grodog's GaryCon VIII Summary Pre-GaryCon Jon and I worked before the convention to organize ourselves and our inbound products, including conducting a full inventory of the 3PP stock that we normally carry. We sold books from a number of new partners this year (or expanded our offerings from some): - Thomas Denmark’s recent games: Warriors of the Red Planet, Guardians, and Colonial Troopers - Barrowmaze Complete by Greg Gillespie, along with a snazzy new t-shirt - Goodman Games, including new sourcebooks, adventures, t-shirts, and zines for DCC, Metamorphosis Alpha, and X-Crawl - Paolo’s Greco’s Lost Pages games and sourcebooks, all hand-delivered from Scotland! - Judges Guild, including the newly-reprinted Dark Tower - The Oracle zine, successfully Kickstartered last fall - The Tekumel Foundation: Empire of the Petal Throne books and maps, including the new edition of M. A. R. Barker’s Man of Gold novel - Tom Wham’s Dancing Dragons and DragonLairds games Wednesday 2 March – The Trip Up Jon and I had an uneventful trip up, getting on the road by 6am Wednesday morning, and arriving in Lake Geneva by 5:30pm or so. We spent most of the evening setting up the booth and products, which took about two hours longer than last year (~6 hours for setup). We collapsed into bed by 2am or so, and slept for 5-6 hours before the hall opened Thursday morning. We had a few last minute items to gather, including my copy of TSR’s Empire of the Petal Throne, which Paul Stormberg asked to borrow to use in his exhibition of artwork by David C. Sutherland III this year. My box was in excellent and humbling company, including Dave’s original painting of the Dungeon Master’s Guide! Jon and I also each brought an AD&D PHB to donate to a friend of a friend, who’s giving them to kids in her after school D&D program Thursday 3 March – Go! We manned the booth with the able and very-appreciated assistance of Guy Fullerton (of Chaotic Henchmen fame), Greg Gillespie (of Barrowmaze infamy), and Steve Smith (of the Knights & Knaves Alehouse). Thankfully, while busy, Thursday morning’s opening wasn’t quite as insane as the first three hours last year were, when we simply couldn’t keep up with demand! Sales remained brisk throughout the convention, which was great. On Thursday afternoon, I ran one of my two CH-1 The Morandir Company events, written by Tom Moldvay. The session was supposed to be full, but I had two no shows, which were counter-balanced by two walk-ons, which worked out nicely! This first session of the con went well, with the PCs exploring through the first portion of the lost dwarven kingdom’s dungeon environs. Their lantern boy was a young lad named Tom (in honor of Moldvay, of course; he was nearly eaten by a wandering slicer beetle…), and his fellow torch bearer, Lawrence (for Lawrence Schick, Tom’s co-DM in Akron). The session nearly concluded with a TPK due to the players setting off a nasty trick/trap that knocked out over half of the party, while simultaneously fighting one of Moldvay’s new monsters in the adventure, a shadow elemental. The best quotation from the session was Eric Hoffman’s: “Do dwarven shadows exist if there are no PCs there to fight them?” After a quick dinner in the first floor restaurant (some tilapia, which was good!), I played in Jeff Talanian’s Astonishing Swordmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea adventure, “The Mystery of Port Greely”---currently being Kickstartered through 2 April 2016 @ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1806106772/hyperborea-the-mystery-at-port-greely (Jeff shared several illustrations and maps from the soon-to-be-published module, and they really added to the atmosphere of the scenario). I chose an Atlantean Pyromancer for my PC, since I’ve not played one in ASSH before, but a more subtle mage might have served the party better in this investigative scenario, loosely based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H. P. Lovecraft. As always, Jeff runs a great game---if you get the opportunity to play with him I highly recommend doing so! Unfortunately my late nights of last-minute con prep, Wednesday’s long drive, and the booth setup the night before caught up with me, so I bowed out of the adventure about 30 minutes before midnight. The other players successfully concluded our mission by rescuing the missing merchants from the Trade Federation, erm, I mean Fishmongers Guild Friday 4 March – Castle Greyhawk The booth on Friday went fine, and we were able to catch with many friends we’ve made over the years. A surprise visitor was our printer rep, Lori, who was touring the convention on Jon’s recommendation, to drum up business for their presses. It sounds like many of the publishers were interested, and Lori was leveraging the Black Blade/Usherwood edition of OSRIC in her walk around the hall Friday evening I ran my second game for the con, set in my version of Castle Greyhawk: Assault on the Heretical Temple of Wee Jas. This was a full table of 10 players plus me, and we didn’t fit into the allotted table in Evergreen. Paul Stormberg graciously allowed us to use some unused space in his Legends of Wargaming hall, which worked out great. One of the premises behind this scenario is that it’s one that I’ve offered in the slate of adventure I run at GaryCon and North Texas RPG Con each year, but it wasn’t selected for the past several years (players chose other missions to pursue). Well, as a result of being left along, the cult has flourished in the dungeons beneath Castle Greyhawk these past several years, and their membership and power have waxed significantly. Unable to suffer their outrages any longer, the High Priestess of Wee Jas in Greyhawk anathematizes the heretical cult, and sends the PCs in to bring their EHP’s head back on a pike! After some early troubles with three ghosts (who aged the party 160 years collectively), the players played very smartly: they interrogated an NPC enslaved by the cultists, who provided some mapping guidance, and they used an Anti-Magic Shell to move past a cluster of guardian statues to penetrate into the heart of the temple complex. Unfortunately the cultists grew aware of the PCs and cast Guards and Wards, which slowed their progress as the cultists gathered their defenses. We called the session at about 12:20am with the PCs in a stalemated pitched battle with the cultists that was going to drag on for quite awhile longer before victory would be decided for either side. Best quotation: “Don’t come in here, I’m worshipping” from Josh Ford. Part 2 to follow Allan.
