Con of the North, 2000, Report

Con of the North 2000 Report

Con of the North is an annual game convention that I help to organize in St. Paul, Minnesota. I always get there early to help with setup. This year, I had volunteered to help Jim set up Midi-maze and the PC computer room. In a fit of great organization, he had several of us gather on Thursday night at his house to carry computers. So we packed our cars full of his PCs (yes, he has several, he builds them as a hobby), then he opened up his garage and had us pack up 14 Atari ST's and monitors that he has been collecting for years. A convoy of heavily burdened autos went down I-94 to the Ramada Inn at I-94 and White Bear Ave. We unloaded our burdens in the hotel and headed to Perkins for a late dinner.

Friday, I gave a lecture for a friend's biology class at a local community college, shopped for snacks, packed for the weekend, and headed for the Ramada. I was one of the first volunteers onsite and narrowly avoided being conscripted by Dave Ehren to help set up the registration desk. I left the PC computer room to Little John Schwartzbauer and Kevin McColl, and carried items to the Midi-maze room.

Midi-maze is a demented game for Atari-ST's, that can be played on no other machine. It is described as a "combat synthesizer", because it relies on a network created by connecting ST's together by midi cables. Basically, it's a 3-D shooter game with very primitive graphics, but all of the characters are brightly-colored smiley-faces, so it's pretty weird. Unfortunately for us, the machines must be daisy-chained in a ring, and we had a pair of small rooms with a doorway between them. Jim had no sleep the night before, and the topology area of his brain was fried. He declared the situation absolutely hopeless and went home to collect a box of joysticks that had been left behind. The moment he was gone, Joel Schneider started moving tables into position until we had a triangular network, with a long midi-cable for the hypotenuse. I went about decorating the room with happy-face paraphernalia that Jim had been accumulating for years, putting up signs to Midi-maze around the rest of the con, and putting out chairs. Mike Miller and his friends actually booted up the computers and started getting the network online. When Jim returned, he declared himself no longer stressed out but merely "vexed."

I wandered around the Con and ran into people I hadn't seen for a while, including Dava Bishop, and I got to meet the Matheny babies, who were very cute. I was staying in a room with Chris Gahlon and Albert Choy, so I found them setting up for the first round of Albert's Feng Shui tournament and got a room key from them. I put my stuff upstairs and returned to wandering about. I entered some miniatures in a contest, then helped the registration staff hand out tickets for 6 PM games. Gamers also returned tickets for games that they no longer wanted to play in; so I was able to get a ticket for Nate Nolan's sold-out Call of Cthulhu game on Saturday night.

Once the ticket rush was over, I went to check on the Midi-maze room. There was a tournament going and Jim was his usual happy self again. I played once one of the contestants wandered off (as they are prone to do during Midi-maze tournaments), but am only a middling-good player. I considered playing in "Miner Mishaps" an interactive game by Jim, Nate, Don Prust, and Joe Donaghue that I'd helped playtest that summer, so I figured I'd at least stop by the room and see if they were short any players. On the way I ran into another group of friends that I hadn't seen for a while: John Trierweiler, Tony Hughes, and Mike Toth. I dragged them to "Miner Mishaps", but it was full by the time they signed up, so I found Joel and dragged him away from his train games to play more Midi-maze (since he'd helped set it up, but never gotten to play it). Then we visited the PC computer room and played Worms Armageddon with Chris Gahlon and Chris Campbell.

Saturday, I got up at 7:30, put my bathrobe over my pajamas, and rushed down to registration. There had been a problem with Saturday-morning registration last year, and I had threatened to run registration in pajamas. Dave Ehren, who may have been responding to similar grim recollections, was standing in front on the registration desk shaving. However, Kelly Prust had things well in hand and found all of our concerns amusing. There were few people registering Saturday morning in any case. So I went back, got dressed and collected some evil toaster pastries from my bags, and returned to help with registration for a while.

Jeff Dobberpuhl and friends had obtained a vendor table for their annual indoor garage sale: mostly of collectable card games, but Chris Gahlon found a computer game that he needed. Nate needed an object to throw at people to get their attention (apparently necessary for GMing Teenagers from Outer Space), so he bought a hollow plastic ball with a Pokemon inside from Jeff. The Pokemon had to go, so he gave it to me. It was a horrible little roach-like thing (I thought Pokemons were supposed to be cute!). I gave it to Joel, who had been having roach difficulties in his apartment. I'm afraid this was the wrong thing to do, because Joel quickly figured out that if he squeezed the toy roach, a jet of foul-smelling air came out of a hole in its nose, and he spent the rest of the Con torturing his fellow gamers with it. A few days later, I gave him a cute fuzzy penguin instead, but he refused to part with the roach-toy, stoutly denying all knowledge of its whereabouts.

Joe Donaghue's Western Call of Cthulhu game had filled up during pre-registration, but there are always people who don't turn up to their games, so I just showed up and there was a space open. It was a wonderful, subtle game with rampaging Cheyenne, poisonous silver mines, and people tearing their eyes out and inspired such quotes as "The only thing that's worse than a cheat... is a claim-jumper!" Joe declared a tie between Jim Beecher and me for best role-player, which is a considerable honor given Jim's role-playing. The prize was a Call of Cthulhu supplement Utatti Asfet.

I went back through the dealer's room and got a copy of Blue Planet from the Fantasy Flight booth for $5. John Trierwieler and Tony spotted me and dragged me off to play in Jim Holthaus' Amber game. Joe Donaghue and Mike Toth were also playing. It was a grim and interesting variant: Amber had lost the Patternfall War, but it had been a pyrrhic victory for Chaos. We were five of the last ten sane, living Chaos Lords, and we were hunting down the three Amberites who hadn't been accounted for. Eight of the others had put Blood Curses on Chaos. The quote for that game was "You know, planarian flatworms learn. What's wrong with us?" The game got even grimmer as two of the characters turned out to be quite power-mad. At the end, two characters were dead and one was quadriplegic. Lots of fun, though.

Once again, I found Joel train-gaming. We went off to eat pizza and drink root beer in peace, but were found by Joe and John, who wanted talk about the Amber game. Joel tortured hapless passers-by with his roach-toy. I stopped in Elizabeth Sloan's interactive Castle Falkenstein game. Most of the players were dressed in fantasy-Victorian finery, so I took lots of pictures.

My character in Nate's Call of Cthulhu game was a tough-as-nails Space Marine sergeant. Joe was also playing in that game. That one was also grim from the start. All the characters were people obviously on their way to investigate trouble: corporate auditors, someone looking for missing relatives, and some soldiers from the Judge-Advocate General's office, and they were the only people on the shuttle! And before we had even landed, there were no communications from the colony. Rather a different setting from Joe's Call of Cthulhu game that morning, but it also featured lots of furious action.

Sunday morning, Chris, Albert and I packed up and threw everything into our cars so we could check out. I helped Albert GM the second round of his Feng Shui tournament. By 9:30, I was working on character sheets for the bad guys; Albert had decided what they looked like (a cinematic bunch), but I needed to figure out what they could do. The role-playing was superb (especially the guy who played Master Li), and most of the game was a knock-down, drag-out fight in a Hong-Kong toy factory.

I played in another Midi-maze tournament. It took sixty points to win a round and I never broke forty, but I decided to hunt one particularly cowardly smiley-face and that livened things up a bit. Robin Anderson organized a volunteer party at 4 PM, so I had snacks and soda and played Hearts with Jim, Albert, Littlejohn, and Steve Tyykila.

There was a drawing and I won a gift certificate to the Source, a local game store. I helped Robin clean up after the party, then we loaded all the remaining soda in coolers onto a cart and went around the Con giving it out to the surviving gamers. Tony Hughes had decided to take over the Clay Olympics, so he was building terrain using neon posterboard and Easter candy while his players built monsters from neon play-do to duel in this terrain. Nate Nolan's monster was King Midi. I went off to say good-bye to Joel, who was, unsurprisingly, playing train games, and then headed home.