Gencon 2009 Report

Okay, I know this is really behind. I would have done it earlier, but I really wanted to finish telling the backstory from the Mage game before I moved on to anything else. So here's my bit about Gencon 2009.

2009-08-12 Wednesday
My wife and I got to Indy on Wednesday evening and checked into our hotel. We already had our badges and all of our event tickets (I need to remember to get a few generics next year). It was about 8 when we got all of our stuff up to our room and settled, so we decided to go ahead and see if we could get our swag bags. The hotel that we stayed in is about a 15 minute walk from the convention center if you're not in any hurry, so we got there and the staff was telling everyone that the desks were all going to close at 9. The line for badges & tickets was pretty long and I don't know if everybody that was in it got through, but we just jumped in the swag bag line and had our bags in less than 10 minutes.

The bag was a bit lighter than last year, but I can't really complain. There was the obligatory "Gen Con '09" d6, a Magic booster pack, a flyer for a local gaming store that I still haven't been to, a few post card sized ads, and a "University of Catan" bumper sticker. one thing that was an upgrade, even if a small one, was the badge holders. Last year the badge holder was a small plastic envelope with two little pre-cut holes in the corners to feed a little elastic band through. They handed out lanyards with clips, but the only way to get the clip to fit to the badge holder was to punch the hole yourself for the clip. Of course the only punch thy had was a standard 3/16" round hole punch. This year the badge holder was of a slightly thicker plastic that didn't tear as easily and it came with the hole for the lanyard clip pre-punched. I know it's a tiny thing, but it made an impression on me.

After looking through the bag for a little while, we started looking through the convention hall for an event guide book. we walked almost the whole length of the convention hall before we found one. So, then we headed over to Steak N Shake to eat and look through the book for something more to do. we didn't really find anything much that interested us for Wednesday night, so we went back to the room to get an early start to our Thursday.

2009-08-13 Thursday
Thursday was the official beginning of the con. We hung out at the front of the vendor hall around 9:30 in hopes of seeing some of the opening ceremonies before heading off to our 10:00 game. Unfortunately the ceremony didn't get started until after I decided that we had to leave if we wanted to get to the game on time.

Our first game of the con was Desolation. Desolation is a fantasy RPG set after an apocalyptic event called the Night of Fire. It's kind of like playing in the Wheel of Time 18 months after the Breaking of the World. I was playing an elf sorcerer who could wield the powers of fire and air. The other members in the party were a Rover performer, a Dwarf scavenger, and a Mongrel Ranger.

We were all from a small settlement that had managed to survive through the Long Winter. Unfortunately the settlement, I think it's name was Green, had been swarmed with locusts and lost all of its crop. We had set out for a place that had been a town in the Before. On our trip through the forest we were attacked by a 2-headed bear that looked like it hadn't eaten in weeks. I noticed it before it pounced, so I solidified the air around its feet to slow it down enough for the others to get in more attacks. It managed to break through and took a swipe at me, but we put it down without much trouble. On the corpse we found a brightly painted collar.

On up the road we found the burnt out remains of a wagon. It looked like the fire had happened about a day before. As we kept going we found another small settlement. Camped outside the village was a troupe of performers and animal handlers with wagons that looked like a match to the remains we had found. After some pleasantries where I tried to convince the carnival that I was nobility and that the others in my party were my servants, the ringmaster asked us to help find a few animals that had been lost in the brigand attack the night before.

We failed to mention seeing a two-headed bear with a bright collar, but we did say we'd help look for the missing wolf. We tromped through the forest for a while more and eventually found what seemed to be tufts of fur high in the trees. we followed them and came to a cave. A wolf-man jumped out of the cave and swiped at me before bounding off a short distance and proclaiming that it wasn't his fault and he hadn't meant to do it. feeling the need to lash out, I pulled out the trick I had used earlier and solidified the air again. This time the air that I solidified was around the wolf-man's head. It didn't take him long to realize that he couldn't breathe, but at that time the carnival troupe had come up behind us and proclaimed that I was an evil magic user and had to be killed. A big fight ensued that ended with few of them dead or unconscious and the rest fleeing. I also passed out from the strain of casting. It wasn't a very satisfying end to the game, but it was only a two-hour game.

That was the only event we had that day before the vendor hall closed at 6:00, so we went over to the hall to look around. The first stop was at the Cheese Weasel booth. They have a little scavenger hunt type quest, if you visit a bunch of different vendor booths and watched their demos you'd get an entry into a drawing for prizes including a pass to Gencon 2010 and even a gamer cruise. Since we were planning on stopping by almost all the booths anyway, it seemed like a fun little addition.

So, we got to walk through the vendor hall for six hours on Thursday. In most cases I'd think that we'd get around most of the hall in that time. After all, I've been to renaissance fairs that took less time to walk. Gencon is not at all like that. I think we might have gotten through a quarter of the vendor hall in those six hours.

So, at 6:00 I was in a preliminary game of a Robo Rally tournament. Winner of the tournament won the board that we were playing on. That board was built with Hirst Arts Castlemolds and was a recreation of one of the boards from the game. I was doing really well in my game at the beginning. There were 3 flags on the board. By the time I hit flag 2, only one of the other players had hit flag 1. Unfortunately, one of the other players decided that since he wasn't going to win, the guy in front wasn't going to win either. I'm not actually upset about it, because it was a really good game. Really, bad cards did more damage than that guy did anyway. So it was a good game and I had a lot of fun playing.

After the game and dinner, my wife and I took a break before walking back to the hotel and played one of the games that we picked up. The game was called Vapor's Gambit. I'm not going to do a full review of the game here, but I will say that the idea behind the game was okay, but the execution wasn't very good. We did kill half an hour or so before packing up and going to the hotel.

2009-08-14 Friday
Friday started right off by hitting the vendor hall as soon as we got to the convention center. We walked around there for a bare few hours before going to a workshop where I got to build a scalemail dicebag. I've done a good deal of work with chainmail, but I'd never worked with scales before. I was quite happy with how it came out. The only problem is that the scales are a type of steel that rusts really easily. I think I'm going to make a new, larger one out of a different material because I do kind of like the way it looks.

After making the dice bag we went over to the True Dungeon. I'd never done a True Dungeon event before, so I was kind of excited about it. we had signed up for the mini quest. The mini quest was only 4 rooms, as opposed to the usual 8. It was also less intense. We were all given one item token that would represent our Rusty Dagger. The tokens were actually other weapons, but for thepurposes of the mini quest, they were all Rusty Daggers. Also, if we had any tokens from previous runs, we weren't allowed to use them.

If you haven't done a True Dungeon event before, here's how it goes. For each room you have 12 minutes to solve the room. After 6 minutes a gong sounds. After 11 minutes the music picks up and gets really loud. If you haven't solved the room yet at the end of 12 minutes, you are pushed to the next room and take damage.

The first room was the outside of a temple. We had to find a way to cross a moat, then open 3 trick locks. We had one person fall in the moat and take a damage. The locks really were tricky. The one that I opened was fairly simple, it required that one of the buttons on the back of the lock be pressed while the key was turned. The others were a bit harder. We actually almost didn't get the last one.

In the second room there was an all-seeing eye. We had to crawl around the room and not be detected by the eye. I don't know what would have happened if one of us had been seen, we all made it through. Then we had to fire a crossbow at a rune on the wall to deactivate a wall of force. We did finally make that one.

At the entrance to the third room there was a rope maze with some lights attacked to it. The lights represented bells. We had to crawl through the maze without ringing any of the bells and waking the guard. Anyone who made it through before the first person to ring a bell would get a free shot at the guard. Unfortunately the first person set off the trap, so none of us got a free shot, but we did kill the guard.

The last room held a table, a chest of small drawers, and a plaque on the wall that said we needed to knock on the topand speak what we sought to be ushered forth. Or something like that. Anyway, someone knocked on the chest of drawers and said "We seek the truth" (that was a clue we got from the plaque) then we were able to take the drawers out of the chest unharmed. On the bottom of the drawers were letters. We had to spell out a sentence with the drawers, which said "Look to the silver". There were gold medalions along the walls of all the inside rooms. They were spaced about ever 3 feet or so. Well, there was one in the room that was silver instead of gold. That one came off of the wall and was actually the amulet that we were searching for. We all won, hurray!

I had actually noticed the silver medallion almost as soon as we entered the room. didn't actually try to take it off the wall, but I did finger it a bit while we were pondering the first riddle. The GM in the room said that I kind of freaked him out when I almost pulled it right off the wall.

The weapon that I'd been using as my Rusty Dagger was actually a +1 Longsword. For beating the dungeon I got to pull a token from a box and got a biece of armor that added +6 to armor and +7 against missiles. If I play again, I should be pretty well off for someone with so little experience.

We were done with True Dungeon around 6:30 and we had a 7:00 game, so we didn't loiter before heading down to play Legend of the 5 Rings. We've never played Legend of the 5 Rings before, but we go to Gencon mostly to try out new games and systems, so we signed up for this one to see what it was like. When we got to where my table was supposed to be we were told that they had a big event in that room and our game had been moved next door. That room was packed, the fire marshal would have had somesern words to say. There weren't enough tables, some groups had to sit on the floor in the hall. we couldn't find the group where we were supposed to be, and the organizers couldn't figure out where to put us, especially since we hadn't played before. Eventually, we just left. We weren't impressed with the organizers for that event in the slightest. It wouldn't have been so bad since they were moved to a different room, but the big event that was in the room that we were supposed to be in was by the same organizers.

So, with nothing much else to do with the evening, we went over to the Red Dragon Inn that was set up at the Marriot. I guess the guys from Slugfest had come up with a few drinks that were inspired by the game Red Dragon Inn. The atmosphere was cool, the drinks were good, we had a good time.

2009-08-15 Saturday
Originally my wife and I were supposed to meet up with some friends Saturday and hit the vendor hall and do some seminars. They ended up not coming until evening, so we just wandered around the vendor hall from open to close. We managed to see all of it and to complete the afore-mentioned quests from Cheese Weasel. We also picked up a whole bunch of books and games.

After meeting up with our friends for dinner we all headed back to the Red Dragon Inn to have some drinks and to actually play Red Dragon Inn. It was a lot of fun and once again, the drinks were good.

2009-08-16 Sunday
The last day of Gencon and we didn't set aside any time to hit the vendor hall. At 10:00 I had a workshop on building terrain using Hirst Arts Castlemolds. Yes, the same bricks used to make that Robo Rally board. That was fun, but it was really hard to find bricks that went together coherently. I ended up making a very broken-down tower because rubble is easy to cobble together. Plus the piece of foam that I had for a base wasn't very large.

At noon we had our last game of the con. It was a pulp adventure game called the Hollow Earth Expedition. It used the same Ubiquity system as Desolation, so we largely knew what we were getting ourselves into. There were only 3 players in this game. Myself, playing the crazy stunt-pilot chick from the surface. My wife, playing a crazy witchdoctor woman with a voodoo teddybear from the Hollow Earth. And another guy playing an amazon warrior also from the Hollow Earth.

Things start off swimmingly as we are in our hot air balloon being chased by Nazis into a stormcloud. Of course we get hit by lightning, and start plumetting to our our collective doom. The first thing that we attempt to do is repair the balloon, put out the fires, and get the engines to give us some lift. The GM tells us the rolls that we need to make to do this, and it turns out that I'm the only one with the actual skill that I'm trying to roll The others are making their rolls untrained.

We manage to get to the ground at a survivable velocity and jump out of the balloon to start running from the machine gun fire that the Nazis are shooting at us. (oh, I forgot about those guys) We are saved by a group of bird men who attack the Nazis and drive them off. They are nice enough to take us to their flying city (I'm not really sure why we wanted to go there, but it worked out) and tell us that they've had dealings with the Nazis in recent days.

The king tells us that the city is losing altitude and they don't know what to do about it. It's not falling fast, perhaps an inch a year, but it is definitely falling. I offer to take a look at the device that keeps it aloft, though I have no idea how my character would know where to start with the thing. The king also wants us to look at a flying saucer that they've uncovered. I don't actually remember why we needed to look at it, it turned out that it flew very well.

So, we were led to where the saucer was by a bird man with a broken wing. The saucer, predictably, wasn't there. It had been sold by the captain of the guard to the Nazis. We were convenient fall guys for its disapearance. So, the captain of the guard accuses us of consorting with the Nazis and the Amazon struts over and smacks him. At this point the GM loses it. It turned out that he was pretty easily amused, and he'd never had a player just stroll over an hit the guardsman. So we fought. The dude with the broken wing got thrown over the side, but I was able to catch him because my character came packaged with a Rocketeer style jet pack. So we killed a few guards and then were arested when the entire militia showed up and demanded our surrender.

One somewhat tedious trial scene later the king tells us where to find a rocket ship to go after the Nazis with. It needs some parts, and we have to sneak around and steal stuff since we've just been convicted of conspiracy. So we steal some seats and a navigational console and fly to the moon. Not the real moon, the Hollow Earth has a moon too. It's where the systems that regulate the weather are kept. There's an AI that tells us that no one's been around in a while to do maintenance, but that there were some Nazis there looking for something. We get some crystals to help restore power to the bird people's city, promise the AI that we'll be back to do some repairs, and head out looking for some Nazis.

When we see the group of Nazis, there is a zeppelin, the flying saucer, and a few troops with rocket packs. I fly the rocket ship right through the zeppelin and take it out fast. I thought that deserved some kind of reward for being crazy, at least a style point, but it turned out that it was how the GM had intended for us to beat the zeppelin. Whatever. The rocket had some guns, and the Amazon decided to jump on top of the flying saucer to do combat with some dude in power armor. It didn't take us long to take out the flying troopers, and the Amazon managed to beat the power armored soldier until she ripped off one of the suit's arms. She then opened the hatch on the saucer and fired the gun on the power armor arm at random into the cockpit. That would probably have been enough to make anybody surrender, but she also hit enough of the controls that the saucer couldn't be piloted anymore.

That pretty much wrapped it up. We delivered the prisoners and the crystals to the sky city and were exhonerated. We returned to the moon and did some repairs up there. And that was the end of the game. I had a lot of fun and our GM was a blast.

The Hollow Earth game was scheduled for 4 hours, but since there were so few of us, it actually only took us about 2 and a half. So we found ourselves with a little bit of time left to head back to the vendor hall and grab some last minute deals.

That was our Gencon 2009. We had a lot of fun and can't wait for next year. Here's a list of what we picked up while we were at the con. I'll probably talk about some of it in later blogs.

Board Games
Bill of Rights
Blasphemy
Dominion
Munchkin Bites
Red Dragon Inn
Red Dragon Inn 2
Vapor's Gambit

Books
Some 3.5 Dragonlance books
Some OGL Babylon 5 books
Desolation: Survivors
Hollow Earth Expedition: Mysteries of the Hollow Earth
Shard