Back from Gen Con

Well I am back from Gen Con, but completely beat and everyone here has some sort of upper respiratory thing.

Will post more tomorrow, but I had a fantastic time!

#RPGaDAY Day 15, Favourite Convention Game

#RPGaDAY Day 15, Favourite Convention Game

I have had the amazing luck to have played in some really great games at Cons.

Running Ghosts of Albion: Obsession is one of my favorite things to do in fact.
But I have a couple of games that bring me great memories.

Back in 2012 at Gen Con I took my kids and we started our 1st Ed AD&D game.  We played in the lobby of our hotel and it was a blast.  Of course we kept getting interrupted by people walking by and telling us how awesome it was that we were all playing 1st Ed AD&D.  We went through module B1 and had a great, great time.

Another one where I was the player in a Buffy/Charmed/Supernatural crossover.  The game was using Cinematic Unisystem (Buffy/Angel) rules so I went into it knowing I was going to have fun.  Well I had an absolute blast.  I played Piper, one of my favorite witches ever. In the course of the game I burned through about 5 drama points but I also had earned 6 for role playing. Course having seen every Charmed episode gave me an advantage.  I wish I had remembered the GMs/Director's name because I would have easily gone to one of her other games.

--
BTW Tonight is the night I learn if I won an ENnie or not.
Win or Loose it was an honor to be nominated and I thank everyone that voted for me!

Gen Con Bound

Posting will be a bit off-schedule this week.

Getting ready to head out to Gen Con.  Going a day early to check out the zoo and spend some time away from the computer.

Hope to see you there!

Found my Gen Con Game

Every time I have taken my kids to Gen Con we have started a new adventure.
I like to pull from the classics no matter what it is I am playing.  So in the past we have done S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and B2 Keep on the Borderlands.

This year it is going to be L1 The Secret of Bone Hill!

I am rather fond of this adventure and have figured out some new tweeks to it to make it work great in my kids' AD&D game.  Plus I have a bunch of Len Lakofka's material from Dragon that I want to port into this.

Should be a blast!

Great Gaming Weekend!

What a great weekend for gaming!

Friday Night I went to my regular 2nd Ed game. We were missing some players so I got to bring along my oldest son.  We got there and more players were missing. So we created some new characters living in the same world with the idea that they could be alternates for anyone that drops into the game or we could even switch from our primary characters to these.  Some hiccups, but all in all a good night and a great bunch of characters.

Sunday Morning I registered for my GenCon games.  I didn't get everything I wanted, but I still got plenty. Going to be playing some Ubiquity and Mage the Ascension for the first time in years.

Sunday Afternoon.  Again, missing characters. This time my youngest son crashed on the couch from his night of playing paintball.  So my oldest wanted to play our 1st Ed game and finish up the Caves of Chaos.  Instead I had him take one of his alternate characters, an assassin, and discover that Mendel the Merchant was part of the Slave trade to and from the Caves.  This will play nicely when they hit the A series later.
Merchant killed, plot discovered.  All in a good day's work.  Now they just need to clear out caves A, B and C and they can move on to the next adventure.

Gen Con 2014

Gen Con 2014 is approaching fast.

In case you are going and want to plan out your gaming the listing of 9,000 events is now out.
Registration is this Sunday and promises to be just as hectic as the last couple of years.  I worked out several alternate calendars to get everything in (scheduling for 4 is a pain).

Lots of Pathfinder, but not as much D&D as I would have liked.
And I'll be honest, out side of a couple of token games, the OSR is really no where to be found.  Ok to be fair there are a lot of DCC games, but it's that and Labyrinth Lord

The vendor map is also out now. So you can plan your shopping I guess.
http://images.gencon.com/GenCon2014-ExhibitHallmapwithlinks.pdf
The cool thing though is this is hot linked, so you can also go to the website of the vendors.

A couple of things jumped out at me.
First, Where is WotC?
Second, where is the group that sells all the OSR games?  I know that in 2012 they had their own booth but other years had been sharing one.

I was reading somewhere, can't remember where now, but it was earlier in the week, that the number of events is actually down a little from last year.

D&D40 Bloghop: Day 18

Day 18: First gaming convention you ever attended.

I had attended some smaller Con at Southern Illinois University back in the late 80s.  But being a poor college student I didn't get a chance to do much.

My first Gen Con was not until 2007.  I have had a blast there every year since (except for 2013, we didn't go).

This year I am taking my boys again.  It should be a blast!

Not Going to Gen Con, but here are some winners

WOW.

That was a lot of people.

So I expanded my winners.
I pulled out my dice and did this old school.

Congrats to:

F. Douglas Wall.
John Harp
David Cutts

and since demand was so high I did some more.

faoladh
Thaumiel Nerub
Anthony Hunter
Tim Shorts

Seven is a good number!

Honestly that was fun.  I am working on more material for a variety of things (vague much?) so I am going to give more stuff away in the future.  Certainly in October, but maybe sooner.

Thanks everyone for participating!

Not at GenCon? Get a Free copy of The Witch!

I am at work. Been here for 2 hours now.  Wish I was at Gen Con to be honest.

How about you?

Well maybe I can improve some people's days.

I am going to give away 3 copies of The Witch today!
I will pick three people that comment below "I am not at Gen Con either".  I will need a way to get in touch with you via email to send out your copies.

How about till the end of the day today or something.

Enjoy Gen Con!

I hope everyone is having a great time at Gen Con today!

I have seen some pictures and they look fantastic.

Have fun!

Gen Con Blues

I had mentioned earlier in the year that we (my family and I) were not going to go to Gen Con this year.
Partly due to expense, partly due to this being the busiest time of year for me at work (getting ready for Fall term to start).

Now I am thinking that was a bad decision.
My kids love to go and frankly so do I.  Not that there is anything special we were looking forward too this year.  Just the normally hanging out with gamers, playing some games, hitting the food trucks, seeing all the costumes and spending way too much money.

We are already set on going next year. In fact we might even go a day early to hit the zoo or the museum.
Can't wait for it!  But until then I will have to settle for hearing all about the fun you all have.

More Wrap-Ups and Plugs

At Gen Con I got to play a FANTASTIC game of Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG that mixed in characters from Buffy, Supernatural and Charmed.  I got to play Piper and was thrilled to death with it.  Reminded me of running "Semi-Charmed Life" so many years ago.   Kudos to the GM and all the players.

A few plugs I'd like to make:

Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary has a kickstarter.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewpascal/dungeons-and-dragons-a-documentary
20 days to go and they still have a bit to raise.  I have heard a lot of good about this film and would love to see it get made.

Band of Zombies is down to it's last 50 hours.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1801360072/all-flesh-must-be-eaten-rpg-band-of-zombies-source
There are some nice stretch goals with this one.

Banners on the Cheap has been flirting with the RPG market.
You can see teh map I had made here: http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2012/07/my-new-map.html
Well now they have a full blown site for maps and battle mats.
http://www.bannersonthecheap.com/rpg-maps-and-banners
The site is super easy to use.

I think that is it for now.

Zatannurday: Gen Con Cosplay

Back from Gen Con and there was only one Zatanna.

But I got her!

I didn't get her name, sorry to say, but I got this pic. One more was sent to me as well.

Love her costume! I thought she looked great. Hope she had a great time at Gen Con.

Gen Con Haul 2012

First up:  Yes. I know I owe you all a Part 2 of the OSR is Dead. But many of you made a lot of the points I was going to.
I also know I missed White Dwarf Wednesday.  I was away from my machine all day.
So instead a drive by post.  With pictures.

So here is my Gen Con 2012 haul.  I also picked up some things here for my kids.

Here we have all the books, minis (love that Gelatinous Cube) and swag.

I picked up a way cool game, Monsterhearts (pdf), that I want to talk about in much detail later.  Also my new ConX 2.0 book, Zenner cards and screen.

I got my two copies of Castles & Crusades from Troll Lord and Jason Vey's Amazing "Amazing Adventures".  Again, I want to talk about that one in detail too.  I picked up a replacement GURPS Horror (lost it years ago) and GURPS Castle Falkenstein.

I got some of the "Drow" D&D dice bags.  And a bunch of older d20 books on magic.

Minis.  I got some dragons (well my kids did) and some other minis.  I love that huge one.  It is a statue of some sort.  In my games it will be a Death Titan.

Some books for my games.  The Dragon (Mongoose) and Dragonlance is for the 3.x game, Faith & Avatars and the Dragon Mag Annual are for the 4e game.  Rokugan was just because it was a buck.

Finally I am replacing my worn out Pokemon backpack for a real gamer bag.

And a full set Drow dice.  We all got some and had to go to all the D&D events to get them. They are very cool.  My wife likes hers because they are purple.  All her dice are purple.

Is the OSR Dead?

So I made some interesting, though not entirely new or unique, observations.

The OSR, as a Movement, is Dead.

This is the point of view of Tavis Allison who gave a talk about the OSR at Gen Con this past week.  Tavis has the street cred to back up his claims too, author of The Mule Abides blog and the Adventurer Conqueror King game system.

Though he has his reasons, I think I am looking at something slightly different.

I am not talking about the lack ENnies or even representation at Gen Con.
There was the the OSR Publications booth, which was great.

I am talking about the OSR as a movement.  If the stated goal* of the OSR was to get old-school style gaming back into the hands of gamers, then one only needed to go to the Wizards of the Coast booth and buy a copy of the 1st Ed AD&D books, or listen to their keynote address about the availability of older products, or go play D&D5.

(* lets be honest here, no one ever stated any goal of any sort)

If the goal was get products to go mainstream, well the OSR Publications booth was a good step in that direction.  George Strayton of the Secret Fire RPG was an industry guest of honor at this past Gen Con as well. Castles and Crusades (one of the earliest Retro Clones in my opinion) never seemed more popular.

So if the OSR as a mission was get "old school" products in the main-stream, then that goal has been met.

The movement then is dead. Why?  Well if the "R" mean Revolution, Revival or Renascence, then the goals have been achieved.   Old School is back.

The OSR as a community or even as a loosely affiliated publishing movement will live on.  Much like the Indie Press Revolution (who, to be perfectly honest, does everything the OSR could do and does it well).
There will still be sites and blogs that support old-school play.  They existed before the OSR movement and will (in some form) afterwards. 

I fear though that for many that the "R" stood for "Resistance" as in the alternative not because they liked old school play so much, but because they hated the "new school" of 4e or even 3.x.  Well for them I fear the battle wages on and it will never be won.  TSR is never coming back to life, WotC owns D&D and there are  many that enjoy the newer games.

In any case the OSR will change.  Not because it wants to, but because it will need to to stay relevant.

I will have to post on this topic more in a bit.

Gen Con recap: The name of the game is "D&D"

I did something truly special this Gen Con. Something that I would love to repeat.

I played D&D with my family through the entire Con.  One of the things I wanted to do with my boys was to play the history of D&D with them.  I didn't get into every game I wanted, but I got in enough to make it count.  I also wanted my wife to join in so she could give her unbiased opinion of the games.  I have learned to trust her judgment on many, many things over the years.

Part of the plan was that any XP, gold or magic the boys got in the games they could translate that over to  the special 1st Ed Game we were playing at night.

We played a D&D4 game on Thursday.  It was a fun game where we all played Dwarfs.  The DM was great and he played well with the kids.  Thursday night I had a game of my own to play (which I'll discuss later).

Friday was our Castles and Crusades game.  I REALLY wanted to play this one after going on and on so much about C&C a while back.  I picked up my new copies of the 5th printing of the Players Handbook and Jason Vey's amazing Amazing Adventures.  The game we played was also a lot of fun.  Again we had a great GM...er Castle Keeper, and in this we all played Assassins.  My youngest loved it.

Friday night we rolled up characters for 1st Ed AD&D!!  They rolled up two each, and these are the children of the Dragonslayers (their current 3.x game).  That took us till midnight since I had to look a lot of things up and we were sitting on the 2nd floor of the JW Marriott and everyone had stop by and comment on what we were doing.

Saturday we played D&D5/Next.  If I would have known we were making characters I would have gone into it with a different mindset.  But it worked out well and character creation was a snap.  Really.  It only took me 30 mins to do my character and help out my wife and two kids.  I playtested the Warlock and I like it so far.  The game itself was fast, I mean really fast. I am going to come back to that in a sec in fact.

Saturday night we played AD&D 1st ed.  I had the boys go on a quick adventure into Castle Quasqueton from B1 In Search of the Unknown.  The boys had some great rolls and they even took out some orcs, zombies and a group of kobolds. The boys made their objective (which happened to be a on sheet of paper I wrote on when I ran this in college around 1988-9 or so), find a missing witch (Marissa) and bring her back.  I hinted there was an evil cult at work (cause that was what I was doing in 88) and the boys ran with it.  Now this cult is "infiltrating" the lands and they now have to put a stop to it.  I might run with that.

Fighting the Kobolds
Quite by accident one of the common elements in the D&D5/Next playtest and my AD&D game on the same day was the party (6 and 5 characters respectively) fought 4 kobolds.  The combat for each ran very, very similar.  In both cases it was fast with hit points flying everywhere and characters on the verge of death. I can say that in at least this respect D&D5 is closer to old-school play than 3 or 4 was.

It dawned on me at one point or another while playing Saturday night.  I was playing AD&D. With my boys. At Gen Con!  I play a lot of D&D with them and I have played a lot of AD&D over the years, but this felt special. This felt like the best thing I could do then and there.

I have no idea what I am going to do with D&D5 when it comes out.  At this very same Gen Con Wizards of the Coast had announced that D&D5 would not be out till 2014.  That is a very good year in my mind.  Still gives us time to play some 4e AND be out in time for the 40th anniversary of D&D.
WotC also announced that previous editions would be made available again via e-book format of some sort.

There were copies of 1st Ed for sale at Gen Con and we all also picked up a full set of D&D "Drow" dice.

For me there is no debate. D&D still reigns as king at Gen Con.

Back from Gen Con!

I am back from the "Best 4 Days in Gaming" and I am still riding a gamer's high.

So much to talk about and share.I'll have to get my thoughts collected and share some posts with you all soon!

Posting this week

My regular posting is going to be off this week due to Gen Con.

I have some reviews of some books I have been using for years , so I have those queued up and ready to go.

There might the random/odd post from Gen Con itself.

But otherwise I am going to be enjoying the Best 4 Days in Gaming!

Friday Links

It is the Friday before Gen Con.  While I am gearing up for some serious vacation time coming to me. I figure I'll send you out some link today.

First off, David from There's Dungeons Down Under is back, at least for 1 post.

http://theresdungeonsdownunder.blogspot.com/2012/04/d-next-and-osr-tumult.html

Kenzer & Co are giving away HackMaster Basic for free!  Crazy I know.

http://www.kenzerco.com/product_info.php?cPath=25_94&products_id=862

The Kickstarter for Band of Zombies for All Flesh Must Be Eaten has 21 days left to go. Get in on the Zombie WWII goodness.  This promises to be a great book.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1801360072/all-flesh-must-be-eaten-rpg-band-of-zombies-source

My boys and I have decided to start our 1st Ed AD&D game at Gen Con.  Seems fitting and I don't have to haul all my minis and maps with me.

But to do that I need character sheets.  While I have one of each type of the original AD&D sheets left, I didn't want to use them.  Good thing we have the Mad Irishman and his collection of RPG Sheets.

http://www.mad-irishman.net/index.html

Happy Friday everyone!

Gen Con 2012

It dawned on the other day that I am in no way shape or form ready for Gen Con 2012 yet.

Hotel was booked back in January, badges bought, games registered for.Google calendar updated.
But I am not mentally ready.  I am not running anything this year officially, maybe something for my kids.  Most likely the continuation of theForgotten Temple of Tharizdun.

I plan to pick some things up at the OSR booth, but there are not many purchases I want to make this year to be honest.

Who is going to the Best Four Days in Gaming? 
What are your plans?