Due to sudden car bills for my car and Willow's car, I missed Gen Con Indy 2003, and I really regretted it -- it was the first Gen Con in Indy, my sister was going, and I was really excited about it. So this year I was determined to go, I made it, and I was really looking forward to my first Gen Con Indy.

Wednesday

I flew out early Wednesday morning, making an hour-long layover in Dallas, TX. This guy is the first Gen Con gamer I spotted (he's wearing a shirt that says "gamemaster" on it), so I took his photo. Also at the airport I ran into Ash, a guy I knew from Wisconsin (who had actually attended the housewarming party I had at my weird house in Springfield). The convention had almost begun. I arrived at the Indy airport and took a cab to the convention center because it was late enough that I should've been able to pick up my GM badge (available after 3pm). Unfortunately they were delayed until after 5pm, so I wandered around the exhibit hall for a while taking pictures and getting an idea of the layout.

People had lined up to get their badges and buy event tickets. Last year there were horror stories about hours-long lines (some sort of network problem or the phone lines for the credit-card call-in machines, if I recall correctly), but it looked like things were going smoothly this year (I hear they used standard cash registers, which don't have those problems) and I didn't hear any complaints.

I ran into Adrian and Dave, a couple of my WotC friends who now work for Gen Con LLC.

This is "Ratty," a British guy who's kind of an icon of the RPGA and Gen Con, I see him every year. Normally he wears a hat that looks like a rat, but right now he has more of a beholder motif.

This is my friend Laurie, who's been volunteering for the RPGA at Gen Con for several years now. One of my "I see you only at Gen Con" friends, which you actually get a lot of once you've been going to the show for a while.

This year the big theme from WotC was the 30th anniversary of D&D. They set up this big display in the lobby showing the history of the game from Chainmail to the white box set and all the way up through AD&D, AD&D 2nd edition, and 3rd edition D&D, with the campaign settings and books of interest like OA. Pretty cool.

One of the big triangular displays from the D&D 30th Anniversary setup. I chose this one because one of the products shown on it is my masterpiece, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. :)

I ran into this young lady while she was waiting in line to buy tickets to an event.

This'll give you an idea of how long the lines got late in the afternoon. However, Gen Con had multiple staffers working at the end of the line and it moved at a good pace. Like I said, I didn't hear any complaints (it was also Wednesday and it's not like they were missing any ongoing events, and these people were getting a head start on their fun for the rest of the show).

Shaun and Miranda Horner, both of whom used to work for WotC (Shaun in DCI, Miranda as an editor for RPGs). They're good friends of mine (though Shaun is "Evil Shaun" and I am "Good Sean") and we've known each other since the TSR days in Wisconsin.

After all this looking around I decided to go to my hotel, since it was still another half hour before my badge would be ready. To make a long story short, the name for my hotel (Courtyard Indianapolis at the Capitol) wasn't the name the locals knew it by (the Courtyard Marriot) and there was another Courtyard Marriot in the immediate area, so after three wrong stops and a total of 30 minutes trudging through the humid Indiana August weather, I reached my actual hotel, checked in, showered, and went back to the convention center to pick up my badge. That's where I ran into Brian (known on my boards as GarenThal), who would be sharing a room with me at the show (I had left him a note in the room saying that we could meet at the badge desk at 7:15pm or back at the room if that didn't work out). Brian and I went off to dinner to chat a bit (it was the first time we had ever met in person, despite daily email exchanges about various projects).

Then I went off to bed. I had been up to 1:30 a.m. Wednesday morning (i.e., very late Tuesday night) finishing the materials for my FR LARP on Friday, and my flight out was 6 1/2 hours after that, and I had a two hour time change to deal with. I needed sleep before the Thursday morning Arcana Unearthed tournament adventure I was going to run!

Thursday
I got up on time, ate at the hotel restaurant (which was actually pretty cool ... they had a waffle maker where you could make your own fresh waffles ... excellent!), and went to the convention center with time to spare for my 9 a.m. event.

I passed this room at the show at around 8:30 a.m. and there were already a lot of people playing games. Go, Gen Con!

I passed these folks in the hall ... they're dressed up as the Fighter, White Mage, and Red Mage from Final Fantasy/8 Bit Theater. Good job!

The adventure I ran that morning was The Severed Oath, a two-round tournament written by Mike Mearls (of Malhavoc Press) using the Arcana Unearthed rules and the Diamond Throne setting. Monte Cook and/or Iron Wind Metals provided Arcana Unearthed minis for all the monsters and the characters, though there was no time to paint them and thus they were bare metal. The players got to keep the minis of their characters and the DMs (there were six different sessions of Round 1 of this tournament, so DMs, plural, is correct) got to keep the monster minis, but I already had all of these AU minis so I ended up giving them to the players as well. At this point in the adventure, the PCs have just overcome some inshon (froglike horde humanoids that breed like rabbits) who had set an ambush for anyone who tried to cross a wood bridge. In this and the following pictures I used Photoshop to color some of the minis to help identify them. The inshon are green, the sibeccai (jackal-humanoid) oathsworn (a monklike class) is dark red, and the litorian (lion-humanoid) warmain (heavy-armor fighter) is yellow-orange.

Later in the tournament, the PCs discover a group of inshon driven away from their attack on a town. The inshon are arguing about which should be leader of the group, as the current leader hasn't done a very good job (they're not getting fat eating dead townsfolk, for example). Three PCs have snuck up on the encounter with the rest farther behind. The glass beads all over the table represent trees rising up out of the swampy ground, and the paper approximates a small elevated area above the water level.

Here the PCs have reached the old ruin where the bad guys have holed up. The mojh (draconic-like humanoid) mage blade (kinda like a bladesinger, but not really) used a mud spell to make the floor inside the first room in the house muddy and slippery so the bad guys would all fall down. Unfortunately, the rest of the PCs charged in there and every single one of them fell down at least once because of the mud (even the mojh mageblade!) ... we all had quite a laugh at that (the gnomelike faen PC eventually gained some stability by crawling onto an enemy's dead body and used it as a jumping point to drier ground).

This is as good a point as any to mention the glass bead with the picture in it on the left side of the photo; it's an Imajewel from Hammerdog Games ... a very handy little do-dad they make to represent torches, but they have many other kinds (I'm always losing track of light sources in games, so I have five torch Imajewels). Jonathan Tweet mentioned them to me a few years ago and I picked them up at Gen Con 2001.

Now this just capped it all off. The PCs had defeated everyone except the main enemy, a harrid (vulture-headed spellcasting creature). The sibeccai oathsworn had invisibly sneaked into the last room and decided to grapple the harrid so it couldn't cast spells. The sibeccai failed on its first round's attempt and most of the rest of the group ran into the room. The sibeccai tried grappling again and succeeded. So the giant champion of life (kinda like a paladin) attacks the harrid and crits, but accidentally hits the sibeccai because of the grapple. That's OK, the sibeccai is still alive. Then the akashic (skill-oriented character) shoots at the harrid with his bow, crits, and accidentally hits the sibeccai, who drops completely dead (to something like -16 hp). So in one round the sibeccai goes from completely unharmed to crit twice in one round by his own party members and drops dead. We couldn't believe it ... that's one I'll be talking about for a while. Anyway, we finished up the game, passed out the minis and some other prizes Mike Mearls brought, and said our goodbyes. I headed off to the exhibit hall, generally my favorite place at the show.

The exhibit hall is where all of the corporate (read: game company, game seller, or something along those lines) attendees set up booths to display, demonstrate, and sell their products. You see the latest releases from most of the major game companies, plus interesting stuff from not-so-big game companies and usually several out-of-the-basement people who've put together enough money to publish their own d20 book. It's really big, and people know it's the biggest non-electronic game convention in the States so they go all-out ... big booths, flashy displays, booth babes ... anything to attract your attention so you take a look at (and hopefully buy) their new game.

This is a panoramic shot from the entrance doors to the exhibit hall (a composite of about six individual photos I took in rapid succession as I turned slightly in between each shot). It's big (it's actually two adjacent halls at the convention center, with the dividing wall removed) ... I dunno exactly how many exhibitors were there, but I'd venture a guess that there were at least 300.

I spend a lot of time in the exhibit hall. There's a lot to see, plenty of interesting people, and fun stuff to buy (plus this is where I usually run into friends that I haven't seen in a while, as well as fans of my books and people who visit my site or boards). Various companies demo their games and often entice you with freebies to get a demo. This year the on-site bag (a bag of freebies provided by various attending companies, normally for promotion or advertising purposes) included a coupon book for various booths ... go to WotC with a coupon to get a Wizards laniard, go to the Rackham booth to get a t-shirt or a special Gen Con edition Ejhin de Vanth miniature, get $5 off one of the t-shirt stores, get a free die, etc. Cool stuff. More on some of the things I actually picked up at the show later.

This is one of the booths at the show that sells replica swords, so Gen Con's not just about gaming, it's about things you can hang on your walls that might kill you if they fall off during an earthquake.

Paizo's booth used cheerleaders to promote their Undefeated magazine (all about card games). This, in my opinion, is the most stunning of them.

Artist Larry Elmore says, "Get away from my booth, you punk!"

Artist Jeff Easley, who I realized reminds me of my uncle.

My friend Linae, who used to work for WotC's Production deparment (production handles typesetting books and cards and stuff) and just moved over to the Book Publishing department (working with editors and novelists and such) right before the show. This was her first Gen Con. She's a real sweetie.

Keith Baker, creator of Eberron, was getting a lot of attention at the show. His wife asked me to take a picture of a fan getting his picture taken with Keith so she could send it to Keith's mom (parse that sentence, eh?), so here it is.

Thursday night was the D&D 30th Anniversary Party sponsored by WotC. Free food, free goodies (D&D30A bags, cups, posters, and shirts), and music, all taking place in a converted train station. I took these pictures from the VIP room, which was on the second floor, with windows overlooking the main dance area. Other photos from the party: 86 87 88 (there is no image 1989) 90 91

Bruce Cordell is a friend of mine and one of the designers on the WotC R&D team. Raven Mimura is an artist friend of mine from Washington who's done a lot of work for Wizards. I didn't realize it until the night of the party, but Bruce and Raven look a lot alike.

After the party, a bunch of us (me, Brian, Linae, Cindi Rice, WotC's Kyle Murray, WotC's Mark Jessup, and several other people I can't remember right now) walked around downtown looking for a karaoke bar called the Ugly Monkey. We eventually found it, and though it was very loud, we had a good time. Here is where I'll mention that at least three times during this day, people mistook me for Chris Perkins; we're both tall, thin, and bald, but really don't look much alike, so unless you don't know us or you're drunk it's not likely to happen. I mention this now because an acquantance of ours at the bar (I won't say who) confused me for Chris. :P

After all the excitement I went to bed.

Friday

I overslept by 45 minutes and missed the breakfast get-together Julia Martian set up for the WotC web site contributors attending Gen Con (myself, Julia, Miranda, Skip, Eric Haddock, and Carrie Bebris). I at least managed to show up at the very end when they were chatting before heading out. Sorry, guys!

The "D&D General" seminar, where Charles Ryan (brand manager), Ed Stark (licensing manager for D&D), Bill Slavicsek (VP of RPG R&D), and Chris Perkins (creative director for D&D) talk about what's coming up in the near future for D&D. I snapped this photo when they were talking about an upcoming D&D Minis expansion; I'm not into the game at all and prefer metal minis to plastic, but the beholder looks so good I might try to get my hands on one....

At 1 p.m. I had planned to go to the Writing For Dungeon seminar, but as I'm friends with the editor and I've worked with him before and he's told me what he wants in the adventure I'm writing, I felt I could skip the "how to get Dungeon to accept a submission" and "how to write using the style guide" stuff, which is mostly what the seminar is about (it's for new people trying to get started). I decided to cover more of the exhibit hall (since the day before I only got halfway through because of running into friends and talking), and I totally forgot about poking my head into the session of Cult of the Swamp Lord (a tournament adventure I wrote a few years ago and updated to 3.5 for the RPGA to use at GenCon).

Monte Cook at the Sword & Sorcery Studios/White Wolf booth. "What's this book I'm holding." It's weird, I barely saw Monte at all during the show, we were both so busy (except he was actually working).

A stormtrooper was posted near one of the exhibit hall entrances, whether just for show or to represent security, I don't know. But it was cool. :)

Two shots of the Armorcast booth, with all of their (purchased unpainted) resin goodies painted up nicely. While I was here I purchased two items, the new #9320 Dark Legion Defiler Pods and the #572 Large LPG Storage Tank I'd been meaning to pick up for a while. The Defiler Pods work great for weird monster eggs, evil torture devices, or mutation-inducing chambers. I plan to cut and file the mechanical bits off the LPG Tank (attaching some gooey blobs to cover any scarring) and use it for some weird device, maybe a big vat of human-mutating potion the yuan-ti are cooking up.

The folks who make the Settlers of Catan board game (and all of its variants, add-ons, and sequels) had an oversized version of the game for demonstration play. Kinda makes me want to build a big version of it on my own, it looks so cool. :)

Sony Online Entertainment has announced Everquest 2, and they demoed it on big screens at the show. Impressive-looking, even though I'm not into Everquest.

One of the demo arenas for WizKids' Heroclix game.

The demo arena for WizKids' click-Battlemech game.

The demo arena for WizKids' click-pirateship-battle game.

A panoramic shot of the WotC booth. WotC/TSR usually does a good job of making their booth look impressive (in past years the "booth" was actually a giant castle over a hundred feet across that you walked into in order to see the new TSR stuff), and they pulled it off in a pretty subtle way this time. For L-shaped walls defined the corners of the area but left the interior space open to traffic. An area at the center housed the retail section. All around the "booth" were places to meet authors, artists, RPG staff, or even participate in demons of WotC/Hasbro products. And the more demos you did, the more stamps you got on your "passport" and the better your chances to win something on the Wheel of Prizes. Nicely done. They also gave away a couple of preview minis from the new plastic D&D Miniatures Game expansion (a half-illithid lizardfolk and a horn-headed armored humanoid).

A close-up photo of some cool swords I saw for sale elsewhere in the exhibit hall.

One of the D&D demo areas in the WotC booth, this one set in Undermountain. They also had an Eberron Dungeon Delve set in Sharn, City of Towers (a pretty cool setup with several towers linked by stairs and balconies, and over the course of the show the action moved from the ground level until it reached the top of the towers and a lot of characters were actually flying around, which they represented by a gridded plexiglass placed on top of the flat towers so the minis could be placed out in "empty air" without the use of wires or tall "flying pillars").

The Star Wars d20 Minatures Game demo, showing of the new game and the color maps that come with it.The stuff looks pretty good!

Two different play areas for the Crocodile Games booth, one used for their Olympus stuff (titans, gods, Greek heroes) and the other for their Aegyptus (races modeled after catlike Bast, hawklike Horus, and so on). I picked up a Horde Mummies Booster (which contains a mummy with sword and a different mummy with sword) since you can always use a nice mummy mini, and a Nekharu Witches Booster (which contains a Nekharu coven witch with dagger and a Nekharu coven witch with dagger and skull) which I intend to use as harrids (from Arcana Unearthed). While I'm talking about Crocodile, I should mention that one of the Babes of Gen Con 2002 is actually Marike, a Crocodile employee. Who knew?

After a viewing all of this, I went to lunch with Linae and then realized I was late for my 3 p.m. "What's Wrong With 3E?" seminar, so I raced to that. I was able to refute most of the points the 3E-naysayers brought up, with almost all of the remainder dismissed by me or others as "you don't like change" or "that's optional, so don't do it any you have nothing to worry about" or "it makes no sense for a business to deliberately release [2E AD&D] books that they know are going to sell 1/10th as much as comparable [3E] books that won't have poor sales." It was a good discussion, and it was nice to see the 3E folks say "keep on playing 2E if you want, we're not going to force you" and the 2E folks say "I don't like 3E and I'm going to keep playing 2E." Afterwards we chatted a bit about WotC and D&D in general.

Saturday

A panoramic shot of people lined up for the annual Gen Con costume contest, which takes place Saturday at noon.

Reaper Miniatures didn't have a retail booth this year ... logistically it's hard for them to display their full line of minis unless they buy space for a huge booth at the show, which makes it really hard for them to break even. Since their minis are available just about everywhere, they focused on gaming in the Miniatures area on the second floor, with a gigantic table covered in Dwarven Forge Master Maze and Hirst Arts CastleMolds pieces as a backdrop for demoing their new Warlord miniatures game.

Reaper also had a city setup using prepainted models from J.R. Miniatures.

Another group in the Miniatures area playing a game called BrickMech, which involves building mechs out of Lego bricks, Blox, or whatever.

The Gaming Lego Users Group (GLUG) had a big area set aside for an ships-and-islands scenario. It's kinda hard to see in this picture because the room's carpet has a strong pattern.

Some of the ships built for the GLUG scenario.

A painted diorama of creatures emerging from a portal, on display along with other gorgeous minis. I even got to see this fantastic diorama, though in person it didn't look quite as cool because it was displayed on a white shelf which made all of the light-sourcing less impressive.

Another diorama, this one using a dracolich mini as a dragon's skeleton on display at a wizard's museum, along with tour guide and young wizard students.

Every year they have a "paint and take," where you pick out a mini, get to paint it with the paints they provide, then get to take it home ... for free! It's normally sponsored by (and materials provided by) Reaper. Oh, and before you get too excited, the person in the shiny dress on the right is a guy. I dunno if he was in costume or a transvestite.

This is the same young lady I saw on Wednesday, this time in costume.

On Wednesday and Thursday I saw a weird wooden frame in one of the lobby areas of the convention center, with some guy putting wads of aluminum foil on it. I remember thinking, "A lumpy foil sculpture, that's pretty lame, what the heck is that all about?" Then Friday he started adding clay over the base material and it started to look really cool. On Saturday it was done and on Sunday it was dry enough that you could touch it and pose with it (for scale, check the right side of the image ... that's a full-size vacuum cleaner). A very cool demonstration of large-scale sculpting. Live sculpting performed by Kim Graham ... cool! And good thinking, Gen Con, that was a neat idea to set it up.

Mike Mearls, Monte Cook, and Sue Cook at the Meet Malhavoc Press seminar.

I had to take off in the middle of this to sit in as a panelist for a Game Mechanics seminar called "Internet Piracy: Impact vs. Ethics." In addition to me and the guys from TGM they had Steve from DriveThruRPG.com . He argued against filesharing RPGs, I played devil's advocate and argued that they weren't enough of a problem (in terms of lost sales) to worry about unless someone started selling scanned PDFs. The irony is that I'm really against filesharing and don't like people who post or dowload copies of books, movies, or music. Anyway, we had some good debate and Q&A with people at the seminar, then I walked back to the exhibit hall with Stan!, JD, and Marc.

Me and my "brother," artist Wayne Reynolds, at the WotC booth artist area. I first heard about Wayne when Bruce Cordell, Jim Butler, and I were working with a British online game company back at TSR, and Paul (the owner of said company) told us about one of his artists, Wayne, who really wanted to do art for D&D. We got them all in contact with one of the art directors, and now you have Wayne's art in and on your D&D books. Yay! That was about six years ago, and Wayne and I have emailed quite a few times since then, but we had never met. This was his first Gen Con, and he was an artist guest of honor, so I knew I'd run into him eventually, and I did. No, Wayne and I are not really related, though for a moment we did fool Eberron's Keith Baker into thinking we were.

Me, Wayne, and his wife Ged. They're a really funny couple, and ... well, you know how you meet some people and afterwards you say, "They were really nice?" Well, the Wayne and Ged aren't so much nice (though they are nice) as much as it's apparent that they're really happy to be talking to you and really interested to hear what you have to say. Plus they're really damn funny (it was Wayne's idea to have this "family portrait"). I'd like to hang out with them for a while, I'm sure it would be a riot.

I forgot to mention something really handy I picked up at the show. Jonathan Tweet has something he calls his "Pick of the Con," the favorite thing he found at the show. Mine are the Magnetic Miniature Marker Discs from Alea Tools. They're little colored magnetic disks you stick under a miniature to mark that it's invisible, wounded, flying, poisoned, slowed, and so on. They come in multiple colors and (because they're magnets) you can stack them under a mini to show multiple effects. They even point out ways to use them as counters if you're not into minis at all but still want to represent tactical gameplay. I bought a player's pack and I might order more online at some point. Check them out!

Sunday
Sunday was going to be a busy day for me. At 8 a.m. was the "What's new with Wizards?" seminar, the FR seminar was at noon - 2 p.m., and my flight left at 3:30 p.m. In between these things I needed to say goodbye to as many as my buddies as possible plus do my last-minute shopping.

Brian and I got up early and checked out of the hotel, as I'd have to time to head back after the FR seminar to get my stuff. We then ran off to the What's New seminar....

... where Mary-Elizabeth, Peter Archer, Charles Ryan, Ed Stark, and Bill Slavicsek (standing) talked about future WotC products, including a new RISK game, the Star Wars Miniatures game, and a quick overview of future D&D stuff (as it was already covered in the D&D General seminar). The picture shows a slide with a rhodian pointing a blaster at the viewer; I wanted to make a joke about how rhodians should now get Improved Initiative, since Greedo shot first....

In the last free time I had at the show, I did my shopping. I picked up a Beer Money t-shirt (with a picture and quote from Beer Money, the new card game from Atlas Games that's a more grown-up version of their hit game Lunch Money), the new movie Dead Camper Lake (from Dead Gentlemen Productions, the guys who created The Gamers), and a set of slave minis called the Drugged from the Chronopia miniature game published by Excelsior Entertainment).

Here's Eric Boyd, Richard Lee Byers, Ed Greenwood, and Chris Perkins on the panel, answering questions about the future of FR, asking about what products people would like to see, and enjoying Ed's off-color sense of humor. Some people asked about Neverwinter Nights 2 and I jumped in with assurances about the dedication to story, NPC AI, and relations between Bioware (who created the newest version of NWN, and licensed it to developer Obsidian) and Obsidian (which is made up mostly of my old Black Isle Studios buddies. Seminar ended, said hello and goodbye to the panelists, handed Ed a copy of the Gen Con Preview version of Hungry Little Monsters (he's a contributing author, after all), and went outside to catch a cab to the airport.

Airport was uneventful, flight to Atlanta was uneventful, flight from Atlanta to San Diego had an obnoxious loud little boy behind me but fortunately I brought my earplugs so he was much less annoying. He fell asleep during the showing of Mean Girls which meant I was able to fall asleep, too. When I woke up I took out my clipboard and wrote out three pages of notes and ideas for two upcoming books I want to write and the Dungeon adventure I'm working on right now.

All in all, an eventful convention and even a productive flight home. I'm very glad I went and glad to be storming back into the tabletop RPG hobby now that I don't have that pesky day job taking up all of my writing time. :)