Got into Indianapolis on the Tuesday afternoon, and, of course, had to go and take a look around, get situated, that sort of thing.

Checking out the view of White River State Park from my hotel room. (28th floor, so there’s a lot of view)

Wandering through the ICC.
This is absolutely the least crowded this place would be until Monday

Did not expect Gen Con Security to be already in place.
Or to have such awful breath.

The banners & posters & such were already in place at this stage.
“Starfinder” intrigued me, as the implication seems to be that it’s the Science Fiction version of the Fantasy game, and I’m curious as to how that’s going to work.

Rather than stand in a queue with the other VIGs, and the Trade Day folks, and the Media folks, for early entry into the Hall Of Effortless Wallet-Emptying, I sat on my arse in the VIG Lounge & chatted with the one other guy there, who was adopting the same strategy as me; Wait until a bit after 9am, then amble over & join the end of the queue as it files in.

It worked well as a system, & we just breezed on in at maybe 9:10 or so.

I only had one purchase I needed to make, and that was this year’s set of dice as a souvenir.
And also because I didn’t bring any with me.

I stripped the plastic insert as soon as I could; While it’s fun to have the display tin, it’s kind of space-inefficient.

Plan “I’ve bought all I need” was working well, until those Irresponsible Bastards at Ultra Pro had a display case right on a walkway. What sort of monster does that?
Then they followed up by asking whether anything had caught my eye when they saw me looking into said display case.

Really, I’m the victim here.
And as an impulse purchase, a couple of Aluminium six-siders in their own little milled-out & anodised case is not a bad thing. I hope.

For the rest of the early entry time, I just wandered.
Saw this poster at a seemingly-unoccupied booth, so I’m guessing they were still getting set up.

There were also the folks at The Broken Token, who had a dice tower with all sorts of fun stuff which would spin when you dropped a handful of dice through it. They’d made this a part of their booth, and were encouraging people to play with it, and the thing stood maybe a metre tall.

Sadly, the wall-mounted tower was not a product for sale, though I wasn’t the first person to ask whether it was, and they’d had one person who just flat-out wanted to buy the thing from them once the con was over.
I get the idea that they’re looking into how to make a production, shippable, modular version.
(I have no use for one, but I can see that if you have a home gaming setup in the basement or family room or whatever, something like that would be a whole lot of fun)

I set myself up just inside the doors, to watch the flood of people enter the Hall in the annual “Running Of The Nerds”.
Did take some video, but it’s … kind of boring; There’s a difference between seeing the flood of humanity on screen & feeling it stream by.
Did get a shot of the folks who had set themselves up to capture the hoard as they approached.

Last year I spent maybe ten minutes in the lee of a rubbish bin before the flow of people eased off enough to walk against it; This time it was maybe three minutes, because they just opened up all of the doors at once.
Most people seemed to be taking it calmly, and following the chant of “Do Not Run”, but there are always a few who get inside the door and want to run, or at least very fast walk with an option on jogging, to get to whatever the hell they’re after.

Someone in the hotel, I’m assuming in the room opposite, kept leaving their wine glass outside mine, probably because the doorway was in a little alcove & the glass wouldn’t be in anyone’s way.
That said, it did kind of make it look like it was my glass, and that thing looks to be able to hold a half-bottle at a minimum, so I’m not sure I like the message it’s sending about me.

Besides, I’m more into ciders these days.

Thanks to foolishly agreeing to do it over dessert last year, I was up at Oh Dear God in the morning to take part in the Orc Stomp 5k Fun Run.
Which I walked.

This was taken just after the start, and the object in the centre is someone jogging in one of those inflatable T-Rex costumes, which I’m assuming was a sauna within minutes. As far as I know they completed the thing, and they had someone with them to provide guidance when the window fogged up.

There were also some people dressed as velociraptors, in more runnable costumes, who you could try to stay ahead of as a motivational thing. I don’t have a picture of them, and it’s not because they were so far behind me.

The course ran along the White river, which made for some nice reflections in the water, and was quite pleasant.
And flat, which was also pleasant.

Towards the end, after navigating the bit they’d not signposted (it was the one part of the route where it was possible to go off-course without realising it, as it was a veer-left or veer-right situation. no signage) we saw an Opossum who was … unimpressed … with all of these people wandering by.

The bridge towards the end, at about the point I realised that I need to get another pair of sunglasses.

And the photo at the finish.
They gave out ‘free’ t-shirts as part of the run pack, so I wore mine; Didn’t realise that the finisher’s medal centred so well on the Orc Stomp logo.

I’m obscurely pleased with that medal.

I took some pictures of the board & card & war gaming hall – In previous years it was more carved up, but this time they had the walls rolled back to make one enormous space.

I didn’t play any games in here, but it made a more interesting route than the big corridor, so I tended to cut through here a lot.

And that brings me to the end of things.
I’m sure that there are events I’ve forgotten to mention, …

In fact, one came to mind just as I typed that.

After what turned out to be my last game, I went to the concert by the GM, a comedian by the name of Mikey Mason.
It was scheduled for an hour, but ran to maybe an hour and a half, and was a whole lot of fun.

I’d been to one of his shows at my first Gen Con, back in 2012, so I knew some of the songs, but there was a bunch of new stuff, some of which I’m about to link in, because it’s my blog and I can.

And there’s this one too.

Here’s a second attempt at ending the post, with a couple of pictures from some post-con walkarounds.

This one doubles as part of my “photographs of photographers” series, and shows what was the hall of wallet-lightening on Monday morning.

And here’s the board & card & war game hall, seen in some earlier pictures, on Monday afternoon.

I know, not my best work on the title. I blame the Blueberry Crumble coffee for throwing me off.

No, I’m not kidding; I’m at Cafe Patachou, and they have a Blueberry Crumble coffee which does have solid notes of what I imagine such a thing would taste like.

I’m in the VIG programme, which essentially means that I pay a bunch more for my ticket, don’t have to enter the knife-fight for housing, and get a few other perks, one of which is a Bag-O-Stuff from various companies who would presumably like cashed-up gamers to look favourably upon their products.

In previous years I’ve done a triage and given away a bunch of it, but I just didn’t get my act together this time, so that’ll have to come at the end of the trip.

Let’s take a look.

A nifty satchel, with laptop compartment. I’m not planning to use it while traveling, but once I’m headed back to the UK, I can see it being of use, particularly if I get a job which requires me to look somewhat professional.

I’m sure that this is a particular sort of glass, for a specific sort of drink, but I don’t know which one. A lot of whisky, maybe?
Not sure about what’ll happen to this; Part of me wants to keep it as an allegedly useful thing, and another part of me can see what a pain in the arse it’d be to carry a glass around while traveling. Don’t think it’s worth posting home.

Pathfinder stuff, …
I’ve played the system once, and … To me, it fills the same space as D&D, and from how they’ve exploded into the market, it seems pretty safe to say I’m not the only one who thinks that.
I’ll have to find someone who wants these, but I might know a guy.

These I see making their way to someone with younger kids?

The swag is currently in Chicago, so if I find a place to donate these in or near there, that’s where they can go.

I believe that Tamsin would hurt me, and be morally correct for doing so, if I did not keep this.
Not only does it have pirates, but there’s also a punne, or play on words, in the name.

And this just looks exciting.
Because Pirates.

Also, by stripping the enormous plastic insert from the box (from the look of it, you’re supposed to put expansions into the box too) , I was able to fit all of the swag, plus my badge & a few other things, into said box, greatly reducing the volume of stuff.

This is one of those extended posts, where I try to cover a bunch of stuff in one post. It’s kind of long, so you may want a drink.
Maybe a sandwich.

It’s OK, I’ll wait until you’re back.

We’re set? OK, here goes;

Event Registration

Event registration happened while I was in Nelson, or at least the big part of it did.
The basic thing to know is that, a week or so prior to events registration, the initial list of available games/events is published, and you can start to find the ones you want and save them in a ‘wish list’, ordered by priority. Then, when events registration opens at some ungodly time of the morning in NZ, you can submit that list.
It doesn’t happen automatically, you have to be there to hit the button.

Normally, connecting from NZ, I get somewhere in the 5000’s, so all of the high popularity/low availability stuff is long gone, so my wish list is built with every session of the hard to get games added into it, with backups for my backups, working on the assumption that I’ll be lucky to get any of my second choices.

Well, not this time.

That’s an astonishing position on the queue, especially for hostel wifi from Nelson.

Because everyone’s doing event reg. & wish list submission, there’s a bunch of chatting over social media, both with the wider community of folks you don’t know on Gen Con forums or Facebook, or over things like Messenger, which gave us ths conversation with a friend in Chicago.

What can I say?
It was early.

The way the next bit works is that you have two hours to buy any event ticket; After that it goes straight back into the pool.
I ended up having to do some game-triage with the event tickets I got, because I ended up with multiple sessions of my first & second choice games, so a quick schedule was knocked together to figure out what to keep & what to throw back.
Ended up with a pretty good assortment, I think.

Tamsin & The Pirates

Around the time of my birthday, while in Edinburgh, we’d been chatting about Gen Con, and Tamsin had idly wondered about the sorts of events available, so we had a play with the Event Finder, and put in the search term “Pirate”.

This little beauty came up as one of the results;

Having spotted it, we had to see whether there was a session I could make, and there was, so my schedule got an addition.

The Con’s The Thing

I’ll be honest, there’s not a lot I can say about Gen Con that I didn’t say back in 2015 or 2013, which is why I’ve linked to those categories in CraigBlog. It’s changed a bit, but not that much.

Did dinner with folks at Scotty’s Brewhouse on Tuesday night, seated outside on a very pleasant evening, watching people try increasing levels of flattery, persuasion, attempted corruption, and flat-out no-holds-barred bribery to get hold of the promotional dice said Scotty’s gives out on a ‘one specific colour of die per day, with food order’ system.
The fact that one of the parties involved went back there every day and ate a lot of fried pickles should tell you how the bribery went.

Did lunch with other folks at The Ram on Wednesday, after badge pick-up, sneaking in before the crowds got ridiculous.
Caught up with still other folks at The Stink (the Gen Con Forum social event) and ended up heading out for dinner; The actual event seemed kind of flat, though I did pick up an ‘Ally’ badge ribbon from the Gen Con Gaymers, and had a fun conversation with the guys at the table about ribbons beyond ‘GAYMER’ & ‘ALLY’, such as ‘WELL, THAT ONE TIME’ or ‘EVERYONE EXPERIMENTS IN COLLEGE’, or ‘NOT AFTER I GRADUATED’.
Only thought, the next day, of people wearing an Ally ribbon over a Gaymer ribbon, for the somewhat closeted.

Basically, social things. The stuff you do when you catch up with people you’ve not seen for a year, and want to know how they’re doing, and maybe introduce some of them to each other.
I’d make the argument that that’s a lot of the appeal of Gen Con; Even though you may share no gaming interests with the people you’re talking with in line, or sitting on a bench, or in a restaurant, they are still the kind of person who comes to an event like this, and that means they’re probably the same sort of crazy as you, with a different focus. I have no interest in CCGs, but it’s still fun to hear people who are really into them get excited about it.

Once you’re in the con, and going to events, it can be difficult to catch up with people, or easy to not find the time to catch up with people, and I find that you’re constantly waving ‘hello’ to people as you wander past them in the halls, each going to an event somewhere else.

The Will Call line on Wednesday, where people pick up their tickets, was … ridiculous.
I tried taking a video while walking down it, but my hands & walking aren’t steady enough; It took me two minutes of constant walking at a good pace to get to where they break the line for traffic control purposes, and it started a good way down towards the other end of the ICC.

Then it was out the door, and eventually turned the corner under the trees you see above & headed down the street.

Some friends had looked at the line and declined, planning to come back later.
I’d heard rumors of the VIG Lounge folks fetching Will Call packets for friends of VIGs, so I asked, assuming it was a special occasion thing. Turns out it’s not, they do it a bunch, and so said folks skipped the ridiculous line & were able to get on with their Con.

The Games Themselves

I’d intitially thought to post pictures of the character sheets, but … I’m not sure if that’s OK.
It’s not like they’re my intellectual property.

Timewatch

I found out about Timewatch from an RPG.net thread about kickstarted games which, for various reasons, didn’t look like they were going to happen. They’d funded, but the deadlines had passed, as had new ones, and getting hold of the people producing the games was difficult, and so on.

Timewatch was on the list in a ‘not sure’ category; The writer was still working on it, but there had apparently been a pattern of going quiet, the reappearing with a status update, then nothing.
I’d missed the opportunity to back, and probably would have done so, based on nothing more than the canon character “Skeg the Time Raptor”, an agent from an alternate timeline.

Well, it now exists, and it’s a fun game.
I understand that the system is a simplified version of Gumshoe, and I certainly understand it better than I did the Gumshoe implementation in the Trail Of Cthulhu game I played in last year.

We ended up going very Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, simple because they system allows you to do things like decide to run a mapping drone over the facility at some point in the future & send yourself the data, so you now have it.
Or, because you need to blend in at Spring Break, form a band, get jobs with production companies, take a year or so to learn how to play instruments, …, that sort of thing. Not sure why we had the Time Raptor on vocals.
My 1840’s Big Game Hunter was on drums, which maybe made sense?

It was a whole lot of fun, with a group of players who got right into it. (a couple from Montreal had backed the kickstart, and had received the delivery notice from the courier after they left for Gen Con)

Cogs, Cakes & Swordsticks

I think Kedamono, or possibly Taz, suggested this one as a system for a Big Red Couch episode.

This was being run by Lynne Hardy, who wrote the game, and was part of the offerings from ConTessa, who are “passionate about getting more women involved in running, talking about, and creating tabletop roleplaying games”.
It was a fun game, and an interestingly simple system; The stats, and there are only three of them, are in the game’s name.
Cogs for technical things, Cakes for social, and Swordsticks for physical stuff.

We were performing a heist, which worked well at the Plan A level, so plans B & C never got a look in. Probably for the best, as plan C was really more of a concept, and Plan B was harder to do than A.

Inspectres

I’d tried to play this last year, with the same scenario & GM, but there weren’t enough players.
This time, we had enough, and were able to deal with ghostly pirates from various eras (including some confused software pirates) by finding out that the old lady who’d hired us was inexplicably the ghost of Salmonbeard the Pirate, who’d brought them back to drain their energies.
Or something; I’m a little hazy on the motivations there, to be honest, but that’s what the players decided along the way, so that’s what happened.

The interesting thing, or at least the most interesting thing to me, was that the GM really only had to put out the initial “Pirates on a Lake”, and the players did the rest. From one point of view the GM doesn’t have to do much work, but on the other hand they do have to try to make the game work with whatever rubbish the players come up with.

Dr. Who

We were using the canon characters for this one, which I think contributed to the slow start.
Not only are you trying to find your groove & get used to the other players, but you’re also trying to decide how to play the character from the show you’ve been given (in my case, Mickey Smith) and trying desperately to remember what they’re like as a person.

Once we did warm up as a group, we took off & investigated the hell out of that scenario.
At one point I saw the watch of the guy opposite, but assumed he must be on a different time zone, as there was no way we’d only been playing for 75 minutes.
Nope, we were just getting a lot done, in a fun way, in character.

Also, one of the other players looked like a younger David Tennant. Many of the same mannerisms as Tennant-Who, and very similar glasses.
The game finished early, but well. The story was done, and that was the right spot.

Can’t really comment on the system (adventures in time and space edition, apparently) because I never got to roll any dice or really interact with said system. Did get some nice lines in though, so I at least got to do things.

Numenera

I own a copy of this in PDF, but wanted to see it in action.
The plot was a fairly linear “Go Get The MacGuffin” story, or more accurately it was obvious that this is what it was.

That said, my goal was to try out the game, which I did, and the story gave folks a chance to try things out.
It’s trying to make the game easier for the GM to run, to the extent that all you really need is one number to represent … pretty much anything. More information is useful, even vital in some cases, but the core is that one “This Is The Difficulty” number.

Furry Ninja Pirate Steampunk Victoriana Space Opera with Robots & Magic

This one I do have an image for – The action list my Robot Manservant character was drawing up.

The game was run by Geek Rock Comedian Mikey Mason, and having handed out characters he also handed out a sheet of questions for each player, different for each character, asking a range of things; The scenario was then built from those answers, so it’s different every time.
It worked well.

We started out having screwed up a job because I’d answered “why do you have to do this job” with “to square things away after we messed up the previous one”. The Orb of Souls was not my fault.
That said, I got some mileage out of being the literal & unflappable robot, calmly taking notes that the item was Round and Full Of Souls while the annoyed Mob Boss ranted that “It’s a friggin orb filled with friggin souls”.

Not sure if the easily distracted first mate character was always that way, or whether it was added because the player was on the young side & got distracted & tangenty a lot.
Special mention has to go to the guy playing the anthropomorphic Fox ship’s captain as Captain Kirk, complete with mannerisms & hitting on anything that moved.

Mr. Mason was doing a concert about an hour after the game, and told folks, so I went to that.
Had tried to get a ticket, but they were sold out, but I got in with Generics & the shady influence of having sat next to the guy on the door during the Furry Ninja Pirate Steampunk Victoriana Space Opera with Robots & Magic game.
Corruption: It’s Awesome!

And that’s kind of the end of the games – There’ll be a second post with some other stuff, but I’m tired.

I had one more game scheduled for Sunday mid-day; Four players including me were there, ready to play The Laundry Files, but the GM didn’t show.
I checked next door, in case there’d been a mistake or a misprint, but no such ‘luck’.
Tickets got refunded, in full, but as far as I know there was no response to the attempts to contact the ‘Premier Event Group’ running it, so I have no idea what happened. Now that Gen Con has been over for a few days, might send a message their way, to see whether the GM got sick, or something went wrong with scheduling, or what?
Or whether the GM simply couldn’t be bothered, in which case they need to know that.

I got to talking with the other players, a couple from Portland, Oregon, and a guy from Las Vegas who was slightly startled to be the person who’d traveled the shortest distance to get there, as it’s not normally the case.
One of the Portlanders was starting to think that The Laundry Files is cursed; He’d tried to play last year, had a GM no-show, and they rounded up a substitute who really didn’t do a good job, which is understandable.

In hindsight, I should have taken up the offer from another GM in the room to play in her game (Lone Wolf, which I know nothing about), but I’d been looking forward to trying The Laundry Files, and I think I let that disappointment make the decision. I was already there to play something I’d never played before, which is pretty much what dropping into her Lone Wolf game would have been.
Oh well.