GaryCon XIV 2022
Day 1
I raced out the door at 8 am and forgot several things -- my hat, some Kleneexes, Chapstick, and…my vaccination card! I was reminded of the first when I checked my head in the car, the second when I wanted to blow my nose in the car, the third after eating some salty popcorn for breakfast in the car, and the last one once I was in line to register. Thankfully, someone was home to take a photo of my vaccination card and send it to me, or it would have meant a 3-hour roundtrip to go get it!
I had come to GaryCon for one day because, while I had intended on attending virtually only, there had been no Thursday virtual events of interest to me. And it felt good to be back at the Grand Geneva immediately. I started seeing people I knew right away, or at least thought I did; someone who looked like Carlos Lising walked past me so fast I couldn’t be sure it was him. And I never saw him again all day to find out for sure! I did run into Josh Popp and Anna Meyer right away, since they were both volunteering at the registration window.
I had set an ambitious schedule for myself of stepping in and observing various events for 30-minutes at a time, to minimize close contact. I may be triple vaccinated and wore a N-95 mask, but I was still taking no chances!
At 10, I was supposed to drop in on Paul Stormberg’s “Sunken City” (actually Rob Kuntz’s Sunken City, run by Paul), but delays in registration slowed me down, and then I got turned around in the building, having not been there for two years! I had to go outside to reorient myself, and by the time I found the board room I had 15 minutes of scheduled time to observe. Paul had told me over Facebook I could play for 30 minutes and drop out, but 15 minutes was too short a time to bother with, so I watched the players flounder about on rafts, trying to figure out how to retrieve the party member they’d just lost…
At 10:30, I was upstairs in the Evergreen room for Legends of Role-Playing. Every year there is a new, exciting display, and this year was one focused on both Chainmail and Siege of Bodenburg, which was fascinating -- mainly because of the Darlene-created new rendition of the Great Kingdom Ur-Map (that I’m guessing Paul Stormberg commissioned?). I want a print and I want it yesterday!
Kevin Maurice was setting up a dragon chess board he’d built himself, but I was really there to watch Knights of Camelot get played. I had seen the giant version of the classic TSR board game there in the past, but never had the chance to play or watch it played. I found it fascinating, like a barebones RPG campaign created entirely by random rolls on various tables, and got some ideas for a Hideouts & Hoodlums board game (as if I had time for new projects) from it.
At 11, I went to the Swinghurst room for the “Celebrating Greyhawk: a Fandom Renaissance” seminar. Kristoph Nolan was basically recruiting for the Oerth Journal scholarly fanzine, but it was also a chance to see Anna Meyer, Mike Bridges, Jayson King, and most importantly Roger E. Moore, making his GaryCon debut. It would have been nice to have a Q&A with Roger, but Roger’s hearing did not seem to be very good and I doubt that would have worked well. It was great being able to tell him how much it had meant to the Greyhawk fandom when he reached out to us to help with research circa 1997-98…and it was pretty fun fact-checking Kristoph on early D&D/Greyhawk history too.
At 12:30, I had left myself a mere 30 minutes for both lunch and the exhibit hall. Obviously that wasn’t happening; I spent most of my next 30 minutes at the Black Blade booth alone, talking to Allan Grohe about the works of Rob Kuntz I didn’t own yet. I finally picked up “Beyond the Living Room” a Legends of Roleplaying adventure, and from CASL Entertainment, module A5 Kill Marquessa! Too bad I never found Carlos again to sign it…
Because I always have to buy something from the Kenzer boys, I picked up Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine #285 with the super-cool Steranko Nick Fury parody cover. I picked up my second art print from Darlene. I was going to pass up Bunnies & Burrows 2nd edition because I thought the hardcover price was too steep, but I couldn’t say no when Zach Glazer told me it was 40% off -- how could I say no? Now I just need to find time to run Bunnies & Burrows again…
For lunch, I was going to grab a convention burger, but the stand I was going to buy it from were out and waiting for more to be sent over from the kitchens. So I went to the Starbucks in the building and bought an Italian sub sandwich (that I had to pick the onions out of - bleah), a strawberry-banana drink, and a peanut butter cookie (spoiler: the cookie was the best thing I ate all con long).
I had taken my food upstairs to eat outside the game rooms I next planned to visit, but I wasn’t planning on sitting there long because I had already fallen behind my schedule and would miss the Judges Guild module, Tower of Ulission (which I’ve never played or even seen before). That was when someone walked past and recognized me, even though I didn’t recognize him (which happens fairly often to me, so I wasn’t too surprised). It turned out to be Gary Welsh, an old-time Greytalker I had just recently reconnected with on Facebook. We spent the next half-hour reminiscing about old times on the listserv, or corresponding with Gary Gygax back in the day, and I lost watching Erol Otus run Dungeon Crawl Classics. Interestingly, Gary had a copy of my GaryCon schedule open on his phone, which I had previously shared on Facebook, and had been using that as his own guide to the good events. Both of us planned on watching Darlene run her card game Jasmine in the Evergreen room.
Luckily Darlene had found the room on her own (I had given her poor directions earlier in the exhibit hall) and was already getting started with her players. Unfortunately, Darlene is a soft-spoken woman and we couldn’t really hear how to play Jasmine (Gary owns a set of the cards, but I don’t yet). In addition to watching the game, we walked around the other exhibits and cool set-ups for games and discussed them.
At 2:30, back on schedule, Gary and I split up so I could head to the Linwood room to watch Matt Finch run “Mythrus Tower.” I have known Matt a long time, but had never met him offline and had only seen him in person for the first time earlier that day when I walked past him in a corridor (I hadn’t bothered him because he was talking to someone else). Unfortunately, there was no sign of Matt or his players at his table. This did give me the chance to go find Erol Otus’ game and make up for missing his game earlier.
It’s interesting, the mental image I’ve always had of Erol Otus. Because of his bizarre art style, I always pictured him looking Marty Feldman-like, but he actually looks boringly normal - normal, except for the green pants he was wearing. Erol didn’t seem soft-spoken, but his room was pretty loud, so I couldn’t hear what he was saying anymore than I could hear Darlene. I was really impressed with his DM’s screen, though, which was (naturally) covered with his own artwork.
At 3, I went to my second Greyhawk seminar, “Legends & Lore: What’s Going on in Greyhawk?” Anna Meyer, Mike Bridges, and Jayson King were all there from the last one, plus Jay Scott (of course, since Legends & Lore is his Twitch show), and we were joined by Shawn Hille - none other than Brother Ulrich the Maimed from my ongoing Castle Greyhawk campaign! This was like a sequel to the earlier seminar that let Anna talk more in-depth about her projects. She had been working with professional oceanographers to establish the currents of the World of Greyhawk, and it was interesting how they got them to work and make sense, while the land of the World of Greyhawk is rife with impossibilities.
I had planned to leave and come back later to this program, but because I was boxed into the corner and the door was going to be shut, it made more sense to stay longer and not come back. So it was 3:45 when I left to go watch Allen Hammack run the module he is most famous for -- C2 Ghost Tower of Inverness. And who should be sitting at his table but Robert Brandon -- none other than Jolith Rhygar from my ongoing Castle Greyhawk campaign! By now they were really far into the module, facing the medusa. The last time I ran C2, it was a TPK against the medusa, so it was pleasing to see they all managed to survive...
No comments:
Post a Comment