Urban Shadows again. This time I went for something about as far from ‘normal person’ as possible, and played a ghost. I feel like I got the game more this time, the idea of using the influence of your group, the trading of debts to get things done, that sort of thing
Urban Shadows is a game I’d heard of, but never played, and was down in the unfashionable “these will never come up” tail end of my event wishlist.
Well, it did, and after some misgivings during the game, I’m glad it did.
Urban Shadows is political urban fantasy, so there’s a lot going on with debts owed & owing, the power+influence of your circle/group, that sort of thing.
The Orc Stomp is a 5k allegedly fun run, which I, and a fair number of others, walk. I did it with Mini & Frank a few years back, found that I oddly enjoyed it, and so kept doing it; There’s a charity element, so I can pretend that it’s not completely about me, and because it’s exercise I can also pretend that it offsets some of the terrible dietary decisions I’m no doubt going to make, or may have already made, during the con.
Continue readingFirst up was Rapscallion; I’d never heard of this game prior to the event wishlist process, and I’m so very glad that I spotted it, because it was my standout game of the Con.
Looking at the various documentation I have for events, I must have spotted it while looking for things to fill it out the tail end of my wish list. Presumably I was looking through events by Magpie Games, or maybe games that were Powered By The Apocalypse or Forged In The Dark.
Went to the Newfields Art Museum with Tom, where there was a multimedia Van Gogh exhibition;
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Going against almost every packing habit of the last 5 years, most of my stuff is loosely/badly packed in the suitcase so that it’s not mostly empty & so that the British Snacks will have something to keep them from being bashed to fragments on the trip. The only things in the carry on are the “must travel with me” items & a change of clothes; You only need to have your luggage delayed once before you start doing that.
I’ve ridden the tube to find my terminal for tomorrow. The hotel I’m staying in isn’t in the grounds of the airport, but is extremely airport adjacent , and the tube run between here and the terminals is free. ( Airport terminal hotels were super expensive; the price of the tiny little windowless cabin I stayed in last time more than doubled )
I’ve managed to kick things off with a cold+sore throat combination, so that’s going to be fun. I have a reusable mask with me, so I’ll be at least trying to wear it on the flights, out of consideration for others.
This didn’t go well. I have stuff to do, and games I’m looking forward to, but … it didn’t go well.
Starting at the start, over the previous week or so, but mostly in the hours before wishlist submission, trying to come up with a suitable balance of events arranged to take advantage of the priority system. In my case, this means that my backups have backups.
See? All perfectly sensible.
The jury is out on what went wrong. At my end, I got the worst queue position I’d ever had, in the 9400’s. And then the Gen Con servers ran amazingly slowly, so it seems like something didn’t work as planned at their end; Maybe their load testing missed something, maybe whatever they’re using to scale up for demand just didn’t work right, or maybe they just dropped the ball.
I’m usually done with events after a few hours; My list this time didn’t even get processed until 2¾ hours after it was submitted.
Eventually, I was offered some event tickets which weren’t sold out. Threw back some duplicates, then spent maybe the next hour looking for games to fit into gaps in the schedule, and in the end came away with something I’m pretty happy with that doesn’t look like a trainwreck waiting to happen.
I tried to convince myself that I’d totally be able to do an 8am game, but in the end could not, because that’s insane and there’s no way I’d actually make it.
I’m still tweaking the schedule a bit in places, trying to get that balance between “that looks fun”, “do all the things”, and “downtime is important”.
Here’s how it looks;
Not 100 on how I’ll fill that gap on Saturday, but I’m sure something will come up.
All of the games are either in the JW Marriott ( it’s a convenient coincidence – I almost always stay there ) or in the Indiana Convention Centre ( over in the NE corner ). Fortunately, given the excessive heat warning issued for … well, Indiana … there are Skywalks & a whole lot of air conditioning.
