShawna, Josh, a middle manager named Karen, another player taking on an IT tech named Bela, another guy taking up the role of a sales manager/ex soccer star named Nick, and one last person acting as Will, a Claims Adjuster. Nick’s player was a suave older guy with a lot of charisma, and it seemed initially he might take over the table, until we met the last character, Joseph, the event manager at Falling Waters who would be overseeing our group’s stay.
Played by an energetic Frenchman named Yan wearing a kilt and a vest, this Event Manager became the center of the adventure almost immediately as Yan roleplayed his fucking heart out doing everything in his power to meet our characters’ every need, inventing whole areas of the resort and activities out of whole cloth. The table atmosphere went from moderately interested to comfortable, invested, and talkative in a minute flat.
The GM responded with aplomb, letting us take control and roleplay amongst ourselves at will, only nudging us toward her prepared “corporate work events” when we faltered. The group silently seemed to agree to play Paranoia about an hour in, jockeying for position and warily spying on each other as the events manager appeared like a spirit in scene after scene to overwhelm us with care and amenities, while all the while, the government-issued Subversive threat warnings in our brain implant chips mounted.
I don’t know if the GM ever planned to secretly reveal a traitor, or perhaps our investigations would have turned up someone outside the party, but whatever she planned, she pivoted immediately onto our internal backstabbing and had the government swoop in to inverview us one by one. Most characters nervously threw one person under the bus; my toon, LaShawna, who I’d secretly given the aspect “Carefully Cultivated Naivete” partway through the night, had been keeping tabs on everyone, especially that alarmingly well-informed events manager, who was eventually carted away by the secret police.
It was an outstanding gaming experience and genuinely one of the best sessions I’ve ever played. Everyone was so locked in, in character, and onboard with where we were all going, the GM was so adaptable and clever, the mechanics fit what we were up to so well. . .
UGH. What a good fucking session. GEN. CON. SAVED.
Also, I ate White Castle of my own accord, and it was glorious. James and I swap beds again for maximum fairness, and I settle down for a fitful night of couch mattress toss-turning.
Post broken in two because apparently there is actually a character limit here!
Saturday: Luchadors, Death Matches, and My Last Session - The Watertown Horror Book Club's Very Bad Night
Saturday dawns bright and horrifically early: it would appear that my 9AM Luchador: Way of the Mask session entitled “They Stole Grandmas Brain!” was, in fact, at 8AM. Bleary-eyed and hastily showered, I stumble across town to the ICC, where Rebecca and one other guy are waiting–another half-empty table. Oh god, is this it, the curse returned? What fresh hell awaits?!
Except no, no, not at all. I take on the role of a Gimmico-class wrestler, the nun-themed Mother Mercy. Rebecca dons the brightly colored spandex of Phoenix King, while the last guy gets behind the punchy fists of Eviscerator I. We are staying in a small town hotel in the American southwest when we get an emergency phone call: Phoenix King’s Grandmama Rosa is in the middle of being abducted by aliens from her retirement home! Wasting no time, we leap into our vehicles: I declare Mother Mercy’s got that sweet, sweet Church van action from the local iglesia, while Eviscerator steps into his “muscle car,” a classic Volkswagen Beetle with burly men painted all over it.
We peel into the nursing home parking lot to find it in total chaos. We manage to wrangle the confounded elderly and shake down the seemingly useless staff for info. Following a trail of wreckage from Rosa’s room, we stumble upon some Punks skating and playing loud Rock Music at a graveyard, and the Mother cannot abide by that, so we give those uppity teens what for with some well-applied armbars and bodyslams.
Eventually, we interview some of the old folks and learn that some serious shenanigans are going on–it looks like people’s brains are really getting swapped around by aliens! Investigating further reveals that the nefarious villain Dr. Nathaniel Sidious (N. Sidious, you see) lay comatose and braindead in a locked room within the nursing home, and that he’d been getting regular visits from his son, Nicholas Sidious, right up until the abducts started. Cars are leapt into once more and we drive across town to the Sidious residence, finding it burnt out. Eviscerator pries open the gates and we crash into the garage, finding a panel van covered in LEDs to resemble a UFO.
Furious, I pull out the church’s PA system and demand that Sidious show himself for a violent showdown right here in “YOUR GARAGE STADIUM, SCUMBAG!” Instead, a bunch of goons wielding tasers dressed up to look like ray guns trot in and are summarily beaten to pulps. We progress toward the basement to discover an enormous underground laboratory, where Nick Sidious is busy trying to pry open Grandmama Rosa’s cranium to replace her brain with a gorilla’s. Eviscerator utterly demolishes the science villain with stupendous force, only to have his father’s brain, extracted and placed into a giant mecha, and the unhelpful chief nurse from earlier, now revealed as an Umbra Accord ninja, get the jump on us.
Luckily, King Phoenix delivers a crushing blow to the ninja nurse’s nefarious sonic weapon and sends her racing away, while my Mother Mercy skids across the lab floor at extreme speeds, whips out her crucifix lasso, and rips all the nutrient tubes from the brain’s chamber, sending N. Sidious Seniors gigantic brain flying across the room to splatter onto his son. EVIL DEFEATED, SON.
Victorious and horrifically sleepy, I shamble back to the hotel, stopping en route to grab a shrimp po boy from a food truck that I mindlessly shovel into mouth, and just crash for two hours, missing out on a panel on Inclusivity in RPG Streaming run by Adam Koebel, which I’m really sad about. I wake up with just enough time to grab an Uber to the ICC to play in one last game!
Joined by Cord, James, and their friend Eric–who I’d barely seen all con long–we sat down at David Coppoletti’s DCC-powered adventure “Throttle Down Death Match.” Now, earlier, when I talked about how I’d talked up the crazy ass indie games I’d gotten into the previous year, tempting my friends away from their Pathfinding and Dungeon Dragonning this time around, David’s balls-to-the-motherfucking-wall batshit crazy game “The Quicksilver Pantograph” was at the absolute tip-top of that list. So EVERYONE had been striving to get into this dude’s games with me. This was our shot.
Meanwhile, Josh is lamenting his gaming choices to us remotely, trapped in a Dragon Age game wherein the GM had dumped the rulebook in front of them, told them to make characters, and left for 20 minutes until his friends showed up to help the obviously struggling players. Oh lord, is this it, the curse’s return? Is it all about to go wrong again? When David announces we’ll be rolling up our characters, fear sinks in.
But it was an unfounded fear! David is a fucking pro, and he whipped me, my three friends, and a father and his two teenaged sons through chargen lickety split, having us all roll not only for our death match vehicles (oh, did I mention this was a game of wanton vehicular slaughter?!), but also for the unique traits and backgrounds of our death pilots. When one of the kids rolled that his heavy mecha pilot (who inexplicably had guns for arms and then, with another random roll, ALSO legs) was a marketing rep for a large gun company, everyone at the table made extra rolls for new weapons.
My buddy James took on the role of a cult of ascended born killer-monks–sort of like murderous Mormons, he saw it–piloting a dune buggy. Cord controlled a set of cyborgs in another buggy who believed they were in a VR sim. Eric’s crew was made up of desperate priests who’d lashed a horrific demon into the engine compartment of his caddy dragster to contain it (and it would free itself if his vehicle was destroyed). The dad got another mecha pilot who also believed he was in a VR sim, while the younger son played a team of gun-addicted madmen riding in a kitted out ice cream truck of death.
When I rolled my random background for the four pilots of my heavily armored pickup truck, David’s face lit up. “This one is really dark,” he warned. Apparently I would be running a family of four who’d been horrifically mangled in an airplane crash, been rebuilt as cyborgs, and forced to compete in these deathmatches as an unending hell of bloodsport torment. Jeeeeesus.
So, of course, Ted and Marie, plus Teddy Jr. and Little Sally strapped on their SMGs, boarded the pickup, and rolled into the arena. Where they were promptly burnt to crispy ashes by Cord’s flamethrower-toting cyborgs. They respawned at the edge of the arena, made their way cautiously back to the idling pickup, and reboarded, with Ted Sr. declaring that this family vacation had become a family BBQ as they strapped themselves in atop the burnt out remnants of their former selves and dove back into the fray.
What followed was three hours of over-the-top gratuitious hyperviolence, horrible gun puns, and surprising last minute alliances and betrayals (after Ted Sr. got sniped by the driver of the ice cream truck, a resurrected mecha pilot was welcomed by the family as their new father figure who piloted them toward 3rd place). James quickly cottoned onto the fact that unseating drivers and stealing their rides earned as many points as killing drivers or destroying vehicles, so he swooped all around the arena, having his characters leap from whatever flaming pile of wreckage they’d last stolen to grab another. At one point, Eric’s driver-priests lost control of the demon in their dragster, and it raised itself into reality fully, sucking them into its grotesque biotech body, before it was plowed into by no fewer than two cars and re-banished.
In the end, James emerged victorious, doubling second-place Cord’s point total, and everyone agreed that David Coppoletti was a glorious madman whose games they would always play in forevermore.
Grabbing one last meal from a Venezuelan food truck, which wound up being surprisingly decent (the chicken arepa was bland, but the beef-and-bean one was EXCELLENT), I fed myself enough to build up energy for running one last time.
I trudged, sore and deadly tired, toward my last game, once more hidden in Crowne Plaza’s back rooms. Would I be able to muster more energy than I had the previous two times? Would people actually show up this time around? Could I possibly live up to the standard set by the last few GMs I’d played under?!
Thankfully, Morgan, the college friend, had signed up, and Josh had offered to bring some Generics and camp by the table in case anyone flaked. Which, unsurprisingly, one person did, so he got his spot, alongside an older couple, GenCon pros through and through, and a young couple. The guy had played in my “Minor League Evil” the year before, loved it, and had done everything he could to get into one of my games this year, finally managing at the very end with his girlfriend. Thus situated, the six players sat down to experience “The Watertown Horror Book Club’s Very Bad Night.”
Watertown Spoilers
With Warheads as Fate Points and the mid 90s as the backdrop, the players took on the roles of the six officers of the Watertown Middle School Academy’s Horror Book Cub and rode toward school on a dark misty October night to setup for their big Halloween Party/Booknanza (the Scholarly Book Fair was in town, you see). It was still on, despite a series of horrifying and mysterious accidents befalling people at the school for the last several days–especially since Specks’ dad had promised the group he’d gotten them a really spooky treat to show off!
The school’s resource officer was supposed to call them in when the school was open, but they never heard from her, so bikes it was. In the mist, they almost ran down an older man in the street, who was almost immediately revealed as–a zombie! Well, to almost everyone, except the jock of the group, Speedy, who thought he was a vampire. They subdued him and a high roll + player improv determined the only way to stop the fungal infection causing the zombification was to sand off the exterior spores, so the group’s wealthy crafter, Sperries, set about making a belt sander while they fought two more zombies. The goth kid, Spook, learned she could control the dark creatures with her wiccan ways, much to her surprise, when one of the zombies leapt into an open manhole covering at her command. Speedy proceeded to stab one zombie, the resource officer, in the chest with a stick to ensure the “vampire” didn’t rise again.
Suitably terrified, the group nonetheless persisted in going to the school to setup their party, calling 911 to help the zombified townsfolk. They made their way past the pond in front of the school, when suddenly gigantic tendrils ensnared the group’s checked-out president, Space Case. Speedy freed him with a quick shock from the cop’s taser, and they made their way in. Picking the locks left in place by the mysteriously absent Coach Stevens, the group made their way down the Science Wing, where they were set upon by two sickly werewolves. Secretly, I had their weakness as being heat (the lycanthropy was spread by fever, and they were thus prone to overheating since dogs can’t sweat), so when Sperries crafted some flashbangs in the chem lab, they easily took down one werewolf, while the group’s nerdiest member, Specks, freed some rats from cages to distract the rest.
They snuck into the large, darkened gym, finding it in total disarray, as Coach Stevens had apparently abandoned a rearrangement mid-job. When eagle cries pierced the dark night, the group’s geek’s pet rat, Spud, fled in terror, so she chased after him, followed close by Spook, Specks, and Space Case. Sperries ran down the mirror-hall-esque path made by trophy cases pushed into the center of the room and was quickly surrounded by the school wrestling team, their heads replaced with the school mascot: eagles! He ran away, very very well, while Sperries tried to catch up.
Meanwhile, Spud had lead Spark over into a big area of pushed-aside volleyball nets, which began to constrict around her. Seeing this, Spook drew out her pinking shears and threatened the nets vigorously. They backed away in terror, and Specks was able to cut Spark and Spud free. Meanwhile, Sperries had crafted a fan to blow the fatty, salty scent of popcorn from the popcorn machine he declared his rich dad had got for the party toward the wrestlers, scaring most of them off; Speedy finished the rest. Much to everyone’s surprise, Space Case beat them to the far side of the gym by playing “Yackety Sax” on his guitar and wandering through a gap in the trophy cases at one end to emerge from the exit doors at the other, Scooby Doo style.
They made their way to the library, finding it inhabited by a grotesque, handless mummy who was trying to pry away protective wards on the walls to escape. The vice principle was slumbering on the table, slumped across a box they quickly realized was part of an Egyptian exhibit from the local museum where Specks’ dad worked. The mummy summoned some ghostly girl scouts to protect itself, but Spook banished them by fishing a stale Trefoil cookie out of her ritual bag and crushing it beneath one Doc Marten boot. Sperries and Specks worked together to fashion a mummy unraveler from their previous tools, while Speedy distracted the mummy with quick jabs to the face, breaking its jaw. Space Case started to play “You Spin Me Right Round Baby” while Spark launched Spud at the mummy, the brave rat helping secure a loose bandage to the Unraveler. The mummy spun out and was summarily defeated, rousing the slumbering Vice Principle, revealed as the mysterious author of the group’s favorite books, the Bone Chillers series, who’d traveled here to investigate reports of an actual mummy (the box contained its cursed hand) and been trapped by in the library when the horror novels piled up near it awakened it and gave it new murderous life.
Utterly happy with how the game had gone, I hung out with Morgan and Josh for awhile, grabbed more White Castle on the way back to the hotel, and passed the fuck out.
Sunday: Dealer Halls and Fond Farewells
After a bit of car acrobatics to get everyone’s stuff piled into my car, get folks delivered to where they needed to be, and get my car parked back in the garage I had in-out privileges in through the end of the day through our hotel booking, the gang made their way over to the ICC one last time to peruse the dealer hall. I had begged James not to buy too much, since my car was already dangerously full, but I couldn’t bear to actually watch him, since I knew he’d buy 40 things anyway :)
Luckily, Morgan was hanging around the dealer hall herself that morning, so I got one last chance to hang out with my old buddy (she lives in Texas now, so we basically never see each other). We wandered around for a couple of hours, catching up and not buying anything, until James had completed his purchases and emerged with a stack of boardgames as tall as he ways. Sighing, I lead us all back toward my car, bidding Morgan adieu and trying to make plans to hang out more in the future.
We drove back down to NC without much further excitement, though we did get to have Culver’s frozen custard in Indiana, which was super tasty. I dropped off my passengers and finally got back to my place. I got in around 1AM and, as has become tradition in this post, passed the fuck out.
GenCon 2018 is in the bag, folks. Despite a really rocky start, at the end of the day, I had an excellent time hanging out and gaming with all my friends that could actually make it up, eating way too much terrible food, running (in retrospect) a couple of games that were pretty great, and getting to play in several very, very awesome games.
I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who’s on the fence about next year :-D
Nice write up!
Great write up, Armando. I’m glad you’re back on the board… and cringing at some of those games you suffered through.
That Fantasy AGE game destroyed my will to live.
Glad the Daedalus game turned out well. Would have been a bummer to have missed out on critical Role AND have the game be lousy.
Believe it or not, I know almost nothing about CR. For years I thought it was only a podcast, which I don’t ever really have time to listen to, but I recently figured out it also has VOD recordings, so I’m about five hours into the first campaign on YouTube now. All my friends are nuts for it, though.
This was my first GenCon… it was like heaven, nirvana, and valhalla all rolled up into one. I was also surprised to learn that more people cosplay at GenCon than at SDCC (which I also went to this year for the first time).
I didn’t pre-register for any events… I intentionally decided to just wing it - so I spent a lot of time in the exhibit hall and playing Rio Grande board games. Met a ton of cool people.
Next year I want to try to get a hotel closer to the convention(my luxurious airbnb was only $300 for the duration but a 10 mile one way trip) and make sure to sign up for some events.
I’d never even heard of it until a couple of days ago, when I saw it while poking around on VRV. But I’ve seen Matthew Mercer in a ton of shows and I’m sure it’s hilarious.
I haven’t played an RPG in years, but signed my son and godson up for a couple this year. They convinced me to play one, a Savage Worlds Gotham without Batman. The guy who ran it was great and we enjoyed it quite a bit. My son especially, since he knows a lot of Batman stuff and so did the GM. The GM went with what the players said and had a great experience.
They played 2 more RPGs, Part-time Gods and Amp: Year One and really enjoyed them. It was pretty great to talk to them after the game because they both were excited and wanted to talk about the experience.
I missed meeting up with any of you. bit of a bummer. Had a great time though as always
Yeah. The downside of my scheduling there (9 RPG sessions + 1 seminar) and going up with a gaggle of IRL friends is that I had very little time to break away and just try to meet up with people. I was so happy I managed to catch Morgan at the dealer hall on Sunday morning, but was sad I didn’t get to catch any of y’all at that point.
Glad you enjoyed the return, @Seppey. Savage Worlds is a lot of fun. It’s about the most “crunch” I’m interested in these days, but it does it very well.
Thanks Armando. My son definitely prefers story over simulation they had a great experience. they even played Shadowrun Adrenaline, a streamlined Shadowrun, and it was run without a lot of crunch so they liked that also.
I did get to meet up with @Harkonis and some others. Played a western themed kinda tile laying game that i cannot remember the name of. Harkonis did not like when i took a tile that would score me 8 points but left a tile that would score 13 points for someone else. Jokes on us since that person didnt win. I came in 2nd to last. It was a pretty neat game that came in a small box; I would play it again.
Then we played Hail Hydra, a Marvel themed hidden traitor game (type of game which my son loves). Turns out I can tell when my godson is lying but not my son, so danger :-(
Played Secret Hitler with a different group but including my son. I gave him the chancellorship when he was Hitler and we lost. I believe he has always been honest but i learned i wouldn’t know otherwise.
Carson City
Hail Hydra
Great write-ups @ArmandoPenblade, I really enjoyed all the descriptions of the games and the people. You should write a blog or do a stream of your game nights…I would read/watch for sure.
I am mostly a little surprised and touched folks read all (or even some) of that. I keep meaning to do more formal write-ups, but time. . .
I am tinkering with something that calls back to a post I made here a long time ago about a game I want to develop, so maybe y’all will hear more eventually :)
Oh! Is it a PnP RPG where you take on the role of an Antifa Brawler, Social Justice Wizard, Media Scribe or Comedic Cleric (laughter heals all wounds) to fight the forces of tyranny, fascism and injustice and their hordes of mind-controlled zombie citizens and foreign special agents to save your beloved Republic of Penbladia?
No wait…that’s real life.