Wednesday, August 11, 2010

GenCon 2010

Well another GenCon has come and gone. If you hit RPG.net you might have seen some of my conclusions but here's the longer scoop:

Gaming was awesome! This was one of my goals this GenCon. Last year I actually got to do a little gaming (Eclipse Phase and mortals Exalted run by Alan Alexander) but that wasn't as much as I'd like. This year I got into 4 games, two Cthulhutech, 1 Alpha Omega, and 1 Hunter: The Vigil. They were all fun but the Hunter game took home the prize for most awesome. It was a late night game (started at 10) and we pretty much went the comedy route with it. This made it awesome and if there was a horror aspect to it that might have been due to the bad jokes flying about. However everyone had fun and we ganked the 400 year vampire in a single round to finish off the night! The other games were enjoyable as well but not nearly as crazy as that one.

Picked up a ton of books: Sunward, Ancient Enemies, Eoris (apparently one of about 20 people to own it at the moment!), Delta Green & DG: Targets of Opportunity plus a bunch of used books. No Titan Games this year but Chimera Hobby (from Appleton, WI) had a buy 1 get 3 free deal similar to Titans offer. Found a couple interesting books there. White Wolf let me down with no book sales at their booth instead pushing for the Grand Masquerade which doesn't hold much interest for me because a)I'm not going b)It's a LARP event primarily c)Vampire's not my thinking [except for killing them in Hunter games I guess] d)Booth Babes == Big Turn Off [see PAX banning booth babes]. Plus I was really looking forward to Return of the Scarlet Empress. Fortunately Noble Knight came through in a pinch for me there and it was waiting for me when I got home on Monday. That being said there felt like generally less stuff on the floor then in previous years so after a couple hours on Thursday I felt like I'd pretty much seen and gotten everything I wanted. Only Adam Scott Glancy's quality sales pitch got me to fork up for DG & DG:TOO (based partly on the amusing games he runs for RPPR every year).

For panels we just did 2 of the 3 White Wolf panels. Would have done all 3 but because they got listed late already had a C-tech game during one of them (also forced us to leave another one early but them's the ropes). The panels were excellent as usual. I greatly enjoy listening to the White Wolf guys speak and I was glad that Eddy Webb, Rich Thomas, and Ethan Skemp braved the fandom to come out and chat. The last year hasn't garnered a lot of love for White Wolf on the web so to come to GenCon (especially when they weren't even books to placate people at the booth) is quite awesome! Can't praise the guys enough and I am curious what news comes out of Grand Masquerade even if the event itself doesn't hold a lot of interest for me. Plus we did get the new pdf schedule for next year and that's pretty awesome.

Wrapping up good GenCon, can't wait for next year but I have some reading to do between now and then!

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