Saturday
That morning, we had a sorta Paizo-VC breakfast at the Excalibur’s buffet. Robyn, CA, Stephen (SRM) and myself pigged out before running back to the Tropicana for the morning slot. I was not due to GM NeoExodus until 9am, but I like getting there to see if I can help.
Turns out, one GM was missing in action. Guess who??? That’s right, our glorious leader, Mike Brock was missing. So I started running the event for him. It was Part 3 of the Intro (which I had not prepared). But I played Dradle Dreng, Lady Morilla and Grandmaster Torch for the young wide-eyed Pathfinders.
Comes 9am a player (who I would later know as Dave Stern) shows up to play NeoExodus. At the same time, Mike strolls in at a leisurely pace… Excellent. I tagged him into the adventure and move to NeoExodus for “The Sashenka Incident”.
Table of three into the political thriller that is “Sashenka”: fun times to come. This time: Freija, Nose-Cutter and Hans got embroiled in the turmoil of Imperial and local politics. I had to cut some elements of the adventure short to fit in the four hour we had.
The afternoon I spent gladly doing nothing but walking around the hall, shopping, talking and listening in on Courtney’s excellent rendition of my “Terrors” adventure I wrote for the Beginner Box Bash. I won’t hide that I preferred the original version, but the one that was produced for the BBB was excellent (it’s a question of setting, not adventure). I also listened in on Stephen (SRM) run Midnight Mauler. It was very interesting to hear another GM’s take on this adventure I now run with only minimal peeping at the text anymore. I looked at the painted minis involved in the events. In short, I made a butterfly of myself (a fat, balding butterfly mind you).
Of particular note, during that time, Dave (from the morning game) came to see me with an issue he had in the adventure. He and I talked for quite a while about it. In the end, he managed to convince me (he must’ve made quite a Diplomacy check). Following our talk, I had to re-think a few things and his argument is extremely valid. I talked to LPJ about it last night and in turn brought him to Dave’s way of thinking. So I have to go back into the adventure and clean up some things. These elements will be moved to a later part of the story.
Thanks Dave and congrats on getting me a lot more work!
For the evening, I had volunteered to run the Gencon Special, Blood under Absalom. The adventure has a few issues and things I wanted to change to make it flow more smoothly. So I gathered my judges and I told them what to change. I have to give a lot of kudos to Peter, Jay, James, Will, Chris, Bruce and Nick who went along with my last minute changes and brought everything together. The game was fun.
One thing I strongly disliked is the finale with the stupid d20 roll-off that serves no real purpose but to add “action”. I have no problem saying it was stupid (said it before, will say again). There should NOT be a “winning” and “all others loose” in these types of events. Last year’s Year of the Shadow Lodge, though it suffered from some issue was a better adventure.
A big thanks to Doug Daulton who provided a mountain of swag (although that mountain led to one happy table and 6 table of disappointed-to-pissed-off players). But experience teaches us many things, including the splitting of swag! Next time we’ll make sure everyone leaves with something…
Though I tried to stay up all night, I went to bed and slept. Too soon, it was onto the shuttle, to the airport and…
Sunday
Got home, ate with the family. Slept. Woke up, watched my fantasy football getting creamed by Julio Jones. Watch The Simpsons. Fell asleep after that. Snoozed through Family Guy (I don’t watch Allen Gregory, that crummy show they put after the Simpsons, it’s just terrible). Got up, went to bed.
That was my last days at Neoncon…
Next time: The hate, the hate and bucket of hate flowing onto the con…
JP
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