Gen Con 2007 Report, Part 2: Thursday

During the third week of August I returned to Indianapolis for my sixth Gen Con. While not everything went off without a hitch, I am choosing not to dwell on those things. What follows is my recap the first full day at the convention.

:: THURSDAY

Thursday is the first full day of Gen Con and the official start. The vendor hall opens at 11 AM to the masses. I slept in this morning and had lunch so I missed the giant nerd herd of gamers who storm the vendors looking to be the first to get their hands on the shiny new games and demo this year's latest and greatest offerings.

The vendor hall was massive this year. There are thirty rows inside where in years past there were twenty two. Most noticeable for me are the companies that were absent. Chaosium was not at Gen Con this year.

The big news was the announcement by Wizards of the Coast of the long rumored Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. That was more exciting than their sad attempt at social networking called Gleemax. Is this is their way to reach out to the role playing community after booting non-Wizards games from the RPGA?

Signgirl and I have been playing Magic: The Gathering lately. So I stopped at the Dave and Adam's Card World booth and bought two boxes of Magic cards. Come to find out they were in Chinese! Fortunately they later let me exchange the one unopened, sealed box of cards for credit toward the English version. Signgirl is selling the opened box on eBay for me. Any takers for Chinese Magic cards?

My first game was the Torchwood LARP. Torchwood is a British sci-fi series that is best described as a combination of X-Files and Angel. In our game I played a military leader who was illegally running a black market operation out of the Cardiff base of operations. I had the best time with this group of players. Everybody was played their parts superbly. I reveled in my role of troublemaker as I set up distractions for anyone who got to close to my operations.

Next Cpt Squash and I played in a Fey LARP loosely based on the writings of Laurell K. Hamilton. Fey are fairy folk. Theirs is a world of acrimony that rivals the Vampire: The Masquerade or the writings of Anne Rice.

I played a female assassin who was a human monk. My role was to assassinate the visiting Pope. This was not my last trans-gender roleplaying at the convention. Fortunately, the female players were terribly offended by the way I choose to play my character. I did get an education on the sisterhood of shared governance which I mistakenly called a cabal.

Here is my only picture from the Fey LARP. Mar was showing off the pirate puppet he bought earlier that day. This picture makes me smile.

Posted at 8:44 PM