FIRST AND FOREMOST...

HELP A COUPLE FELLOW ARTISTS TODAY!!!

~RogueRider and =mookyvet are good dA friends of mine who have done some really amazing commissions for me and others, some of which can be seen below.  Both of them are in bad need of some help and a little money to help out their financial straits, and both do some absolutely awesome artwork... so this should be a natural fit to anyone.  I can vouch for their ability and their friendly attitudes, and tell you that your money will go to a damned good cause.  So if you have a little extra spending money, go now.  Commission them.   Details can be found in their deve journals!

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It's HEEEEEERE!

This is just a mishmash of thoughts, opinions and mental ruminations that have struck me whilst having my Christmas away from Christmas here in sunny Indianapolis, which for this weekend is the gaming capital of the world.  I'm a little behind, I know... I was going to actually try to keep a more progressive daily log and update when I could get internet access, but I underestimated the weight of a backpack full of gaming books, and my back wasn't about to stand up to that plus a 17" laptop being carted around for a mile of walking from the parking garage to the convention center.  So I'm afraid everyone will have to deal with the post-coital bliss rather than the... uhm.... mid-coital?   At any rate, I'll add onto this as I finish the days, so if you receive this multiple times, it's just me adding the next day!

Anyway....

THURSDAY!

8:00 AMish:    Welcome to Indy, Gen Con Attendees!   For me, this is my absolute favorite time of the year, even though by the end of it, I'm always worn down and acting only with considerable help from my friends caffeine and barely-legal drugs.  But for now, I'm giddy like a schoolgirl on nitrous and lithium and you couldn't drag me down from this high if you told me my house was on fire.  Not only because it's Gen Con, but it's Gen Con the year the freaking Pathfinder RPG comes out! By that, I mean, of course, The Pathfinder Role Playing Game Core Rulebook, which should be considered a legal weapon.  Seriously, this thing weighs in at 4 lbs, chock full of awesome and has enough heft to brain someone several times over.  It's like a freaking old-fashioned bible, only without the guilty feelings.  (Unless you're habitually short on money.  Then I guess you might be a little guilty you just plopped $50 on a single hardcover book.) I subscribed at Paizo, and lucked into mine coming in on Tuesday, two full days before full release-- for once, I could thank the Post Office for something!-- which worked out well, since I had to upgrade my Pathfinder Society character before Thursday.

9:15 AMish:    We're officially off to see the wizard!  I picked up my friend Tom from his house.  It's Tom's first Gen Con, so I'm hoping he's as impressed as I always am; he said he may only be able to make it today.  Together we have every intention of walking all over the Marketplace floor for the first 5 hours of Gen Con.  The good deals don't usually come till Friday/Saturday, but Thursday is a great scout day to find out what books, games, minis and such you'd actually conceive of picking up if you still have money by then.  Unless you're me.  I have a wretched track record of blowing money hand over fist there, which is one reason that this year I put money aside and forced myself to be studious about the books I get.  After all, much of what I get could be on sale any time from any reputable store... it's just much cooler getting it direct from the people who create and playtest it!   I had a hard cap of $450 for everything-- including food (high), parking (higher) and stupid purchases (highest).  Usually, I'd be able to make that last close to two weeks, even with bills.  I'm hoping to make it to 3 PM today.  

9:16 AMish:    Fortunately, I've already got my biggest expense already paid for, so 3 PM is looking more reasonable all the time... did I mention you could beat up a maddened grizzly bear with The Pathfinder Role Playing Game Core Rulebook ?

9:50 AMish:   And here we are.  We actually lucked into vacant parking at Pan Am Plaza, a mere hundred yards from the Convention Center.  Using the last three years as a guide, this is approximately 1860 yards closer than I've ever managed to park for Gen Con on any day but Sunday.   I have come to the conclusion, therefore, that Tom is in actuality a potent good luck charm, and I will make it a point to bring him to every Gen Con I possibly can from now on.

9:53 AMish:    I then remember why I park a mile out, as I see that a 4 hour stay in the Pan Am Parking Garage will cost me $20.  That's like... 4 books from the Titan Games "Buy 1 Get 3 Free" table!!!

1015 AMish: Badges in hand, we make our way into the fray. The Grand Hall of the Marketplace beckons. Tom notes that it's been twenty minutes and there have been no costumes yet. Understandable, as costumes tend to fill out more as the weekend goes on. Come Saturday, everyone with an inkling to cosplay will be out in droves. Right now, everyone's getting settled in, still. We step inside and just inhale. Almost every major RPG company is here, along with the other gaming companies, all showing off their miniature games, wargames, card games, LARP supplies, dice games, board games, and electronic/MMO. And then there are the T-Shirt, Jewelry, anime/manga, theatrical weapon and accessory dealers, the secondhand game dealers, the not-quite-game-related-but-vaguely-close dealers, and the artist alley and self-published writers. All under one roof with thirty thousand gamers. I need a moment to compose myself. It's like I woke up at Christmas and found a lifesize petrified swimsuit model beneath my tree. Sometimes all you can do is sit there with anime-shiny eyes and whisper "it's just so beautiful!" and let your heart settle after a bit.

12:30 PMish:    Some small part of me gets a stab of pride when I see that the Paizo booth (makers of the aforementioned nigh-mythical bludgeoning weapon known as The Pathfinder Role Playing Game Core Rulebook ) has a line that stretches into the next two booths.  It's not like the Paizo booth is a tiny one, either, and the line winds all the way around and back into the used bookstore next door and into the T-shirt booth beyond that.  Tom and I both noted that the Wizards of the Coast booth (whose nixing of 3rd edition and release of 4E honestly helped precipitate the interest in the PFRPG) had a really scanty amount of people in it, and I knew their booth just really didn't seem to look as impressive and have that "OMG Oomph!" as it had in earlier years.  Maybe the economy's just hitting them, same as everyone else.  Maybe they really have PO'd people with 4E and the drop of their original Mini rules, among other things.  Maybe they don't have any big releases this year around Gen Con (I don't know, honestly.  I tried 4E once, I just didn't much like the feel of it; since WOTC does nothing but 4E anymore, I don't keep up with their releases.) Maybe they've sort of stepped aside to let Paizo have the early crowds, and are planning to really step up later in the weekend.  I dunno.

1240 PMish:    Just talked myself out of buying White Wolf's Exalted 2nd edition core book.  The concept seems like it's a cool one, and like Tom points out about himself, I'm a rules-system lover.  

1:05 PMish:    An interesting thing Tom brought up as we passed the WOTC booth again-- for note: it's still a little more dead than I'd expect the industry leader to be, when much of their competition (Paizo, White Wolf, Atlas, Troll Lord, Catalyst, Fantasy Flight, et al) have some positively packed booths: DDI, or whatever WOTC's online D&D 4E content is called, is-- from what he'd learned-- platform-dependent (Again, see above, I have no clue about WOTC's releases).  Mac and Linux users are SOL for Wizards' 4E online content, in other words.  And yet, at their booth, while showing all their Magic: The Card Game and 4E promo stuff, they were running all Macs.  WTF?

1:25 PMish:    Further happiness: I have my PFRPG Core book thanks to the subscription, so I didn't have to wait in line to pick one up.  The PFRPG Beta sold out last year by Friday (bear in mind, that was a free PDF too!) and it looks like while Paizo came in with a larger stock this year, the PFRPG is moving at a damned good clip.  (A sign on the PFRPG books said "No More Than SIX Per Customer," and there were people picking up nearly that many... I need their jobs, whatever they are!) The other good news: the length of the line dissuades me from just spending an assload of money at the Paizo booth this year.  Last year, I racked up something like a small house payment there.   I'm doing very freaking well this year.  Maybe it's Tom's calming influence, but I'm a solid 3 and a half hours in, and I've spent more on parking than I have on anything in the Marketplace!

1:45 PMish:    D'oh.  So much for that.  One of the used book sellers had the 3.5 Sharn, City of Towers for the Eberron setting, and Tome of Horrors 3 (for the 3.5 system), each for 50% off.  I bit like a largemouth bass on a shiny lure.  Still, $40 in a 4 hour span is pretty damned impressive for me, especially since we're leaving in a couple hours so I can get Tom home in time for class and me back here for my 6 pm Pathfinder Society game.  I know I'm still looking for a couple gifts to pick up while I'm here, so that total will rise, but this is the only day I'll be pulling this much time with this much money, and it feels good to think I may still have some when all is said and done.

2:45 PMish:    Talked myself out of Fantasy Flight's Anima RPG.  Like Exalted, Anima has been on my radar for a while, and not only is it a decent-looking system, I happen to like the work of one of the Anima artists an awful freaking lot.  But I just can't bring myself to swallow the $60(!!!) price tag.  Don't get me wrong: it's beautiful, and I think I'd probably enjoy it, but hell, that's $10 more (and perhaps, what's even worse, over 160 pages less!!!) than the goddamned lethal weapon bible book. And the thing is, I know the high quality of Paizo's stuff, from all sides-- content, writing, detail, and physical product quality... and I know I'll use the PFRPG with my gaming group.  I really don't have anything by Fantasy Flight Games to judge their content by, and a completely new system, especially one that's not so archetypical (while fun for me to learn from) might be a hard sell to the group.  I'm pretty sure I'll get it eventually, but I doubt I'll get it direct.  A game with that kind of price tag really needs to give me a blowjob or something along with its content.

3:00 PMish:    Walked the Artist's Alley, and saw how good I will never be.  It's both awe-inspiring and depressing all at once, although not so much of the latter.  I also met Wayne Reynolds, whose cover work I adore from WOTC, Eberron and Pathfinder.  I was reminded that Tom had two big problems with Paizo (and I think I'd agree they're legitimate-- see, I'm not just a Paizo schill!)... 1) Sometimes their adventures tend to railroad-- although I'd argue that a good GM doesn't have to follow any canned adventures by the letter, and 2) it seems like they have been reusing the same art over and over since forever.  Well, after seeing the prices Wayne Reynolds can command on a single piece, I do not blame them at all for #2.  Hell, I'd freaking use the same art a couple hundred times if I dropped that sort of cash down.  I'd have the freaking stuff stenciled onto my tombstone, hot dammit.

5:30 PMish:    Intermission.  Back after my first game of the night!  My first day total: $92.  Including $20 in parking... NEVER made it out of Marketplace day that well before!

10:00 PMish:    Spent the evening playing in my first Pathfinder RPG-based game ever, and I'd have to say two things.  One, I like it.  Sure, it's generally 3.5E, but there are some better clarifications made of some clunky rules, streamlining of skills (a character doesn't receive as many skill points as in 3.5, but instead of having to put ranks in Search/Spot/Listen, there is an overall perception skill), some (not all) of the classes feel like they're a little better balanced without giving every character a metric assload of special abilities, and there are a lot more feats that make perfect sense.   Most of the changes I've seen in the Conversion Notes are ones I'm pretty happy with.  I think I'll stick with it.  By the way, our characters found the operating place of an evil Rat Cult, killed off its high priest and its huec.... heucv... hecuv... its undead guardian, kicked ass and took names.  And my Pathfinder Society character reached 2nd level!  Woooo!  Not bad for a character that only sees the light of day at Gen Con!

Midnightish:    More later!  Looking forward to my first big FULL day o'gaming tomorrow!

NEXT: FRIDAY!

<sub>"The bard did not just kill that man with a chair leg after I missed him five straight attacks with a magical bow."
- Actually said around my table at Gen Con. And yes, he did.</sub>