Con Report: Genghis Con XXXII

February 17-20 was GenghisCon here in the Denver area. I had a blast with Vern and CaLeigh there. I will break it down by day then talk about Con Jr.

Thursday:

I went solo Thursday, and I decided to beat traffic and get to the hotel early--about 3:00, I think. There was nothing going on yet. I saw a guy sitting, looking like a gamer. (I don't know exactly what that means. It's certainly profiling, but I was dead on.) I asked him where everything was, and he told me I couldn't really do anything till 5:00. I then ran into Leif Olson, the con organizer, and he basically said the same thing.

Then I saw a guy who was walking by, and he looked vaguely familiar. It turned out to be Ross Watson, of Fantasy Flight Games, whom I've never met in person, but I'd seen his picture. He's been on TGTT a couple times, so I introduced myself. Then I realized Ross was on his way to meet the gamer guy I asked for directions. It turns out he was Michael Surbrook, Hero Games contributor and author of the excellent Kazei 5, an unabashedly '80s-inspired, Anime Cyberpunk setting for Hero. Michael has never been on the show, but he almost was twice. So we had at least emailed before. Soon, we were joined by Bill Keyes, who's done layout work for Hero and BlackWyrm Publishing. Several local friends came by over the next couple hours--Lee "Gobbo" Langston, Richard Wetmore, and some other folks whose name I unfortunately forget. We ended up having some great, pre-con gaming discussion. Fun was had by at least most.

After we registered, I was invited to grab some grub at the hotel restaurant, along with Ross, Michael, and their friends from here and New Jersey. Conversation was good--food, not so much.

That night I ran Iron Dynasty: Way of the Ronin, a Savage Setting of "heavy metal oriental action." I think everyone had fun. The table was full, and I did have to turn folks away due to only having six characters (note to self: have extras for Tacticon). I ran the game without minis or any sort of tactical map, and it didn't seem to detract from anyone's fun. That said, I think I'll start running Savage Worlds with the tactical set-up, at least in public.

After my game, I drove home. I'd be staying at the hotel for the rest of the con, but there were Friday school concerns with the little one, which made it easier to be home the first night.

Friday:

Friday morning, Vern and I headed to the con. Traffic prevented us from making the first block of gaming, so we spent the time chilling out and meeting up with friends. There was a lot of wandering here. The dealers' room wasn't open till 3PM, so really our trip down to the con was kinda wasted. I was very happy to have the time with Vern, though. We get precious little with my current Real Life Job.

Driving back to Broomfield to pick CaLeigh up from school meant we would miss the second RPG block of Friday. When we returned, we were able to check out the dealers' room (pretty well stocked for a local con), and I signed myself up for a Gumshoe homebrew game, based on Esoterrorists. Friday was my "freedom" night, when Vern had CaLeigh come bedtime.

After I had my game setup, my buddy Matt Cutter, from Pinnacle Entertainment said we should get dinner and have a pickup game after the his Deadlands game was done. So I went and turned in my Gumshoe ticket for greener pastures. Shane Hensley ended up joining us for dinner, and we went off-site, to an Italian restaurant called The Bent Noodle. (If you're ever at GenghisCon, look this place up. It was awesome.) Dinner was great, and the conversation was even better. Shane graciously picked up the tab (which made for the best "you're flyin' I'm buyin' ratio ever--thanks Shane!).

When we got back to the hotel, Matt was too beat to game, and Shane went off to check out the minis. We'd missed the final block of RPGs, as well. So it turns out we did zero gaming on Friday. We dropped CaLeigh off at Con Jr., and I did end up going to the auction. Vern hung out (read: fell asleep on my shoulder) till CaLeigh's (and her) bedtime.

The reason I stayed was I noticed two copies of the 1991 revision of TSR's Marvel Super Heroes Basic Set. They looked to be in good condition, so I decided I'd pay up to $30 to get my hands on one. The first set was sold for $31. That's right, I kept to my guns. I noticed the other hands in the room dropped much earlier than mine, so I had a feeling I wasn't going to get too killed on the price of the next one if I was patient. Speaking of patience, it would be two hours before copy number two was offered up, but I won it for $13--a complete steal! All the cards and figure flats (unfolded) were included, along with the dice. The books were in great condition. One corner of the box tore, I think, under the pile of games where it lived for the several hours during the auction. No worries. Tape can fix a box corner. $13!!

Saturday:

Saturday morning, the family and I joined the Rocky Mountain Savages for a breakfast meeting. It turns out we're going to try for a proper Savage Saturday Night at Tacticon. Also, we're going to start organizing Savage Worlds games in game stores. Fun fact: Savage Worlds fielded more games at GenghisCon than D&D 4e!

After breakfast, I reported to the room where I was to run my Smallville game. I had only two pre-regs, but I was hopeful we'd get more. Not only did I not get more, but the pre-regs never showed, either. So no go for Smallville. Sad face ensued.

I reported my game-fail to Linda Weygant, the phenomenal RPG coordinator, and she got me squeezed into Marc "Lord Inar" Gacy's homebrew Savage Worlds game, set in a family-friendly world he called Rocknester. I got to play a female Skunk. Yep... crossplay and a furry. In the first round of the first combat, my character got shot, taking 27 damage to her Toughness 5 frame. Believe it or not (mostly thanks to Marc's pity), my character survived. The session was fun. I will be asking him some questions about Rocknester. I think I'd like to use it with CaLeigh and my nephew, William.

Saturday afternoon, Vern and I were in a couples-based Unknown Armies game. The guy running it, and his significant other (I never determined wife or girlfriend), were doing the game to celebrate their anniversary. Very cool! I own UA, but I've never played it. We had a blast. The story was centered on a couples' retreat. Vern played the creepiest character I'd ever seen her play--she did it well, too.

Saturday night was Vern's "freedom" night. She was in an invitation-only game with Shane Hensley, held for the convention staff. One member of each podcast there (more on that later) got to join in. Vern's gamer-crush on Shane dictated where I stood in that situation.

Since I didn't get to game on my night, we found out Shane's game would be done at a reasonable hour, and Vern turns into a pumpkin at 10:00, my amazing wife offered to let me stay out if I found something to do. so I set up an after-hours game with Shane, Matt, and whomever. When Shane found out about my Marvel Super Heroes find, he suggested I go remind myself how to play and run that. So I spent Vern's game learning Marvel Superheroes. I managed to learn and prep in about two hours!

The game included Shane, his sons Caden and Ronan, Matt, his friend Dave (whom I've heard "war stories" about for years--it was nice to finally meet him), and my friend (and founder of the Rocky Mountain Savages), Chris Fuchs. We had a good time, but the one planned combat dragged the game down a bit. The old Marvel game did a lot of things well, but I ended up house-ruling the damage and the strength of Wolverine's claws so everyone at the table could be effective. The nostalgia alone made it fun, though--Shane kept saying: "I'm freakin' Spider-Man!"

Sunday:

Sunday morning was podcast-o-rama. We recorded two episodes of TGTT and one episode of the excellent (but explicit) WombatCast. The cast included me, Vern, Andy and Justin (from WombatCast), Ross, Michael, Bill, Marc, Leif and Bill (from the Denver Gamers Association), and Linda (RPG coordinator). We had a blast recording, and it turns out I may have gotten myself into some sort of Sumo match with Justin at Tacticon--we'll see what comes of that.

We ate lunch, and I went to the board game area next to host my game of Formula D. We ended up with six players. Two baled with only one replacement. There was one casualty in the game (the long-time leader ended up losing control of his car on turn three of the second lap). Since there was enough room for me, I played. In the end I won, due to some bold moves and one very lucky die roll. I had a good time, but I have to say I don't seem to identify with board gamers the way I do with roleplayers. I probably won't host anymore convention board games.

Con Jr.:

I have to give a shout out to the DGA for having Con Jr. It's a con-long kids event, coordinated by a teacher who either loves kids or is a masochist. CaLeigh spent the entire weekend entertained with games, arts & crafts, and movies... all for the price of a con ticket! This was brilliant, and it will serve as a great introduction for CaLeigh into the convention environment. Con Jr. is run at both GenghisCon (Presidents Day weekend) and Tacticon (Labor Day weekend). Very highly recommended.

In Closing:
  
Despite a couple hiccups--no gaming on Friday, my Smallville game not coming off Saturday, crappy hotel restaurant--I really had a blast at this convention. I am excited about Tacticon this September. It's smaller, but it's run by the same folks.

Genghis Con XXXII

So this weekend, I will be at Genghis Con with my lovely wife. We're excited because our friends Shane Hensley and Matt Cutter, of Pinnacle Entertainment, will be in from out of town. Also, a two-time TGTT guest, Ross Watson, the man at Fantasy Flight Games behind the Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, will be there. I'm very excited about meeting more of the Denver gaming community, overall.

Ignoring my own advice (like I do), I am running three games at the convention:

• Thursday night, I will be running Iron Dynasty: Way of the Ronin, for Savage Worlds.
• Saturday morning, I will be running the Smallville RPG.
• Sunday afternoon, I will be heading up a game of Formula D.

I hope to see you there!

Oh Index, Where Art Thou?

One of the things the RPG industry is notorious for is bad or missing indexes. I've discovered over the last few years, some publishers don't know how to do them and some don't find them important. Others will drop them, supposedly, due to page count concerns. This last one I often find suspect, especially when there are ads or blank pages in the book (I have multiple publisher friends guilty of this sin).

One thing I can guess is they have to be pretty hard to do. Not necessarily the physical process of making one, so much as the decisions that go into what belongs in one. In most cases, it's not enough. You get your "lip service" indexes--the one-pagers. And sometimes you get behemoth indexes that never seem to have what you're looking for.

In the most recent episode of The Game's the Thing, I took part in a discussion about the index in Iron Dynasty, Way of the Ronin from Reality Blurs. I commented on how excellent the final of version of the book's index was. We had to cut the conversation, but I'd like to still give credit where credit is due. Apparently, the Blur's lead editor, Lyn Harm, is responsible for the index. It's six pages and includes a separate table index.

The size isn't what really hit me, it's the fact I have yet to stump the index when searching for something. According to Sean, Lyn actually kept a running list of what needed to be indexed as she edited the several versions of what became the final book. This process also apparently caught missing items, which needed to get added back in.

I am told the layout person is typically responsible for all matters reference in a RPG book--I have certainly never been asked to help in indexing when I edit--but I think the editor should certainly take part in the way Lyn did. Maybe this has been done before; maybe it's relatively common. I just know my experience, and it has never included anything involving the index.

Anyway... Well done, Lyn. And nice find, Sean.

The Denver-Area Gaming Community

While I’ve lived in the Denver-area before, I wasn’t active in the gaming community back then. I really got involved in community when I started working for Game Daze in Tucson. I was meeting a lot of gamers, which led to me starting the podcast, helping to form SAGA, working with Pulp Gamer, and so on. While TGTT is still going, I don’t have that very public presence like I did working at a game store. And I honestly miss that.

My first foray into public gaming was earlier this month at MagnaCon. The folks I met there are primarily board gamers, and I’m psyched to have that venue. But it seems to me there’s a bit of a hole where there should be a more thriving RPG community. I know there are huge presences for 4E and Pathfinder here, and I hear tell the local Savage Worlds community may be organizing, but there’s not anything I can find for “everything else.” While there’s nothing wrong with any of those groups, they are a bit too narrow for my tastes.

My initial plan when I moved here was to just find a “home base” game store and go from there. Denver has several very good options for local game stores. The store closest to me, Total Escape Games, has a nice setup. The staff is decent, and the owners are cool folks. But like every other game store I’ve checked out in town, their prime in-store game slots are already taken by 4E, Pathfinder, Magic, Warhammer 40,000, and Warmachine/Hordes. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. I just don’t have any interest.

Between MagnaCon and a couple chance encounters, I have put together a small group of folks who share my interest in playing different RPGs. I’ve decided to take a page or two out of the Tucson playbook and start something of an RPG guild. I’ve begun networking with interested parties, and we are officially in the planning stages. What I can say now is the main things on the agenda are regular meet-ups, a reverence for all RPGs, bringing roleplayers out of the woodwork, and introducing new people to the hobby. There’s also some grumbling about a sort of GM support group--something we were beginning to have in Tucson when I decided to leave Arizona.

I think a thriving, public RPG group is important because, more so than board games, RPGs tend to be a private affair. The trouble is when private groups fail, or just stop, people who would like to continue playing often cannot find a group, and so they leave the hobby--sometimes temporarily, sometimes forever. I want to reach out to those folks and help keep them in the hobby, and perhaps we can grow it as well.

[GM Tools] Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters

I mentioned briefly in my last post I consulted the awesome book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters. It's written by the fine folks at Gnome Stew--the best GM-centric blog on the Interwebs. I've been using this book for awhile now, and it's time to give it a real shout out.

Essentially Eureka gives away its purpose in its title, but only word of mouth will sing to its utility. There have been a ton of products on this subject over the years, and they've always fallen short for me. Not so with Eureka. I bought the Print+PDF bundle because it's always nice to have a paper book, but I knew I'd want it handy on my iPad.

In Eureka, there are 167 adventure plots, each in the broad categories of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror. They're further broken down into themes. Then there is a list of genres the plot should be easily adapted to. Finally, each plot is tagged with keywords designed to give you some ideas as to what features a story may have, like dungeon crawls, intrigue, etc.

The book actually opens with detailed instructions on how to read and adapt the plots. The advice is great and is easily adaptable to just about any module or pre-written scenario. I've already used it outside the book, in fact. Even if your game's genre is not one of the listed "big three," this book is still very useful.

The book rounds out with four indexes, one each for genre, tag, title, and author. At first I thought the author index was a vanity thing, but then I realized I started to get a feel for each of the authors and began seeking authors out by their style. The book is super-easy to navigate, even if you have very specific needs when searching for a plot--the PDF more so, given its ample bookmarks.

Every GM who has an off-the-cuff style should have this book. Even if you're one of those heavy-prepping types, these plots are more than seeds, and many of them could actually serve as overarching campaign plots. I've personally used it in both modes, "quick, I need a plot" and "looking for inspiration."

As you can guess, this one's highly recommended.

Con Report: MagnaCon 2011

MagnaCon was a lot of fun. I ran five games (in four different systems) and met some awesome people. I'd like to especially thank Veronica Livingston for being a great host, and I'd like to thank Matthew Ward for getting me involved in the first place.

On Friday, I started out running Swords & Wizardry. I only had two players initially. They each ran two characters so we could run the adventure. Eric and Camdon were both good sports, and I think we all had a good time. Later in the session, we were joined by Matt, who managed to have two characters die on him. Finally, the last part was rounded out with the addition of my wife, Veronica.

For the Deadlands session, we had Wife Veronica, Camdon, Matt, Ed, Other Ron, and Lee. That game was a blast. I was going to go with a post-train robbery, Reservoir Dogs kinda thing, but at the last minute I decided to go with more of a From Dusk Till Dawn thing. My great friend Clint Black put that bug in my ear early last week, and by Friday morning, I'd decided he'd made a better call. It ended up being a blast.

Saturday morning, I ran Icons for Wife Veronica, Lee, and Olivia (11 years old--awesome!). It was a good time. The cheesy, in-character one-liners were hilarious.

Running two of the same story at MagnaCon turned out to be a mistake, as evidenced by the one person who showed up to re-play the S&W story I was running. So Camdon, my wife, and I put our heads together and decided to grab some Savage Worlds fantasy pregens from the Reality Blurs website and run something off the cuff. I consulted the excellent book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, and had a story ready in minutes. It was relatively short, but I think we all had fun.

For the finale, I ran my Chicago, A.D. (After Dresden) story using the excellent Dresden Files RPG. We had Wife Veronica, Camdon, Ed, RP, Matt, and Chuck. Despite several factors--noise, group size, and mild food poisoning on my part--the game went pretty well. I have to say FUDGE dice hate me. I rolled multiple -4s and -3s in that game. This wasn't an isolated incident, either. It's happened every time I've played FATE. Unlike what the math fans will tell you, FUDGE dice really average -1, at least in my experience. I mean when I rolled high, the players were even celebrating.

So in my judgment, I am a little nuts for taking on as much as I did for MagnaCon. I won't put myself in quite that situation again--running so many games in so many different systems. That said I had a lot of fun.

But I have to say, "mission accomplished," on multiple levels. I ran five stories in four systems. People seemed to have fun. I had fun. Most importantly, potentially long-lasting relationships were formed in those two days. And that last thing is what this hobby is all about for me.

The only truly negative experience of the weekend (other than the mild food poisoning) was I missed my daughter terribly (as typically happens when we're separated for more than a day), so Vern and I have made the decision to take CaLeigh to Genghis Con Jr. next month. She was excited when we told her. I'm really looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Overall, MagnaCon is really a board game con, and they're trying to add RPGs. If board games are your bag, they had everything. The open library rivaled Pulp Gamer's, and Time Well Spent was there selling games at website prices.

MagnaCon 2011

Tonight and tomorrow I will be at MagnaCon in Denver, running roleplaying games. Here's what I'm running:

Friday
3:00pm - 7:00pm: Swords & Wizardry (up to 8 players)
Labyrinth Tomb of the Minotaur Lords - Enter the dungeon and discover it's treasures. Swords & Wizardry is a revival of the original fantasy roleplaying game. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and your own set of polyhedral dice.

8:00pm - 12:00am: Deadlands: Reloaded (up to 8 players)
Greed - Your gang has just robbed a train full of railroad payroll. The heat is on, and you're holed up in a small town, waiting out the law. But something's... wrong. This horror western uses the Savage Worlds game system. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and your own set of polyhedral dice, including a separate, different six-sider.

Saturday
9:00am - 1:00pm: ICONS (up to 8 players)
It's Saturday morning--time for cartoons! In this super-powered game, your super team must foil the Siderial Schemes of Dr. Zodiac. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and two different-colored standard dice.

2:00pm - 6:00pm: Swords & Wizardry (up to 8 players)
Labyrinth Tomb of the Minotaur Lords - Enter the dungeon and discover it's treasures. Swords & Wizardry is a revival of the original fantasy roleplaying game. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and your own set of polyhedral dice. THIS IS A REPLAY OF THE FRIDAY EVENING GAME.

8:00pm - 12:00am: The Dresden Files (up to 8 players)
Chicago, A.D. (After Dresden) - Harry Dresden is dead or missing, and there's a power vacuum left in Chicago. Can Harry's friends stop a new player from filling the void? This FATE game is based on the popular Dresden Files novels by Jim Butcher, but no knowledge of the books is required to play. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and your own set of FUDGE dice.

The ICONS and S&W games are published adventures, which I'd normally avoid, except Dr. Zodiac was only made available to folks who pre-ordered ICONS, and the S&W adventure was published in a fanzine. So I feel safe running them. The other two are my creation, though Vernie helped me with the DFRPG one.

You might be saying, "Ron, that's four different systems" or "that's open to close on both days," or somesuch. You're likely thinking, "this guy's nuts." But it's a good cause.

I'll let you know if I'm nuts Monday...