So, I went to GenCon last weekend. First GenCon, but as most of you may be aware, not my first large convention of geekery. I went with my local gaming group, which partakes in a variety of everything. Three of them had been before, the other four aside from me had never been to any large conventions.
First off, the haul:
So, that's 6 ships from the new wave of the X-Wing Miniatures Game in the upper left -- two TIE Bombers, two B-Wings, a HWK-290, and a Lambda Shuttle. Next to them stand my Wyrd Miniatures take-aways, the plastic resculpts for the two masters I play which made it to print for GenCon, the faction decks to pick up the masters that didn't make the first release, and the Miss- and Nightmare special editions for this year, along with the 2.0 edition of the rules. In the middle, is R.K. Milholland's sketch of Choo-Choo Bear and the 7th Edition Quick Start promo rules for Call of Cthulhu, which will immediately be making a trip to Tennessee via Atlanta in a couple weeks before finding their final home. On the left, Mutants and Masterminds 3rd Edition was a product I actually Kickstarted, and happily picked up at GenCon to save Green Ronin some shipping overhead. Below that is my "Elf Ranger" pregen from the Candlekeep adventure session for D&D Next, and then Age of Rebellion's beta rules, which look completely self-sufficient (as promised) while offering a different approach to the same core game as Edge of the Empire. Beside that is the character sheet I used in my session of Edge of Empire, playing the "Shadows of a Black Sun" adventure that was featured at Free RPG Day earlier in the year. Beside that are my Android: Netrunner tournament spoils: the middle card is the promotional alternate art copy of Private Security Force (which is a
sweet looking card), and it is flanked by the identities I used in the tournament, which Lukas Litzinger, the lead designer for the game, graciously signed after my first round as he was serving as a roaming judge. Finally, beside that, the character cards for my two True Dungeon runs.
Event-wise, I hit up the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored D&D Next sessions, where about half my group (which is primarily a 4e D&D group, these days) got to play a 2-hour adventure set in Candlekeep. It was nifty (hmm. I should've dropped my ranger pre-gen in there, too... You know what, I'm just going to re-take the picture) and I think most everybody who didn't like 4th Edition will appreciate the direction they're taking with it. The DM of our group came out of that saying they kept nothing from 4th Edition, but I disagree; it seems like they kept the streamlining they tried to do with the skill system in 4th, but took it even
farther, to the point it almost resembled something pre-3rd, if that makes any sense. But yeah, all the 4th Edition framework of powers and requisite maps and the like were gone, taking with it the feeling of playing a skirmish wargame with oodles of hit points. Combat was fast and smooth, though it lost a little of the finicky detail that 3rd introduced with regards to movement.
Next up was time in the Exhibit Hall. Lots of goodies from the Vendors. I wanted to get my stop at Wyrd Miniatures out of the way, so I could use free snippets of time in line and whatnot to peruse the new Malifaux rules. I secured the above Wyrd loot, and the line just barely ran too long for me to make my first ticketed event, a game of Sailpower. I cursed my luck, and vowed to track it down later and see if I could play in a no-show's slot with a generic ticket (never got a chance to try). So I wandered around a lot, stopped to check in on a few Kickstarters I'd backed, including SolForge (Stoneblade Entertainment), Hex (Cryptozoic Entertainment), Tectonic Craft Studios, and CoolMiniOrNot's various projects. Grabbed lunch with some from my group, wandered the vendor hall floor some more with company, where I introduced one of my friends to SolForge (he beat me in a heads-up match, lol), and stood in line for FFG's booth (they were using a ticketing system for the major pre-release items on the first day; I'd snagged my tickets to reserve the option to buy X-Wing ships and decided to save the line-waiting for when my friends were free to accompany me. It was a good call, two of the other guys wanted stuff from FFG anyways).
After loading ourselves down at the FFG booth, we decided it was a good time to go check in at our hotel, which gave me the opportunity to move my car to the hotel lot, as well. Quick bite to eat from my packed snacks, and then three of us went to check out True Dungeon, which one of the other rookies had heard was sort of a "must experience at least once" thing at GenCon. It's essentially an RPG dungeon crawl done up in the style of a haunted house. Your group moves from room to room, quite inventively decorated and very atmospheric, and each room has a DM that walks you through either a combat or a puzzle encounter within the room. It was a neat concept, and the work they put into it is pretty neat, but ultimately, they take a fun concept and bog it down with a bunch of gear and loot represented by chips. I guess some guys go nuts over this, and buy up extra packs of random treasure and whatnot at exorbitant prices, and trade rare stuff between themselves at even more exorbitant rates, and that's how the guys who run this event make a nice living off it, or whatever. I did two sessions of it, one on Thursday with a subset of our group who was interested in trying the combat-focused version, and once on Friday with everybody doing the puzzle-focused version of the other adventure for the year. The puzzle one was way better. The combat was fun, but wasn't necessary in large doses, especially since the puzzles were more interesting and didn't rely heavily on gear collection. The other 7 guys we were paired with for the combat run were pretty nice (and WAY into this, apparently), and helped us get our bearings and even heaped spare (common, I'm sure) equipment on us to help get us kitted out moderately better.
My Friday was entirely taken up with two events: The Android: Netrunner tournament (seen in its own thread) and that second True Dungeon run-through. I had a lot of fun at both.
Saturday, I attended a miniature painting seminar focusing on painting weathered metallics. It was interesting, and I picked up a few things that I might be able to put to use. I tracked down a chance to get the Hex tutorial, and then headed over to the area where they had a LAN set up with 32 stations playing heads-up games against each other. I checked in as a backer, redeemed my ticket to let me play (my other backer friend didn't have any tickets on him, and we sadly didn't have time to wait in the line at that moment anyways -- we had gone over there because we knew it would be the last chance we'd both be free to try to play each other once or twice), and then I ran off to play my 3-hour session of Edge of the Empire. That was a blast. Our GM was pretty good; he wrote the adventure in the Edge of the Empire Beginner's Set, it turns out. I was playing with yet another of the guys from my group and 3 strangers, who turned out to be pretty good to play with and we had a lot of fun careening around the streets of Coruscant leaving a trail of blood and sorrow in our pursuit of a bounty hunter who'd double-crossed our employers. I played CH-1, the Droid Bounty Hunter, and quickly became the go-to guy for shotgunny destruction.
After that, the rest of our group had just secured a table at The Ram, which apparently prints a themed menu every year for GenCon. This year's sponsor was Privateer Press, so the whole thing was done up with a Warmachine/Hordes theme. I got the sirloin medium, they undercooked it to medium rare as I expected, so all was good. Easily the most-real food I ate all weekend. After dinner, we had our last group hurrah lined up in a big game of Are You a Werewolf? (that's another version of Mafia for those who weren't aware), which ended up being our group of 7, another group of 5, a couple, and some solo guy thrown in. We played several games for about an hour and a half. I spent the latter hour or so wondering if I wanted to stick around (I don't really get that much out of Mafia; it's a game that relies too much on picking up social queues and random accusations and not enough on deductive elimination, for me) but not wanting to just bail on my friends while they were all having a lot of fun...
Finally, Sunday was spent playing a few rounds of Hex to get a feel for the game and some of the different ways it plays depending on your faction and color choices, and earning enough tickets (via wins and losses) to exchange for a full set of the GenCon promo items. Then, it was back to the vendor hall yet again to get demos of Relic Knights (Soda Pop Miniatures/CoolMiniOrNot) and Leviathan (Cryptozoic). I ran out of time before I could get a demo in on Sails of Glory, but I have a sneaking suspicion I may just buy that one blindly and see how it goes if I can't find it at Dragon*Con.
Oh! Let me leave you with a bombshell announcement (which I missed the panel for, but got to see in the display case on Saturday) Fantasy Flight Games made... They're going to release Corellian Corvettes for their X-Wing Minis system! This thing is enormous and gorgeous. See spoiler.
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