The GenCon Chronicles Final Part

18 August 2012 

Most of the morning was spent spending time with the friends I was visiting with while in Indianapolis.  Here are some fun pictures:

Some kind of Lego robot rally.  Apparently people tried to program the bots to  earn points

One of the Dungeons and Dragons rooms had little things we could fold up

We had a lot of fun with the dragons.

Maybe a bit too much fun...

A Resident Evil opponent!

They had a costume parade!

One of the many link cosplays.  Also, characters from Assassin's Creed!

I got a lot of photos of costumes from the side

I'm not really sure what these are supposed to be...

Some things from Minecraft

Something from a horror game called Silent Hill

Random?  Yes.

Final Fantasy XIII characters: Lightning and Fang

Snow from Final Fantasy 13! You can also see Fang and Vanille

Kingdom Hearts!  Riku and I think Roxas.  Or is it Sora?  Hard to tell.

GLaDOS!  From the Portal game.

Another shot of GLaDOS

Not sure who this is supposed to be.

Wolfwood from the Trigun anime series

Sackboy from the Little Big PLanet games.

Jace and Chandra from the Magic the Gathering game

Batman and a Batmobile!

Iron man followed by...random animal thing?

Strange jackal and the wizard from the game Magicka

Riddler and Catwoman?

Captain America, Nick Fury and a random guy

Weskar from Resident Evil!

Link and Majora's Mask...I didn't know they were dating

Ichigo from Bleach

Also on Saturday I went to a recording session for the Writing Excuses podcast.  It was a great deal of fun.  I also worked on some puzzles from a thing called the 'False Dungeon' (a playoff of another event at GenCon called The True Dungeon).  It was  series of difficult logic puzzles.  I enjoyed the time I spent trying to figure some of them out.  I saw one that was based on sound, and another based on scent.

A funny comedian.

We went to Colt's grill for dinner.  They had a special menu for the people at GenCon.  They renamed all of their menu items to be more geek themed.  Even the 'categories' for food were geeky.  One that I can recall of the top of my head was called 'Limit Breaks'.

The Sephiroth burger. (Sephiroth is from Final Fantasy 7).

Kratos salad (Kratos is from the God of War series of games)

Of course, the highlight of the GenCon trip was finishing up a Dungeons and Dragons game that had been going on for over 8 years over e-mail.

One of my friends sculpted a mini of my character: Simon

Here we were fighting the second to last boss of the campaign

Poor guy died pretty fast

All the necessary gaming supplies!

The game was a blast!  The heroes managed to triumph in the end.  It was a good way to end the evening.

19 August 2012

The last day was relatively uneventful.  Mostly it was occupied with playing a one time Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and a bus ride back to Green Bay.

I tried to take a picture of a double rainbow. Still, the east is very green!

20 August 2012

A quick drive to the airport and a flight home.  I got home relatively early and I was exhausted.

Inside joke for one of the Mormon Geeks authors

Synthia was happy to see me!

I felt pretty tired after all that fun

Still happy to be back with my dearest Synthia!

Some random last minute things.

I got a chance to play test the next version of Dungeons and Dragon.  I have some good feelings for how it will turn out.  It feels like they've balanced the system well and that it will be an enjoyable system for years to come.

Also, one of the most entertaining things that I did at GenCon was called Cards vs Zombies.  It was a voluntary convention-wide game.  Each person who signed up was given a green strip of cloth that they would tie around their arm or leg, designating them as a human.  They were then given 3 'dart' cards. (It was a card with a nerf dart on it).  Zombies, who had the strips around their heads, would try to tag the humans.  The humans would then have to give the zombie one dart card to stun the zombie for 10 minutes.  If the human had run out of dart cards, they would become a zombie.  Humans could refill their cards.  As an added element of danger, zombies could 'level up'.  Beginning zombies only took one dart to kill and had green cloth.  Next level zombies had yellow cloth and took two darts to kill.  Max level zombies had red cloth and took three darts to stun.

I had a blast with the game.  I spent a sum total of about 2 hours as a human.  I got mobbed by two of the yellow zombie after coming out of the bathroom.  I then turned into a zombie and took to nabbing other humans.  I ended up with a total of about 21 dart cards in the time I played.  Some other funny stories.

I was walking down a hallway when I noticed a woman suddenly move to lean against the wall.  I turned and stared at her, and noticed she was hiding her arm.  I stared at her for about a minute before she pushed off and I saw that she was a human.  I tried to give chase, but she was too quick for me and escaped.  The next day I was near the dart refill station when I saw here.  I carefully hid myself behind a crowd of people and watched her, waiting for her and her friends to leave the station.  I then moved in behind the back of 'humans'.  One of them turned around, saw me, and gave the alarm.  All of them scattered, except for her.  She had the misfortune of backing into a pillar and I was able to capture her.  I simply couldn't resist the opportunity to get 'the one that got away'.

Some other funny stories include moving to cut off humans as they escaped from other zombies.  Unintentionally hiding from humans and scaring them when they saw me.  Overall, it was an enjoyable and fun game.

I really enjoyed my trip to GenCon.  I'd like to give a special thanks to Gnome Games from Green Bay for their help with coordinating the bus and hotel rooms.  Made the stay a lot more enjoyable and simple for me.
I hope you all enjoyed these posts!

The characters from Journey - a rather interesting game

I'm sure someone will enjoy this picture of Harlequin with her hammer