Game = Life

 There were the usual glitches of the site being overloaded, but I got all but one of my first choices, and my second choice for that slot was good as well.   I'm working some at the Rogue Games booth, sleeping in most mornings, and looking forward to a fairly relaxed 25th Gencon.

• 01:00:00 PM - Ghostfacers in Hell (Supernatural, Cortex System)

• 08:00:00 AM  - Pathfinder Society #57: Before the Dawn, P1: The Bloodcove Disguise
• 08:00:00 PM - The Shotgun Diaries: Die Zombie Die! (Ker-blam! Ker-blam!) (John Wick's The Shotgun Diaries)

Saturday 8/7

• 08:00:00 PM - All the Better... (Supernatural)

Sunday 8/8

• 10:00:00 AM - Alien Agents (Monsters and Other Childish Things)

I should never try to sign up for things when my coffee hasn't metabolized yet... the slot information is beneath the listing, dummy!

Pentacon is in Fort Wayne, IN, USA, November 6-8, 2009. To register for events, go to their Consupport site.
There are just not enough slots in any con to go around - I long for the days when I was younger and could get by on a lot less sleep. I'm tickled that I might finally get to play the Pathfinder that I missed when it ran at the club (because I was eating the other scheduled scenario). Then Witch Hunter through Saturday evening - becoming a tradition for me. Sunday I have to have time to pack/check out, so nothing till 2pm, but at least I'll get in one new Fellowship of the White Star. I could easily play the whole con in any of the three campaigns, darn it! I need that thingy that Hermione used in Harry Potter!

Jae's Pentacon Schedule

Slot	When	Event	Status
2	Fri 2-6	Pathfinder #3: Murder on the Silken Caravan	Player
3	Fri 7:30 -11:30	WH: DP Pt 1 - Trier	Player
4	Sat 9-1	WH: DP Pt 2 - Munich	Player
5	Sat 2-6	WH: DP Pt 3 - Wiesbaden	Player
6	Sat 7:30-11:30 PM	WH: DP Interactive	GM
8	Sun 2-6 PM	FWS B205: Nature of the Beast	Player

Here (very briefly) is my Gencon schedule. It's in flux, as I wasn't anticipating being on the Blackmoor staff as of Gencon so I hadn't signed up to run at all. Now I'm Plot Coordinator (at least for the moment) and the campaign horribly short of judges for Gencon.  I feel I have an obligation to run as much as I can.

On the other hand, I *need* to have my first slot in the morning off as much as possible, because I'm just too darned old to go on less than 5 hours sleep for more than a day.  Nor am I willing to give up the stuff I have tickets for, as each and every one is something I'm dying to play.  There are some holes in my schedule though, that I'd left open to hang with friends or pick up a game, so those I can fill with Blackmoor.  I'm willing to run any of the intros at the drop of a hat, and a fair number of the rest of the library.  I suck as a tactical/combat judge, so I won't run the high level/high combat mods that have become the staple of the campaign over the past year.  Fortunately that still leaves quite a few modules.

I'll update here as I get new information.

• Play  8/14 Thurs 9 am Chill "Whatever happened to Chester Brown?" (RPG00079)
• Play  8/14 Thursday 2 pm Supernatural "Seeds of Chaos" (RPG00251)
• Run  8/14 Thursday 7 pm Colonial Gothic "Bonestown" (RPG00251)
• Run  8/15 Friday 1 pm StarMage Prophecies SMP01-06 "Rat Queen's Bane" (RPG01680)
• Play  8/15 Friday 6 pm Trail of Cthulhu "Incident at Killgul Island" (RPG01515)
• Run  8/16 Saturday 9 am  Blackmoor "Welcome to Blackmoor"
• Play  8/16 Saturday 2 pm The Dresden Files (RPG01536)
• Run  8/16 Saturday 7 pm  Blackmoor "Welcome to Blackmoor"
• Run  8/17 Sunday 11 am Cat "Home Alone" (RPG01887)

I spent most of the last week (evenings) and pretty much all of the weekend playing City of Heroes. I'm starting to wonder if my addictive personality is having a wee bit of a problem here... I have a boatload of stuff to get done before Origins, so I'm going to cut myself off from CoH for a couple of weeks to get it all done.

Dang, but it's fun!  I love the character creator, while I still yearn for even MORE options for clothing, faces, and in particular footgear for female characters.  There are not enough "shoe" choices, imho, or body shape options.  I tried to make a toon that looks somewhat like me, and simply couldn't make one fat and dumpy enough.  It's more like me after a successful weight loss regimen, though my chum Philsie did observe that she has a "big butt", so I guess I got in the general neighborhood.  I wish we had all of the costume tools that they have for the NPCs, like tie-died t-shirts and middle-aged spread.  And more than 3 kinds of women's shoes.

Game play continues to hold my interest because they keep making changes and improvements.  I'm *not* a hard core gamer, and my reaction time is pretty slow. I appreciate that I can still play the game (even if I do spend a lot of time running into walls and corners) and be a useful part of a team.

I like the team/hang out with your friends aspect the most.  I can spend the evening with dear friends who are far away, beating up bad guys (or good guys in City of Villains), chatting on Skype and generally basking in camaraderie.  I'd say that's why I've been playing so much, except that I've also spent a lot of time playing solo.

It's also a good avoidance tool -- and I don't really need more of those. It's soooo easy to fire it up and play on the laptop....

So, I'm cutting myself off for a couple of weeks.  With any luck it'll be like my off and on relationship with coffee.  I love coffee, I even need it, but since the last time I broke the caffeine addiction I can take it or leave it.  Ideally I'll be able to go back to playing CoH a couple of times a week like before.

But first... man, have I got a lot to do in the 2 weeks before Origins!

It occurred to me that I've been so busy herding cats that I never posted my Origins schedule. Sap that I am, I agreed at the last minute to recruit, coordinate, zero and organize Blackmoor gms for Origins and Gencon. And edit the modules we playtested. As usual (not just for Blackmoor, but for just about any campaign I've ever worked with) we're down to the wire and the premieres are in various states of edit/revision. I hope I get them before the con...


As you can see, every slot is busy.  On the up side, I might be able to slip away to the dealer's room after my marshaling is done for those slots, assuming that there's someone to cover the campaign resource table.  But no drinking the night away for me, not with that 8 am Marshalling.  Gah.

Needless to say, I've done very little on my WWAWM entry... fortunately, it's Cat, and it will be fun for the players even if I make it up on the spot.

I keep needing to refer to my Gencon schedule, so I'm putting it where I (and others) can find it easily.  I wasn't going to run at all this year, but have allowed myself to be roped in by the Blackmoor people.  They've got 7 judges and 80 tables (and that's just preregistration!) for a D&D campaign that I mostly enjoy.  I am such a sucker...

I am at the moment pretty unhappy with Gencon LLC.  They double-charged me for my tickets, ignored my request for a refund, then sent me the double tickets.  At that point I emailed Peter Adkinson (who is a nice guy, and very reasonable, but, I think, not accurately informed by his staff) and got the ball rolling with Customer Service.  CS, however, wanted me to mail the tickets back to get a refund.  I finally managed to do so on Saturday, confident they'd arrive by the Wednesday deadline.  Not so much.  So, now I appear to be out the $37.50 because they have the extra tickets - I can't even sell them back on site now.  My finances are going to be very tight this Gencon due to some pilferage from my account (yes, cancelled the card and all, and expect to get it back eventually) and my recent run of unemployment.  I could have used that $37.50 to eat for a couple of days.  Grrrr...  I haven't given up - I have a letter detailing the tickets returned that I can send along - but it's not looking good. 

It took me about five hours to get my Gencon tickets - that beats even the Origins record for poor-response websiteness. I do give Gencon credit for letting me download the schedule as a spreadsheet, though. That was an enormous help in finding interesting and obscure games, and sorting out what I wanted to play when. That way I was ready when the system went live - as were, evidently, thousands of other people, more than the system could handle. From minute one there were constant timeouts.

The Gencon folks took the site down as I was trying to check out, and I nearly had a stroke.  I was worried that I'd lose those few events I did manage to get into my cart, but they were there when it came back up the next day. .. about an hour after they said it would. To be fair, I've never tried to write an application able to handle that kind of load, so I suppose I shouldn't cast stones.

But darn it, I missed out on a Firefly LARP, a Serenity game and the Cthulhu Masters (which I've never gotten into, though I've been trying faithfully since 1987...). Ah, well, I did get some neat-sounding stuff, so I'll quit whining now.

Looking over my choices, this looks like the year I return to my gaming roots. I attended my first Gencon in 1987, and in those days there were no "living" campaigns. Every table had characters provided, and Gencon was my gaming dim sum.  I sought out systems I'd barely heard of so that I could give them a try without making the commitment of buying books. This year, except for the Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Gencon exclusive, every one of the games I've picked has characters provided.  I have to admit I'm kinda excited at the prospect.

I have nothing against campaign games - I developed and ran a campaign that I was very proud of - but picking up an unknown character and trying to make him or her live for 3 hours is a totally different challenge. It used to be something that RPGA was particularly good at, but they seem to be going pretty much all-minatures and table-top video-game styled games these days.  Instead of RPGA durance vile, judging or coordinating every slot, I'm spending the long weekend in Indy (as in Independent Game Producers) heaven. My only regret is that I may not have time to get to the dealer's room!

I've gone back to what I call the Iron Idiot schedule, too -- 4 slots a day, pretty much every day.  I'll be exhausted, but oh, the gaming!  And, I'm happy to say, I have a room reserved at the Marriott across the street, so I won't have to go far to collapse.

The schedule may change a little, as I was reminded today that I'd promised the Blackmoor folks that I'd run one slot. I offered them Thursday 8 am, or Thursday 8 pm, or Sunday 8 am. Those are the only ones I'm willing to even consider giving up.

It's nice to be excited about Gencon again.

( Schedule behind the cut )

U*Con is an annual roleplaying con at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I've been going there as long as I've been going to Gencon -- maybe a little longer.  Before I got involved in RPGA, I would premiere my new events there.  This year I'm running a couple of events as a Chaosium Missionary and playing for most of the con.  In a real departure for me, none of the events will be RPGA events.

Here's my schedule, in case you're going and want to hook up.

GM Events
----------------------------------------
Sunday 10a - 2p - Call of Cthulhu: Dark Ages: Under A Greenwood Tree (#531, RP-SU10-2)
Sunday 3p - 7p - Call of Cthulhu: Roaring 20's: The Mystery of April Snow (#532, RP-SU15-2)

Ticket Purchases
----------------------------------------
Friday 7p - 10p - Feng Shui: Supersized Ninjas By the Dozen (#419, RP-FR19-3) ($3 x1) $3
Saturday 10a - 2p - Simple Introductory Rules: The Slayer of Venice (#411, RP-SA10-7) ($3 x1) $3
Saturday 3p - 7p - Call of Cthulhu : BRP: Horror 102 (#520, RP-SA15-2) ($3 x1) $3
Saturday 7p - 12a - Diceless: Name of God (#465, RP-SA19-2) ($3 x1) $3

Wow... I've done something I've not done for many, many years.  I registered for a convention (Origins International Game Expo) with no intention of volunteering.  At all.  I don't think, actually, that I've ever gone to a game convention just to play.  Even my very first Gencon, I volunteered to help judge Chill.

I have friends I can stay with in Columbus, so my costs will be limited to the registration and the slots I play.  It feels wrong... but I think it's a very right thing for me to do.  I've been defining myself as a tireless volunteer for so long, it's time to try something a little different.  If I miss judging/volunteering that much, I can always do so for the next convention.

I had much gaming goodness over the weekend, impaired somewhat by constant pain from the Knee From Hell (see my other blog for dreary details).  It's hard to roleplay in a Tylenol 3 induced haze, and harder when you keep yelping from little stabs of pain.  Managed to have fun, though.  If I have time over lunch I may inflict details.

Of course it is. And... I'm afraid I've reached and/or exceeded that. Lessee...

• Friday was Adam's home campaign. Always fun, but I was off my game...


• Saturday was Waterdeep Chronicles CARP's home campaign, where I was theoretically supposed to run. (It was a home football game day, though, so attendance was low.)


• Saturday evening, I played Living Dragonstar online. The company was great, but I really felt it was a waste of six or so hours of my life (at least, until the ending, which was relatively satisfying). My chums helped me power-up my cleric so that he'll be less useless in the future. (I hates being useless, yet I persist in playing clerics, who are at best support characters.)


• Sunday I wrote all day, mostly finishing a scenario for Living Force, the RPGA campaign that I run.


• Monday I ran an online session of Living Force for a group of judges for Gencon SoCal. Till 2 am, no less (most of 'em are in California, after all). I'm tickled that people like the campaign so much that they hate to "eat" a scenario (run it without having had a chance to play it), but dang... where am I to get the time?


• Tuesday (tonight) is Rick's Adventure! game. I'm looking forward to it, but where am I gonna find the time I need to get Excursion finished and Recursion, Night's Friend, Night's Homecoming, Padawannabes and Way of the Force edited? 'cause those all need to be done by Dec 1st.

Yup. Too much gaming. Nowhere in there do I see anything resembling a normal life...