GenCon 2003

It's taken me a week to sit down and write a review of my GenCon experience. Let's be clear right off the bat: this was the best convention I have ever been to, but most of the reasons why this is true have nothing to do with convention itself.

I went to GenCon with the primary mission of distributing and gathering business cards. I am, after all, attempting to get my foot further into the door of freelance writing for RPG companies, and GenCon is The Big One in terms of gamer gatherings. So I signed up for a bunch of seminars and printed up a thousand business cards. (Mind you, I had intentions of only getting five hundred, but it was only $4 more to get a full thousand, and I just couldn't say no.) As almost an after thought, I contacted a guy by the name of Dan who posts on the Nifty Message Board with me who had posted that he was going to be there and we set up to get together.

Wednesday:
 

Pre-registering: your path to future happiness.

I left at 2:00 AM from New York, driving 12 hours to Indianapolis, which I do not recommend. Next year, I fly. Anyway, I got into my ludicrously-overpriced hotel at about 1:00 PM; the bellhops and valet people all gave me dirty looks because I didn't tip them. They saw what my car looks like, they saw what my luggage looks like, and yet they still thought I had enough money to tip for services I was unhappy about paying for in the first place. Plus, my room didn't have a refrigerator. Again, next year, Budget Inn.

I walked over to the Indiana Convention Center and got my event tickets. I had pre-registered my badge, and as fate would have it, this was a very good decision. The lines at badge registration were insane on Wednesday, and only got worse on Saturday. In fact, it was so bad that if you went on Saturday and got a one-day badge, GenCon is offering a refund of half your ticket price. At any rate, I picked up my tickets and then went back to my room for a nap. Hey, I had been up since 2:00 AM, remember.
 

It's America's Pastime! Left to right: Josh, Joe, Ryan, me, Dan, Zeke, Carrie, and Ethan. Not pictured because she was behind the camera: Meghan.

Around 6, I got a call from Dan, who was meeting a bunch of friends from online for dinner and asked me if I wanted to tag along. I did, and we went to an Italian restaurant with what turned out to be a group of about 12 people from the WOTC message boards. Dinner soon turned into drinks, and most of us ended up at a small bar with outdoor seating, where we talked and drank and quoted Homestar Runner cartoons late into the evening. You knew it was going to be a fun evening when Dan ordered a pitcher of beer and one glass. See the picture to the right

Thursday:

I got up early and caught two great writing seminars. The first was sponsored by the Game Publisher's Association and was about general freelance writing in the game industry. The second was sponsored by the Game Mechanics, a company formed entirely of ex-Wizards of the Coast employees. It was very informative, especially concerning professionalism and responsibility as a freelancer. Go to their website and buy a PDF, they know what they're talking about.
 

Ed Greenwood (left) and Chris Perkins (right) at a Forgotten Realms seminar. I won't make any jokes about Chris, because he's kind of my boss for my freelancing stuff. Ed's fair game, but I can't think of anything to write, so never mind.

I then decided to put their advice into practice and made my first swing through the dealer's room, merrily shaking the hands of RPG line developers and such. The dealer's room was bigger than in years past thanks to the larger convention center in Indianapolis, though I was struck by the sheer number of booths which had absolutely nothing I wanted to buy. Maybe I'm just becoming too picky about my gaming materials, but I can't bring myself to buy a bunch of $40 campaign settings from which I will only swipe 10% of the material for my own campaign. Add in the fact that I don't play any collectable card games, have all the dice I care for, and already got all of my 3.5 edition D&D books, and I (thankfully) did not spend very much money on stuff this year.

A Forgotten Realms seminar was next, though it was more about the novels than the game setting. I got to meet a few authors, which was fun. Interestingly, a few of them started as game designers so who knows? Maybe I'll get to write my Great American Fantasy Novel someday.
 

Doctor Lucky meets his doom at my hands (foreground) while (left to right) Joe, Meghan, Chris, and David can only watch in horror.

Later that night, I viciously killed Doctor Lucky over beer and snacks; see picture.

Friday:

More good seminars Friday morning, and I continued to shake hands with some very nice people. The highlight of the day, however, was the WOTC New Setting Seminar. By now you probably have heard all about Eberron. I had been given a few sneak peaks before the seminar, thanks to my work on a new monster book for Wizards, but it was the first time I had seen most of the art that was in the slide show. The folks on stage talked a lot about the setting search as a whole, too, and I was lucky enough to get a round of applause from the crowd when they introduced me as "other guy, Rich Burlew." Special thanks to my peeps in the crowd, who cheered the loudest.

After the seminar, I got to say hello to a number of the fine folks I met on my trip to WOTC and talk about future plans. Most importantly, I finally got to meet Keith Baker, the guy who beat me out for $100,000. Sadly, he is not nearly as evil as I originally imagined. He's fairly normal. However, in the interest of making my life more like a comic book, I have nonetheless decided to blame all of my future failures in life on him, ala Reed Richards and Doctor Doom. Someday soon, I'll be dominating an obscure eastern European nation while wearing a suit of armor, cursing Baker and his Fantastic Four.

Afterwards, I got together with everyone for what was supposed to be a D&D game, but ended up with like 15 PC's. So it was turned into a three-team deathmatch. My team lost. Damn you, Baker!! (He wasn't there, of course, but see how it works?)
 

Tae Kwon Dan and I prepare duel to the death with BreakKeys while Meghan spurs us on. Note the size and frequency of beer mugs involved.

We then completely crashed a party for the WizOs from the Wizards.com message board. The party was at this German brewhouse place, and was hosted by the lovely and talented WotC_Mel, supreme ruler of the Wizards.com boards. Special thanks to her for allowing a large group of people who technically are not in any way employed by WOTC to get drunk on their tab. And get drunk we did, thanks to the extremely high quality beer involved. We even broke out into a rousing game of BreakKeys, quite possibly the stupidest and most brilliant game ever. You basically take two little plastic keys, stick them together, and twist. One breaks and loses; the other doesn't, and wins. That's it. Nothing else. Pure genius.

Saturday:

I completely blew off my seminars Saturday morning, because I was hungover. I did meet the gang at the local Hooter's for lunch, followed by an afternoon of HeroClix. I played in a DC booster draft tournament, and got extremely lucky by drawing two unique figures out of 3 boosters packs. I ended up winning the tournament, and got a sweet Limited Edition Green Arrow figure. Yay!
 

Wizards' new miniatures line is surprisingly lifelike, though critics have questioned the game relevance of the "Carrie with Shopping Bag" figure, pictured here.

There was also more time spent in the dealer's room, though this time more as a customer than a self-promoter. I ended up buying the Warcraft D&D book, because I'm a big fan of the games and it seemed to have some interesting stuff in it. I passed on Monte Cooke's Arcana Unearthed. Not because I didn't think it was good, because I only did a surface skim, but because it seemed incompatible with the rules I use in my home campaign world. I already use a modified magic system, one to which I'm pretty attached. Plus, goddamn, could the book be less visually appealing? Seriously, on the off-chance Monte or someone who knows him reads this: hire a better layout designer. I know something about this, it's my Day Job, and that book is fugly. Right-ragging text wrapping around left-ragging sidebars is just ghastly. I get that you use the very sparse design for your PDF's because they are easier for printing, but AU will never be a PDF so why stick with the design? Anyway, rant over, moving on: I almost got the Stargate SG-1 game, but decided to hold of to support my local game store (and because I was almost broke). It looks good, and I think it has most of the rules for Spycraft too, a game about which I have heard good things.

Sunday:

Early morning breakfast with everyone gave me a chance to say goodbye to those who had early flights. After another seminar by the Game Mechanics (this one more d20-centric), I finished up the official convention with another HeroClix tournament. I was not nearly as successful this time around.

That evening, a few of us who left gathered to play a D&D adventure that Zeke had purchased. It was, without a doubt, the worst written adventure I have ever seen. And I'm not just talking about the hackneyed plot and clichéd motivations, I'm talking about the box text. There should be a limit on how often you can use the word "roughly" in one sentence. Also, it's hard to take a product seriously that tells you that an area has no signs of animal life or civilization, but if the PCs want to hunt there's a reindeer tribe next to the bugbear village. The whole game devolved into absurdity fairly quickly, but was a hoot nonetheless. By the way, fear the spiked chain-wielding fighter with Improved Trip in 3.5 edition. Thanks to the new rule that standing from prone provokes attacks of opportunity, it's sick, in a bad way.

Josh was kind enough to let me crash on his floor that night, since I had checked out of the Ohmigodtheprice Hotel at noon. The next morning, I drove back to New York.

So you'll notice that I only did a little actual gaming at the convention. Maybe I'm not the best person to review how the gaming was, but oh well. The convention was a blast, nonetheless, and I got plenty of "face-time" with RPG people. It was a success for me in every sense of the word.

--Rich Burlew

Special extra bonus thanks to Carrie and Meghan for providing the pictures!

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