Dave's Adventures In Americaland 2010: Second Annual GenCon Report!
Yes, it's that time of year again. I'm a few days tardy in writing this up - the Con-buzz is already fading from the interwebs, like the memory of an awesome party that doesn't quite stay fixed in the mind the morning after. But I'll give it a go.
As BlackHatMatt says, some people attend Cons to party, some to go on the pull, some to tout for work, some to shop, some to dress up and some to play games. Last year I was in "shop/tout" mode thanks to registration being opened when I was on honeymoon, and this time around I was determined to shift it firmly to "game/tout". I think I managed it. Saturday of the con I spent all of half an hour in the dealer's hall, but I get ahead of myself.
For Brits, especially non-London Brits, the journey to and from Indy is an epic. This year's adventure begins on
Tuesday
Which was spent packing, playing Fallout 3 and then getting the train from London to Reading. Last year I could stay at Ian Crawford's house to while away the pre-flight evening, but he's gone and got one of those job things he's heard are fashionable. So no dice. Dice firmly in suitcase, I instead made it to Heathrow on the link coach and - after getting off on the road that circles the airport about half an hour's walk too early - made it to the Ibis I would spend the night in. Early night, for...
Wednesday
...Started at 3am, forcing myself to get up and get into the terminal, as I wasn't allowed to check in online until 24 hours before my *second* flight of the journey, which meant I could either not sleep at all or get to the terminal early enough to do it there and still get a seat. Fun.
After a six hour flight (Iron Man, Percy Jackson and The Book of Eli) later, I was in Toronto. Soviet Canukstan lived up to it's reputation of being slightly politer than American airports (certainly, it's the best US Immigration I've had to go through, and I'm getting to be an old hand at being peered at suspiciously by them) and after noting the group of young people behind me talking about the climbing abilities of halflings and the best way to kill a gelatinous cube, I met my first gamers. These four Londoners, attendees of Labyrinth (an infamous LARP over here) and D&D enthusiasts, were half newbies and half second-timers like me. I ran into them repeatedly over the Con and all the way home, and I was glad of the company, but I can only remember one of their names (Nadia). Which is a shame. I'll try to track them down through Labyrinth to say hi at some point.
The Four British Larpers and I were soon joined by a pair of Canadian gamers - Keith Foo, webmaster of "Big Iron Vault" (www.bigironvault.com) and his friend had press badges for the con. He knows Jess Hartley! Once everyone assembled in the gate for the connection to Indy, more and more gamers started to pop up - Spanish David (who works for Games Workshop), the Two Big Canadian Gamers and more. It soon became clear this was going to be a bit of a party plane - 80% of the tiny passenger list were going to the con.
It turned out Keith and his friend were staying at the same hotel as me, so my expected taxi fare to Indy from the local airport was drastically cut down by sharing. Orienting myself from the Canterbury didn't take long with my previous experience of the streets around the Convention Centre, and I was soon checked in and - failing to get my badge by five minutes as the lines closed for the night - wandering in search of food and checking out the Train Station open gaming tables, which I hadn't made it to the year before. I didn't find anything to play, though, so I settled in to get prepared for the touting-for-work of...
Thursday
It turns out that despite experiencing it last year on the Friday and warning the British Larpers about it the night before, I forgot how little there is to do in the Convention Centre before the trading hall opens at ten other than get crushed by the ever-increasing crowd of people waiting to get in. I made my now-traditional once-a-con trip to the TCG hall and saw the card and mini games being set up (Reaper had an *awesome* 3d game board for their challenge, and there was an impressive, hand-built steampunk Zeppelin board, the deck laid with squares for mini gaming and the rotors turning by means of little motors). Stuck for something to do for half an hour, I tried something I went home last year kicking myself for not trying.
Battletech Pods!
I missed Battletech when I was a kid. FASA were just "The Shadowrun and Earthdawn guys" when I were a young gamer, so it holds no nostalgia value. But the linked battle-arena sit-in cockpits drew me in, and I was soon stomping around in a Hellcat. At least, I think it was a Hellcat. I thought I did terribly, but turned out to be narrowly second once the scores were printed. Turns out I did a lot of good sniping in between getting blown up by bigger mechs, and the former was worth more points.
That killed the time, and the doors opened. The hall this year seemed less logically laid out - I had to consult the map frequently, as the "avenues" and "streets" rarely ran the whole length thanks to a few badly-placed oversized booths, meaning it was easy to miss things. I ended up navigating by the ceiling banners and the indented sections of the side wall. Cubicle 7's booth was packed, and I had a good talk with Dominic there (who remembered me from last time) before finding Sandstorm / Posthuman and picking up Sunward for Eclipse Phase. The Indy Press Revolution proved harder to locate - GenCon, in their infinite wisdom, had put them right at the back next to the Hentai stand and the small businesses selling gamer soap and the like.
And then there was the White Wolf bar.
Much e-ink has been spilt over the (inspired? mad?) idea to go to GenCon, hire a booth and *sell no books*, instead outfitting it with comfy chairs in the gothic styling and having a DJ and a bar for visitors. When I first saw it, I recognised noone there among the CCP staffers, the place was empty apart from the cheerful greeters from the Camarilla and I was a bit nonplussed. Okay, a lot nonplussed.
Two and a bit hours later, however, following a chance lunch encounter with those British Larpers while I started to read Sunward, I met a friendly face in the Chessex Avenue Of Dice. Travis Stout; gentleman adventurer, videogame designer, D&D and WW freelancer and author of big chunks of this year's big WOTC release in Dark Sun. We explored the hall for a bit and swung by the booth again, both needing a sit down from the crowd.
Eddy Webb was there. Ethan Skemp was there. Rich Thomas was there. Justin Achilli was DJing. All the tabletop side of the business appeared to have turned up an hour after the hall opened. As we walked in, Happy Hour (free drink) was declared.
I decided I rather liked the booth after all.
My watch appeared to like it too. It randomly stopped, causing me to miss the first Seminar I'd booked into for the weekend before I noticed it had been half twelve for a long time. I restarted it and it hasn't stopped since. Clearly a low-level Paradox effect.
Second Seminar of the day was "Latest and Greatest", which turned out to be a talking shop on what the guys at the panel (who run a podcast) thought was cool. That being Deathwatch, Fiasco and Pathfinder. There was a spirited discussion about the trend of rpgs resembling boardgames, which sounds like D&D4 sour grapes to me. I tend to focus more on the tendency I've noticed for games to be balanced toward shorter and shorter campaign-runs as companies realise they share audiences and that those gamers who play epic ten-year chronicles are essentially economic dead weight. Hence D&D's shoot-up-to-Epic progression, nWoD breaking down after the 200th experience point, WFRP being redesigned to make it quicker to set up and so on.
Anyways. back to the Hall for a little while, then while everything shut down for the night I grabbed a quick dinner and headed off to meet the group for our first evening's gaming.
Last year, Jason Martinez played Taliesin in my Mage game (and he was due to do so again on Saturday). This year, he'd decided to run a side-story of his own chronicle, and so I finally got to *play* Mage for the first time. Granted, I was the only mage in a group of three Werewolves and a Changing Breeds Werecat, but I *finally got to play a Mage*. A Mystagogue ley-line engineer, in fact. It was great fun - we defeated a Vandalism-Spirit by cunning means of Calling it through a verge and beating it into a warded box I then dropped a Ban on while the Werewolves kept fighting it. Tactics, youknow?
After the game, we all decided we weren't tired of one another yet and headed to the boardgame hall to see what we could find. Last year we played an epic Descent game; this year we found "Small World" lurking at the back of the pile and gave it a go. Very fun indeed - I especially like the tactics surrounding when to abandon your "character" and then reconquer it with a new one. too early and you don't advance, too late and you've overextended yourself.
By the time we finished, it was pushing half two. Two of the guys were setting up the new Horus Heresy (they never did play it, I was to later learn - they gave up at three attempting to learn the rules and put it back) but I pled tiredness and crawled back to the Canterbury and bed.
Friday
I made it into the Con for opening again, though only just, and after another mooch around (I picked up a few smaller games - Universalis and Fiasco from IPR, Summerland from Cubicle 7) headed over to the connected hotel playing host to White Wolf for the double Seminar of doom. First off was "oWoD / nWoD cagematch", a no-holds barred assessment of the good and bad in both phases of the World of Darkness. Then it was the "nWoD retrospective", in which Travis and I as the freelancers in the room were invited up to join the panel. I hope I didn't make too much of an ass of myself.
That personal milestone achieved, I saw the gang from the night before had snuck into the audience and went to lunch with them and Travis at the nearby Noodle house. Then another Seminar - the folks at Posthuman were talking about the upcoming year for Eclipse Phase.
By now, I was well and truly Seminared out. I crashed for a while at the White Wolf booth, clutching a beer, until I was spotted by a passing Blackhatmatt on his way around the hall. A brief catchup with him motivated me to move myself, and I headed on out to my scheduled game for the evening.
The Wrecking Crew are an affiliated demo team who specialise in nWoD games. I'd signed up to play Mage in a moment of whimsy back when Events opened for Registration months ago, long before Jason invited me to the Thursday night game. As it happened, Jason and the others were playing Hunter a few tables away, but "River of LIght" it was for me, in which an American-Football-themed Cabal (it took me a while to realise all our Shadow names were sports references) had a manual on how to operate an artifact of doom stolen by a Pylon of Seers.
The Storyteller did his best, but most of the other players were new, one was monopolising his time and another really didn't seem to be into it at all. Still, he kept to time and by ten I was out. If it had been the only game I'd played that weekend I'd have been disappointed, but as it was it killed four hours. And my character.
Saturday
There really wasn't any time to lose today; I had a completely booked schedule after eleven in the morning, so my walk around the dealer hall was done on double time. Then it was off to the free gaming tables to run Soul Cage.
This year, we were joined by Grace (playing Nimue). Adding a sixth player meant I felt, at the end, that Nick/Gawain and Alec/Excalibur in particular were a little bit shortchanged in the final mix, but I hope they enjoyed it anyway. Certainly, Phil/Adder did an excellent job with a pretty tense character brief, Mike made me wish I could play Haruspex as well as him and Grace nailed Nimue. Recap will be up on the Actual Play thread in the fullness of time, but there are four sessions of the home game to get through before its proper place in continuity.
Then it was off to the Palomino for dinner with Matt, Eric and Autumn Berg, Michelle Lyons, Heather and one of Matt's friends I met at the Freelancer dinner last year. Which is also where we first encountered the Palomino, and decided to go back to it *this* year.
While others went to the White Wolf nightclub party, a core of us had other plans. Matt was going to run Geist for us. He's already written the game up on his own lj: we investigated and fought off a Crow-host that had somehow lost it's identity and was consuming those of the people it killed. Best game I've played based on obscure Spanish poetry all year!
At the end, we were all dying the death of sleep deprivation, and Sunday would be the trip home for me. So at around one, I bade them all farewell and headed back to the hotel.
Sunday
Up early again to pack and have my suitcase stored, then off to meet the Soul Cage gang for breakfast at the French Restaurant three blocks away. Very tasty indeed. Wishing all but Nick/Gawain farewell (and noting that the Jonas Brothers appeared to be in town judging by the tour buses parked up outside the Hyatt) we headed back to the hall - Nick had turned up late on Friday night and, what with Soul Cage the day before, hadn't actually been *in* it very much, so we walked around for a bit until he had to go meet his ride home. I made a final tour, congratulating Ennie Winners when I'd had conversations with them before, nearly buying Freemarket but deciding Eclipse Phase met my Transhumanism needs for the forseeable future and picking up Barbarians of Lemuria. By chance I bumped into Keith Foo from the flight in, and arranged to meet up back at the hotel to share a taxi back to the airport again.
Which we did.
Leaving Indy was, like last time, a drawn-out process. The gates are full of gamers, striking up conversations about how the Con went for them. Keith, his friend and Cheryl (his sister, I think) were great company for our four hour wait, and then it was onto the plane to Toronto.
Toronto airport, like any airport, is a twilight zone at half nine on a Sunday night. Empty and long, without crowds to distract you from how far you've been walking down the corridors funneling you from gate to gate, and as I'd been sitting right at the back of the plane everyone else had long since cleared off by the time I made it in. I made it to the newsagents near my gate eventually, and immediately ran into those British Larpers! Who were on the same flight back to the UK as me.
The flight which was immediately delayed by two hours because the plane "was unsuitable" and a replacement aircraft and crew were needed. And which I spent sat in the middle of a group of teenaged Canadian Missionaries.
I kid ye not.
Bidding goodbye to the Larpers (I really must figure out who they were), I trudged my weary way to the coach station, onto a coach to Reading train station, onto a train back to Cheltenham and then into a taxi. I arrived back at four pm, some twenty six hours after getting up in Indy.
And then I slept.
I'll post my thoughts on the happenings at the Con, the state of the industry (it's dying! Nah, just kidding) and the games I bought on my Freelancing Blog.
TTFN!
As BlackHatMatt says, some people attend Cons to party, some to go on the pull, some to tout for work, some to shop, some to dress up and some to play games. Last year I was in "shop/tout" mode thanks to registration being opened when I was on honeymoon, and this time around I was determined to shift it firmly to "game/tout". I think I managed it. Saturday of the con I spent all of half an hour in the dealer's hall, but I get ahead of myself.
For Brits, especially non-London Brits, the journey to and from Indy is an epic. This year's adventure begins on
Tuesday
Which was spent packing, playing Fallout 3 and then getting the train from London to Reading. Last year I could stay at Ian Crawford's house to while away the pre-flight evening, but he's gone and got one of those job things he's heard are fashionable. So no dice. Dice firmly in suitcase, I instead made it to Heathrow on the link coach and - after getting off on the road that circles the airport about half an hour's walk too early - made it to the Ibis I would spend the night in. Early night, for...
Wednesday
...Started at 3am, forcing myself to get up and get into the terminal, as I wasn't allowed to check in online until 24 hours before my *second* flight of the journey, which meant I could either not sleep at all or get to the terminal early enough to do it there and still get a seat. Fun.
After a six hour flight (Iron Man, Percy Jackson and The Book of Eli) later, I was in Toronto. Soviet Canukstan lived up to it's reputation of being slightly politer than American airports (certainly, it's the best US Immigration I've had to go through, and I'm getting to be an old hand at being peered at suspiciously by them) and after noting the group of young people behind me talking about the climbing abilities of halflings and the best way to kill a gelatinous cube, I met my first gamers. These four Londoners, attendees of Labyrinth (an infamous LARP over here) and D&D enthusiasts, were half newbies and half second-timers like me. I ran into them repeatedly over the Con and all the way home, and I was glad of the company, but I can only remember one of their names (Nadia). Which is a shame. I'll try to track them down through Labyrinth to say hi at some point.
The Four British Larpers and I were soon joined by a pair of Canadian gamers - Keith Foo, webmaster of "Big Iron Vault" (www.bigironvault.com) and his friend had press badges for the con. He knows Jess Hartley! Once everyone assembled in the gate for the connection to Indy, more and more gamers started to pop up - Spanish David (who works for Games Workshop), the Two Big Canadian Gamers and more. It soon became clear this was going to be a bit of a party plane - 80% of the tiny passenger list were going to the con.
It turned out Keith and his friend were staying at the same hotel as me, so my expected taxi fare to Indy from the local airport was drastically cut down by sharing. Orienting myself from the Canterbury didn't take long with my previous experience of the streets around the Convention Centre, and I was soon checked in and - failing to get my badge by five minutes as the lines closed for the night - wandering in search of food and checking out the Train Station open gaming tables, which I hadn't made it to the year before. I didn't find anything to play, though, so I settled in to get prepared for the touting-for-work of...
Thursday
It turns out that despite experiencing it last year on the Friday and warning the British Larpers about it the night before, I forgot how little there is to do in the Convention Centre before the trading hall opens at ten other than get crushed by the ever-increasing crowd of people waiting to get in. I made my now-traditional once-a-con trip to the TCG hall and saw the card and mini games being set up (Reaper had an *awesome* 3d game board for their challenge, and there was an impressive, hand-built steampunk Zeppelin board, the deck laid with squares for mini gaming and the rotors turning by means of little motors). Stuck for something to do for half an hour, I tried something I went home last year kicking myself for not trying.
Battletech Pods!
I missed Battletech when I was a kid. FASA were just "The Shadowrun and Earthdawn guys" when I were a young gamer, so it holds no nostalgia value. But the linked battle-arena sit-in cockpits drew me in, and I was soon stomping around in a Hellcat. At least, I think it was a Hellcat. I thought I did terribly, but turned out to be narrowly second once the scores were printed. Turns out I did a lot of good sniping in between getting blown up by bigger mechs, and the former was worth more points.
That killed the time, and the doors opened. The hall this year seemed less logically laid out - I had to consult the map frequently, as the "avenues" and "streets" rarely ran the whole length thanks to a few badly-placed oversized booths, meaning it was easy to miss things. I ended up navigating by the ceiling banners and the indented sections of the side wall. Cubicle 7's booth was packed, and I had a good talk with Dominic there (who remembered me from last time) before finding Sandstorm / Posthuman and picking up Sunward for Eclipse Phase. The Indy Press Revolution proved harder to locate - GenCon, in their infinite wisdom, had put them right at the back next to the Hentai stand and the small businesses selling gamer soap and the like.
And then there was the White Wolf bar.
Much e-ink has been spilt over the (inspired? mad?) idea to go to GenCon, hire a booth and *sell no books*, instead outfitting it with comfy chairs in the gothic styling and having a DJ and a bar for visitors. When I first saw it, I recognised noone there among the CCP staffers, the place was empty apart from the cheerful greeters from the Camarilla and I was a bit nonplussed. Okay, a lot nonplussed.
Two and a bit hours later, however, following a chance lunch encounter with those British Larpers while I started to read Sunward, I met a friendly face in the Chessex Avenue Of Dice. Travis Stout; gentleman adventurer, videogame designer, D&D and WW freelancer and author of big chunks of this year's big WOTC release in Dark Sun. We explored the hall for a bit and swung by the booth again, both needing a sit down from the crowd.
Eddy Webb was there. Ethan Skemp was there. Rich Thomas was there. Justin Achilli was DJing. All the tabletop side of the business appeared to have turned up an hour after the hall opened. As we walked in, Happy Hour (free drink) was declared.
I decided I rather liked the booth after all.
My watch appeared to like it too. It randomly stopped, causing me to miss the first Seminar I'd booked into for the weekend before I noticed it had been half twelve for a long time. I restarted it and it hasn't stopped since. Clearly a low-level Paradox effect.
Second Seminar of the day was "Latest and Greatest", which turned out to be a talking shop on what the guys at the panel (who run a podcast) thought was cool. That being Deathwatch, Fiasco and Pathfinder. There was a spirited discussion about the trend of rpgs resembling boardgames, which sounds like D&D4 sour grapes to me. I tend to focus more on the tendency I've noticed for games to be balanced toward shorter and shorter campaign-runs as companies realise they share audiences and that those gamers who play epic ten-year chronicles are essentially economic dead weight. Hence D&D's shoot-up-to-Epic progression, nWoD breaking down after the 200th experience point, WFRP being redesigned to make it quicker to set up and so on.
Anyways. back to the Hall for a little while, then while everything shut down for the night I grabbed a quick dinner and headed off to meet the group for our first evening's gaming.
Last year, Jason Martinez played Taliesin in my Mage game (and he was due to do so again on Saturday). This year, he'd decided to run a side-story of his own chronicle, and so I finally got to *play* Mage for the first time. Granted, I was the only mage in a group of three Werewolves and a Changing Breeds Werecat, but I *finally got to play a Mage*. A Mystagogue ley-line engineer, in fact. It was great fun - we defeated a Vandalism-Spirit by cunning means of Calling it through a verge and beating it into a warded box I then dropped a Ban on while the Werewolves kept fighting it. Tactics, youknow?
After the game, we all decided we weren't tired of one another yet and headed to the boardgame hall to see what we could find. Last year we played an epic Descent game; this year we found "Small World" lurking at the back of the pile and gave it a go. Very fun indeed - I especially like the tactics surrounding when to abandon your "character" and then reconquer it with a new one. too early and you don't advance, too late and you've overextended yourself.
By the time we finished, it was pushing half two. Two of the guys were setting up the new Horus Heresy (they never did play it, I was to later learn - they gave up at three attempting to learn the rules and put it back) but I pled tiredness and crawled back to the Canterbury and bed.
Friday
I made it into the Con for opening again, though only just, and after another mooch around (I picked up a few smaller games - Universalis and Fiasco from IPR, Summerland from Cubicle 7) headed over to the connected hotel playing host to White Wolf for the double Seminar of doom. First off was "oWoD / nWoD cagematch", a no-holds barred assessment of the good and bad in both phases of the World of Darkness. Then it was the "nWoD retrospective", in which Travis and I as the freelancers in the room were invited up to join the panel. I hope I didn't make too much of an ass of myself.
That personal milestone achieved, I saw the gang from the night before had snuck into the audience and went to lunch with them and Travis at the nearby Noodle house. Then another Seminar - the folks at Posthuman were talking about the upcoming year for Eclipse Phase.
By now, I was well and truly Seminared out. I crashed for a while at the White Wolf booth, clutching a beer, until I was spotted by a passing Blackhatmatt on his way around the hall. A brief catchup with him motivated me to move myself, and I headed on out to my scheduled game for the evening.
The Wrecking Crew are an affiliated demo team who specialise in nWoD games. I'd signed up to play Mage in a moment of whimsy back when Events opened for Registration months ago, long before Jason invited me to the Thursday night game. As it happened, Jason and the others were playing Hunter a few tables away, but "River of LIght" it was for me, in which an American-Football-themed Cabal (it took me a while to realise all our Shadow names were sports references) had a manual on how to operate an artifact of doom stolen by a Pylon of Seers.
The Storyteller did his best, but most of the other players were new, one was monopolising his time and another really didn't seem to be into it at all. Still, he kept to time and by ten I was out. If it had been the only game I'd played that weekend I'd have been disappointed, but as it was it killed four hours. And my character.
Saturday
There really wasn't any time to lose today; I had a completely booked schedule after eleven in the morning, so my walk around the dealer hall was done on double time. Then it was off to the free gaming tables to run Soul Cage.
This year, we were joined by Grace (playing Nimue). Adding a sixth player meant I felt, at the end, that Nick/Gawain and Alec/Excalibur in particular were a little bit shortchanged in the final mix, but I hope they enjoyed it anyway. Certainly, Phil/Adder did an excellent job with a pretty tense character brief, Mike made me wish I could play Haruspex as well as him and Grace nailed Nimue. Recap will be up on the Actual Play thread in the fullness of time, but there are four sessions of the home game to get through before its proper place in continuity.
Then it was off to the Palomino for dinner with Matt, Eric and Autumn Berg, Michelle Lyons, Heather and one of Matt's friends I met at the Freelancer dinner last year. Which is also where we first encountered the Palomino, and decided to go back to it *this* year.
While others went to the White Wolf nightclub party, a core of us had other plans. Matt was going to run Geist for us. He's already written the game up on his own lj: we investigated and fought off a Crow-host that had somehow lost it's identity and was consuming those of the people it killed. Best game I've played based on obscure Spanish poetry all year!
At the end, we were all dying the death of sleep deprivation, and Sunday would be the trip home for me. So at around one, I bade them all farewell and headed back to the hotel.
Sunday
Up early again to pack and have my suitcase stored, then off to meet the Soul Cage gang for breakfast at the French Restaurant three blocks away. Very tasty indeed. Wishing all but Nick/Gawain farewell (and noting that the Jonas Brothers appeared to be in town judging by the tour buses parked up outside the Hyatt) we headed back to the hall - Nick had turned up late on Friday night and, what with Soul Cage the day before, hadn't actually been *in* it very much, so we walked around for a bit until he had to go meet his ride home. I made a final tour, congratulating Ennie Winners when I'd had conversations with them before, nearly buying Freemarket but deciding Eclipse Phase met my Transhumanism needs for the forseeable future and picking up Barbarians of Lemuria. By chance I bumped into Keith Foo from the flight in, and arranged to meet up back at the hotel to share a taxi back to the airport again.
Which we did.
Leaving Indy was, like last time, a drawn-out process. The gates are full of gamers, striking up conversations about how the Con went for them. Keith, his friend and Cheryl (his sister, I think) were great company for our four hour wait, and then it was onto the plane to Toronto.
Toronto airport, like any airport, is a twilight zone at half nine on a Sunday night. Empty and long, without crowds to distract you from how far you've been walking down the corridors funneling you from gate to gate, and as I'd been sitting right at the back of the plane everyone else had long since cleared off by the time I made it in. I made it to the newsagents near my gate eventually, and immediately ran into those British Larpers! Who were on the same flight back to the UK as me.
The flight which was immediately delayed by two hours because the plane "was unsuitable" and a replacement aircraft and crew were needed. And which I spent sat in the middle of a group of teenaged Canadian Missionaries.
I kid ye not.
Bidding goodbye to the Larpers (I really must figure out who they were), I trudged my weary way to the coach station, onto a coach to Reading train station, onto a train back to Cheltenham and then into a taxi. I arrived back at four pm, some twenty six hours after getting up in Indy.
And then I slept.
I'll post my thoughts on the happenings at the Con, the state of the industry (it's dying! Nah, just kidding) and the games I bought on my Freelancing Blog.
TTFN!