There are things which didn’t make it into the various daily posts, mostly because I forgot, so I’m putting them here.

1. On Gen Con Sunday, in the lobby of the Westin, we were set up in a spot under the escalators. Other folks were scattered all over the place, often playing with, or at least examining, their new games.
   Someone going up the escalator leaned over, saw people checking out the Firefly game “Shiny Dice”, and called down to ask what they thought of it. The player’s reactions were to look around in an increasingly startled manner, until they looked up, because from their point of view the disembodied voice of God had just talked to them and solicited their opinion on a TV tie-in dice game.
2. Also that night, at the end of the meal, I may have agreed to do the Ork Stomp 5k with Moni, and possibly Frank, in 2016.
   Steven wisely chose to be unwell, which seem suspiciously convenient in retrospect.
   The plan as I remember it did not involve running the thing, just walking it, and may have happened over Baked Alaska, for added irony.
3. On Post-Gen Con Monday (OK, how the hell do you hyphenate that? It looks wrong) I found a flyer for a system I’d heard of, but knew nothing about, so I photographed it.
   

   SixCess flyer

   

   SixCess flyer, other side

    

4. There was also this one, which I’m mostly posting for the artwork.
   

   Nefarious flyer

    

5. While wandering around Las Vegas in the easily-connected hotels, I found a punne, or play on words.
   

   In the Shoppes at Mandalay Bay

    

6. There was also this poster for the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay.
   

All Dead Inside

There was some form of scheme for meeting SM&F on Monday morning, with the intention of having breakfast together before Steve & Moni had to drive back to the frozen North, a.k.a. Chicago, but it has left no traces on the text message history on my phone, so it’s just possible that we arranged it in person & by speaking directly to each other, like savages.

The plan hit some snags when there were no signs of life in Steve & Moni’s room, and it was only when the hotel desk called up that they were shown to still be alive, if very unwell & trying to sleep it off in Steve’s case.
There’s a chance he got the same thing Stacy did yesterday, which we don’t yet have a fun name for; I’m leaning towards G. Coli, but that’s not as immediately obvious as “H1Nerd1” or “The South Asian Nerd Flu” which hit a convention a few years ago.

Undeterred, Frank & I asked the concierge for a breakfast recommendation, and ended up at Cafe Patachou.

Cafe Patachou – East Nor-East of the Westin, and worth a visit

They had, among other things, big-ass omelettes of a nice, if hard to finish on account of size, nature, and a coffee dispensary inside with both a mug tower (an example of the contents is seen above) and takeaway options for that last cup.

I do find it interesting to see how different places, and sometimes different servers, deal with the endless coffee refill situation.
Some orbit with a coffee pot, some, like Patachou, have a station & let you do it yourself, and some, like the JW most of the time, put an insulated coffee pot on your table, and let you figure the rest out yourself.
While on that topic; Drink refills of soft drinks was a little surprising, but most welcome. Fry refills at Johnny Rockets was a baffling concept to me.

And You, You Were Acting Like It Was The End Of The Con

Back at the Westin, Steve had recovered, or Moni had re-animated him using dark necromantic arts and the contents of the complementary soaps & shampoos in the bathroom (and if that was the case, well done Moni – Very convincing), so we ambled through the mostly-empty ICC to visit Bee Coffee one last time.
We nattered with the staff, found out a lot about Who’s Yer Con, got a branded D6 for some reason possibly related to them not having given them all away, and us being there, and generally did the ‘winding-down & saying goodbye’ thing.

Walking back through the ICC, where move-in move-out was in full swing, we got to chatting about Big Red Couch business cards & badge ribbons, and Moni had some suggestions concerning the making of very custom cards which I’ll need to follow up on once I’m back in NZ.

Back at the Westin Frank divided up all of the swag he’d been given into keep & give away, with some of the latter going to Steve & Moni, and some just … Actually, I have no clue where it was going.
This did remind me of what I’d seen in a rubbish bin at the JW that morning.

Caffeinated Beverages and Boardgames gutted to save space and weight; Gamer Droppings

I didn’t ferret through, but I’m guessing that those are boxes which have been emptied of the contents, boards, etc, to save on volume & weight. I hope it doesn’t come to that with my own luggage, but this this in particular is a heavy-ass space-killer;

If it comes to it, rather than gut the contents, I’m more likely to open the box & store extra things in there

Expelling The Unclean One

Steve & Moni left, successfully and without the need for a CDC quarantine, which was a load off my mind after watching season one of The Strain.

Frank drove them to where they’d left their car, so as to avoid the $40/day valet parking fee, and I wandered back to the JW to pack my bag.
Was not looking forward to that.

Got It Second Time

Having pinched some ice bags from the hotel lobby to put dirty laundry in, so that I could use it as packing material, my first run of suitcase-packing was roughly a half-kilo over; I say roughly because I couldn’t hold the scale steady enough for it to stabilise on a reading.
Run two was just round one with the Dresden Files book taken out & put in carry-on, and that put it nicely under the line.

Closing It Down

Frank came back into town a few hours later, and we grabbed some dinner, chatted, then sat in the bar at the JW & just hung out for a while.
We ended up talking to one of the folks looking to set up high-end experiences at conventions, and apparently their launch/awareness-raising events went well.

I’m still conflicted about that business idea.
Their statement that “You wouldn’t need a con badge at all” makes me wonder what the point of coming to the con would be, and I can’t see the market for the services they were suggesting (someone to go get your Dealer Hall stuff for you, a hot shave, getting Gen Con Exclusives direct from the manufacturer) having that much of a market.
I’m also very uncomfortable with what looks to be a parasitic business model, letting Gen Con bring in folks, then creaming off the top half-percent or so of the cashed-up gamer crowd.

My friend Chris is of the mind that they will have done the numbers well, and are by no means uninformed or naïve, and I hope he’s right, because I can’t see that big a market for this.
Then again, what the hell do I know? I use the VIG programme to ensure that I get a hotel, with Early Access and the VIG Lounge, with it’s chairs & drinks, as medium-range ties for second place.

Dealing With The Swag

I had two years worth of VIG Swag to deal with, far more than could be fitted into my suitcase, so a ruthless culling process had to happen.
My first year at Gen Con I brought almost all of the swag home, which required an extra bag, and was a mistake.
This time around, I went with a strict “Can I Use This” system, and it just worked, so I then had to get rid of the unwanted swag; In past years (well, 2013) they’d had a donation bin in the VIG Lounge, but they weren’t doing that this time around.
I figured that I’d drag the extra swag around, let people pick over it, then pile the rest on a table somewhere in the ICC with a “Free To A Good Home” sign on it and walk away.

Fortunately for me, when I met up with Tom, Stacy, and Kevin in the Hyatt for breakfast, Kevin was happy to take on the whole lot, minus the satchel which Stacy wanted. (I’d already grabbed the 2014 satchel, because it was awesome, and has a pocket just the right size for Pangur Ban, my laptop/tablet)

Before hitting the Hyatt, I passed through the VIG Lounge for a coffee, some water, and the very last of the Swag, a card game named “R”, translated from Japanese;

As far as I can tell, this game has nothing to do with pirates

In The Hall, and Out To Lunch

The GM in the “Paging Dr. Dinosaur” game had been using Fate Coins as fate point markers, and they had a nice heft to them, so I bought a couple more sets, because … I have poor sales resistance to shiny things.

Sometime in the hall I met up with the Lewis Family, who were down from Michigan for the day.
I was able to inflict NZ chocolate on them (going to have to remember the NZ chocolate thing for next year), and we caught up briefly, then met a bit later for lunch at The Ram, for a somewhat longer catch-up.

It feels like there should be more written there, but it’s hard to sum up beyond “we had the sort of conversation where you re-establish a friendship after a couple of years, and also eat Nachos”.

Back To The Hall, For A Desperate Last Gasp Of Commerce

Well, it might have been a desperate last gasp of commerce if I’d bought anything, but, …, I didn’t.
This did not, however, mean that I walked away empty-handed; Such is the power of the last hours of the last day.

Almost immediately after saying goodbye to the Lewis’ (How do you pluralise that?), I spotted this;

Did not get a chance to try this, and know nothing about it. Looks like it might be a “Build The Map” game

The poster next to it is for the “Archer” game, but despite having recently discovered that said show now grabs me, … , I’m not sure I want to know how the board game might work.

Sometime in here I found that Tom, Kevin, & Stacy had had to leave suddenly; She’d fallen ill, and they’d had to go.
I’d planned to go find them and say Goodbye, but … Such is life; I’d said a preliminary farewell in the Hall earlier.

I also found this, over towards the Entrepreneurs Area of the hall, and I can’t tell if it’s Strangely Meta, Incredibly Literal, or Both;

Deck Building: The Deck Building Game

Unexpected Things

I decided that, since I had maybe an hour before the Hall closed, I would go to the very back corner, aisle 30 or 31, in an area which hadn’t been opened up the last time I was at Gen Con, and was designated as the Entrepreneur Avenue, where all of the future Wizards of the Coast, TSRs, White Wolves, and Fantasy Flights were hanging out.

Somewhere along the line I’d heard that there were three New Zealanders at Gen Con; One of them I’m pretty sure of, another was Norman, but I had no idea who number three was until I found a booth with a little tray of NZ snacks (so I’m not the only one to think of that, though I didn’t consider the Cookie Time range) with an invitation to try them.
I enquired, and after an initial bout of confusion over whether I was asking about the snacks or the product, I was told that NZer number three was this guy, who wasn’t there at the moment;

I’ve not yet checked out the product/service, so you now know as much as I do

The booth seemed to be one of those shared-booth sort of things (like the one in which I saw Flatpack a couple of years ago, but without the Angel Of Death sitting at the back poisoning everyone’s sales), and the guy I’d been talking to (Tom) did a very quick demo of his game, Pics & Circumstance.

It’s similar in play, I’m told, to Cards Against Humanity, and involves one player relaying the whim of the Glorious Leader by playing a card, and the other playing pictures to represent their solution to the problem, then justifying it.
I feel that my suggestion of Tanks & Landmines as a way to make golf more interesting indicates that I have understood the concept, and the game designer did not seem displeased by my approach. In fact, he said “You’re gonna be great at this”, but he was trying to sell me on a game.

They have a kickstarter on the go right now, which I’m linking here; Pics and Circumstance, by Tom and Pete Games

They have a kickstarter, and a somewhat un-nerving logo

In a thoroughly unexpected event, he gave me one of the Demo decks, and offered me another if I promised to get it into the hands of someone who’d play it a lot. I declined, because I couldn’t promise that, but I did promise to get various game-playing types to, as it were, give it a crack.

Pics & Circumstance Demo Deck

On the way out of the hall, I passed by a booth selling miniatures-painting supplies, specifically paintbrushes; I’d seen some advertising for these as part of the lead-up to Gen Con, but hadn’t paid much attention at the time, so I stopped to take a look, and ended up talking to one of the folks behind the counter, who turned out to be the product creator/designer.

Games and Gears

Chatted with him for a little while about how the con had been (He arrived with 4 suitcases full of stock, and was down to half a case), and about a silicone-tipped brush, which it turns out is good for fine linework because it won’t splay on contact & won’t take up a lot of paint, so it’s just what’s on the surface.
Add to that the fact that the brushes were set up to be travel brushes, so the end of the brush came off and was a cover, and I was very impressed, and told him so.

So he gave me one.

Brush deployed, and ready to be used

Brush in Travel Mode – There is a little vent hole in the cap

Quoth The Raven, Take A Nap

With the closing of the Hall, I ambled back to my room, put away the surprise swag, and took a nap. It was everything I thought it could be.

Some time later I got a text about plans for the evening, so ambled over to the Westin, where Steve, Frank, & Moni were playing Nevermore, a card game involving Ravens, though not eyeballs, which is sad for the ravens.
It was interesting, though tricky to summarise, as Steve demonstrated while trying to explain the rules; Works better, it seems, to just plow right in and sort it out as you go.

I did take Pics & Circumstance, but Nevermore was already set up, and it has a lot of bits.
Plus there were SEKRIT PLANS for the evening, involving dinner at a fancy-ass seafood restaurant for Moni’s Birthday.

The restaurant was the seafood equivalent of a high-end steakhouse, and had things like oysters, & fish I’d never heard of.
Not being much of a seafood fan, … It was OK. Wasn’t blown away by my meal, but everyone else seemed to be enjoying theirs, and being able to try Key Lime Pie for dessert definitely kicked things back into the ‘enjoyable’ category.

Steve was feeling increasingly unwell over the course of the evening, which made me wonder about the wisdom of having a dozen chunks of snot on the half-shell oysters, and by the end was looking bad enough that Frank fetched his car and gave him a ride back to his hotel.

Hickman’s Killer Breakfast

This is an event where Tracy Hickman kills the entire audience in a two-hour improv exercise, where the only thing that’ll keep you alive is being entertaining or a technical problem. Or both in our case.
By chance, Frank & I had come up with a riff on people scouting for locations for pub/inn franchises, he for the Prancing Pony, and me for the Beige Chupacabra. This tied in nicely with the wholesale destruction that had happened with some previous people, and also with a Dalek fixated on renovation while the rest of the Daleks concentrated on destruction, so we could riff on cheap land just crying out for development.

We still didn’t last long.

Trail of Cthulhu

I’d thought at first that this was a western, based on the name, but when it came time to choose events, back in May, I looked it up and found that it’s an investigation game.

We had a good group (only four players), and were investigating the theft of the 200-year-old diary of a necromancer.
Of course someone had used it, of course there were ghouls, and of course we ran away. We just did it after grabbing the book.

The system is, as I understand it, based on Gumshoe, and I went to have a look at the book a bit later in the day.
It’s interesting, and I think I understand the basic idea, but I’d want to learn some more, and the book wasn’t $40 + sales tax worth of interesting. It’s probably ‘get the PDF’ interesting though.

Admin, of a sort, and the visiting Dealer Hall for only the second time

I had a ticket for a Fate Accelerated game on Sunday, but by mid-Saturday I was starting to feel like I’d been racing around the entire time. I hadn’t, but that’s what it felt like. I decided that I wanted a day without events, or at least scheduled events, so I refunded the ticket to clear the last day of Gen Con.
This turned out to be a good idea.

While on my way to the Dealer Hall (for only the second time – I’d been there for maybe an hour during VIG Early Access, minus the time taken for the long-ass line to file in, plus the time taken to let the Nerdrush in so that the doors were clear enough to get out) I passed by Norman in the hallways.
There’s no great story here, other than “Hey, I Saw Norman”.

In the hall, I spotted & visited the Pinnacle Entertainment booth, probably after visiting the … I’ve forgotten the company, but they publish Trail of Cthulhu.
Anyway, I asked one of the staffers whether the Explorers Edition had the same content as the Big Hardback Edition, and they confirmed that it did. It’s cheaper, which is no bad thing, but what I was mostly after was smaller. I decided to buy it, and the staffer checked my name, then opened & signed the book, as he was the one who wrote it.
Thus, I got to briefly chat with Shane Hensley, who also wrote the Deadlands system, which I had some fun running many years ago, and is what Savage Worlds developed out of, and thank h, im for writing it. My own little fanboy moment.

Paging Dr. Dinosaur

I made this comment somewhere, so I’m repeating it;

“It was by far the best event of the Con, and a perfect one to end on. Fantastic group, fantastic GM, stupid dinosaur.”

At the end of this, I have a much better idea of how to make this game work. It started with an incongruous event, we had a brainstorm about it, and all of the time-travelling Soviets from a secret Mars base, present & future Doctors Dinosaur, the Futuresaurus Rex, and massive property damage all spun out from that.

Going into more exhaustive detail, the game started with Soviet operatives in 50’s spacesuits with bubble helmets, wielding psychic powers, attacking Tesla Island.
(I arrived last, so got to play Atomic Robo, because nobody else wanted to)
After an initial fraças, they vanished, and we then used the Brainstorm mechanic of the system to work out, because we are all top-notch Action Scientists, what had happened/was happening. A heavily armed visit to Dr. Dinosaur’s lair to try to persuade him to help, if only to stop other people from using his advanced crystal technology, ended with the realisation that time-travel was possible, and that we’d just confirmed it for him, at which point Future Dr. Dinosaur appeared with the Soviet Psychics & attacked.

Defeated him & them by erasing the whiteboard with the working formula on it (they all vanished), and then set a trap to catch Future Dr. Dinosaur, who turned up as expected, but with a surprise Armoured & Be-Weaponed T-Rex, which promptly stomped me/Robo through the floor, so I spent the rest of the fight attacking said Futuresaurus from the floor below. This included standing on a desk holding it’s ankle to pivot the creature to a prone position, and jumping from desk to desk to office chair in an attempt to keep it that way, at least until the floor(s) collapsed and buried me.

This being ARRPG/Fate, being buried doesn’t actually stop you from helping, or at least spending Fate Points on other PCs and helping out in other ways (BEHOLD OUR MAMMALIAN SUPERIORITY!!), and by the time the coup de grace was set up, the player who’d gone racing off to find a freezing unit (we couldn’t kill present Dr. Dinosaur, because the presence of his future self proved that it wouldn’t work, and for some reason we decided that putting future Dr. Dinosaur on ice was a good idea. I’m not sure why) had +19 before spending a point.
He was successful.

Having played in that session, where the players all clicked as a group, riffed on and supported each other’s ‘bits’, has given me a much better idea of how to run this game, & what I did wrong before.
I should have left things more unplanned, shouldn’t have pinned down the whole backstory/plot, and let/forced the players to investigate & decide upon what is happening.
Looking forward to trying that.

Dinner

Atomic Robo ran 8pm-Midnight, so I wandered back to the JW & grabbed a very late dinner.
Frank texted me sometime during this, and wandered over to hang out over dinner. He’d not planned to eat anything, but then tried a cheese fry, and then wanted some of his own.

This is kind of how things go at Gen Con, for me at least, and it’s why I want to learn enough Ruby on Rails to make a way to make finding people easier. Texting folks works OK, whether it’s “Are You Still Awake, And Interested In Hanging Out?”, “I Just Finished A Game; Anyone Want To Get Lunch?”, or even “My Event Finishes At 5pm, Anyone Want To Get Dinner Sometime After That?”, but something where you could see what people were doing, and what they’ll be doing in a little while, at a glance & all at once, would be a useful thing.
Well, useful to me, at least.

The initial plan was to do a post every day.
Clearly, this did not survive second contact with the enemy Gen Con, but I did keep notes, so here’s me turning them into something more readable.

Friday

Late on Thursday night, the idea of getting breakfast was suggested by Frank, when I passed by He & Steve & Moni (amd probably Mac) playing a game on a big touch-screen game table in the JW lobby.
This seemed like a fine plan, so we met in the lobby a bit after 8, waited a bit for a table, and had a lot of breakfast.
~urp~

My first game of the day was an Atomic Robo RPG, run by Mike Olson.
When I showed up, I thought I was the last one there, but it turns out that all of the other players were folks with generics who were hoping that there would be cancellations; I was the first actual ticket-holder to show.
(The way it works at Gen Con is that you can buy a ticket to a specific event at a specific time, or you can buy a Generic ticket, good for any event at any time. Specific trumps Generic, but if a player doesn’t turn up, or turns up too late, you can get in)
Me being the last to arrive gave the Generic-holders hope that maybe, somehow, four people with actual tickets weren’t going to show.
False hope, as it happens; They arrived as a group of four, and I saw the same group at later games, which makes me assume they were doing most of their games together. Don’t 100% understand that approach myself, though if they’re friends who don’t have a regular group and this is their chance to play together, maybe that makes sense?

Odin Ortega, of Majestic 12’s Paranormal Sensory Initiative

The game was a Majestic 12 game using ARRPG, so “Shadowy Government Agency Trying To Keep Weird Tesliana Under Wraps” was the order of the day.
I get the idea that there’s a sourcebook or expansion in the works, as there were some new systems in play at the start of the game, one of which utterly baffled me;
After the initial “here’s the problem”, there was a thing involving intel which had come to light which will complicate things, and for some reason I was just not getting the idea, so the GM was bouncing back all of my suggestions, which made me kind of concerned as to what the next 4 hours were going to be like. Fortunately, another player had a suggestion which did work (Guarded By Somali Pirates – One of the others was Lava Moat, which was interesting given that the target was a freighter), and things improved when we got to the requisitioning of special equipment, and how other people help to make that happen. (We ‘borrowed’ a wildly experimental mood destabiliser from Delphi, an offshoot of the Soviet Psychic Warfare programme, by posing as third parties willing to test & report back on the device)
Once in-game, things went fine. System worked, game was fun, mood destabiliser was used to attack the pilots of a remote-operated combat bot, who promptly got affected by insatiable greed, ignored us, and looted the freighter. (We’d been suggesting random emotions, but the GM wisely discarded many of them; “Lust” would have been entertainingly awful)

Next up was a QAGS game, run by the very entertaining Josh, of the Monkeys Took My Jetpack and Porcelain Llama Theatre podcasts, and indeed of Hex Games, who publish QAGS.
One player, sadly sitting right beside me, had no inside voice, and chose to portray his character by speaking even louder & dropping semi-random comments into the conversation/game. It got old fast, and I suspect it wasn’t just me who thought that, based on the number of times he’d say something over the top of everyone, there’d be a pause, and then folks would just carry on where they left off. He’d randomly rolled the character’s gender, got ‘female’, and then periodically proclaimed that he was androgynous for the rest of the game.

Aside from Ensign Shoutypants, and that only some of the time, it was a good fun game.
In grand 50’s Cold War Sci-Fi style, we travelled to the mysterious planet directly on the other side of the sun from Earth, to see what had happened to the first expedition, and crashed, just like they did. We battled strange creatures, rescued the disembodied still-alive head-in-a-jar which was all that was left of the previous mission’s scientist, infiltrated the citadel of newly-Communist War Apes,  and destroyed the strange Vril-powered device the Soviets were using to transport themselves here.
In a moment that I found amusing, the NZer was the one who spent a yum-yum to ensure that we’d saved the American flag from the crashed ship. Where Is Your Patriotism, American Gamers?!

I’d dragged along a bag of the Whittaker’s L&P chocolate, so offered it around, and people seemed to like it, including the GM; Got an extra yum-yum out of that, and gave him some for the road.

Post-gaming, I caught up with Tom, Stacy, & Tom’s friend Kevin, and we wandered out to a pizzeria/bar for dinner, followed by ambling back to the hotel to natter about things. Also, they tried strange New Zealand Chocolate;

Kevin, Tom, & Stacy try a crunchie bar

So far, NZ chocolate is going down well as an experience.
The pineapple lumps and L&P chocolate rated highest on the “what the hell is this?” scale; There are, it seems, things a bit similar to the crunchie bar out there.
Incidentally, does anyone know how they make the Hokey-Pokey stuff? I’m guessing it involves a mass of hot honey-based mixture, and something in the bicarbonate of soda line, or something similar, to foam it up.

And, because it’s an icon of … something … New Zealand Confection Advertising Nostalgia maybe? … Here’s a very grainy version of a classic NZ Advert; Crunchie Bar Train Robbery

Found a better version: Crunchie Bar Train Robbery

Long Lines

In previous years I joined the line for VIG Early Access to the Dealer/Exhibit Hall early, to try to get a decent place.
This year, based on some faulty assumptions, I decided that I could just join the end of the line a bit before the 9am start, and not have to stand in line so long.

Had a brain-fade and joined said line at maybe 20 to 9; It stretched a long way at that point, all the way down a corridor and back.
As an indication of how long the line was, here are a couple of texts I sent;

Once the line started moving, it did so pretty quickly, and I got to chat to the guy behind me, who is the proprietor of a boardgame café in Thailand;

LanLaLen Boardgame Cafe, in Nakhonpathom, Thailand

Once in the hall,  things went pretty well.
Found my first target/booth/destination, which effortlessly removed $100 from my wallet; They were quite pleasant.

The folks at Campaign Coins remembered me, as did the proprietor at Indie Press Revolution, which is kind of nice.

Big Crowds

I tried to get video of the crowds rushing into the Dealer Hall when they open up to the plebeian masses non-VIG’s at 10am, but … It just didn’t capture the whole “Flood Of Humanity” thing.

They flooded in, and a steady torrent, for maybe ten minutes.
Even after the flow slowed, it was still difficult to make your way against the stream, and often required that you find a calm spot, protected from the current, until there’s a temporary gap which will allow you to grab a few metres of forward motion, making it into the lee of the next Booth/Stand/Rubbish Bin.

A Visit From The Swag Fairy

The content of said swag is is covered in a different post, over here.

I ended up sitting at a table chatting to a group from New Jersey, who were all sharing a VIG Badge + Companion Badges arrangement, and were running an NFL-style draft pick system for the swag, which was fun to watch.
As a bonus, one of them actually played Yu-Gi-Oh!, so I was able to get rid of the pack from the 2014 swag by giving it to him; I dropped it off at his hotel, which made the whole thing very easy.

Cremefillians

First up was a Low Life game, a “Spork & Sorcery” game using Savage Worlds, described a bit better in this post.

It’s interesting, but probably not my sort of game.
The scenario didn’t quite work; “Go investigate this thing” has the trouble that, particularly in a kind of silly game, it’s hard to know when you’ve found what you were supposed to find.
A GM who is clearly more interested in his setting than in using the system is fine (he offered to go fully narrative, but at least one of the players wanted to try the Savage Worlds system), but combine this with disorganised character sheets & a GM who held some of the important information in his head, and it got a little frustrating.

On the plus side, I got to play a Cremefillian, an creature descended from a Twinkie.

No Inspectres

There was supposed to be an Inspectres game, but something went wrong.

I turned up late because Low Life ran overtime, and was further delayed by the escalators at the JW being out, and then by going the wrong way at the Marriott next door, having assumed that a corridor was a loop.
It was not, so I had to backtrack.

There were two people plus the GM when I got there, and they had been getting worried that they were it, but with me turning up things were looking like the other players had also been delayed, but when I got back from filling a water bottle, they’d realised that we three were going to be the only players. The GM felt that it would run really badly with three, and a call by the other guys to some friends led nowhere, so the game was called off.

The other two players were going to come back the next day, to try to get into another session, but that didn’t work for my timetable, so the Former Inspectres GM & I went to a LARP-ish session of “It Came From The Late Late Late Show” where they only had four players, and were suffering as a result.

The Late Late Late Show

They called this a One Camera LARP, because it was in one room, with one scene happening at a time.
There were character sheets, but we didn’t use them, and the thing was pretty free-form.

I was playing the James Dean-inspired high school bad boy who, along with five others, had just been given only a few hours to get the Principal’s signature on a scholarship application. Said principal had not been seen at the school in some time, so after a brief attempt to forge his signature, we went to look for him.

At his house, we discovered that;

1. His house was a creepy Victorian Mansion
2. He was hanging upside down over a crocodile pit, thanks to a trap he’d been testing
3. He’s a mad scientist or villain of some sort
4. It’s possible to rip out wrought-iron gates with a truck & trick-shot them into a basement through the open front doors so that you can use them to cover the pit when you lower a trapped person to safety, provided that you’re relaxed about property damage
5. He wouldn’t sign the Community Service requirement section unless we foiled the caper planned by another Evil Mastermind

A short trip to Chicago & the ‘rental’ of a boat got us to the Evil Mastermind’s lair, carved into a hitherto-unknown volcano in Lake Michigan, and my faith in the destructive potential of what had previously been thought of as the ‘brains’ part of the team (as distinct from myself & the redneck with the pickup truck) was restored when their solution to ‘how do we use a torpedo from that submarine over there to blow open that door’ was to play with the ballast to raise the bow, bore-sight it, and direct fire a torpedo into the door.

After some running, and capture, and escape, we discovered that the caper was to steal Mt. Rushmore using Zeppelins.
Naturally, in order to stop this, we had to saddle up the mutant flying squirrels found behind the “In Case Of Emergency” hatch, fly to Dakota (not sure which one), and attack the airships with anything flammable.

Basically, our community service was to save an American Icon.

Intermission

Somewhere in here I wandered over to drop off Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, chatted with Tom in the VIG lounge, and we both caught up with Chris, who we’d met in that self-same lounge in 2012. Chris had been wondering where all the people he recognised had gone, and thus was happy to see us.
It’s all a bit hazy in the timeline department, and I cannot help but think that 8 hours of gaming in a row is too much for sanity.

Sometime after that, I wandered back to the JW & got some dinner.
I was going to head for bed, a bit after midnight, when, …

Bee Coffee

Frank texted me from Bee Coffee (coffee place opposite the convention centre who get right into Gen Con), where he was waiting to walk someone to her car at the end of her shift, wondering if I wanted a coffee.

I wandered over, we chatted for a bit, and then walked one of the baristas to her car, which was a hell of a long way away through some frankly dodgy areas. Apparently they’d been offered free car parking for their late opening nights during Gen Con, but it was not what you’d call ‘convenient’.
Or salubrious. Or an area you’d want to be walking through alone at night.

Put it this way; I was glad of the company on the walk back.

“Hey, Cool Shirt”, and Pallet trucks on carpet kind of suck
Before I made it into the central bit of Gen Con at the ICC (which I think of everything East of the Crossroads Concourse), one of the proprietors of Off World Designs spotted my LonCon3 shirt, so we did the whole Good Luck For The Con/Hope You Enjoy Yourself thing. (Off World Designs do shirts and other merchandise for a huge number of cons, so their stuff, & they, get around)
Shortly afterwards, while ambling around before the VIG lounge opened, I passed someone from Upper Deck heading in the other direction with a big-ass pallet of boxes on one of those unpowered pallet truck things.
A short while later I passed him again, he’d not made it that much further, so offered to help.

Did I mention that those things suck on carpet?
It’s very hard to gain, or keep, momentum, so we went with a process of taking one half of the handle each, leaning into it, and going full steam ahead. It worked, though a few calls of “We’re not stopping” were needed, and we did end up on a collision course with the previously mentioned Off Worlds person; Fortunately, she seemed to understand the need for constant forward movement, and dodged.

We achieved our objective.

Catching up with Tom & Stacy, and general hanging out
Ran into Tom & Stacy in one of the hamster tubes (didn’t have the pallet truck by this point; we couldn’t have got it up the escalator anyway), and after a brief diversion to get water, sat & talked until the urge to wander past the VIG Lounge got too strong, so we did, even though it didn’t open until noon.
Except they’d organised themselves faster than expected, possibly due to lack of Swag Bags, so they’d opened at 10-ish.

Sadly, they had no furniture beyond the various desks, so after sorting out our stuff on the floor, I dropped off my stuff at the JW & we sat in the lobby for a while, until the hear & tiredness required naps, or at least even more air-con.

Meeting Frank, getting lunch
Some time later I met up with Frank, mostly by accident, so we ambled off to the foodcourt to hunt down a food.
(sometime in there I was able to identify a My Little Pony costume he’d seen as Rainbow Dash, making it about 20% cooler than other costumes)
Steve & Monica showed up sometime between ordering & food, followed some time later by someone whose name I’ve forgotten, who has something to do with a promotional event happening at the Indianapolis Zoo. As a note, the phrase “Everything’s Open” when referring to a zoo makes people like me think that there will be events like “Can gamers outrun lions?” and “Roll to dodge monkey poo”.

Hitting The Stink
I was able to try Vegemite Chocolate, thanks to the GenCon U.N. folks.

Yeah. That’s a thing I have now done. Crossed off the list.

The Stink was kind of loud. They went with a Hunger Games theme with this one, which meant frequent announcements about which randomly-assigned District had been eliminated.
This is something I’ve often found amusing/annoying about geek social events; There’s the stated plan to set up an event where people can meet, talk, play games, etc., and then the environment is such that every ten minutes or so, all of that is interrupted so that you can listen to someone you’re not talking to & can’t see.

Post-Stink
Tom & Stacy & I wandered off to get dinner, which is pretty easy with a mall foodcourt nearby.

Post-dinner, and after some rambling & wrangling with air conditioning systems, Tom & I ended up back in the JW Lobby, up on the third level, going through the coupon book to see what looked interesting, and where the various booths we wanted to visit could be found.
In my case this was “Scattered From One End Of The Hall To The Other”, but this worked out OK, as I had a pretty short list of must-visits, and on the day I’d already spent $100 before I needed to look at the wee map to figure out where to go next.

Sometime before the JW, we were looking in the display cases outside the dealer hall, and I noticed something called Mysterium.
I know almost nothing about it, other than that the cards & game pieces on display were very pretty, so I may need to take a closer look.
Yes, actually, I am that shallow with my potential purchases.
(that said, the pieces & cards I found on a quick web-search don’t look quite the same, so maybe what’s there is a deluxe version, or something prettied-up for display)

I started today with some plans to go and do tourist things, but a walk to find the CVS demonstrated just what I was in for.
I did do a lap of the State Capitol building, to see whether I could spot a sign for tours of the building (according to the website they do happen), but couldn’t spot one, and the heat & humidity were getting pretty bad, so I inhaled a litre of water & retreated back to the land of air-con.
Naturally, I wandered through the ICC, to see what had changed. Quite a lot more signage, and a number of the company-specific rooms were being set up

Wall Hanging at Gen Con 2015, possibly having to do with Ortus Regni. (which I have probably spelled wrong)

I’m not really sure what this is about, but it looks Very Piratical

Coming from a bitterly cold Auckland winter into an impressively, oppressively hot Indiana summer, combined with jet-lag, is doing an excellent job of kicking my ass for me. 🙂

Sometime in the afternoon Steven & Monica got in from Chicago (or maybe Chicago-ish?), so we met up in the lobby of their hotel, where they presented me with a bag of the stuff from last year’s VIG swag bag.

2014 VIG Swag-Bag Contents

Frank turned up after work, and after a shuffling of cars out to the suburbs so that Steve & Moni weren’t paying $40 a day for hotel parking, we went to dinner at Bonefish in … some suburb. I have no idea where it is.
“Indianapolis somewhere” is my best guess.

It was a good night, and involved birthday cake (Monica had a birthday).

There’s not really a lot more to be said about the evening; We were joined by Mac (who is the chap who got my VIG badge last year), and later Kevin (who is a friend of Frank’s).
I’m not 100% sure when the evening broke up, but I think I got back to the hotel a bit after 11pm.