Blogger is truly awful for uploading a lot of pictures, I find . This is actually fairly nightmarish to post. Things will inevitably end up looking funky, and so I apologize, but I did want to share some pictures from GenCon, like I promised a week ago. I've been struggling to do so ever since >.<

So... let's get to the pictures!

Does this t-shirt look familiar? Remind you a bit of my classic solo-dungeoning style? My fellow raiders (since everyone in our raiding team was able to attend GenCon) thought so, so I had to pick it up.


One of the best things from GenCon was True Dungeon. There was a lot of room for improvement, but the experience was amazing.

If you haven't heard of True Dungeon, you go in to a built labrynth style room with a group of your friends, after having decided which D&D class you will play, and equipping yourself with the proper "gear" via tokens (you don't actually change your clothes).

In each room you are presented with different prop puzzles that you attempt to solve in order to "clear" the room, including combat sequences, locked chests, etc. Every class has a different kind of "skill check". For instance, I played a cleric, and everytime I wanted to heal someone, I had to pass a memory check, identifying the proper shape of prayer bead for a specific virtue. The rogueish class in our group had to delicately move a small bead through a lighted track in order to open a locked chest, and the melee classes had to slide large tokens across a drawing of a creature in order to strike properly. This is all in addition to using your collective brainpower to solve puzzles and do some problem solving.

A lot of people ask if it's like LARPing, and it's not - there's no acting roleplay involved necessarily, and we were cracking up a lot of the DMs and characters in each room with our goofy antics.

I also picked up a lot of WoW TCG cards. We all got starter class decks (my fiance and I each bought two) as well as some booster packs. A lot of our crew are old school Magic players, and the overall opinion was that while it can't hold a candle to Magic TCG (and I doubt anything ever will) it was still pretty good, and there were some aspects of game play that were better.


Last weekend a bunch of us got together and actually played a WoW TCG raid, and that was very interesting. Pretty fun, but there are some definite weaknesses. I'm playing around with different deck builds, and fighting against different classes before I pass a final judgment. If nothing else, I got some nice loot cards from some promotions at GenCon. Cryptozoic is really doing a lot to promote the decks even in spite of all the problems caused by the changeover from Upper Deck (a lot of the cards still refer back to Upper Deck websites and promotions that no longer exist).

I'd been hearing about the awesomeness that is The Ram (a local pub/brewery type place near the convention center) for years, so I was excited to finally get to check the place out. Now I can be a cool kid too and have a t-shirt like all of my friends.

In order to get a hotel for GenCon, you basically have to buy a badge and get into the housing pool in February, and get lucky by reserving your room then. My fiance bought his badge, but was in such a rush to make sure we got a room, he didn't order mine. Therefore, I had the lovely experience of waiting in line at 7am on Thursday morning to get my badge... fortunately, as punishment, I forced him to get up and wait in line with me :)


A long time ago, when I first started D&D, I mentioned the troubles I had in finding a good female dwarf mini. My main goal for GenCon was to acquire a mini that would work well for my female dwarf cleric, which is essentially my staple class, no matter what (yay dorfchicks!). The folks at the Reaper booth at GenCon were able to locate the exact one I wanted in seconds. I was on cloud 9.

Later, I tried to paint minis. Suffice to say, I will be begging and pleading with others amongst my friends to paint my mini for me, because I do not have the patience to paint tiny things. After an hour of it, I pretty much wanted to rip my own hair out, as well as the hair of everyone else nearby.

Probably one of the things people most recognize about GenCon are the amazing geeky costumes. I took lots of pictures of fantastic costumes, most of which are homemade, but in my eyes, these two costumes are the winners. The two folks pictured here had actually never met before... they were just two random people who had awesome costumes that looked fantastic together, and everyone wanted pictures of them.


Last but not least, I'm including a rather boring photo of the auction room at GenCon. I didn't spend as much time here as I would have liked, but there were some really superb things up for auction - of special importance were many personal effects of the illustrious late Gary Gygax, and the proceeds were donated to his wife I believe. Apparently, despite everything he'd done for the gamer culture, he wasn't able to leave much behind for his wife. I sure would have liked to bid on his beat up briefcase that he carried everywhere...


Okay, seriously. I'll try to stop gabbing about GenCon now. It's just that ever since the convention, my brain has been divided amongst multiple new games and things that I'm enjoying. My mind has expanded in pure delight! My pen & paper D&D group is going to try out OpenRPG so that we can game more frequently, since getting together has proven to be a bit difficult. If you have any experience or anecdotes from using OpenRPG, I'd love to hear them!

I am fresh from my first venture into the wonderful world of GenCon, my friends, and I feel revitalized.

This may have been my fiance's 11th GenCon trip, but it was my first, and it was a lot more fun than even I expected!

As you wander the halls of the Indiana Convention Center, surrounded by people talking about Star Wars and Star Trek and Magic and trolls and hobbits and demons and swordplay and any manner of geeky activity, this is the only place where it's okay to stop someone and ask if that device they are carrying is a new game (no, it's just a fancy thermos), or which version of Settlers of Catan they are playing, or where they got that fantastic bright pink wig with the matching corset, or find people who actually *get* the jokes on your t-shirt.

It felt... like home. *sniff* Surrounded by people who are even geekier than myself. Inundated by social awkwardness that melts away as people find a common passion. Tip-toeing carefully around board games and card trades and minis spread everywhere, knowing just how valuable those items are to their owners and friends. For once feeling like the coolest person in a room because you can spout off the fundamental differences between a WoW priest and a D&D cleric, and which stats are most important for each type, and finally locating the one vendor who understands why it is so important to you to have a delightful female dwarf mini.

So... what did Miss Medicina do?

• Drank way too much beer at The Ram. (And bought a t-shirt!)
• Spent far too many hours wandering the exhibit hall (And bought a t-shirt!)
• Picked up a fancy gencon badge holder (And bought a t-shirt!)
• Restocked on card sleeves for my new-found delight in the WoW TCG and for my D&D spells
  
• Paid far too much for far too many TCG booster packs (And got a Blazing Hippogryph!)
• Remembered the prayer bead for every skill check for my cleric in True Dungeon (And almost fell through a mirror!)
• Relived my childhood at Video Games Live as an orchestra rang out the midi files of my youth from Nintendo's Zelda to Mario Brothers to Lament of the Highbourne.
• Bought dice. So... many.... dice....
• Discovered Kill Doctor Lucky, and almost managed to do exactly that.
• Ran into someone else from my hometown academic program, where we could reveal our secret geekygamergirl obsession for the first time.

I walked away with a few new collection hobbies that may come back to bite me in the ass, but I had a ridiculous amount of fun. I also have a new appreciation for the City of Indianapolis, which I confess pleasantly surprised me. I did not meet a single person who showed any sort of resentment towards the mass influx of geeks upon their fair city - in fact, we were welcomed with open arms. At the local mall where we stopped to get some food, we sat next to two well-blonded and tanned high school age girls whom I expected to be weirded out by us. Instead, one of them brightened up and pointed out a costume of someone walking by in great excitement as she recognized the Sailor Moon fans.

Everyone has a little bit of a geek somewhere inside it seems. GenCon is one of the few events at which you can completely let loose, and it's cool to be "uncool". We don't think your full suit of homemade chainmail is the mark of a loser here - we are all very impressed. Go ahead and rock out in that steampunk corset, lady, it's welcome here. See that dude over there? He writes the best Harry Potter fanfic.

I've been to several academic conferences in my life, but I probably met a greater number of truly brilliant, creative, and enthusiastic people at one GenCon than at all of my academic conferences combined. I was blown away by how welcoming everyone was. Ever since I met my fiance and was introduced into the deep geek world of gaming (I had been a closet gamer previously), I always felt a bit like an outsider. But not at GenCon! There's so much content, so much new stuff to see and learn, that everyone is new at something, and everyone is getting exposed to new things. Everyone is both a pro and a noob depending on the scenario, and it felt excellent. So much knowledge exchange...

I will followup with a picture post. Blogger isn't particularly picture friendly, so I need to do some finagling.