The 1997 GenCon Report

As we did last year, Jim, Brian, and I piled into Brian's latest car and headed for Milwaukee on Wednesday morning. On the radio, Howard Stern asked a homeless person where Adolf Hitler was born and was told (possibly sarcastically): "Jamaica." So Jim regaled us with snippets of Nazi reggae for the rest of the trip. We arrived in plenty of time to register (financed in my case by the sale of old Magic cards), to drop off other old Magic card packs at the auction area, and to pick up a few game tickets (no free alternates in the packets like last year. After last year's hotel debacle, Don Prust had reserved rooms for the Minnesota gamer contingent at the hotel adjoining the Mecca Convention Center, but Brian and I were the only ones assigned to our room. There were six people in Jim's room, but they all wanted to stay together to save money. Don tried to find a couple of other people to share the room and the cost, but Brian finally decided to cover the extra cost himself for the sake of peace and quiet.

We attended the traditional pre-Con dinner at Toys, a nearby Chinese restaurant; the food was no worse than usual, but the only people I knew to talk to were Minnesota gamers, including the Twin Cities Role-Playing Special Interest Group and the Atlas Games staff. On my way back to the room, I wandered back through the hotel bar/mezzanine area, which was thronged with card players. I found a bunch of people, including Woody Harrelson, a former Atlas guy (now fled to Steve Jackson's outfit), playing On the Edge. I turned in early so that I'd be awake when I went gaming in the morning.

Thursday morning, I got up bright and early, hoping to get into "Agents of Fortune," a light-toned sort of X-Files/Twin Peaks game I'd really enjoyed last year, with an alternate ticket. I was the first alternate there and the GM had started to characters when the holder of the last real ticket turned up. Since the game had not yet started, the GM had to let her in, but by then it was too late to get into another game. So I wandered around and ran into Carol Gundrum and Judy Stucky, from MageCon North, who were waiting to pick up their characters for the Star Trek: DS 9 LARP.

I did a quick survey of the Dealer's Room and picked up my most expensive souvenir for the Con, a $15 Lord of the Rings tarot deck (I didn't make that much off the old Magic cards). I stopped by the Galileo Games booth, since my friend Steve Addlesee had done some artwork for the rulebook for their Legend of Yore fantasy role-playing game. They were selling off flood-damaged copies of said rule-book for $5 each, so I immediately grabbed one. It does indeed include lots of spiffy Addlesee art (especially certain of his favorite poses, as well as rules and lots of source material for the game. The Galileo representative is a big admirer of Steve's, and was able to report that Steve's originals survived the flood intact due to the high quality of materials Steve uses. I hassled the Atlas people and talked to Wyrd Images, a company that runs Gothic horror LARP games at cons. Con of the North has no budget for them this year, but perhaps next year.

At noon, I went to the Ars Magica Premiere Tournament, for which I had a real ticket. It was just as well, for there were a lot of players. Unfortunately, several of the players were not very familiar with the rules, which are as complex and as vital to the system as they are in, say, Champions. This made the problem-solving parts of the scenario difficult for them and they gave up on role-playing pretty early too. However, David Chart, the GM and author of the scenario, seemed to really enjoy role-playing talking, hopping rocks, and there were a couple of very clever players who came up with some interesting solutions to the obstacles before us and some truly goofy arguments. The three of us players who enjoyed ourselves were advanced to the next round.

I also had a real ticket for the Official Champions Tournament, a superhero event run by Sue Grau of HAC. HAC, the Hero Auxiliary Corps, is a group dedicated to running quality role-playing tournaments using the Hero System rules. I'd played in and enjoyed last year's episode of Official Champions. This year's was an investigation scenario for which several of the characters were poorly suited. So most of us entertained each other by role-playing. I didn't advance, but had a good time.

I headed back to the hotel to round up people to attend Doc Cross' party, which I had heard about in Alarums & Excursions. Only April was anywhere to be found, so she was conscripted into the Golden Hamster Horde and off we went. Doc Cross and Co. were gathered in a nearby hotel. Doc convinced April to try Toon, and I met the fiendish Dr. Lisa Padol and Jonathan Tweet, among many other jolly folks.

Since Dark Champions (another HAC superhero game) was not being run this year, I decided to start Friday off by playing Octagon, yet a third HAC superhero game! I got to play Nightshade, who has nifty shadow powers and who felt that she'd let down a teammate. There was a great mix of combat and soap opera stuff, and the other role-players were terrific. I advanced as an alternate, and hoped to get into the final round, given how good the first one had been.

When I got to the second round of the Ars Magica tournament, the only other players were the two fellows who had advanced from my group. None of Peter Hentges' players (from the other first round) turned up, nor did any of the people who hadn't officially advanced (although Pete had offered to run an Ars Magica game for them anyway). Given how passive the other players had become by the end of the last round, this one wasn't very different! My character was an honorary mage, who had no powers, but lots of useful skills that she'd developed in her years as a messenger between the households of magicians. The other two characters were pretty powerful magicians, but had grown up in Ivory-Tower environments and had an interesting time dealing with the quest we were on. David Chart congratulated us all on having advance to the third round (since no-one else had shown up).

I then decided to try a new game, whose designer I'd spoken to the previous day in the Dealer's Room. Heaven and Earth is a role-playing game set in the modern day, with various paranormal stuff going on. The players were all trying to buy a haunted house for various reasons. My character was an evil old fellow who wanted to contact evil spirits through it so that he could further his studies in black magic. Several of the other players were young (about 20) and tended to a sort of manic-depressive role-playing style: really in character, even over the top one minute, and apathetic the next. But it was pretty good and the game is due to hit the market in March sometime.

I considered going to another game, but after twelve hours, was just too tired. So I talked to Peter Hentges a bit, met up with M'iko Carter, a TSR employee, then headed back to the hotel room, where Brian was chuckling over his purchases from the auction. Brian then headed downstairs to pummel people at Magic, and I went to sleep!

Saturday morning, I wandered down to the Chaosium area and ended up in a small Pendragon game: "Akron Hieron", a rescue mission searching for some of Arthur's knights shipwrecked in Ireland. We had one terrific player who managed a disturbingly Monty Python-esque rendition of his knight that in no way detracted from the otherwise-serious scenario.

Once again, there were only three players at the Ars Magica tournament! My two fellow players from the earlier rounds failed to turn up, but there were two players from another round two. But the scenario was great, a trip through the Faerie Realm to defeat the villain who was menacing the magicians of Britain, with all kinds of bizarre scenery and wacky NPCs. One of the other players, Joy, came up with really interesting solutions to a lot of the problems we faced. At one point, she botched a spell and couldn't say anything true for a certain length of time, which was pretty funny. But we survived and bested the villain, and Dave Chart caught his plane back to California. Jeff Tidball of Atlas declared us all winners (for having the good taste to show up to one of the better events at GenCon ) and showered us with Ars Magica supplements (we voted for Joy to get 1st place, naturally).

I got a chance to try Legends of Yore that afternoon. Galileo Games ran several scenarios and I played in "Duke Blood" a marvelously cynical political intrigue scenario. I got to play the ambassador from this wacky female-chauvinist power and had to try to turn the elves against one of their own. The rules seemed to work pretty well. They seemed to be about as complex as those in AD&D, but combat moved quickly and there seemed to be a reason for each mechanic.

Once again, I was thoroughly gamed-out by 8 PM. But, as I staggered back through the hotel lobby, I saw Jeff Millun, who had run the excellent HAC "Dark Champions" last year. So, we sat and talked, and he told me that he'd become the storyteller of a vast World of Darkness LARP campaign in Chicago. He also told me that HAC had elected to dissolve itself, but that the individuals involved intended on continuing to run good games at GenCon. Since I know who they are, I'll have no trouble finding them, but hopefully this report will be useful to other would-be players in those games. Then I visited Wyrd Image's headquarters in another hotel and headed back for some sleep.

Brian and I got up plenty early to dump our stuff (including Brian's many auction purchases, the prize of which was an alarming stuffed cat) in Brian's car. I went over to the room that had been reserved for the "Octagon" final round, hoping that at least one of the regulars would not make it to an 8 AM event. But other alternates had the same idea, and the first round had been such a great game that most of the regulars turned up on time. Don Prust bowed out, freeing one spot, and I was the last alternate let in. The game was well worth it, as my character was the one whose problems were tearing the team apart, and since we'd been sent to Hell to rescue some dependents, the strain was starting to show. We had a brief break to watch the assault on the TSR Castle from one of our windows overlooking the Dealer's Room.

I barely made it to my next game on time. I finally had a real ticket for "Agents of Fortune". It was also a HAC event, of which I'd played in a previous episode. I got a new character, a mad scientist (an excellent foil for the other female character in the group, a drugged-out mystic). It was a marvelously dark episode with a less-than-clear ending. Several of the other players had played in earlier episodes and had excellent feels for their characters, and it was quite a satisfactory finale to GenCon.

I made one last trip to the Dealer's Room to use two certificates I'd won to make a set of Spherewalker cards (for Everway) affordable. I picked up my earnings from the auction, which were barely above the minimum bid, then rejoined Brian and Jim for the trip back to Minnesota.