This year at Gen Con Indy was the first time I had a booth for Sean K Reynolds Games (the Game Mechanics lent me some space in their booth for So Cal 2004, but this is the first time I went all-out for a show). I shared a 10x10 booth with the Wicked Dead Brewing Company, and between working in the booth, running games to promote my books, and a seminar, I had very little free time to look around the exhibit hall, so this year I don't have a lot of photos to show for it. I've learned from my mistakes this time and my booth next year will be much better. Anyway, on to the con info!
(Thumbnails link to larger pictures.)
Tuesday-Wednesday
My friend Brian and I drove to the show, leaving just before midnight on Tuesday, driving overnight and arriving Wednesday afternoon to set up our booth (which was pretty simple, as we didn't bring a lot of stuff).
Our booth. In the foreground is Willow's handmade soaps, then some print copies of The New Argonauts, a bunch of painted minis for sale, some unpainted free minis (I had a "buy a book, get an unpainted mini for free" promotion going on). Beyond that is the Wicked Dead stuff -- many self-contained non-d20 games such as Cat, Enemy Gods, Inspectres, Necronomonopoly, Octane, Run Robot Red, The Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men, and Thirty (check 'em out!).
Thursday night I had dinner at Friday's (attached to our hotel) with my sister, Brian, JD Wiker, Marc Schmalz, and Eric Cagle. It was nice catching up with everyone, and I crashed right after dinner because I was still tired from the overnight drive. Then I woke up again, worked a bit on the characters for Brian's Thursday game (we ran out of time before the show and ended up making the characters at the show, which was a joy), then went back to sleep.
Thursday
At noon I ran a 4-hour adventure called When Luna Calls, a tie-in to Curse of the Moon. All six PCs were lycanthropes using a new template from CotM; here they're in the final encounter, facing some lycanthrope goblins and a weremanticore.
Brian Cortijo ran a game called Whispers of Ragnarok, a tie-in to an upcoming (and as of this writing, not-yet-officially-announced) book I'm doing called For Asgard. The PCs had to retake a bridge between Midgard (the human world) and Jotunheim (the giant world), see what lay beyond it, and destroy the bridge if it looked like the giants were planning to invade. Here the PCs are in an ice cavern trying to retreat from a giant so they can destroy the bridge before the army of giants can catch up to them.
My friend Kristie (another friend from WotC back in the day) playing "spokesmodel" for Paizo's Shackled City hardcover, a collected and updated version of the Shackled City adventure path adventures that appeared in Dungeon in the past year.
This is the Heroscape display at the WotC booth. I don't really know what the game is about (I didn't ask for a demo, I just liked the display) but it looks like some kind of plastic-miniatures wargame. Note: I checked out the Heroscape site and (oddly enough) there's nothing that comes out and says "this is what the game is" ... there's info about strategy and specific aspects of the game, but nothing that tells you what the game is (note the prominent "What is D&D link" on the WotC D&D page, "What is Magic?" on the Magic page, and so on ... the WotC site knows what it's doing, the Heroscape site needs some help).
A view of the corner of the Avalon Hill display ... they had a big setup with a lot of military vehicles, mannequins dressed in military fatigues, and so on.
Another angle on the display (I'm standing around 90 degrees counterclockwise from where I took the previous picture). They were doing game demos on the hoods of the vehicles, which was neat.
A view of the D&D dungeon delve. They only had one delve this year (last year they had one for Waterdeep/Forgotten Realms, one for Sharn/Eberron), which actually made me a little sad ... IMO they could have used some of the HUGE amount of space for the Avalon Hill display to run more D&D stuff, but I'm biased. :)
WotC was showing off the Hecatomb game with a big series of gothic panels with stained-glass windows. Pretty cool and spooky.
A cool piece of terrain the folks at Rackham (Confrontation) booth were using to demo their game.
A Confrontation diorama.
Thursday night I had dinner with Monte and Sue Cook and my sister Keri. I was still tired (I'm an insomniac and always wake up around 6:30 a.m.) and went to bed shortly after.
Friday
I ran a second When Luna Calls game on Friday. This time I only had three players, so I had to fudge some things so they wouldn't be overwhelmed. Here the werepanda, werebat, and weretiger are battling some weretiger goblins on the roof of an old fort.
... and here they are in the final encounter. You'll note the map doesn't look exactly like how it did for Thursday's game, that's because I tend to "wing it" when I run one-shot games just to see if it runs better one way rather than another.
This is Brian's Friday Whispers of Ragnarok game. Here the PCs have retreated all the way across the bridge, pursued by a giant, who is happily whacking at them while they're trying to chop the bridge supports.
Friday night I went out to eat with Cindi Rice, Ed Stark, and Ryan Miller at Buca di Bepo, a good Italian place that has VERY large portions. As I was pouring about a pound of parmesan on my spaghetti, Ryan remarked "Want some spaghetti with your cheese?" I said the first thing that came to mind, which was, "Shut up! Want some mouth with your face?" which makes no sense, but it was quite funny at the time. :) Afterwards we went to Shula's, the bar attached to the Hyatt, and chatted with my friends Rob, Kristie, Ted, Brian, Ed Greenwood, and other industry notables.
Saturday
While waiting for the exhibit hall to open for the exhibitors this morning I spotted a kid with a cool Cthulhu backpack and his parents let me snap a photo. One of the booths at the show was selling them (anyone remember which? I'll link it here.).
I ran round two of the Olympus Quakes tournament this day (an adventure tie-in to The New Argonauts). Here, the heroes (colored tokens) confront a bunch of soldiers created from Ares' blood (gray tokens) while Ares himself (photo-token) digs around in a cave for an ancient artifact.
And here they are confronting him outside the gates of Olympus itself. The red tokens are a mistlike monster made of Ares' blood, which he breathed out in a cloud to fight the PCs.
My game ended early, so I had some unexpected time to look around the exhibit hall some more.
More new stuff from the Miniature Building Authority, the folks who make prepainted resin buildings for games.
A Games Workshop display of a squad of tyranids invading a city. I especially like how some of them have landed in the exposed interiors of some of these skyscrapers.
Another view of that same display.
The booth for Diceboxes.com, folks who make boxes where you roll your dice -- keeps them from rolling off the table or through a bunch of miniatures.
More stuff from the folks at Alea Tools. They now have a bunch more colors for their Magnetic Miniature Marker Discs, an improved hole-puncher (for making circular tokens to glue onto your MMMDs), and scissors-cuttable material to glue onto the bottom of your miniatures (an improvement from using tin snips to cut up tin cans for that purpose).
A demo area at the Privateer Press. Cool stuff!
A photo of the Odin miniature from Eastern Front Studios. I'm thinking about getting one of these for a For Asgard game (it's 54mm, which is great to represent a god among 28mm mortals).
NECA has the licenses for several cool properties, including Sin City and the Nightmare Before Christmas. I picked up a couple of starter decks for the NBC game because I'm a fan of the movie; I haven't tried to play it yet but the cards look nice and the mechanics look pretty simple.
The Grichels booth. These folks make weird leather bookcovers, tissue box covers, and other stuff bearing odd faces like what you can see in the picture. According to their mythology, grichels are spirit creatures that observe other creatures with curiosity but rarely intervene.
Brian and I did our "Spell and Magic Item Building" seminar, which was well-attended and probably could have been four hours instead of just two (maybe next year we'll do two separate seminars, one on each topic). A lot of good questions, clarified some important issues.
Saturday night I grabbed some dinner, then headed out to a "celebrity gaming event" set up by the Dead Gentlemen. Goodman Games is publishing an adventure based on the plot of the new Gamers movie (Gamers: Dorkness Rising), and they gathered together several guys from DG as well as myself, Monte Cook, and Aaron Williams. We gamed in front of an audience (boggle!), they filmed it (double boggle!!), and it's going to be a special feature on the GDR DVD (triple boggle!!!). We had a lot of fun, tried hard to be funny, and then ran off to the "behind the scenes" preview of G:DR, which looks really funny. I've only seen little bits of it (basically the two scenes I was in) so all of the stuff they showed was new to me and was very funny. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the actual movie.
Monte and I right after the behind-the-scenes viewing of G:DR.
And then I went back to my room and conked out for the night.
Sunday
Sunday was my easiest day -- no games to run, no seminars, just some time in the booth. I met with Rob and Kristie at Starbucks for some chai and banana bread, then headed over to the booth to set up. That didn't take long, and Keri and Brian were in and out of the booth, so I was able to wander around, talk to friends a bit, see the art show (which also involved talking to friends), and buy some stuff.
Things I picked up include:
Sunday night I went out with Monte, Sue, and Brian, then left with Monte to talk games at their room, then hooked up with Cindi, Ted, Ryan Dancey, John Zinser, Ryan Miller, and Luke Peterschmidt at Houlihan's, then went to the Hyatt bar to see Wayne Reynolds and his wife Ged. On the way out we ran into Lisa Stevens and Vic Wertz from Paizo and talked for a bit about the show, the industry, and living on the east coast. Went back to my room, called my room-mates (who were out with The Game Mechanics), put in my earplugs so they wouldn't wake me when they came back to the hotel room, and fell asleep. The next morning JD, Brian, Keri, and I went to breakfast, then we finished packing, said goodbye to JD, took Keri to the airport, and drove home.
Along the way I ran into a lot of fans and people from the message boards, which is always cool. I especially want to thank Sheridan, Andrew, Steve, and Brian for running games for me at the show, and Brian and Keri for helping me run my side of the booth, and John, Jared, Annie, Dave, and Rebecca for running the Wicked-Dead side of the booth (which often required answering questions about my stuff, too). You all RAWK.
Overall, a good show. I was busier than I wanted to be in all the bad ways and in few of the good ways, but like I said earlier, I know better now and I'll be able to make next year's show even better (plus, I'll have a bunch of products coming out between now and then to show in the booth).