DragonCon 2015: The Last Dragon(con)

Bet you thought I forgot to do this write-up, huh! Well...yeah, I totally did. Ahem. Let's go.

So, I haven't been to DragonCon in a lot of years. The last year I went, I think, was 2003, so that was a good long while ago. This year, I went with Michelle  and someone else, and there were a whole bunch of people at the con that I knew, but did not see.

We flew down, and my brother had originally planned on picking us up, but we were running late, so we took the train instead. That was a good decision, because the train is exempt from the fucking horrendous Atlanta traffic. Also, we made some train-buddies!

Pictured here.

We had dinner with my brother and sister-in-law and my nephew, and then wandered down the block to get our badges. All in all it was a lot of walking, and then standing in line.

Which would become a theme.

But on the way back, we saw a Ferris wheel!

So there's that.

Then the next day, we had a game in the morning! Which...kinda began one of my first frustrations. Gaming is the unwanted stepchild of DragonCon, you see, so the game slots start at 9AM, but the bus doesn't start running until 9 or 10, meaning if you're staying offsite (which we were, even if only by about a half mile) you're walking. So we walked.

We did make the game on time, though. It was a Savage Worlds conversion of Conspiracy X. I played a priest with former ties to the Mafia, and we were investigating alien activity in this little town in the Grand Canyon.

Let's fight some reptoids!

It was a good time. The conversion was solid, and the scenario was arranged such that characters who weren't overtly fighty (like the one I was playing) had some investigation/face kinds of things to do before the combat sections. The GM paced it well, too. My Grade: A

From there, we decided to go get lunch, and then hit the dealer's room(s).

When you've got 70,000 people in your town spending money, you welcome them.

Michelle ponders her options. 

Getting into the dealer's room required standing in another damn line, down the block. Yay. But once inside, we found lots of interesting costumes, and some storefronts that Michelle and Chey enjoyed. No one was selling RPGs, so I wasn't really so interested (I have enough t-shirts, and I don't want a corset).

ALL HAIL THE GLOW CLOUD.

This does not do the dealer's room justice. 

After shopping, we headed back to the hotel. I saw some kids playing in the fountain in Olympic park, which is always cool.

I almost joined them; it was hot as balls.

That night, I had a game to run for some Chill backers! They'd made up their characters and given me an HQ to work with in Mobile, Alabama. I used Siris, the ancient ghost (it's in Chill, go look it up), and they all almost died at the end, but made good use of the "flip the tokens to live" thing.

DARK PICTURE for a DARK GAME.

Saturday! I had to get up and run Chill again, actually. I ran Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, and had a decent group; they had fun, seemed to enjoy the characters and the scenario. I forgot to take their pictures, but hey.

Meanwhile, Michelle was running her Clue version of A Tragedy in Five Acts. Three of her players were dressed as Hell's Grannies, which is pretty awesome by itself.

Make tea, not love. 

Directly after that game, I played in a Games on Demand game. Now, GoD works very differently at DragonCon than at other cons, because the Games-of-Thrones-esque leadership of the con is afraid of GoD and doesn't understand it. So we signed up for a session, sat down, and the GM gave us a menu of games. We whittled it down to a couple of choices, and wound up picking Little Fears.

Now, I like Little Fears. We talked a little about similar games, and I mentioned World of Darkness: Innocents, and the GM said (before I finished my sentence), "Yeah, that was really derivative of Little Fears," so I got to say, "I developed it. And no, it's not derivative, it's using a similar premise, which is not the same thing." And then he admitted he hadn't actually read it, so yeah.

Anyway, we wound up with eight players in the game. Two of them got up and left, with no preamble or explanation, about 3/4 of the way through, which sucked. The game itself was...OK. We were in a cul-de-sac, then all appeared in Closetland, but wound up wandering from house to house getting nasty things done to us, until finally one of us (Cheyenne's character) escaped just in time to get hit by a bus.

Honestly, it was a little uncomfortable. The game was presented as "little kids being afraid," which is fine, but at no point was Closetland or the Boogeyman ever mentioned, and certainly not the possibility of real harm coming to the characters. I have a thing about kids being harmed, and I misread the GM on the subject, or else I'd have asked that we play something else. Also, there was no way that we could have gotten the scenario "right." There were no clues as to how we should proceed, no leading questions, and the hints we did get were blatantly false. So, it was fun at the beginning, but by the end it was less "horror game" and more "character abuse," and I wasn't feeling it. My Grade: C-

This was after the other two players fucked off.

And then on the way out, I saw a Deadpool dance party.

All those red things are Deadpool.

And then I went back to the hotel, and saw some Warboys waiting for the bus.

If there's a more perfect metaphor for DragonCon, I don't know it.

And then dinner, after which we saw a thundering herd of football fans coming down the hill toward us.

We fled.

And then Michelle and I hunkered down in the room and bought Inside Out on pay-per-view, and stayed in, and it was glorious.

Finally, Sunday. We had decided that DragonCon had very little else to offer us, so we went to the aquarium instead.

Anybody know what kind of fish this is?

OTTEROTTEROTTER

The severed heads of Bertie and Bippy, or something. 

OTTEROTTEROTTER

Michelle, Cheyenne, and the Starfish Woman.

And then we flew home. What I have determined about DragonCon is that it was fun when I was 10 years younger and easily able to walk miles, tolerate the heat, and stay up late. Now, I much prefer Origins and GenCon, which have much less of all of those things. But it was a good time, and I'm glad I went at least this once more.

GenCon: Wow.

Holy cats. GenCon.

This was seriously one of the best years I've had at GenCon, both personally and professionally. I got to talk to a lot of really awesome people, I made some connections for projects that I'm really excited about, and of course, Onyx Path announced the second editions of the World of Darkness lines and that the next WoD game is going to be Beast: The Primordial, which I am, of course, developing.

Good stuff. Also we sold all the books we brought with us, which is pretty baller.

But I know, you're just here for the pictures and the GM's Report Card.

Picture first:

Seconds later, she was on the roof.

I spotted this young lady in the convention center and kind of squeed a bit, because Mirror's Edge is one of my favorite games and her cosplay is awesome. But I did want to say: It's polite to ask if you can photograph someone, even if they're in costume. Don't assume that because someone is out and about that it's OK to take their picture. I mean, it's probably not illegal in any case, so you can, but that isn't the issue. There are lots of things that you can do that it's still unpleasant to do, so have a little decorum (for the record, I asked).

Anyway, Thursday I had a game of Daedalus to run, which went pretty well. I think I want a more dynamic scenario for when next I run it, but I also have some rules tweaking to do - it's not quite as exciting as I'd like. For all that, the players enjoyed it, and I felt bad telling them the game wasn't actually out yet (but they could go to the IGDN booth and find awesome games that were!).

Cardhalla, always impressive.

And then I had a game of Dime Stories to play, after a quick stopoff for dinner at a food truck. Dime Stories is an RPG that plays a lot like Dogs in the Vineyard, insofar as you have traits and gear that add dice to your pool, though the underlying moral element isn't there. It feels a lot like Firefly with the "space" part perhaps ramped up a little, and the game revolved around us surveying for a mine and stumbling into a corrupt little town held hostage by a cruel thug. In the end, we wound up basically trying to broker a deal between the "native" folks who actually owned the land the corporation we worked for, but the nuance was a little hard to get to that late in the evening (plus one player was kind of a dick close to the end of the game, which kind of soured the mood).

I'm not terribly impressed with the game itself. Like, I don't dislike it, but it felt kind of derivative, and I didn't feel like the mechanics did anything new or special, they just kind of worked. That said, my buddy Jonathan is a good GM and kept things humming along, and didn't let us get away with the easy ending, so that was nice. My grade: B+

It's Spanish for "Tell me stories."

And then, sleep.

Friday I ran some curse the darkness demos at the booth, and then sat on a panel about Kids and Gaming, which was pretty cool and reminded me I needed to pick up Little Wizards. And then I had to zip over to a game of Outbreak: Deep Space. Which turned out to be...not so great.

So, part of this is my fault. There are two zombie RPGs whose titles sound kind of similar. One is called Outlive Outdead, and I backed its Kickstarter and even have a picture of myself in the book. I've never gotten to play the game, though. The other game is called Outbreak Undead, it's a huge, pretty book, and I often pick it up at cons and then put it down after I flip through it, because it looks boring. I thought I was playing the former; turned out I was playing an offshoot of the latter.

The setup for the game was OK; we were on a prison ship, woke out of cryo-sleep early, there are zombies, argh. Simple enough. The problem was twofold.

First, the GM had never run a con game before, and was quite unfamiliar with this game in particular and this scenario for it. He understood the rules, but he was having trouble applying them in context. He called for rolls to do things like open our cryo-tubes, which would have been more silly than anything else, except that the characters in this game suck. It's a percentile system, but my character - who is a corrections officer - had nothing over a 40%. There are some modifiers that raise your target number, but not by much, and as a result I think I succeeded about...well, about 30% of the time. Which is boring and sucks and is not fun to play. (We could get into a big discussion about whether failure is fun to play and can lead to character development - I talk a little about it here - but this was pretty much a standard "roll and you miss and on we go" kind of thing.)

Plus, we didn't do any roleplaying. Not one scene. It was a minis game, except we abstracted most of the combat as well. My Grade: D

ZOMBIE FAIL. 

So then...well. Turns out Friday was my 40th birthday!

You know, I don't like parties much, unless they're mine. I know how that sounds, and it's not that I have to be the center of attention, but I like knowing the people (at least most of them) at a party, I like having a little bit of say about what's going on around me. Anyway, this was pretty awesome. There was this cake:

Don't be fooled, it's actually full of vibranium.

The cake was awesome, but I swear it weighed more than Cael. But I got it to the space, and people arrived.

People.

People.

Peeeeeeople.

Hey, it's me and Michelle!

One of the comments I made was "it's amazing how closely my 40th birthday resembles my 9th," by which I meant all the superhero stuff we use as decoration. But it was great - a lot of people, some of whom I don't see very much, coming to join me for my birthday. I didn't feel older at all. I felt loved.

LIKE AN AVENGER.

And then, sleep.

Saturday I stumbled downstairs for the Onyx Path panel, where the aforementioned announcements took place. And then following that, I had a game of A Tragedy in Five Acts to run, for which I did not snap any pictures. That was, however, one of the most absurd games of Tragedy I've seen. A giant octopus named Calamara attacked San Francisco. One of the characters became a ghost in the first act, another a squid-mutant. And in the the, there was a nuclear blast set off at the Hostess factory, and everyone died, the ghost standing there in confusion. The winner (the Parent, playing the aforementioned squid-mutant) titled it The Squid's the Thing.

Something I did note: We had one female player. When she bid on scenes, one of the things she almost always changed was her character getting kidnapped or otherwise damsel'd. Food for thought.

From there, I wandered a bit, and caught some fellow freelancers in a bar (because where else would they be).

And also some of Batman's villains:

Either Batman has a plan to escape or they've prenegotiated. 

So then a spot of dinner, and then on to Fate of the Norns with Michelle! Now, this was another game I backed on Kickstarter and never played, but it's a pretty cool game. It doesn't use dice. Instead, you have a bag of runes from which you draw, and different colors mean different actions. The characters are neck-deep in Ragnorak (which, as the author/GM pointed out, isn't a one-night deal, it lasts generations) and we wound up fighting horrible death-bears. Two of us died, but in death, you have the chance to go to Valhalla and have the whole group (of players) "level up." I don't generally hold with levels, but I do like that death has a purpose and a mechanic. I would totally run this game for my players. My grade: A-

My character was a skald. I sang "Immigrant Song" in battle. 

And then, sleep.

Finally, Sunday! Sunday, of course, means Clay-o-Rama!

Now, strangely, I had 8 people signed up but only 3 showed, and then another joined us. So the match was quick.

Construction phase.

The battle is joined!

We had some pretty cool looking monsters. One guy - the oldest combatant - zipped off to the end of the table and waited for the other three younger boys to duke it out. He won, of course, but I do want to note that just before the killing blow was struck, his last remaining opponent used Bowl and threw his doughy butt down the table, whereupon his scorpion monster fell right apart. It was pretty satisfying.

Also, this game involves hedgehogs. 

From there, shopping. Michelle and I walked around, schmoozed a bit, bought a bunch of stuff, and killed time until it was time to tear down the booth.

Also a comp. 

And then onward, home!

I'm not experiencing con drop yet, though I might; it was a really good time, and I met some new awesome people and spent time with pre-existing awesome people. Next year, of course, should be the debut of both Beast and Chill, so I'm greatly looking forward to that, as well as seeing all my con-buddies.

Loot!

Origins!

A little behind, here, but that's because I lost time working on work stuff to Origins, which puts me behind on blogging about cons, like Origins.

Circle of life, I guess.

I did not take a lot of pictures at Origins this year, which was silly of me, but I will show you the ones I did take, and also recount my experiences.

I spent much of Origins 2014 at the Indie Game Developer Network booth. The IGDN, if you don't know, is exactly that - a collection of folks doing games from various angles (a lot of us are writers and designers, and we're making a push to get more of the art/layout/graphics folks in). One of the big perks of the organization is that we can buy into a booth for Origins and GenCon and get the benefits without the huge cost, so here we are.

Seriously, this booth would be catnip for me if I didn't already own all these games.

So I (and +Michelle Lyons-McFarland and +Tracy Barnett and +Mark Diaz Truman and some other folks) worked the booth all weekend, ran demos, sold games, it was a good time.

I also wound up running some games. Now, last year, I ran games through Indie Games on Demand, which was fine, but I felt wibbly about not knowing which game I was going to run until I got there. This year, I signed up to run World of Darkness: Innocents and was surprised when the game filled (it was Wednesday night), but it turned out that they were friends who kind of ambushed me, which was fun. I ran curse the darkness using the Apocalypse World hack that Olivia Hill wrote for Infinite Shadows (on sale now here and at the IGDN booth at GenCon!), and that was pretty cool - lots of in-character conflict. I had one scheduled use the Fate Accelerated hack that +Rob Wieland wrote for the same book, but that didn't get players, which is weird because Fate games generally fill.

(I also ran a pickup space opera game using Fate Accelerated for +Branden Webb, +Rachel Steiner and +Shane Allen, and that was fun, but I didn't take pictures because I'm dumb. However, Rachel played a drunk alien, Shane played a mustachio'd boxer and Branden played a prince-in-hiding, and there was combat against Tzimisce-like aliens, so that's cool.)

Anyway, I was also scheduled to run A Tragedy in Five Acts, but that didn't fill and it's not the kind of game you can run with one player. So instead, I went over to Indie Games on Demand and borrowed a couple of generics, and wound up playing Dream Askew.

Dream Askew is a post-apocalyptic game using (appropriately) the Apocalypse World engine. Unlike AW, it's GMless, and it deliberately takes the genre in the direction talking about marginalization, gender, sexuality, and the queer experience. With the right group, it's awesome. We had the right group. (Dream Askew is a game from +Avery Mcdaldno, the genius who also gave us Monsterhearts, and you should support the Patreon for the game.)

Anyway, we had our queer enclave in the ruins of Seattle. I played the Iris (psychic and kind of fucked up), a blind trans man named Brace, who experienced the psychic maelstrom as an inferno, and acted as a kind of angel of death for members of our enclave who were wounded beyond our ability to fix them. It was pretty badass.

See the chips? It's GMless, so unlike other AW games, you make your moves on your own. Weak move (which tends to hurt or at least complicate things for you), take a chip. Strong movie (you get to be badass and the focus of attention), spend a chip. It was a lot of fun.

Normally I'd give a GM grade, but since there wasn't one - or rather, we were all GMing! - I give us an A.

Oh, and there were some shifty characters wandering around that day.

Wanna know how I got these goggles?

Sunday, I ran my traditional game of Clay-o-Rama. This year they put me in the kids' room, which was awesome. Since it was explicitly labeled as a Kids Track game, I didn't have to worry about adults coming in and fucking it up (I mean, some adults played, but they were parents of other players).

The building phase. 

Look at the horrible monster! The Claydonian, I mean, not the kid; he's delightful. 

Tentacles: Always a solid strategy. 

But making a flat monster is also viable. 

Combat and carnage!

As usual, all the adults died off (but one did survive into the last four). As usual, a little girl won. I don't think her Claydonian is pictured, though.

So following the Clay-o-Rama battle, I headed back into the dealer's room to work the booth a bit more and do some shopping with Michelle. Another successful Origins completed!

My haul. 

Origins 2013: General Update and GM's Report Card

I started doing GM's Report Cards for con games a few years ago, and while I've never managed to recapture the magic of the one year that I played a bunch of games at Origins that were all fantastic and all well-run (seriously, lightning in a fucking bottle), this year was pretty spiffy. Let's begin!

We left Cleveland on Wednesday morning and got to the hotel without incident, with a stop at Grandpa's Cheese Barn because duh, Grandpa's Cheese Barn. We arrived at the hotel and Michelle picked up her trusty steed.

Wait, what? Well, Michelle had a little gardening mishap last week and sprained her ankle, and the doctor recommended against walking too much. As you know, "walking too much" is an Origins staple, so she got a scooter:

Scooty-puff junior? 

Meanwhile, we had dropped Sarah off at the entrance to the Convention Center with our booth stuff, and I met her in the exhibit hall to set up the booth.

Sparse.

 The booth in its larval form. I hadn't seen the exhibit hall during set-up in a long time, and it was kind of cool to see everyone unpacking boxes and getting ready for the craziness of the weekend. Little did we know, the craziness was already in the house.

Sarah and I heard a loud boomy kind of noise, but I figured someone just dropped a big box or a pallet or something. But then we saw that the lights were out in half the exhibit hall, and then they told us to evacuate. Whoa.

We went outside, figuring it was just a blown transformer (do not Google that phrase if you value your childhood). And then came the emergency vehicles.

All of them, I think.

I apologize profusely for catching this woman in this pose, I just wanted the fire truck.

So Sarah and I sat on the grassy knoll (not gnoll) and waited. And then we got bored and walked around to the Hyatt so we could catch up with Michelle. We eventually got back into the dealer's room and completed the booth:

Note no copies of Tragedy, which John helpfully drove down later that evening.

I was scheduled to play in a game of All Flesh Must Be Eaten, but it got canceled, so we went to dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse. On the way there, we saw protesters.

Because nothing says "God's love" like "passive aggressive emo violence."

I have no idea what they were protesting. Maybe us, but that'd be a first. Maybe Pride, but that's a couple of weeks away. Maybe just immorality in general. Michelle's comment was: "I want to walk up and tell him, 'I'll listen if you let her talk.'"

Anyway, after delicious meat-face (ever been to a Brazilian steakhouse? Let's just say it's not vegan friendly) we went back to the hotel and crashed out for the evening.

Next morning, I had a Games on Demand slot to run, but there were more GMs than necessary (this would be a repeated theme), so I wound up playing in a game of Psi-Run. Now, Psi-Run is available here, and I just bought it, and you should,, too. You're playing a group of psychic folks with amnesia, chased by sinister agents who want to bring you back. What's "back?" You need to delve into your own memories to find out (you make characters by posing questions about your powers, your weaknesses, and your past).

Our game was pretty darned cool. Three players: Myself, and then a guy and his son. The kid did pretty well with it; a little excitable, but not at all age-inappropriate, and he seemed to enjoy it. He wound up captured and we broke into the prison to save him, and all wound up captured, but then teleporting to the other guy's uncle's cabin in Vermont.

The GM made it cool, but unfortunately he was also the one kind of hosting the GoD booth, so he wound up getting up and dealing with GoD-related stuff, which made it hard to build any momentum. In a game that's basically a long chase scene, momentum is pretty critical. That said, one of the reasons is was so frustrating was because the game was so much fun, so that speaks well of it (like I said, just bought it, planning to run it for some of my players).

GM's Grade: B+

The kid is lying down because his character is unconscious. 

So from there, we got some lunch, and the Michelle and I got to play in a game of Rotted Capes. This is basically Marvel Zombies: The Unlicensed RPG. Well, that's maybe not fair, because MZ has a lot of backstory and tone that Rotted Capes doesn't, but it's still a mashup of super heroes and zombies. I'd backed their Kickstarter, and wanted to try it out. I got to play Arc-Lightning (or, as the character sheet, "Arch-Lighting"), an ex-super villain archer.

This game was a lot of fun. The GM wound up being a little late, having literally just rolled out of bed, but once he was there he kept things moving and responded well to player suggestions and craziness (and considering it was his first time running the scenario, I'll forgive him reading directly from the text). He knew the game well, and since Rotted Capes has a not at all simplistic system (it's not overdone, it's just involved), that's good. I was a little frustrated that while my character could hit accurately, damaging zombies was an issue, but that's maybe something I could fix with a few tweaks. Michelle really enjoyed the game, so I might wind up running it for my folks at some point.

GM's Grade: A-

That huge pile of dice is mine. They weren't all necessary. SHUT UP.

So then we got some dinner at the food court and I had to go back to Games on Demand, where I had priority since I didn't get to run in the morning. I had folks there (a couple of whom had played in Rotted Capes) who wanted to play curse the darkness, so who am I to argue?

The game was set in Cairo, and the characters had rigged up an irrigation system...only to see the Nile stop flowing (I know, right?). They investigated, but the first Removal Challenge came after they procured camels;  the beasts stampeded, dragging one of the characters down the street and killing him, which is our first camel-related fatality in curse the darkness.

The second Removal Challenge, though, came off with no fatalities and everyone making the essential choice, and they discovered a man in the Between, comatose, apparently keeping a big enough shadow Open to let the Nile flow into it. The Opener they had with them closed the shadow, and they rescued him. The story ended with more questions (like, how long had he been there and how'd he do that?), but that's how I roll.

Everyone seemed to have fun and a couple of them came and bought the game afterwards, so I'll call that a win. :)

Watch out. They spit. And kill.

 That was Thursday, then. Friday I worked at the booth for a little while in the morning, and then got some lunch with David and Filamena and their kiddos, which was nice. We had to get back for a game of Cold Steel Wardens, which I'd also backed on Kickstarter. No pictures this time, I'd forgotten my camera.

So, Cold Steel Wardens is based on Iron Age comics; Dark Knight Rises, Watchmen, and the kind of grim, grittier superhero stories that we all know and love. Characters, therefore, are supposed to be somewhat darker and willing to, y'know, murder. And that's all fine. I enjoyed the game and I'm looking forward to seeing it finished. I have a few issues, though.

First, the system (roll a dice pool of d10s, 6+ is a "hit", 1s cancel hits) has a lot of what Michelle rightly referred to as "design remnants". Things like 1s cancelling successes, which was a bad idea in OWoD and it's a bad idea in general, because it's a) one more thing to remember and b) makes you worse at things as your pool gets bigger. And the game has a lot of that, little extra fiddly things that could probably be cut in the service of focusing the game a little more. Which leads me to...

...the system doesn't serve the game very well. As is, it's a servicable supers engines, but there's very little in it that marks it as Iron Age. That said, I don't have a suggestion right offhand, but I personally feel that a game's mechanics should reflect what it does, rather that the game engine just being a physics engine and the game's text doing the work of creating the narrative.

Also, some (not all) of the characters we had were too derivative. Michelle's characters was introduced as "basically Rorschach." Well...that's kinda lazy. I mean, "inspired by" is fine, "like," is fine, but for one thing Rorschach is a complete bastard and he's hard to play, and for another, it serves your game better to make up characters that showcase the game well.

That said, my character was pretty cool - former EMT who developed the power of phasing and fought crime as Sawbones, wearing a surgical mask and a trenchcoat. I didn't like a lot of the flaws he was given, but the concept was neat, and lent itself to some fun tactics.

The game was basically "ambush the drug dealers and kill them," so we did that. The GM obviously likes his game, so that's nice. Five demerits for not letting us keep the character sheets, though.

GM's Grade: B

So then I worked the booth for a while, and then went to Games on Demand, hoping to run Demon: The Descent or A Tragedy in Five Acts. Problem was, while there were a lot of players, there were also a lot of GMs, and I wound up without a table. I knocked around a bit trying to find something to do, but in the end decided to stay up in the room with Michelle and watch a movie on Netflix and recharge. That was a smart decision, as it happens.

So then Saturday! I spent a lot of time in the booth on Saturday, as my friends Andrea and Corey got married at Origins (like, it was in the event book and everything), and Michelle and Sarah both wanted to go. I did, however, see Daredevil wandering around (though I assume he didn't see me).

Hooray for Blindy!

During my booth-time, I Tweeted a bit about wanting to run Demon. And lo and behold, someone hit me back and said he was available. I just had a game of CthulhuTech to play first.

Well, actually, no, it got cancelled, so we played Demon: The Descent that evening at the Games on Demand room. The game was fun; the Integrator betrayed everyone and gotten ripped to shreds by the Destroyer and the Psychopomp. And then said Destroyed exploded because he bit the head off an angel right after the angel had activated self-destruct (weird game). 

We finished up fairly early, and wanted to play Pandemic with our amigo and contributor to The Road to Hell on Earth, Jonathan Lavallee. But he was stuck in a game of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, as Rocket Raccoon.  

No, really.

Here's the thing about running Marvel: If your GM is sitting on 5d12 in the Doom Pool for an hour, it's time to fuck off and play Pandemic. So there ya go! We saved the world from disease. You're welcome. 

So then we hung out for a while, chatted about game design and our upcoming cyberpunk game, and then eventually crashed out.

And then Sunday. Sunnnnday.

I had the 9AM shift at Games on Demand again, and once again, lots of players, but lots of GMs. But I wasn't taking it lying down this time, and got a little more assertive about running, and boom! I got to run Demon: The Descent again. Four players, with very different spins on the characters than last time (they also glommed on to Agenda a bit more than the others). One player had to duck out early, so got stuck in a Solitary Confinement caused by a cell phone, but the others destroyed the Infrastructure forming on Port Angelus and then got the heck away before more angels showed up. The fellow on the right in the picture, by the way, is Peter Adkison, who was a lot of fun to play with.

Angels don't tap their feet to the music. Demons do. 

After that, it was all booth all the time until 4PM, when the booth closed and it was time to pack up and head out! We took turns doing some shopping; I picked up swag, which I will show you:

RPGs.

Board games.

Origins was good this year. Our first year with a booth, and so it was expensive. But the gaming was good, we got to hang out with some awesome people, and I'm hoping we can figure a way to get some booth space next year.