Con Report - Gen Con 2002

Wednesday
OK, so Willow and I leave Seattle at about 11:45 a.m, make our connection through Chicago, land in Milwaukee, take a cab to the Hyatt, and check in with no problems. I know we want to go to The Safe House this night because it will be the least busy, so we walk over. Unfortunately they've stopped serving dinner (it's 9:30 p.m., dinner stops at 9), so we each get a Spy's Demise and enjoy the atmosphere. This is Willow's first Gen Con and only the second time she's been to Wisconsin, so we wander around the place and let her check it out. Left the Safe House to go to dinner at the Rock Bottom Brewery. Headed back to the hotel, note the locations of all of my events, go to sleep.

Willow wearing her T-shirt with the goth parody of the Power Puff Girls on it (bought at the show).

Milwaukee had these weird sculptures painted by local artists all over town. I think they were going to be auctioned for charity. This one looked like the ballerina hippos from Disney's Fantasia, so Willow wanted a picture with it.

Willow with Warwick Davis, the actor who played (among other things) the main character Willow in the movie Willow, and as such is one of Willow's favorite actors. She was quite please to meet him at the show and got a signed picture, too.

Thursday
I had Monte Cook's workshop on Game Design at 10 a.m.. I want to have breakfast with Willow, but since she normally sleeps until noon Pacific time, I have a hard time getting her out of bed at 8:30 a.m. Central time. Eventually we get up and have breakfast downstairs. I suggest she nap during the seminar, so she goes back to the room and I head off to see Monte.
Why go to a seminar with someone I see every week and have worked with for years? Because it's always good to hear about the experiences of others in your field and get their advice on things. And Monte knows the game really well and there's always the chance you'll hear some new tidbit. The seminar was in a small room and had about 50 people (some people had to stand).
After the seminar I retrieved Willow and we wandered around the exhibit hall to look at all of the booths. I picked up some simian minis from Black Orc Games, another TSR 25th Anniversary Good Mage and Evil Sorcerer to replace the ones that Willow painted and then sold to benefit the September 11th charity (she really liked painting those two and wanted to do them again), a Khemru miniature from Crocodile Games, and another Ral Partha winged lion (now I have two). We took note of certain booths that had neat stuff for gifts for people.

Here's an image of the Dungeon Delve in the WotC castle.

    At 2 p.m. I had a d20 Modern seminar. But I skipped it. Yes, I'm bad. That happened a lot this con ....
    At 4 p.m. I had a signing event at the RPGnow booth. I was a little late for it, so I stayed late. A signed a couple of things for some people. I even signed books I wrote for the adjacent booth. :)
    After the signing we wandered the other half of the exhibit hall, rushing the last part to try and get a quick look at everything before the hall closed at 6 p.m. We then went to the street party outside the convention center, finally tracked down my friends Cindi, Jeff, Doug, and Stan!, and went looking for a place that (a) served vegetarian food (more for Doug than me, as Willow and I ate lunch late) and (b) served milkshakes (Willow really wanted one). Stan! suggested Hooters; Willow and I had never been and we were getting desperate at this point. Well, Hooters has neither vegetarian food nor milkshakes, but they do have a lot of boobs. Leaving Hooters, we went to the Rock Bottom Brewery, which I knew had vegetarian food (since I ate there the day before). But no milkshakes. They have ice cream for dessert, and they have milk, and they have blenders to bake drinks, but they wouldn't make a milkshake. So I ordered a glass of milk and some ice cream and I made my own freakin' milkshake. Stupid dairy state where you can't even get a milkshake....
    Back to the hotel, note location of events for Friday, sleep.

Friday
I was supposed to stop by the games area and meet with Dave Mattingly. Unfortunately, we ran late that morning because we had to go to a local costume shop and pick up parts of my costume for the Ravenloft play the next day. Sorry, Dave! I suck. :(
    At noon I was scheduled to go to the Intro To The Chainmail Minis Game seminar. Since Chainmail has been canceled, the seminar was canceled. Willow and I decided to go to the 3rd floor and check out the speed painting (miniatures) stuff and the paint-and-take area sponsored by Reaper Miniatures (BTW, Reaper totally rocks, for this and other reasons ... more on that later). I then went (late) to the What's New In The Forgotten Realms seminar and Willow went to the hotel to order a milkshake from room service (since she didn't get one Thursday). She was rebuffed by a rude room service person and went downstairs to the restaurant to get one. She saw Stan! in the bar and the bartender made her a milkshake. Yay!
    I arrived late to the seminar and missed some sort of slide show but in time for the Q&A, which was mostly your routine stuff: Are you ever going to revisit area X? Are you going to revive the Y campaign? What about a new novel with hero Z? Others probably have better notes on the seminar than I do, so I won't try to give you a half-assed version.
    I was going to be going to the Freelancing For WotC seminar, but I realized, hey, I already know how to freelance for WotC. Plus, since my schedule is filling up and WotC hasn't contacted me about any freelance, I probably didn't need to worry about it. Willow and I went to the Safe House for dinner but they were at capacity for dinner reservations. So we went back to our room and ordered room service, then went to our rehearsal for the Ravenloft play. That lasted almost four hours, and so we went to bed after that.

Saturday
At 10 a.m. I was going to go to the D&D Q&A seminar, but I slept late and didn't really feel like going to a rules seminar, especially as I suspected a lot of it would be about core D&D stuff, the Epic-Level Handbook in particular. Willow and I had breakfast and then I went to the Spellfire area of the card games room to sign some cards (I appear on a couple of Spellfire cards). Next to that was the Dragon Dice area, so I hung out with those guys for a while (since I'm technically a VP of SFR Inc., the company that owns Dragon Dice).
    At 2pm was a Meet Malhavoc Press seminar. However, due to a mix-up in the program book that listed it with two different locations, I showed up at one location and Monte at the other. So I talked to the ten guys at my location for an hour about rules stuff, FR stuff, and WotC stuff. Someone finally tracked down Monte at the other location and we figured out the problem; he showed up just in time to take everyone next door to the Sword & Sorcery Studios seminar.
    I called the Safe House and actually made reservations for dinner at 5 p.m. Did a brief tour of the art show, and after that we went to the casting call for the Ravenloft play at 7 p.m. The show was at 8 p.m., and it was a lot of fun. I played Sweet, a demon whose magic made everyone around him sing and dance ... and some of them to spontaneously combust. Willow played a vampire slayer, and she and her friends eventually tracked me down, but I escaped. The show was a lot of fun (despite the fact that some bozo scheduled a Cthulhu revival next door at the last minute, so we were competing with their noise), and I have some cool pictures from that.
    After the show, most of the cast gathered at the downstairs restaurant for dinner, drinks, and desert. And after that was a well-deserved rest.

The audience for the show, taken by peeking the lens of my camera between the draping.

Rob Bane as Spike, a vampire in the show. Rob is a great guy and helped us out with housing at Gen Con (since I didn't register for it while I was an employee and was too late for the deadline after I was laid off). Rob and is an employee of GenCon and worked incredibly hard at the show (sometimes 16 hour days) to make sure things went smoothly.

Two pictures of me in costume.

Stan! played a horned demon in the show, but giving him a horned helmet was easier than a ton of makeup for a two-minute appearance.

Willow and Doug. This was Doug's third Ravenloft play; this time he had a cameo as a pretty boy rescued by Willow's character.

Sunday
Sunday was a busy day for us. I had a 10 a.m. seminar--What Do You Want To See From WotC?--but since the only thing I really wanted to see from them were my three unpublished books, particularly Ghostwalk, and they know that already, I decided to ditch it.
    Our flight was to leave at 3:45 p.m., so we needed to be at the airport by 2:45 p.m., which meant we needed to leave the hotel by 2:30. Problem: we had a bunch of trading to do in the exhibit hall and we were supposed to check out of the hotel by noon. Laden with junk for the Ravenloft play, we'd never be able to haul all of that around. Fortunately, after we were able to store our extra stuff with the help of Christina, one of our Ravenloft play stars, and get a bunch of trading done (the only bad thing is that we were so pressed for time I didn't get the chance to stop by the Dragon Dice seminar like I said I was going to ... again, I suck!). We traded for some cool Dark Eye miniatures (a German minis game that has only begun to be imported into the USA), some Chronopia minis I plan to use for Ghostwalk, and a really cool cloaked guy (the Dragyri Soul Warden) from the Dark Age miniatures game (most of the minis are based on the artwork of Brom, rk post, and similar artists).
    And then I went to the Reaper booth.
    If you didn't know, I'm doing a d20 book on elves for Reaper. Ron, my main contact there, is a great guy. He checks out my web site all the time and even sent me a complete set of Reaper paints when he realized I was using Games Workshop paints (the "evil empire" of miniatures companies, much like how WotC is apparently the "evil empire" of RPGs). Ron really knows how to take care of his freelancers. He wants me to be happy, so he gives Willow and I a bunch of minis, including Verocithrax, a box set dragon miniature that's huge, totally awesome, and probably costs something like 50 bucks. Ron, you kick eleven kinds of ass!
    After loading up on Reaper stuff, we grabbed out stored luggage and headed off to the airport, repacked briefly to minimize what we had to carry, then made the long trip home. We arrived around midnight and promptly crashed.

Babes of Gen Con
What about the babes of Gen Con, you ask? I feel that there weren't as many this year. Maybe becaues my girlfriend was there and so I was comparing them to a different standard, or maybe I was being more picky. It certainly wasn't because Willow was discouraging it ... heck, she pointed some out to me. In any case, I don't have as many photos this year, and eventually took pictures of a couple of booth babes (which I tried not to do deliberately last year) just to give me a few more numbers. Here they are.

I think this is a booth babe. She agreed to the picture only if I didn't use the flash on my camera. Weird.

The booth babe for artist Clyde "look at them bazongas" Caldwell's booth.

You might remember Lindsay from last year's Babe of GenCon photos. She's now a full-time employee of the GenCon company.

This is the wife of artist Claudio Pozas. For the life of me I can't remember her name right now (I think it's Paula), but she's very attractive. There must be something in the water in Brazil that lets them grow really attractive women!

A woman I saw while I was signing Spellfire cards.

Willow took this one at the costume contest. Resolution is poor because Willow got in at the last minute and had to stand in the back of the room. I wish we had a better picture, because she looks pretty cute.

Costume contest again. Something about this blurry photo makes me think this is the same woman who is the very first picture in the Babes of Gen Con gallery from last year....

Costume contest again. I don't think there's a lot of cloth in her costume....

Here's a woman who I think was Russian, but understood enough English to know that I wanted to take her picture. Her boyfriend glowered at us. :)

A blonde woman carrying a whip I saw on the last day of the show.