...And I had...A great time!
Hope I can do it again next year. Next year I'd like to Gm something.. or somethingS. It was well worth the trip and my mind is brimming with new ideas for pictures and picture serials and game ideas and pictures for game ideas and serialized pictures based on game ideas...stay tuned.
Some highlights for me, (besides just your basic friendly easy awkwardness in getting to sit around a table and spill your imagination with and at strangers) Play testing Eric Boyd's "House of Cards" heist game where I played an alcoholic Sinatra Music agent/producer making things hard for the rest of the team by kidnapping the mark in a limo behind a shield of Paparazzi; Another highlight was trying out the new Gamma World (picture of my character pending) and then playing a long session of John Harper's Lady Blackbird which I fully enjoyed and want to read/see/ (make(?)) as a graphic novel someday, it's perfect story material for that. Also the largest (10 player!) Dungeon crawl I have ever been part of was fun and interesting, it moved along, incurred death by inter-killing, and was used using death frost doom, hosted by, in my opinion, the best dungeon illustrator I've seen, Tony Dowler. To top it all off I was able to worship at the feet of the great Gygax, playing the game that started it all (for me) AD&D, which was perfectly, loosely (perfectly loosely) and smoothly DM'd, with a full party in a 3 hour slot with some/lots of story, a two level dungeon and a full party! Imagine THAT! I think it kind of extolled the virtue of the system, even while incurring all of the same eye-rolling and deriding that the rules have deserved, and reminded me of all of the tweaking and house-rulings we used to use. Of course, like I said, we hand waved some of the more sticky areas, but over-all it was a pretty accurate play that was fully fun.
As icing on the cake, I found a comics shop around the block from my hotel and bought a copy of the whole Jodo-Moebius epic "The Incal" and read all 300 pages virtually without interuption waiting for the train and on the train. I finished the last page as we pulled in to the station! Amazing!
I suspect there will be lots of good art-shrapnel to come out of this little mind-grenade! But my first order of business is getting back into and finishing this Danger Patrol crazy-comic which I'll probably make available through Ka-Blam when I'm done so that if anyone wants a hard copy they can have one. Just so you all know I only have the first part of the adventure scored with brush and ink, which means the whole adventure is only halfway done and I may never get to the second part... we shall see.
Cheese and Beers!
Nate
PS. I ran across this great essay on boxes that I liked.
