I’m just now getting a chance to write about the great time I had at GenCon this year, but I wanted to make sure y’all saw the pictures I got of all the great games, costumes, and miniatures I got. So welcome to Unicorn Rampant’s virtual walking tour of GenCon 2010!
Games and Minis
In the “big tables” category, I saw a giant version of Ticket to Ride that looked like a lot of fun. Also present but not pictured were giant Settlers of Catan and a few other giant versions of some great board games.
Geek Chic had their beautiful gaming tables in evidence as well. This year they’ve branched out some and have many styles of hand-made, beautifully finished game tables, end tables, coffee tables, all with lots of neat hidden compartments, removable tops, drink holders, die cubbies, and such.
I love Babba Yaga, and these guys had put together a fun 3′ x 3′ piece of terraced terrain for her hut to live on.
Close up of the chicken-legged hut itself.
Speaking of terrain, if you want to make assloads of walls and caverns for cheap, this is for you. Molds that you pour your own resin into and then paint the resulting walls yourself. Available in castle flavor, gothic cathedral flavor…
…and of course Egyptian flavor.
I was really impressed by the level of detail, and the multiple levels of these paper playscapes. Also, super-affordable compared to any of the resin pieces.
Arr, that be a fine-lookin’ vessel, ripe for the plundering! And a bargain at twice the price!
In terms of high-quality finished work, these guys always stand out head and shoulders above everyone else. Of course you get what you pay for in this case. This Caribbean Spanish settlement actually gave me flashbacks to my trip to San Juan in Puerto Rico.
And of course the miniatures. First of all, you need a bunch of dragons.
No. More dragons.
One of Reaper’s display cases. I love those guy’s work.
Close up of a Remorahaz.
Frost giants! We got your frost giants!
Scorpion-man-things and dinosaurs.
A good specimen of a Type 6 demon.
Demons, djinn and dastardly dark steps.
And of course a plague rat-a-pult?
I love digging around for old gaming books, particularly anything from the late 70’s and early 80’s when I first started gaming. I found some real gems, like this. Who doesn’t love a game of hot man-to-man combat?
My assembled loot from the Exhibitor’s hall; the 1980 D&D red box, just like the one I bought in the toy store at 7 years old, a couple of AD&D adventures from the same era, and a couple of vinyl transfers from Berserk.
Costumes
One of the highlights of GenCon for me is always all the great costumes everyone puts together. Most are hand-made.
Satyr girls always make me horny (pun intended – sorry).
Not sure if these girls were officially supporting the new DC comics game that just came out, but I really liked the costumes either way.
Steampunk, Victorian styles, corsets and bustiers continued to be popular costume themes this year. I also saw a lot of savage or primitive costumes this year, a newer trend.
Nice brass jetpack!
A couple of Paizo’s iconic characters made an appearance at their booth.
A picture of me enjoying the costumes. That’s my renfaire garb, minus the cowl.
Some fun and overtly sexy costumes – I particularly like the caution tape miniskirt. Caution indeed! In seriousness, I really like the atmosphere of acceptance at GenCon when folks want to let their freak flag fly. Last year there were kids going around with “gay gamer” shirts, and this year there was a fair amount of cosplay / anime / genderqueer / raver costuming going on.
This lady put together an excellent Goblin King costume, a’la David Bowie in Labyrinth. I tried to take several pictures of her costume, but I think she cast blur on my camera.
The blur spell took a while to wear off my camera.
Another savage-looking outfit from this pink-haired elven sorceress or shaman.
The world’s tallest leprechaun.
Games
And of course, I played a lot of games at GenCon this year. In years past I had made a point of trying to promote Unicorn Rampant, either by meeting people in the industry that we have partnerships with, like Paizo and RPGnow, or by running games. Of course that meant I was either exhausted or missed out on having fun playing myself. This year I tried to maximize the fun by playing as much as I wanted to, and giving myself breathers between games if I wanted. As a result, I had the most fun this year that I’ve had a GenCon.
I played some great RPGA games – the Ravens of Winter’s Mourning game was lots of good investigative fun, and the Curse of the Gray Hag was simply awesome. Here are a few pics from the Curse of the Gray Hag game.
Here we’re trying to get away from the shambling mounds and into the Hag’s tower, since I had convinced her that we were there to help free her. I played the eladrin priestess of Loth that is in the rear of the party there.
Some of the unfortunate other players in the Curse game. Notice the ‘cursed’ status markers on half the party? That meant they took 20 damage or lost their highest level spell every time they attacked the hag or her defenders.
The actual battle against the Hag, a solo monster, and her flesh golem, an elite monster. With half the party unable to effectively attack, this ended up being too tough of a fight for us, and some of the players got frustrated and called it quits when we hit the end of the time slot. Since my character had already accomplished her objective of getting some deadly nightshade from the surrounding fey-swamps, she had no problem bailing on the fight at that point. In one of my prouder moments, I took no damage at all in the entire adventure, and managed to parley past two of the combat encounters. Note my strategic position hiding on the stairs.
Then, of course, there was the Tower of Gygax. This event has become the highlight of the con for me. I even got a chance to run the Tower for a bit late Saturday night. Now with a Facebook group, even! Check it out for even more pics and memories from the Tower:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=145288208818624I feel like this character sheet I found illustrates the excitement that the tower created.
Here’s Steve, another of Unicorn Rampant’s writers, running a room he contributed to the Tower of Gygax. We had lots of girls playing in the Tower, which is always nice to see. In fact, it seemed like more women come to GenCon to play every year.
The chamber that Steve ran: a chasm, rope bridges, sinkholes in the floor, rushing torrents, and an enormous air elemental.
The master of the Tower: Save Versus Death and Kobold Quarterly’s Scott A. Muarry running The Tomb of Horrors for the Tower players Saturday night. I was thrilled to survive a few rooms delving into the Tomb.
One of the Tower’s deadly rooms: the Arcane Monolith. I won’t ruin the details, but I’m stealing parts of this for my home game.
Towards the wee hours, Scott decided to throw out the books and wing it off the cuff. Hilarity and death ensued.
Finally, in the wee hours of the night, I stepped in to run a few rooms in the Tower. This is me explaining how the chest they just opened is full of poisonous vipers that are now biting them.
Here I am describing how the lever that they just pulled has sent half the party to their deaths at the bottom of a 100 foot pit.
Finally, once they removed the treasure from one of the tests, a fusillade of darts strikes those nearby. The dwarf grabbing the box survived and got away with a magic ring of protection. Those who dare win!
Of course, this was just a fraction of the gaming going on, but with 20,000 gamers gathered and playing, there’s no way I could see everything. It was awesome.
One of the many rooms full of gamers.
Until next year, thanks for reading, and happy gaming!
-Adam A. Thompson
Unicorn Rampant
Posted in convention and tagged ale break, GenCon by Adam A. Thompson with .
