View From the Bushes

Well, I'm back from GenCon, and as usual it was outrageously enjoyable and even more tiring. For some reason, at the convention when someone says, "Hey, after we get done playing D&D at 2 am, you want to come back to the hotel lobby and play an obscure board game based on being a plantation owner in 18th century San Juan, Puerto Rico," you actually consider it an excellent suggestion and immediately say yes. I can't imagine any other circumstance under which I would think that was a good idea, but in any case I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start with Wednesday.

I stayed up to 5 am getting everything ready for the con. Most of the time was spent on something I'm not really at liberty to discuss, but the effort definitely paid off. So after that I got about three hours of sleep before I had to wake up, run to Kinko's, and actually pack for the convention. In between the two hours of sleep and the hectic last minute preperation, not to mention the majority of the day being spent on a plane, I completely forgot that it was our anniversary and in fact did not remember it until this evening. But then my wife is cooler than I ever thought possible; she didn't even give me a hard time about it. The rest of the day was mostly spent with the tedium of flight, though I did manage to squeeze in dinner at the end with a bunch of old college friends I hadn't seen in a while.

Thursday, despite needing all the sleep I could get, we woke up fairly bright and early and hit the exhibitor hall basically as soon as it opened. I spent most of the day getting my big priorities for the con out of the way: the thing which must not be named, which went really well, and the second priority which was to get with FFG and get a final sign-off on the Midnight adventure, which I also got. There's still a couple of kinks to work out of the system for purchasing individual adventures, but I expect that the Midnight adventure will be available by Saturday. All told I spent about four hours in the hall, but I was still amazed at how little I really saw, which is probably good because the more you see the more you buy. After that we went to Buca di Beppo, which apparently is a big chain, but you wouldn't know it. To get to the maitre'd you have to walk through the kitchen. We headed for dinner about four; the whole idea was to get an early start and then play Castle Maure, the Gygaxian mega-dungeon, until we finished it (yeah right). Of course, in between dinner and finishing up characters, I think it was 8 or 9 before we really got started. I was hoping to just do one day per paragraph, but that's obviously not going to work...

It was while we were playing Castle Maure that it happened. I have a fairly addictive personailty. In other words, it's pretty easy for me to get hooked on something and I know that, so there are a certain things I know would be outrageously fun, but that I avoid because they would consume all my time and money. But every so often I get blindsided. Wil (Upchurch) said he needed some minatures for the game, so he convinced me to pick up a box. I figured I could give it to my son as a gift. Of course, once I saw how cool the minatures looked and realized how well they would work in my own D&D campaign, I was hooked. The very next day I dropped $100+ on minatures. Oh well, if I hadn't spent a hundred dollars on minatures I would have ended up buying the "World's Largest Dungeon". In any case, Maure was a lot of fun even though we did end up activating the terrible golem and I ended up getting slaughtered in a single round. That's what I get for making an Elven Fighter. Elves just aren't meant to go toe-to-toe with anything called the "Terrible Golem."

Well, that was longer than I expected, so I guess I'll split the rest of the days over the next little while.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross