GenCon 1993

Thursday

Thursday started with waiting for the dealer’s room to open. They were late (about 10 minutes) and the crowd started getting a little rowdy. To make matters worse, someone brought out a carton of the latest issue of White Wolf and started throwing issues to the crowd. Fortunately there wasn’t a tremendous crush of people, and the doors did open soon after.

I was surprised at the size of the hall! They expanded into the East Hall, where most of the roleplaying gaming had been held previously (all RP gaming was moved across the street). This gave much more room for the dealers and room for more dealers and exhibitors than previous years. I did most of my game buying in those first two hours.

At noon I had arranged to have lunch with Mike Stackpole, and we spent over an hour just having a very nice conversation on writing and gaming and the industry in general. Mike’s had a long career directly associated with the industry, and is one of its most ardent and impressive defenders. I am definitely going to have to repeat it.

Octagon Champions Tournament (Preliminary Round)

At 4:00 pm was my first event, Sue Grau’s Octagon tournament. I had some knowledge of the background from Sue’s ‘zines in CT and I wanted to play in it. Specifically, I wanted to play the character Nightstar, who has something Sue was warned never to put into a tournament character: a Cosmic Power Pool, based on Shadow Manipulation. (A true grossity, a Cosmic Power Pool allows the player to select powers on the spot. It demands someone who knows the rules to use it effectively; needless to say I used it shamelessly. For example, I would create a six-foot wide catcher’s mitt to grab and Entangle an opponent. The character’s stated favorite trick is to create a shadow hound (or several of them) with tracking and telepresense ability to conduct searches for her: her tag line is “Here puppy, here puppy puppy: you know, shadow hounds are just so easy to lose in the dark.”) I also had fun playing off another character who was Nightstar’s husband; that player and I played the ‘Nick and Nora Charles’ routine well enough that I was named the alternate to the final from that round.

The other characters were Battler, Nightstar’s husband, an eight-foot tall demon, and the team’s principal fighter; Gemstone, the leader with a magic gem that opened dimensional gates for him; Catalyst, a flying energy projector with chemical powers; Outlaw, a nervous young man with an impressive reflection ability; the Scarlet Ghost, a spooky mentalist; Quarterstaff, a martial artist with a psychic quarterstaff; and Mindweave, an ex-cop with mental powers. The Scarlet Ghost maintains a mental link between the other characters; that link also stabilizes her: without it (and every member in the link; seven is the smallest number necessary) she would eventually (and soon) go insane.

The preliminary round opened with a trip to a local fairground by the entire team in civilian garb, where we stopped at a psychic’s tent. The young woman inside showed true psychic powers (albeit limited) and made four predictions: one of us would see someone they would never have expected seeing again, a second would find something they never expected to find, another would walk the line between sanity and madness, and finally one would die. We took the predictions seriously enough, when the woman somehow knew we were linked together.

We went from there to Nightstar and Battler’s cabin in the Jersey swamps, where we started hearing about the Jersey Devil, a local legend which has apparently come to life, killing three campers. We investigated (I, thinking that shadow hounds would be a little conspicuous, what with the number of search parties in the area, created shadow ravens instead, and covered the area) and found the first prediction: a High Demon Lord, known to Battler and apparently insane from a bungled summoning. He had committed the murders and we were forced to destroy him when we couldn’t cure him nor return him to his native dimension. We tried investigating who had summoned him, but without success.

Afterward we started hearing rumors of a new gang in town, named the Demons, that had taken over a large part of the criminal activity in Philadelphia. We eventually discovered that they were, in fact, truly demons; we then confronted the gang and defeated them handily: I went “Bowling for Demons” while hanging a curtain of darkness in front of me as a force wall. That was also when I used the catcher’s mitt as an entangle on the smallest and fastest demon. Inside of a turn we had defeated and destroyed the demons we saw, when another, unseen demon, reached up from below ground and killed Quarterstaff, fulfilling the second prediction. (To be continued…)

Sue was very busy at the time and couldn’t decide on a finalist or alternate, but she posted the results in the Hero Auxiliary booth in the dealer’s room later. I was the alternate from our round, mainly (I think) for the way I played off Battler.

(I have to envy Sue’s energy: she ran events in almost every slot, then would go over the Major Goolsby’s (the sports bar across from MECCA) with a bunch of the Hero and HAC people and close the place. When she started the Octagon tournament final Sunday morning at 8:00 she was still energetic enough to bounce up and down.)

Thursday night I reserved for the A&E party, but I got sidetracked to the NVM party in the Hyatt beforehand. I actually only stayed a few minutes at the party, long enough to get their free T‑shirt, but I mostly stayed outside talking with Carol Dodd, the woman who plays Bronwyn in Erick Wujcik’s GenCon Amber campaign (cousin to my own character Damarian). This was totally unplanned but welcome.

We spent a half hour talking about the present situation, which was currently centered around a Tarot reading we had done at the close of the last session at Ambercon last April; Erick had finally sent us a description of the cards a couple of weeks before GenCon and this was the first time we had to discuss the reading. She had a notebook with several pages of notes on the meaning of the cards (primarily Amber Trumps); it was a non-standard Celtic Cross with significators crossing the column of four on the side. We discussed the general meanings at they applied to the situation, and gave each other our predictions and perspectives; as it turned out, she was far more correct than I was, but we aren’t finished by a long shot. (Probably because she is more knowedgable about the scenario, largely due to her communication with Erick and my not being able to stay awake during the previous GenCon session Sunday night/Monday morning.)

Afterward I finally made it up to the A&E party in the Marc Plaza, where I saw a lot of the usual (and some decidedly unusual) suspects: Spike Y. Jones and Mary Chriest, “Doc” Cross, Jonathan Tweet, Scott Bennie. I’ll remember more names as people sound off in A&E about the party, and after I have the pictures developed (after I finish the roll, of course).

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