Gentlemen, Stat Your Engines: GenCon 2003 Indianapolis Con Report
Indianapolis has only one flaw as a host city for GenCon -- it's more than an hour from Chicago. Here, at least, Milwaukee remains supreme. But in quaint architecture, plentiful bars, and balmy weather, Indianapolis more than holds its own. And for hotel rooms, bar closing times, and ease of dining, Indianapolis easily takes pole position. The Indiana Convention Center/RCA Dome complex blows Milwaukee's MWEC to shards -- it's like night and day; gaming space is vast. Further, it's nice to be in a city that's been briefed on GenCon, and where bartenders, waitresses, hoteliers, and cabbies act like they want us to keep coming back and spending cash there, as opposed to the Milwaukee default mode of bemused resentment. (At least two local restaurants set aside back rooms for all-night "open gaming.") My GenCon-going experience (commute aside) was as easy and painless as it's ever been.
This, of course, was from the perspective of someone with an exhibitor's badge (well, technically, someone else's exhibitor's badge) waiting for him at the Chaosium booth (where I held the office of "booth cat," in the words of Andy Dawson) on Wednesday afternoon. For the innocent fan who didn't pre-register for events, and didn't have his badge mailed to him, recurrent computer nightmares extended registration and event ticket lines around the block for hours at a time, especially Saturday. (Industry wag Phil Lacefield referred to the show as "The Best Four Days In Line." Unkind, but not necessarily unfair.) The program, although readable (including an essay by yours truly) and showing real signs of rethinking by GenCon LLC, unaccountably failed to note the system or GM for any of the roleplaying events. So, although I suppose everyone could easily find their event, they had no idea which event they were finding. Perhaps it's a good thing that they couldn't get tickets in the first place. Hopefully, this can all be put down to "new city jitters," and next year will go down smoothly.
Save Vs. Poison For .5 Damage
Unlike whatever devil's brew Mike "Million Words" Mearls summoned for me on an exploratory Wednesday night, which caused, if I may be indelicate, an excellent prismatic spray in all who quaffed it. It took me the rest of the show to get my digestion back -- I'm sure it showed my manhood, but I'm not sure it's worth it. That, in a nutshell, also remains my response to Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, which had a kind of low-key coming out at the show (having shipped a couple of weeks earlier) in the new, sadly castle-free, Wizards of the Coast booth.
The other thing that made a modest bow at the show was the formal announcement of the winner of the "New Setting Competition" Wizards began in a fit of madness a few months ago. The winner, it transpires, is called Eberron, in fine contravention of the rule that "silly names don't sell." (Compare, for example, Al-Qadim to Forgotten Realms.) The setting, designed by redoubtable freelancer Keith Baker, remains disingenuously mysterious -- the publicity material has lightning railroads, goblins, "inquisitives" (private detectives?), elves, airships, dinosaurs, and halflings in seeming random profusion. We shall see whether it lives up to its silly name. Other d20 settings had less silly names, from Chad Justice's d20 Modern apocalyptic god-horror game setting Dark Inheritance to Rob Vaughn's mini-setting of apocalyptic road-war Redline from Fantasy Flight (which also had Sorcery & Steam and Mike Mearls' new City Works), to the last best hope of a Babylon 5 RPG (Matthew Sprange's d20 version from Mongoose). The new Hogshead had two d20 reference books in their Crime Scene series out, and an outfit called MonkeyGod Enterprises had a big historical weapons-and-armor compendium called From Stone to Steel that looks pretty cool. The first raft of 3.5-compatible d20 stuff began to trickle in, such as additional Dragonlance setting material from Sovereign Press to mesh with the new Dragonlance Campaign Setting book from Wizards, and Matt Forbeck's "more hogs, less warts" Redhurst: Academy of Magic book from Human Head and Fast Forward. We'll see if the new 3.5 stuff now moving through the channel has the same effect on the d20 crush as that pernicious beverage did on my delicate digestion.
It's An Honor Just To Read The Acceptance Speech
The Diana Jones Award was a tie, as the secretive cabal of designers behind it wished to celebrate the business and game-evolutionary insights of Jordan Weisman, head of WizKids and driver behind all those endless click-based minis, now both sold to Topps for $30 million. But not at the cost of hailing Rebecca Borgstrom's triumphal design of Nobilis, 2nd Edition. By dint of having my name on the cover of both editions (both times as review blurbs from this column, in fact), I got to read the acceptance speeches of both Borgstrom and absent publisher James Wallis to the assembled multitudes, who cheered lustily and returned to drinking the free booze. Me, Rebecca's words, and alcohol -- a better deal than that, you will not find.
However, I can't leave the topic of awards without a too-brief shout-out to the ENnies, awarded on Friday night by the fans at the ENWorld d20 site. In just three years, they've come from a desultory chat to a hallway revival to a fairly polished, professional, high-energy show that easily rivals (and in some cases, such as quality of the nominations and winners, shames) the Origins Awards. Atlas Games won two gold ENnies, one for Chris Aylott's Dynasties & Demagogues and one for -- dramatic pause offset by dashes -- Unknown Armies, 2nd Edition (for Best Non Open-Content Game; Steve Kenson's superlative Mutants & Masterminds won for Best d20 Game). Had I been able to recover from my delighted shock in time, I would have been happy to accept the award for John and Greg, but Michelle Nephew did a superlative job expressing her thanks to the ENnies and to the fans. Let me, then, take this opportunity to thank them myself -- for adding another great award to the industry in such a short time, and for keeping the torch of quality held so high, and for, in John Tynes' words, giving UA an ENnie to go with its Outie.
Crisis On Infinite Goths
The big White Wolf announcement the next morning was less of a shock -- as many had suspected, "it's only the end of the world again." As someone who has been howling off and on for the Wolf to go ahead and ring in Judgement Day since 1997, I will have my bluff well and truly called by three new crispy hardback books to debut in January, February, and March of 2004 to be called Gehenna, Apocalypse, and Ascension. This will end the current metaplot, and cluster-bomb the continuity, of Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage, respectively, and not before time. Alongside these books comes a Time of Judgement book that will likewise end the story for the changelings, hunters, trolls, catoblepas, and sundry whatnot festooning the World of Darkness. This will no doubt be fine stuff (I know many of the writers involved), but the rubber will really hit the road when the Wolf has to press the shiny red "reset" button on the World of Darkness. This, I venture to predict, will hork off a lot of fans (regardless of the creative decisions involved) and splinter the Camarilla, which will have a broad and meaty impact on White Wolf's installed fan base. Oh, well, we'll always have Exalted.
The Wolf announcement did, at least, give us snotty arty game types all something to talk about besides the dearth of Next Big Things on the floor. The closest we got to the Big Thing were the little things from the mutation pool known as the Forge; Ron Edwards' third Sorcerer supplement (Sex and Sorcery), Vincent Baker's Kill Puppies For Satan (which removes the cheery bonhomie from Hogshead's Violence RPG and the moral center from Unknown Armies to produce a game of surprising purity and depth), the crowd favorite My Life With Master by Paul Czege (in which you play the cringing minion of a particularly ill-tempered Dark Lord), and what bids fair to be an interesting contender for Best New Idea Of The Show, Luke Crane's The Burning Wheel, a fantasy setting featuring a scripted combat system. A few games remain unknown quantities, but look potentially interesting: Michael Paul Simon and Alan Jay Payne's aerial fantasy WindZone, Louis Porter Jr.'s Haven: City of Violence (described to me as "Grand Theft Auto: the RPG"), and Benjamin Rogers' Arabian Nightsish RPG Promised Sands, which Steve Long urged me to look at.
Also, as with any GenCon, there were plenty of guaranteed workmanlike products from Bob Schroeck's GURPS Shapeshifters to Greg Porter's new incarnation of Time Lords, now available in a not unattractive print on demand from BTRC for his new EABA universal system (likewise available). Some of these well-crafted standards rise to the heights themselves -- Monte Cook's "alternate Player's Handbook," Arcana Unearthed was the deserved hit of the show saleswise, and if Steve Long's Fantasy Hero (which does for the fantasy genre what Jim Cambias' Star Hero does for SF) weren't excellent, that would have been the surprise. As it was, it made a great free weight along with Patrick Kapera and Rob Vaux' Stargate SG-1 RPG core book from AEG -- together, nigh a thousand pages of justly-anticipated gaming goodness. And, speaking of justly-anticipated gaming goodness . . .
Coming Up In A Fortnight
That's British for "two weeks," for the curious. British people curious about what kind of colonial yahoos don't know what "fortnight" means might want to drop by Cambridge, England this weekend for ConJuration and I'll try to explain it to them in my exotic Midwestern drawl -- which should be getting mighty drawly if the rumors of an ale bar at the show are justified. At any rate, between the ale, the explanations, and the drawling, I'll be hard pressed to get my "Report From The Scepter'd Isle, Demi-Paradise, That Other Eden" in while I'm there. So it shall spring up like summer crocuses or whatever springs up around August 13 or 14, when this column will be back on schedule by being four days late. The next column in August will report on a vast shock of GenCon-ish releases, including many of the aforementioned games, possibly including further reactions to Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and hopefully including Orpheus, which might have finally shipped by then. So, we'll see you in a fortnight and a bit, or in just a bit if you're in the Cambridgeshire ale business.
