Origins 2015!

Origins! Woo!

Yeah, I know. GAMA doesn't do administrative stuff well, their software is weird, etc. Don't care. Still love this con, and attendance was up this year, so that's great to hear. Let's see some pictures!

This year was special because my son Kai was in attendance, and ran his first con game. So we picked him up from his last day of school on Wednesday and hit the road.

We stopped at Grandpa's Cheese Barn on the way, because obviously. 

We got to the con and unloaded the stuff for our booth, and then I went to go fight with registration about exhibitor badges.

Michelle doing booth assembly. 

See, here's the problem. If you want an exhibitor badge, you have to wait until those become open to register. Which is great...if you don't plan to sign up for any events. I do want to sign up for events. That meant I had have them cancel my badge, cancel my events, sign me up for a new badge, and then sign me up for my events real quick. It worked, it just took a long time. But we got it sorted and the folks at registration were really nice and patient.

Back to the booth, then: We couldn't get it entirely set up, because most of the flooring hadn't been delivered. See, funny story, UPS randomly decided to deliver half of our flooring to our house in Cleveland, rather than the hotel that we'd specified as the delivery address. So...huh? But, Amazon and UPS worked with us, and got stuff shipping down to us. So we set up as much booth as we could...

TRAVIS IS A MONSTER.

  ...and fucked off to get dinner.

We got dinner at Bare Burger, a lovely little place across the street from the convention center that serves (you guessed it) burgers, many of them made from bison or wild boar. Very tasty food, though I think the staff isn't used to Origins. When I walked in, I just had Kai with me, and the host said, "two?" And I said, "no, eight, they're just not here yet. Actually, we're both four people." He just kind of blinked. I said, "dude, it's gonna get a lot weirder than me this weekend, best be ready."

Kai contemplates burgers.

Tim & Travis.

Anyway, dinner done, we went back over the convention center. I walked Kai around a bit so he knew the lay of the land, including the giant inflatable sheep.

You thought I was kidding?

And then he had his first game, which was Are You a Werewolf? I wound up playing, too, because I had nothing else going on and why not? AYAW is an Origins staple; we also often play it at our holiday party, though there are some differences. The Origins folks have everyone pat their legs during the night so that you can't listen to movement and try and figure out the werewolves that way (not that it mattered, as loud as the room was). I always find that weird, because it's not like there's anything else to go on, not if you don't know the people and know their tells. Ah, well. It was fun, I got eaten by werewolves, and then we headed back to the room for rest.

Thursday!

Eee!

So, first thing was finishing booth set-up before the hall opened. We got the flooring and got the booth completed, and I think it looked pretty nice.

Buy one of each!

The booth from the other angle.

Thursday I worked the booth, and then had an afternoon Chill game that didn't happen because I didn't get players. Bummer. So I wound up wandering the dealer's room a bit. Kai had a game earlier in the day...

I believe this would be the infamous "anime weird ninja school" game where they give out candy.

 I found Tim doing demos in the booth...

GHOST PIRATES.

 And Jerry in his booth...

Sellin' books. 

But that night, after dinner, Michelle and I went to Games on Demand, and there was a crazy line of people to get in.

Like a Cedar Point ride.

We wound up playing in a game of Feng Shui 2nd Edition, which was lots of fun. I was a magical cop named Stephen Wei, and lots of fun Jet Li-esque shenanigans were had. Michelle was a sorceress thrown forward in time to handle some Chi weirdness. We fight crime!

The games was really well-run, I think. There were a couple of moments were the GM paused to explain things for a bit too long, but it wasn't an ongoing problem, and the fight scenes (which are important to Feng Shui were evocative and quick-paced). This was run through Games on Demand, and they have yet to disappoint. My Grade: A

The GM, some sheets, my pen. Very minimalist. 

Then sleep! Then Friday!

Friday was the day that Kai was going to run his game of Cat. I was supposed to be free until 2 so I could be with him for his first hour of the game, but my GM got sick and lost her voice, so I had to run two Chill games back to back. Which was somewhat exhausting, but hey.

I segued directly into my second game of Chill, which also went well. That finished up about six, and we had some time to wander. Kai was supposed to be in a game of Mammoth Catan, but Origins fucked the schedule up, so that got cancelled.

Looks cool, though, dunnit?

 We saw a "rocket ship" made of balloons.

Sometimes, a balloon is just a balloon. 

We were supposed to play The One Ring that night, but that got cancelled, so we crashed out instead.

Saturday!

First thing: Kai and I played in a game of Barbarians of Lemuria retooled for Thundarr, the Barbarian!

Now, my dad used to watch Thundarr with me on Saturday mornings, and it was a show we liked. I didn't have time to show Kai much of it, but he got a sense of how it worked. He played Princess Ariel, I played Ookla the Mok, and we beat up a bunch of evil monsters and destroyed the Moon Men and saved the world. It was pretty awesome. The GM kept things moving and moved the spotlight appropriately, and, most important, he played off the 10-year-old at his table nicely; he didn't talk down to him or just tell him what to do (which is good, because Kai can have great ideas on his own if you give him a minute, but he'll go along with whatever folks suggest in a game otherwise). My Grade: A

Character tiles!

Fightin' rat monsters!

And then some lunch at North Market, and then I had a game of Chill to run, which went fine (got to see people I don't get to play with often, which is always neat).

And then more Chill! +Monica Valentinelli had asked me to run a game for her, so I gathered up some folks and we played a game of Chill in the Big Bar, at a Geek Chic table. I liked this game; it's quick and tense. I think maybe I will use it as a con game going forward. No PC deaths, though the monster used the Chill discipline at the end and threw everyone for a loop.

Captain America came to visit. 

Monica and Jerry review their mission. 

Bat Lord: Banished! Woo!

And then sleep? Naw, and then we sat up chatting and drinking forever. And then sleep.

And then Sunday! Sunday morning at Origins means only one thing: Clay-o-Rama! It was weird this year, though. I had eight people signed up, but only four showed, so it went really quickly.

Preparing for battle. 

So that was quick, and then back into the dealer's room to wander around for a while before it was time for tear-down.

Chill book, tokens, dice, and a character sheet. You know you wanna buy it. 

And then tear-down!

Rawr!

SMASH!

And that was Sunday. Monday, we were still there. We got everything packed up, and got on the road to Baltimore for a little mini-vacation, leaving the ruins of the con behind...until next year.

Wait...I still...function...

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.