Chatting to the security lady last night while we waited for Lou from engineering, and the topic of lost property came up.

Apparently the thing that had them run ragged for Gen Con was the stuff people forgot in their rooms, which housekeeping then found, and which had to be collected by security.
Sometimes it was something simple, like a phone charger.
Other times, a game.
Sometimes, so many boxed games that they had to make multiple trips to transport it all.

Her guess was that it was maybe 80 cases on Sunday, and 80 on Monday. The JW has a shade over 1000 rooms, many of which were Gen-Conners, which makes it look like 15-20% of people left something behind.

I used the torch on my phone to check under the bed & chair after hearing about that.

How in the name of all that’s fuzzy do you forget a stack of full-size game boxes?

It’s 0511h, that’s the best I’ve got.

As a side note, the announcements here at the combined Greyhound/Amtrak station are hilariously incomprehensible. I picked out the last few sentences, but as for the rest, I quite honestly understood more of the announcements on the Dubai Metro, and those were in Arabic.

There were some late evening shenanigans, when the room safe failed to respond to button presses. I’ve had that before, but never when my passports were locked inside.

A nice security lady came by with the unlock device (I figured there has to be such a thing, and there was a wee port on the front) but couldn’t do anything because the thing didn’t do button presses. Then Lou from maintenance/engineering came by, removed the whole front of the lock, and swapped out the batteries. (It took 5 AAs) 

Packing up Big Red went well; Things just fitted.

A friend from Aylesbury had asked if I’d pick up some things for him, but with the pack … There was just no way I could fit any game box. I had the mass allowance, it was the volume that was the issue; Some of the items on the list were double-depth boxen, and … They’d have been brushing the sides of an empty Big Red.
Y’all saw that pile of swag, right?

One of the things I like about catching the trains in this area is that you quite often see folk who I’d call Amish. Might not be the right name, but you get the idea. They’re just waiting on a train in their traditional clothes, often with enormous cups of coffee.

After all of that traveling, it was only this morning that I realised that I can get the waistband of Big Red out of the way by fastening it around the bottom of the pack, for situations where I’ll not be wearing it for long enough to need to take the load off my shoulders.

Starting with the VIG Free Stuff, to give a sense of the scale of the thing;

OK, I say ‘free’.
In reality, I paid a lot more for my badge, so that I can guarantee a close-by hotel. The swag above & below is a part of that, so in one sense it’s free, because I didn’t buy or select it, but in another sense, I’ve paid for it.
Free Peanuts, not Free Beer.

Combined with the coffee urn in the VIG Lounge, that Mayfair Travel Mug thing was a lifesaver.

The gold Gen Con 50 die was part of the swag, the red Scotty’s die was a giveaway for eating there & ordering off the Gen Con menu.
I know folks who’ll eat there every day, just so that they get every day’s dice, as they are different colours. Me, I just can’t eat that many pickle chips.

Not sure what’s happening with the image rotations, but I can’t fix it on the phone, or at least on this  phone.

If this thing makes it back, in a soft-sided tramping pack, I’ll be amazed.

Probably the single most useful item I’ve ever had in a swag bag; 10,000 mAh power pack, solar and USB chargable, with two USB outputs and a lamp.

No idea.
Don’t know the game, but there wasn’t any kind of donation bucket, and I wondered what the die was like.

OK, on to the stuff I bought.

There’s a set of dice for each Gen Con, which makes a fun & useful souvenir.

Why yes, those are solid steel Fate dice.
And a solid steel D20 the size of a golf ball.

They were out of the Masks RPG when I found the booth, but I got the cards anyway; I can buy the book online.

Steven & Moni checked out on Monday morning, with half of the vendor hall, it seems.

I’m not 100% on this, but I think that’s a section of a Crystal Caste booth poking out from behind the suitcase.

Did brunch with a friend from Chicago, for whom this was her very firse Gen Con, so it was great fun hearing about all of the stuff she’d done & seen.
And then there was the eclipse.
Naturally, it was cloudy.

I’ve put up all of the photos I took, but selfie camera through filter glasses from a magazine slipcover that I filched from the Metropolitan Lounge in Chicago does not make for a great shot.
Could maybe have tried to use the main camera, with a bigger lens, but this is realistically a job for a solarscope, not a cellphone.

It took one of the other folks (I’d set up on a low wall at the entrance to White River Park, and various other folks wandered oer to join me; There were people outside the hotel across the road too, but the wall option meant that you could sit, and eclipses tke a while) to point out that it felt cooler as the eclipse happened. It never got darker than “Storm’s A-Comin’ “, but even with no clouds in the way, you couldn’t really feel the sun on your skin, and for the first time since I’d been there, the air didn’t feel hot and humid.

And to close this post out, I found the sketch I tried to do of a Cat wearing plate-mail.

I’m not good at drawing.

Badge-bling update.

Something I’ve been doing this con is to have permanent & temporary badge ribbons. The Sponsor, Ally, and Contessa one stay, because they’re importent. Other ones, I’ll stick on, then take off again when I don’t care anymore, so I had a Gen Con Unofficial Facebook Group ribbon for a bit, and then one from a games company.

Last game was Eclipse Phase, Fate edition; Transhumanist Horror.

Something I read years ago broke things down as;
Transumanism is about how technology will make the future better,
Cyberpunk is about how it won’t.

In the case of Eclipse Phase, it’s about how , in the future, we’ll be able to get into situations that are so much worse, and be able to do things that are so much dumber than what we already do.

I’ve not had a bad game this con, and this one was the idea one to end a con on; Great group, a whole lot of fun, a bunch of deeply screwed up characters.
Ended up chatting with the GM & one of the other players (waves) for a couple of hours after the game ended.

Trying to get a shot of that mirrored river surface; I think it worked.

We (Frank, Kevin, Amy, Steve, & Moni) went to a high-falutin’ steakhouse for dinner, on the occasion of Moni’s birthday.
It was really good food.

On the way back, cutting through the ICC, we could see the pack-up happening. 

Ended the evening (eventually) sitting around and nattering in the JW, until people started to zone out.

Firstly, a badge-bling update;

I had a game out on the field at LucasOil Stadium, which was a surprisingly comfy place to game. The space just eats up the surrounding noise, so it was only when a crowd nearby started yelling that you really noticed what a huge space you were in.

This one was a Masks game, so Teenage Superheroes. My first ever Powered By The Apocalypse game, so … it was new and interesting.
I think I’d want to try using it for a campaign; So much of the system is about the interactions and relationships between the characters, and that can’t really come out during a four-hour con game.

I pretty much grabbed the playbook in front of me and based the character on the image, because it’s a bad-ass image.
Does mean there was a moment of;
Other Player: Oh, so like Jessica Jones.
Me: Ahhh, Fuck.
Player Beside Me: Don’t worry, there are no original superhero ideas left at this point. 

Next up was a Cthulhu City/Trail Of Cthulhu game, which was horrible and awesome; Think ‘Dark City’ with a ‘The Cabin In The Woods’ ending.
The finale, which came down to ‘stop the ritual and leave the world as it is’ vs. ‘let it happen and remake the world’, essentially left it up to whoever walked through the door first. He got to poll the players & some NPCs, but it was his call.
He chose the status quo/Devil You Know option.

The GM had signed up to run the game by accident, as he normally did Night’s Black Agents games, so there were many disclaimers, and he was worried that he’d not done a good job.
I/We reassured him that, in fact, he’d run a fantasticly dark & creepy & opressive game.

I’d had tickets for another game on Saturday, running 2100-0100, but the shakes started to kick in at about hour four of the Cthulhu City game, which is a good signal for me that it’s time to get some sleep.
So I did.
Did try to return the ticket for Lori’s Midnight Game: Rocky Horror Gen Con Show, by going to where it was happening, but I couldn’t spot anyone who looked like they were running the show to give the ticket to.
No sense in them not getting credit, in the sense of “people came to this event”, for the game – As I understand it, that’s how Gen Con allocate resources for events needing more space, based on attendance in previous years.

Also an awful concert selfie from the TMBG concert on Thursday night.

In that the selfie is awful, not the concert.
The concert was awesome.
And I now have the They Might Be Giants cover of “Bills”, by (I think) Destiny’s Child, stuck in my head.
Alongs with some lines from ‘Dead’;
I will never say the word procrastinate again,
I’ll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed,  

This was at 9am or thereabouts. Vendor/Exhbit/Dealer hall won’t open for a full hour, but still they come, drawn to it, like Martian Invaders to the bloodstreams of Earthlings … Where’s this bit going?

Also, I beheld a beholder.

I then had to roll a football-sized D10 to see which eye I was hit by.

I got Charmed, which seems fair, because that’s an adorable outfit.

First game of the day was called The Infinity Project, using the Cypher System, which also crops up in Numenera/The Strange/Invisible Sun.

Bored Airmen & Airwomen (Is that how it works?) running an experiment find that the base is over-run with Power-Suit Wearing Nazis, Bigfoot(s), Lizard Men, and a Giant Carnivorous Plant.

As you can see, Angela kind of got the shit kicked out of her while battling Nazis & Lizard Men, but we won in the end.
Plus, after an initial bout of unpleasantness between us and the Bigfoot(s), they seemed to be OK, so we kind of left each other alone. Even helped them defeat the Lizard Men, but they then fell prey to the giant plant.
On the plus side, the Giant Plant ate a few Nazis, and we felt pretty good about that. 

Next, Monarchies of Mau, the adventure being Lord Krasmus Von Cheshire’s Priceless Beozar, where we were delving into a ruin in a strange foreign land, ruled by a creepily hairless cat, looking to recover the Beozar which was on Lord Krasmus when he died.
So, a quest for a hairball.

Did I mention that we’re playing anthropomorphic cats, in the ages after Man has gone away? I feel like that’s important.

Moni (& maybe Steve also?) had made up Gen Con 50 shirts.
To play it safe, she’d asked Gen Con whether it was OK to use their name on a shirt for non-commercial purposes. Mike, who is the guy next to me in the photo, said it was fine, OK’d the design, and said how much he liked it, so we got one made for him too.

… and in today’s QAGS game, it happened

Started out as a regular flying monkey, then took someone’s jetpack.

Let’s unpack that a little, shall we?

The game had us as a bunch of prisoners in Cadayland Super-Max.

• I was the Head Flying Monkey from the Wizard of Oz
• There was Wylie Coyote
• A Three-Foot Tall Gangster from some cartoon I don’t know
• The Evil Queen from Snow White
• Some sort of Atomic Fireball guy

Can’t remember who the other one was.

We all made our own characters – QAGS is good like that, it takes very little time to make a character.

Candyland came under attack, and in a Suicide Squad sort of way, we ended up saving the day. Even though we didn’t want to.
There were these exploding neck collars, see?
And only King Candy could disable them, because the Prison Warden was killed when someone attacked the prison. Turns out that attack was in order to kill us, but we didn’t know it at the time.

Long story short, we defeated the Nutrimancer and saved the day.
Anf then the Evil Queen poisoned King Candy and took over, because we all saw that one coming.

Oh, and swag happened.

Tried to do an unboxing video, or at least an unbagging one, but the travel phone just doesnt have enough memory. I’ll take some photos.

Took this picture mostly because I thought it was a nice image, 

… and this one because the flags lined up nicely.

Picked up my badge & assorted paraphernalia on Wednesday, around midday.

The colour stripe behind the badge is my ALLY badge ribbon from last year. In this situation, I suspect, it looks more like CLOSETED.

The folks who do those ribbons (Tabletop Gamers) had a last-minute fundraising campaign, after their sponsor had to drop out, and raised 200% funding in about 48 hours. I’d thrown in some money, so I went along to an event they’d be at, to get my  SPONSOR badge ribbon.

They’d offered to post them out, but being in the UK, I told them to save their money.

It turns out that Jeff, who organised it, had saved the mail out thingy anyway;