| GenCon 2005: Fear the Cuteness! |
| Well, I wasn't going to go to GenCon this year. Too close to start of school, not enough money, blah, blah, blah. Then Aaron Dembski-Bowden, a fellow freelancer and all-around great guy, emails me and says I should go. Since he's all English and stuff, I was compelled to attend, if only for a day. So, Heather and I bundled up da Squeaky (aka our daughter Teagan) and headed out to the con. This, then, was Teagan's first con, and as such there are quite a few pictures of her on this page. Fear the cuteness. After a long and fairly uneventful drive, we arrived, checked in to the hotel, and headed for the Ennie awards. The Ennies are presented by EnWorld, and my Vampire: The Requiem demo (which you can find here) was nominated for two awards (and also received Honorable Mention in Best Adventure, which I'm kinda proud of). |
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| A picture of the shindig at right. Anyway, my demo won the Silver Ennie for Best Free Product/Web Enhancement, so I got to go up and make a little speech (30 seconds, man, because I talk fast when I'm excited) and get a little medal. Very exciting! Pictures below of the crowd o' winners (the guy with the mohawk is Justin Achilli), and me with my winnings. |
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| And then we went to bed. Sleep=good. Saturday morning, we woke up and Tegan had a little crawl around the huuuuuge hotel room (Omni Severin is totally worth the money) and some cuddle time with her Mama. |
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| We went downstairs and had a leisurely breakfast at the cafe in the hotel, and Teagan tried some gardening while Heather was on the phone (she might not actually be on the phone, but she looks like she is). |
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| And then we headed over to the convention center. Now, I didn't have any games scheduled here. The day was basically to hang out with Aaron, find Kylee, meet up with some other folks, wander around the dealer's room and spend some money, and generally relax (well, I wanted to run a Werewolf game -- and wound up doing so -- but read on). Getting into the dealer's room required fighting through the Dawn of the Dead-like masses of geeks, but with the help of Dave, the guy running many of the Mage tournament segements at GenCon, we managed. |
| But we took this adorable picture while we waited to get in. |
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| Also this picture of pirates. |
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| So we waited at the White Wolf booth while the Mage: The Awakening frenzy raged (all of about 3 minutes, and then they were sold out). I got my author copies of Blood of the Wolf, my copy of Mage, and a copy of VII for Vampire, and then we zipped off to find Aaron. John, aka Mythdude, was most helpful, since he'd been to the Morrigan booth and knew where to find the bald Brit. So we all headed out of the chaos and sat down to chat. |
| Aaron's a charming and intriguing fellow, and it's a damned shame that he lives an ocean away, because gaming with him on a regular basis would be fucking choice. Anyway, Bill Bridges had asked me to go to lunch with him and Brian Campbell to discuss this Reign of the Exarchs book we're working on, so I charged John with making character sheets for the Werewolf game and went to Champions for lunch, where the gave me four freaking pounds of cheese fries. As an appetizer (no, I didn't eat them all). |
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| But before lunch, I took this picture of people staring at a large screen. I think I was going to comment on the strollers and how I saw lots of kids at GenCon, but I don't remember. After lunch we headed back to Aaron's hotel room to swap one of my copies of Blood of the Wolf for one of his copies of Lore of the Forsaken (I don't pay for books when I can help it), and then trekked back to the dealer's room to wait for Kylee so we could get started making Werewolf characters. As usual, I snapped pictures of strange and beautiful things. For example, at right see a corpse hawking a card game at Twilight Creations' booth. |
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| This young lady's butt is evidently a save point. I have no comment. |
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| Here we have Justin Achilli with some sort of carrying device. That he's carrying (look, best I could do. I know it's not as good as the ass-chicken dance). |
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| Eventually, Kylee showed up, but in the meanwhile we picked up another player (Michelle Lyons, another occasional White Wolf freelancer and contributing author to Ex Machina, which is an awesome game). I had met Michelle before, but never gamed with her. She had stuff to do, but my subtle charms ("You will game with us....I waggle my fingers at you...") worked. So we set off in search of a free table and found another player, my friend and occasional playtester Matt Karafa. Now we had five. All we needed was space. Good. Freaking. Luck. Unlike Origins, there is no free gaming area (or if there is, I did not see it). We got kicked off of two tables before Tammie Davis, White Wolf demo queen, came to our rescue and found us a table to play Werewolf. So the players all made characters (all Blood Talon pack), we decided upon New Orleans as the setting (rather, they did; I just needed a city with lots of cemeteries), and we got down to it! The game revolved around retrieving and eventually destroying the Chalice of Arista, which you might know about from this book, but it also involved something called a Moon-Puppet, which is detailed in Blood of the Wolf. Go buy both. Ahem. Anyway, here are some pics from the game. |
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| Kylee and Aaron. |
| The pack prepares for battle. |
| The pack engages in battle. |
| Teagan, meanwhile, stands up... |
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| ...and makes phone calls. |
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| And, the pack photo! Matt Karafa, Michelle Lyons, me, Kylee Hartman, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, John Kennedy. |
| So, the game finished, we called up Jeff (who was in town helping his friend move and had joined us for the drive) to bring our car back, and went to a late dinner at Mikado, which is a wonderful Japanese restaurant. Kylee zipped off to make herself look even hotter for some kind of "LARP" foolishness, and then there's this picture. |
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| So then we headed home. We stopped in Columbus for the "night," by which I mean "from 3AM until 8AM." We got up early, I snapped this final photo of Jeff and Heather (you can't tell because I'm not in the photo, but I'm half-naked, too) and headed on back to Cleveland to retrieve my Labrador retriever. |
| Thoughts: I'm totally doing the whole weekend next year. Heck with this "one day" shit. Running games, too. There were people I wanted to see and didn't, but on the whole it was a great day. And with that, I'm done with cons until next summer! |