GenCon 2015: The Sweatening

When people asked me how I was or how my con was going this year at GenCon, my go-to response was "sweaty." For the first several days, it was hot as balls and I was running around crazy-like getting and keeping the IGDN booth going.

But this was the best GenCon I've had in years. It's the first time in quite a while that, when Saturday night rolled around, I found myself thinking "aw, I'm not done yet!" rather than "OMG I WANT HOME."

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. I didn't take a lot of pictures this year, but I took a few.

Wednesday

Michelle and I got into Indy on Wednesday afternoon after a thoroughly uneventful drive. No traffic to speak of, no construction, it was glorious. We were driving a cargo van, stuffed to the gills with material for the booth and several boxes of Chill. 

Wait, do vans have gills?

First order of business: Set up the IGDN booth. We had help from lots of lovely people including Joel Sparks, Andreas Walters, Jesse Butler, and others I'm forgetting, I'm sure. We only managed to get it about 70% done, though, because folks had to scatter for the evening (including me - I had a Chill game for backers that night!). 

But before that, a quick look at Cardhalla, under construction: 

And then a quick stop at an awesome little food truck called Karma Kitchen. 

And then the game! The game went really well (this was the "Regional Coordinator: Indianapolis" backer level; folks make characters, the incomparable Timm Henson illustrated them, the equally incomparable [see what I did there?] Thomas Deeny laid them out, and I ran the game). I whipped up a game set in Milwaukee (their HQ of choice) involving a Spectral Remnant shoving drunk college students into the river so it could "rescue" them, and then failing miserably. They managed to get it to actually save someone, and it passed on peacefully. 

Speaking of "passing on peacefully," by that point it was late and time to sleep. 

Thursday

Thursday, we hit the booth, got the books set up, and got it lookin' pretty. 

And then I had a game to play in: World of Dew. Now, I'd run this game once, in order to review it, so I was looking forward to playing it and seeing how it worked with the creator. For the most part, it worked very much like it did when I ran it. 

The game was fun, and it was cool watching Benjamin Woerner run it. I played a police inspector investigating a murder, but the particulars of the murder unfolded as we played (with player input). The group was...just OK. One of the players was playing a smuggler, and named him Han Solo (but, like, with different vowels so it was vaguely Asian or something). I get the feeling like the group didn't quite grok the tone that we were going for, but they came around as we played. My grade: A. 

Stabbin', shootin', noirin'. 

So then I had some time in the booth, selling books. It was pretty busy, which was nice. And then later on in the evening, I ran a game of Beast: The Primordial for some folks. It went pretty well; it was the same scenario I ran here. Some investigation followed by a short fight. No one played the vampire this time, but all five Beasts were represented. 

And then sleep. 

Friday

Friday morning, after a booth check-in, I had a Chill game to run. I ran Cold, Dark Earth again. We only had three players this time, so I was a little worried about them getting killed, but the players were smart, asked the right questions, did some strong research, and won the day. 

So then, I had a panel for the new World of Darkness, and some time to sign things at the Onyx Path booth, and then a game of Bluebeard's Bride. 

Now, I'd been looking forward to this game for while. It's an Apocalypse World hack created by Sarah Richardson, Marissa Kelly, and Whitney Beltrán. In it, you play aspects of the titular Bride's psyche, and wander Bluebeard's castle on the wedding night, opening doors and experiencing the horrors therein until you reach the final room and meet your fate. This game got under my skin like very little else has in a long time; I actually wound up playing it again Saturday night. 

Anyway, in our game, I played the Fatale, and got to revel in sensuality, which is kinda what I do anyway, so that was cool. We wound up escaping, but being rejected by our family and thrown back to Bluebeard. (I love tragic games, have I mentioned?) My grade: A

Sarah, trying to make us shudder in fear.

And then sleep!

Saturday

Holy cats, Saturday already? I got up early to play in a game called Clockwork Dominion. This is a steampunk game, but with a strong existential, Matrix-if-it-understood-subtle thing behind it. The game uses cards instead of dice, but uses a custom deck with numbers from -5 to 5 on it, so you just draw and add your relevant stats. Our characters were teenagers in a gang called the Penny Reds, and there was a West Side Story plus human traffic thing going on. It was a lot of fun, the game was really nice looking and seemed to flow well. The group was nicely cohesive and the GM played well off of us. If I have a complaint, it's that she read from a script, but she had really good delivery so it wasn't as snooze-inducing as I usually find that particular practice. I went and bought a copy of the game afterwards. My Grade: A-

Game set up when we got there? Check.

Rescuing St. James from Mr. Dandy!

After that, I had a game of curse the darkness to run. I realized as I set up that it had been a solid year since I'd run the game, and I was worried that I'd forgotten how it went, but muscle memory kicked in just fine. The characters were in Vegas and searching for water, and wound up moving their whole community to a lake out in Minnesota after a disastrous run-in with some anti-Between folks looking to trade water. Chris Shaffer died twice!

And then dinner with the IGDN folks at Mikado, where much sushi was consumed. And then back over to the convention center for the second game of Bluebeard's Bride (with someone I used to know, Michelle, and Christina). We wound up getting killed outright this time. It was just as awesome. 

Sunday

So, for the first time in I don't know how many years, I was not ready for the con to be over. But c'est la vie. I ran my annual game of Clay-o-Rama on Sunday morning, for a table full of kids (unlike Origins, which was mostly adults). 

Claydonians-to-be.

The construction phase. 

The victor, the mighty Pretzel!

After that, a couple of hours in the booth, and then a scant hour wandering the dealer's room, and then tear-down, and then dinner at Weber's followed by some really awesome discussions. 

And then, then next day, Michelle and I loaded the stuff from the booth into the van and then headed home again. The dealer's room looks creepy without any dealers. 

But here is the swag pile!

 Greatly looking forward to next year!

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. 

GenCon 2013! - GM Report Card

I'm a little late getting this one, and of course it's maybe a little funny I'm writing it while I'm at FanExpo (I've got some time before my first panel), but y'know, better to do it while I have a moment. So!

Early GenCon is as it often is: largely devoid of life (I mean, by comparison), and Cardhalla is still being built.

You only get a "before" picture this year because I wasn't around when it fell. 

But that isn't to say that thronging crowds of people were far off! I'm led to understand that attendance was up considerably this year.

Ah, throngs.

I wound up spending a good deal of time in the dealer's room, mostly on Sunday. But I did manage to photograph some strange and beautiful things, such as this freaking amazing cave thingie.

Admit it, you want to make a dwarf character now. 

Did some gaming, as well. I played in two games: Deadlands Noir and Better Angels. And now we get into the "GM Report Card" bit.

Deadlands Noir is, as the name suggests, the Deadlands setting but placed into a noir context, complete with detectives and grifters and femme fatales and so on. We were in New Orleans, and my character was one of the aforementioned grifters - somewhat like the hucksters of Deadlands Reloaded, but without the ability to deal with the Devil (which I missed, and would probably import if I run this). We also had an undead detective (Harrowed), a mad scientist (Michelle, talking fast) and a couple of other folks that I don't remember offhand - one was the femme fatale.

Basic plot: The Big Sleep. Maybe Chinatown, a little. Find the millionaire's missing daughter and wife. Things come to light; the wife was cheating and generally unpleasant, so maybe it's not such a big deal if she doesn't come home. Dude has a son that supposedly died in a flood on their old estate. We wound up at said estate, and the lost son had become an alligator-monster and tried to eat us.

All in all, this is fine and in-setting. The GM got into his NPCs, used a lot of different voices, and kept the names straight (which, given the number of secondary characters, is impressive)

The problem actually came with the system. Savage Worlds is a crunchy, minis-based game. It loses a lot, IMO, if you don't use it, including maps and tokens and so forth. And we just kind of winged positioning and movement during the fights, which means that some of us (the folks with spells and other wonky powers) kind of got shafted because we can't think tactically.

But the other issue is, the last fight involving the gator-dude just dragged out, because said gator-dude has a really high Vigor and armor and a high Parry, which means we can't hit him, and when we do we can't damage him. Which would be fine - we have to work for our hits - but then the GM spent bennies to soak and unshake, and now we're back to the grind. We got out by using some clever tactics, but it felt like the GM was really married to one moment and kind of shoved us into that. My grade: B+

Noir game, so kind of a dark picture. 

Food trucks! I love them, though the lines are long. But you do get to people-watch. Or rabbit-watch.

Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a magician out of my hat!

Surrounded by severed legs. Art?

Ran afoul of a gorgon. 

Back to the dealer's room, we put some stuff up in the Cheese Weasel section. If you look carefully you'll see a copy of curse the darkness in there.

And in the dealer's room proper, you can see some of my favorite people!

Eloy's a saint. John and Kristen...aren't, but I love them both anyway. 

Friday night was the Ennies. curse the darkness was nominated for Best Electronic Product. It was really a contest for the Silver, because there was a Deadlands product in that category and I knew we wouldn't beat that, because of the way the voting is structured if nothing else (and I'm by no means upset about that - just means we need more visibility for Daedalus next year!).

The venue was really cool:

Waiting for a laser and big ball of popcorn. 

And we got to see Leonard Balsera sing "Take On Me" and completely rock it. So it was all good, even though we lost to Hobomancer and (as expected) Deadlands: The Last Sons.

Next morning (which I guess would have been Saturday), I had a game to run at Games on Demand. So!

Kira, stylin'. 

She's running Dresden Files. Note the awesome board for scene Aspects. 

I wound up running curse the darkness (it was that or Tragedy). I had three players, and they put us in Boston, following an earthquake, and were trying to get their doctor another doctor. None of them played Openers, and the Between was largely ignored. I never realized how great a source of Between Points having Openers really is; they went pretty much unnoticed by Them the whole time. The Removal Challenges came from aftershocks, and that worked just fine. 

Lined up on the wall, ready to die. 

 We finished up early, so I did a stint in the dealer's room.

Kristen, still not a saint. 

Topher and Renee, trying to fix a broken robot. 

And then it was time for Better Angels! This is a one-roll engine game in which you play supervillains possessed by demons. The demon in question (played by the person on your left) will help you out and activate your powers, but it'll ask you to do horrible things. If you're eeeeevil enough, you can avoid doing really terrible, actually evil things. It's a cool premise, and I backed the Kickstarter (and later picked up my copy).

The GM kinda got thrown into running at the last minute, and it sort of showed - pregens, but all handwritten. I personally think we should have made the characters, because the game's terms and systems aren't immediately intuitive and making characters might have helped with that. But the game was fun, the GM listened to us, and it went pretty well. My grade: A-

Also Michelle played a tennis-themed villain named "Zero Love."

And, finally, Sunday, official day of shopping.

Ballonthulhu! 

A Klingon, a Wookie, and a pirate playing in a band. I don't remember what song. 

Will, with his swag.