Gen Con 2011 Wrap-up

Gen Con Day 0:
Wednesday, August 3rd 2011
I'm an Indianapolis local. That means that I'm lucky enough to not have to fly to Gen Con every year. I actually work close enough to the Indianapolis Convention Center that I was able to work half a day on Wednesday and then walk to get our badges from Will Call. I heard that the Will Call line was around a quarter of a mile long, reaching all the way back to the J.W. Marriott when Will Call opened at noon. I really feel sorry for the people who waited in that line in the heat. I hope some company decided to get some good PR by handing out water. Once Will Call opened, though, they must have really been running hard. By the time I got in line around 1:30 it was hardly into the next room and I only had to wait in line for about 20 minutes.

Here's a rundown of the swag for this year, omitting fliers and things that were purely advertising:

• Full copy of the Rift video game


• 30 card Magic the gathering starter deck (I got the white deck, Maria got the Green)


• True Dungeon treasure token (I got a Bone Scroll Case, Maria got a Nixie Vest)


• Voucher for the yearly commemorative Gen Con die from Crystal Caste


• Gen Con coupon book

My next stop was the Cheese Weasel booth. Cheese Weasel Logistics is a marketing company. Every year they hand out quest cards to con goers. The quests are really simple: while you're in the vendors' hall, visit the booths that are advertised on the quest card. You do a product demo or listen to a short presentation and they punch your card. If you get all of the punches on a card you get to enter it into a drawing for prizes.

After picking up the quest cards for use Thursday through Sunday, I started wandering around the convention center looking for QR codes associated with Wizards of the Coast’s “Explore Neverwinter” con game. Eventually I ran across some friends from Game Paradise and we hung out until Maria was able to get away from work and then we headed to the Stink.

The Stink had its own swag, so I’ll list that here:

• Stink Die


• Untold Undead card miniature standees from Clerics of the Midwest


• Lanyard


• Gen Con 2010 T-Shirt


• ”Bathes Daily” Badge Ribbon


• ”You Stink!” Badge Ribbon


• ”Thanks for Bathing” Badge Ribbon

Gen Con Day 1
Thursday, August 4th 2011
Thursday started off right at 10:00 when the exhibit hall opened. Unfortunately, we missed the opening ceremony. Actually, I don't even know where it was this year since the Convention Center was revamped. So we hit the Exhibit hall and ran straight for the couple of booths that had free stuff in the coupon book.

After about 3 aisles in the exhibit hall we decided we needed lunch and headed to our first seminar titled “What is the Pathfinder Society?” It was two guys from Paizo who are heavily involved in the creation the the sanctioned adventures that make up the Pathfinder Society games. Maria and I hadn’t played pathfinder before, but knew it was a lot like D&D 3.5. And we’d never played in any organized play events either. We’re not members of RPGA, DCI (okay we’re members of DCI now because of a game we played on Saturday, but we weren’t then), the Camarilla, or anything like that. The Pathfinder Society, however, just sounded cool. I’m pretty sure we’re going to try to get into some games in the near future, though it may have to wait for Who’s Yer Con in March.

After “What is the Pathfinder Society?” we headed off to our next seminar. This seminar was about designing adventures and adjusting existing adventures to fit your group. It was run by a few guys from Wizards of the Coast. I was hoping to learn some great tips for designing a few con games that I'm hoping to run in the future. I did pick up a few pointers, but not as much as I was hoping. We ended up skipping the other seminar we had scheduled for Thursday and headed back to the exhibit hall.

Thursday night we played a game called Jumpers. In this game you play yourself. You rate your physical and mental attributes from one to five then roll your magical attributes. As you play through the game, if you need a skill that you personally have but you haven't written down, you just write it down and rate it from one to ten, then roll it.

We started out where we had all been on Wednesday evening, so three of us were at Gen Con and the fourth was sitting at home painting minis. There was a huge storm, lightning, chaos, panic, then we all woke up in the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago inside one of the bear enclosures. We snooped around and found something that told us the year was 1991. We decided that it would be really tough to explain ourselves, so we avoided security and snuck out of the zoo. Shortly thereafter, we jumped again.

The place we jumped to this time was a desert. We were on a highway and the sun was directly overhead. We walked along the highway for about an hour or so and the sun didn't dip an inch. I want to say that at some point we passed a sign that said we were in Arizona. Anyway, we found a little town off to the South of the highway, so we got off at the exit and headed for it. Then we noticed that the sun had jumped about 2 hours worth in the sky. Walking back to the north caused the sun to rise again toward Noon. When we reached the outskirts of town it was almost dusk.

A general store held some tools, supplies, and clothing. There was no one in the store. The date on the newspaper said it was in the Seventies. When we checked the back room we found our first person on this world. He was frozen in place and didn't move a muscle even to breathe, though he seemed warm to the touch. If we moved inside the room in a North/South direction he moved as if her were reaching for something on the shelf. We quickly ascertained that those of us that were standing in different parts of the room observed the clerk in different positions.

By this point we had all been up for close to 30 hours, so we headed to a hotel for a few hours rest. In the hotel we saw several more people frozen in time, and again they all seemed to go throughout their motions as we moved in a North/South direction. We decided to set watches and those who were awake heard a periodic sound of a screen door opening and banging shut. One person saw a bright light coming from the open doors of the church at the center of town.

After we woke up, we all decided to check out the church. Inside we found the disemboweled corpse of the man who had probably been the town’s pastor nailed to the cross. There was also a smooth-talking man in an impeccable suit standing in front of the alter. He told us, “This is my place,” and that we should leave in that manner people assume when they are supremely confident in their ability to persuade/force you to do whatever they want. Something about the whole situation just screamed “demon!” right in my ear, and I was perfectly willing to walk right out that door and on into the backwards sunset. Maria was about to join me too, but then the demon said something that made Maria stop, and I was obligated to stay with her.

When it became clear that we were going to pick a fight, the demon started to remove his jacket so he wouldn’t get our insides on it. Maria took one of the milk bottles I had filled with water and headed to the font to put holy water into the bottle. Apparently that turns the entire bottle into holy water. One of the other players had picked up a shovel at the general store and he charged the demon while his back was turned. He rolled spectacularly, so our Jump Master ruled that the head of the shovel had cleaved through the demon’s shoulder and buried itself in his chest. This rather displeased the demon. As he screamed, tore through his nice suit and grew to a size larger than the church, we jumped again.

This time we found ourselves on a beach. Looking around we saw a wooden dock a ways down the beach, and what looked like a Roman city along the cliff above us. While we were discussing what we should do, a couple of Roman spearmen approached us and started talking to us in Latin. None of us could really figure out what they were really saying other than that they probably wanted us to identify ourselves. Maria tried speaking in Spanish, but apparently Spain didn’t exist yet. Eventually we ended up attacking the guards, probably not our wisest choice but it worked out.

After subduing the guards there was a large earthquake. We looked up to see what was apparently Mt. Vesuvius erupting. Immediately we started sprinting for the docks. Everyone else jumped onto the last ship as it was leaving, but I missed and fell into the water. Just as the pyroclastic flow was reaching our location we jumped again in time to save our bacon.

That was the end of the Jumpers game, as it was midnight. I had a really good time playing and I wish we’d been able to make it to the Mega-jump on Saturday night, but we already had a game scheduled for that night. The Jump Master (Josh) gave us some T-shirts and buttons and we said our goodbyes. After a quick stop by White Castle, we called it a night and got ready for Friday.

Gen Con Day 2:
Friday, August 4th 2011
Friday was our big hall day. We wandered the hall, we were very careful to at least go past every booth. I’ve lost track of all of the demos we did, but I did pick up a whole mess of business cards and I hope to start working through them once my Internet connection is repaired. One of the things I did keep our eyes open for was a virtual tabletop program. If you don’t know already, a virtual tabletop is a program that allows players in different locations to have a common space to play their game. Typically there are in- and out-of-character chat channels, dice rollers, maps, tokens, and some whatnot. This was important to us because we wanted to see if it would be possible for us to continue gaming with our current group, even though we’re scattering across the globe. We saw a few of them, but the one we settled on was Epic Table. It’s still in beta now, but it’s already pretty slick without having a lot of extra stuff that you have to pay extra for.

Friday night was a game called Genesys. Genesys is a universal roleplaying system. Largely what that means is that it’s a system, and you can add your own setting to it and it should work out. The dice systems are pretty standard, but what they innovated with was a system they called Fate. At the beginning of the session you get a couple Fate Points, if you roleplay well you get more kinda like with Style Points in the Ubiquity system. In a combat situation, initiative is handled by dealing out cards like in Savage Worlds. What was different was that each card has 2 traits on it, a Light Side trait and a Dark Side trait. When the cards are dealt to you these traits do not apply, but if you choose, you can spend a Fate Point to activate the Light Side trait to affect you for the round. A Fate Card is also laid down for the combat and whichever side of the card Light Side or Dark Side is right-side-up to the DM affects the entire round of combat. If you like, you can also spend a Fate Point to negate the effects of the group Fate Card. Fate Cards are then dealt again for each round of combat. It’s an interesting system that could use a bit of refining, but that’s why it’s still being playtested.

The game we were playing was 1950s pulp. We were called together by a museum curator who told us that a magical artifact had been stolen and that it was going to be used to resurrect a particular evil goddess whose name escapes me. We were all given other magical items and then we boarded a plane to Iraq, at least I think it was Iraq. During the flight three women who were traveling with us, a professor and her assistants I think, were possessed by demons and attacked the curator and tried to crash the plane. A few rounds of combat while shoving each other out of the way and they were brought down, but they did almost break down the door to the cockpit.

Landing in Iraq we found that there had recently been a coup and the woman who met us on the ground told us to refuel and leave immediately. We told her we couldn’t and eventually she gave us a truck. An hour or so down the road the truck dies and we start seeing Iraqi military heading our way. My character had a mechanics background, so I threw up the hood and managed to get the engine restarted (it had been sabotaged by the woman at the airport) in just one skill check. We jumped back into the truck and avoided the entire encounter. To the DM’s credit, while we hadn’t been intended to bypass the encounter so quickly, he let us do it anyway.

The next trick was finding our way to a monastery in the mountains. Out information told us that somebody in this particular village would know, but that they didn’t commonly share such information with strangers. On our way to the village we saw a man and boy walking along the road. Maria’s character had some telepathy, so she decided to figure out what she could glean from them. She rolled really well and was able to get the exact route to the monastery from the boy’s head. Later on the DM told us that he’d had groups spend an hour trying to sneak into town to get the information covertly.

At the monastery we met a monk who had not heard of a temple to the goddess we were talking about, but he said there was a temple to Lilith in the mountains, but no one entering has ever left. Eventually we persuaded him to show us where it was and he took us there. The entrance was underwater in a small pool. We had to enter one at a time. As soon as the first person entered the first monster appeared and we went into combat. Then when the second person entered the second monster appeared, and so with the third. There were only three monsters, and there were six players, Maria was in the back of the line outside and didn’t even know there was something going on until it was over, she didn’t get to participate in the combat at all. I think that particular encounter needed to be tweaked.

We solved a couple of riddles, found our way to an alter and the museum curator raised the goddess. Big surprise, right? So Maria took his head clean off with a shotgun preempting him turning into another monster for us to fight and we started fighting the goddess. It took us a few rounds to think of screwing with the statue that had been used to summon her, that took half of her life away. And eventually we killed her. Another fun game under our belts. I don’t know if I’ll be picking up Genesys when it finally gets released, but I’ll at least think about it.

Gen Con Day 3:
Saturday, August 5th 2011
Saturday was a big game day for us. We started bright and early at 10:00 with Desolation. Now, I know I’ve said in the past that I love desolation. I’m actually planning a Desolation game to run at a con in the future. But this time it was not so great. All of the players seemed pretty into it, we were ready to have a good time, but the DM seemed a bit less fired up. Maybe he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before, maybe he was hungover, maybe it was just starting to feel too much like work, whatever the reason he just wasn’t on fire.

It was a short game, only scheduled for 2 hours. We were exploring some old Dwarven caves when an earthquake brought down the passage we’d been in previously. Trying to find our way out, we happened across a pair of Dwarf women, twins, who were also trying to find a way out. I was playing a Dwarf, so I knew what the women were scared of. The Deep Horrors are a somewhat insect-like race that can take over humanoids and turn them into warriors. They are the bogeymen that Dwarven mothers tell their children about, except they’re real.

The women thought they knew a way out, so I was all about heading that way with as little delay as we could. Unfortunately, the other party members wanted to explore every side passage along the way. In one side passage we found what had once been a Dwarf but was mutating into something else. After a few rounds of conversation we put a merciful arrow through his skull and went on our way.

We went further along our path and faced a group of Dwarf corpses that were animated by corpse fungi. in the real world there is a fungus that can infect ants that will cause them to do certain actions (mostly just walking around) even after the ant had died. Desolation’s Corpse Fungus works pretty much the same way except it will cause the infected corpse to fight somewhat and to exhale spores.

After that we started to find our way out and came upon the brothers of the women we’d been traveling with. Of course they had already been turned by the Deep Horrors so we had to destroy them, but that’s usually the way these things work out. A few rounds of combat and we were back in the light of day.

After Desolation we went to the Wizards of the Coast room to have our first introduction to Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. We played in a rather extensive D&D 3.5 game and I have prepared a few others that we never actually played so we have some experience with D&D, but we hadn’t yet tried out 4th edition and we were interested to see what was different.

I won’t bore you with the differences that we found, most of you have already played 4th edition by now anyway. The encounter was just six of us in a field with 2 wolves and 2 goblins. We were all 1st level characters and none of us had played 4e before, so we didn’t exactly trounce them, but it wasn’t a difficult fight. What really stuck with me though, was that the woman running the game was easily the worst DM I have ever gamed under. She didn’t know her stuff, she discouraged playing in character, she didn’t even have a book.

We grabbed some food and headed to the Pathfinder Society room to try out what they called a Delve. The delve was basically one encounter in an arena to teach us some mechanics of the game. We were kind of hoping for a little more than that, but it’s what they had that was free. There were 7 players at this table including a couple who was probably in their 50s and had never played an RPG before. I don’t know what possessed them to try it out, but they seemed to have a great time. The DM was kind of confused with us because we already knew basically what we were doing, and since the new couple was sitting next to Maria, they kept asking her questions instead of the actual DM.

Through with our quick little delve, we headed on to our next game: Hollow Earth Expedition. Hollow Earth uses the same Ubiquity system as our earlier Desolation game but is set in a 1930s pulp world. Kinda like Indiana Jones in a lot of ways. This particular game was not set in the default setting. It didn’t even have anything to do with the Hollow Earth. We were playing a double feature, the first two hours were a western, the next two hours were a 1001 Arabian Nights kind of deal. The DM ran both games like we were in a corny movie on SyFy.

In the western I was an Apache boy who had been raised in England and trained as a doctor, now returned for revenge on the man who was responsible for destroying my village. Maria was a Chinese miner with martial arts training. The whole party was out for the blood of one man in particular. We rode into town on a rainy day that happened to be his funeral. We demanded to see the body and one of the pallbearers dropped the casket into the grave, which made an odd sound. I decided to go all in and jumped into the grave on top of the casket. The bottom of the pit gave way and I fell with the casket into a mining tunnel. There were strange creatures down there and the rest of the party soon followed me to confront them. They were kind of like the ugliest Nosferatu you’ve ever seen in a movie, and they were pretty feral, attacking their dead instead of us. We made short work of them then checked the casket to find, not the man we had all been coming to kill, but a woman who fit the description of his most recent mistress.

We headed down the mining tunnel toward the cliff face. We picked up an NPC who told us that he had seen several shackled women and children being moved through the tunnel. We came out of the tunnel into a large underground chamber that had a large lake and a ship moored inside. There was a firefight and a lot of maneuvering for cover before we finally found and killed the sniper. Next was the ship’s cabin and the man we had all come to kill... wielding a Gatling gun. The truth be told, I couldn’t tell you how we got him, all I remember is that I wasn’t very instrumental in it.

In the second part of our double-feature I played a 1300 year old Djinn who had been transformed into a 13 year old boy with no magical powers. Maria played a man who had been transformed into a monkey. We were all a part of Sinbad’s crew. We started at night, on deck. Apparently we were the most worthless members of the crew and were forced to sleep above deck.

During the night a giant bird breathed fire onto the ship and landed being ridden by a man in a golden helmet and a woman in chains. The man summoned four skeletons and then took the woman and walked into Sinbad’s cabin. We all started hacking away at the skeletons and the bird while Maria, as a monkey, climbed the rigging over the bird and went to help Sinbad. We had a warrior princess with us who took care of the skeletons handily and we managed to get past the bird. I’m not really clear on how exactly it went down, but the man in the helmet was a mage and he somehow got Sinbad to the bird, who took off with him, before we knocked him out and I stole his helmet. Then we remembered that the ship was on fire so we decided to swim for shore.

The woman had a spyglass with her that had Djinni writing on it. The magician in the group (who I knew was a fraud, but I didn’t out him because I thought it was funny) said he’d study the device to determine what it did. I casually walked over and stared at the spyglass in a wide-eyed 13-year-old manner, read the inscription on the spyglass, and said something in a tone that only the magician could hear that amounted to “Wow, I’ll bet it can see through illusions and stuff,” then walked away.

After a bit we were given clues that led to the basement of a building by the bay. On the wall there were alcoves that after a bit of investigation formed a pattern resembling a star constellation. The Magician sweet-talked the first mate of a ship owned by the Caliph himself to take us out to where the stars pointed. once there the area was surrounded by thick mist, but looking through the spyglass allowed us to find the safe way through the reef surrounding a sunken island.

The highest point on the island was still above water and we climbed the volcano until we looked over the rim and saw the mage that had transformed me into a boy and Maria into a monkey. Sinbad was bound to an altar and the giant bird was standing off to one side. The first thing I did was toss three grenades, I had demolitions for some reason, then our warrior princess jumped down to the mage and the bird took off to breathe fire on us. When the bird got up to us to incinerate us I tossed a few grenades down its throat and its head blew pretty well off.

When the princess dispatched the mage he turned into mist and started to invade Sinbad’s body. The princess grabbed the body and started moving him away and I jumped down to the alter and pulled out the lamp that had once bound me. Saying the proper incantation I bound the mage to the lamp which reversed his spell on Maria and myself. Since the lamp that had bound me was already occupied, I was a free Djinn, free to cause all sorts of mischief. I ended the game by transporting all of us to Baghdad.

Gen Con Day 4:
Sunday, August 7th 2011
Sunday of Gen Con always seems to have kind of a somber feel to it. Everybody’s backing up, getting ready to leave, talking about what they’re thinking about for next year. I think we’re going to try to plan more events on Sunday late in the day so we can keep going to the last minute without just wandering through the exhibit hall trying to figure out if we have the budget to buy just one more book.

This was my fourth year going to Gen Con. I always have a blast and this year was no different. We’re planning our budget better for next year and we already have a list of stuff we’re looking at buying. I’ll miss it, but it’ll be back next year and so will I.

That wraps it up for the Best Four Days in Gaming.

Until the next post,
Good Gaming.