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;

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.