{"id":988,"date":"2010-08-13T19:17:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-13T19:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/?p=988"},"modified":"2014-11-21T16:52:28","modified_gmt":"2014-11-21T16:52:28","slug":"gencon-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/?p=988","title":{"rendered":"GenCon 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 So welcome to Unicorn Rampant’s virtual walking tour of GenCon 2010!<\/p>\n

Games and Minis<\/span><\/p>\n

In the “big tables” category, I saw a giant version of Ticket to Ride that looked like a lot of fun.\u00a0 Also present but not pictured were giant Settlers of Catan and a few other giant versions of some great board games.<\/p>\n

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Geek Chic had their beautiful gaming tables in evidence as well.\u00a0 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.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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Close up of the chicken-legged hut itself.<\/div>\n
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Speaking of terrain, if you want to make assloads of walls and caverns for cheap, this is for you.\u00a0 Molds that you pour your own resin into and then paint the resulting walls yourself.\u00a0 Available in castle flavor, gothic cathedral flavor…<\/div>\n
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…and of course Egyptian flavor.<\/div>\n
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I was really impressed by the level of detail, and the multiple levels of these paper playscapes.\u00a0 Also, super-affordable compared to any of the resin pieces.<\/div>\n
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Arr, that be a fine-lookin’ vessel, ripe for the plundering!\u00a0 And a bargain at twice the price!<\/div>\n
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In terms of high-quality finished work, these guys always stand out head and shoulders above everyone else.\u00a0 Of course you get what you pay for in this case.\u00a0 This Caribbean Spanish settlement actually gave me flashbacks to my trip to San Juan in Puerto Rico.<\/div>\n
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And of course the miniatures.\u00a0 First of all, you need a bunch of dragons.<\/div>\n
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No.\u00a0\u00a0More dragons.<\/div>\n
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One of Reaper’s display cases.\u00a0 I love those guy’s work.<\/div>\n
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Close up of a Remorahaz.<\/div>\n
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Frost giants!\u00a0 We got your frost giants!<\/div>\n
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Scorpion-man-things and dinosaurs.<\/div>\n
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A good specimen of a Type 6 demon.<\/div>\n
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Demons, djinn and dastardly dark steps.<\/div>\n
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And of course a plague rat-a-pult?<\/div>\n
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I love digging around for old gaming books, particularly anything from the late 70’s and early 80’s when I first started gaming.\u00a0 I found some real gems, like this.\u00a0 Who doesn’t love a game of hot man-to-man combat?<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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Costumes<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the highlights of GenCon for me is always all the great costumes everyone puts together.\u00a0 Most are hand-made.<\/div>\n
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Satyr girls always make me horny (pun intended – sorry).<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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Steampunk, Victorian styles, corsets and bustiers continued to be popular costume themes this year.\u00a0\u00a0I also saw a lot of savage or primitive costumes this year, a newer trend.<\/div>\n
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Nice brass jetpack!<\/div>\n
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A couple of Paizo’s iconic characters made an appearance at their booth.<\/div>\n
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A picture of me enjoying the costumes.\u00a0 That’s my renfaire garb, minus the cowl.<\/div>\n
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Some fun and overtly sexy costumes – I particularly like the caution tape miniskirt.\u00a0 Caution indeed!\u00a0 In seriousness, I really like the atmosphere of acceptance at GenCon when folks want to let their freak flag fly.\u00a0 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.<\/div>\n
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This lady put together an excellent Goblin King costume, a’la David Bowie in Labyrinth.\u00a0 I tried to take several pictures of her costume, but I think she cast blur on my camera.<\/div>\n
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The blur spell took a while to wear off my camera.<\/div>\n
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Another savage-looking outfit from this pink-haired elven sorceress or shaman.<\/div>\n
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The world’s tallest leprechaun.<\/div>\n
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Games<\/p>\n

And of course, I played a lot of games at GenCon this year.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Of course that meant I was either exhausted or missed out on having fun playing myself.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As a result, I had the most fun this year that I’ve had a GenCon.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Here are a few pics from the Curse of the Gray Hag game.<\/p>\n

Here we’re trying to get away from the shambling mounds and into the Hag’s tower, since I had\u00a0convinced her that we were there to help free her.\u00a0 I played the eladrin priestess of Loth that is in the rear of the party there.<\/div>\n
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Some of the unfortunate other players in the Curse game.\u00a0 Notice the ‘cursed’ status markers on half the party?\u00a0 That meant they took 20 damage or lost their highest level spell every time they attacked the hag or her defenders.<\/div>\n
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The actual battle against the Hag, a solo monster, and her flesh golem, an elite monster.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Note my strategic position hiding on the stairs.<\/div>\n
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Then, of course, there was the Tower of Gygax.\u00a0 This event has become the highlight of the con for me.\u00a0 I even got a chance to run the Tower for a bit late Saturday night.\u00a0 Now with a Facebook group, even!\u00a0 Check it out for even more pics and memories from the Tower: http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/group.php?gid=145288208818624<\/a><\/div>\n
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I feel like this character sheet\u00a0I found illustrates the excitement that the tower created.<\/div>\n
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Here’s Steve, another of Unicorn Rampant’s writers, running a room he contributed to the Tower of Gygax.\u00a0 We had lots of girls playing in the Tower, which is always nice to see.\u00a0 In fact, it seemed like more women come to GenCon to play every year.<\/div>\n
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The chamber that Steve ran: a chasm, rope bridges, sinkholes in the floor, rushing torrents, and an enormous air elemental.<\/div>\n
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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.\u00a0 I was thrilled to survive a few rooms delving into the Tomb.<\/div>\n
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One of the Tower’s deadly rooms: the Arcane Monolith.\u00a0 I won’t ruin the details, but I’m stealing parts of this for my home game.<\/div>\n
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Towards the wee hours, Scott decided to throw out the books and wing it off the cuff.\u00a0 Hilarity and death ensued.<\/div>\n
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Finally, in the wee hours of the night, I stepped in to run a few rooms in the Tower.\u00a0 This is me explaining how the chest they just opened is full of poisonous vipers that are now biting them.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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Finally, once they removed the treasure from one of the tests, a fusillade of darts strikes those nearby.\u00a0 The dwarf grabbing the box survived and got away with a magic ring of protection.\u00a0 Those who dare win!<\/div>\n
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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.\u00a0 It was awesome.<\/div>\n
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One of the many rooms full of gamers.<\/div>\n
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Until next year, thanks for reading, and happy gaming!<\/div>\n
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-Adam A. Thompson<\/div>\n
Unicorn Rampant<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Molds that you pour your own resin into and then paint the resulting walls yourself.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Also, super-affordable compared to any of the resin pieces. Arr, that be a Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[187,512],"class_list":["post-988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-convention","tag-ale-break","tag-gencon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1289,"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions\/1289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unicornrampant.com\/newccb\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}