It’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve returned from Gen Con, and we quickly dove back in to organizing and planning and writing Primeval Thule. But that doesn’t mean our Gen Con Trip wasn’t noteworthy, Rich already put up a post on his own blog, but here are a few more notes and comments about the Sasquatch expedition to Indianapolis!

We had actually planned our Gen Con trip months in advance, before we even knew when our Kickstarter would launch (or even if it would be successful). We decided against a booth for 2013, as at that point we weren’t even sure if we’d get concept art or anything else in place yet, and we agreed that it would be weird to have a booth with no product to sell or even just show off. We did figure that we’d probably be able to run some Primeval Thule-style adventures, though, so we set up a few slots to run some Pathfinder games. All Pathfinder, because at the time we weren’t sure that we’d be doing more than one game system – it would be a couple of weeks before we jumped on adding D&D 4e, and then a couple weeks after that we’d added 13th Age.

Our travel plans also integrated some cost savings. There are basically no direct flights from Seattle to Indianapolis, and most flights have layovers in Denver or Chicago. So instead of getting 2-leg flights, we just flew direct to Chicago and rented a car to get us to Indy. The drive time ended up being only a little more time than we’d have spent getting onto and off of another plane, and we had a pleasant drive once we got past downtown Chicago in our classy 2011 Toyota Camry. (My personal note: No offense if you drive one of these, but man does the Camry have a perfectly bland ride. No acceleration, wide steering radius, and soft brakes that squeaked a bit too much on our rental, even when I wasn’t using them!) And since Dave’s brother lives just outside of Indy, we were able to shack up there instead of springing for a hotel room. The accommodations were superb, and the toddler alarm clocks got us up and ready for the day!

Our time at the convention was reasonably well spent. We were able to meet up with a bunch of backers both at our Saturday seminar and just walking around. Next year we’ll definitely have to do a less formal meetup at an eating establishment. And perhaps a booth, but that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves, so forget I said that for a few months. We also touched base with our contributors. We kept running into Ed in odd places, but that’s really sort of par for the course. It was also good to put faces and voices to the guys that had until that point been email addresses or twitter handles.

We also spent a lot of time talking to industry folk, most of whom we already knew, about the tabletop game business and where everyone thinks it might be going. We spoke with a couple of distributor reps and other small press companies to get even more info and set expectations on our post-kickstarter plans for not only Primeval Thule but also our ideas for what we do once we’ve completed Thule. It’s fair to say that we’re excited about what we think we’ll be able to do over the next year.

The convention was much busier than any of us had experienced. While we’d missed the last couple of years, all three of us had been regulars since the 90’s. Gen Con has done a great job growing the convention beyond just the D&D presence. It just felt about twice as busy and big as it was around the 2008/2009 time frame. We were pleased to see the Pelgrane booth and that 13th Age was doing well. As was Numenera, Shadowrun 5th edition, and the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. We also picked up a number of boardgames, too. I grabbed a couple of older games I’d been meaning to get, including Steam: Rails to Riches and DIxit, as well as newcomers Monolith (a Kickstarted boardgame), Love Letter by AEG, and Dungeon Roll (also Kickstarted). Rich went to the lavish Murder at Baldur’s Gate event, and I managed to get into the premiere of Gamers: Hands of Fate (which I heartily recommend).

Game Sessions

Table set up in prep for Steve’s Thursday game

Gen Con had placed all of our game sessions in the new JW Marriott on the west end of the convention. The cool thing about it was the way the game rooms were set up. The rooms were arranged on opposite sides of a long hall, but the dividers were up so that each of the rooms only had 4 tables in it. That definitely kept the noise down — if any of you have ever tried running games at cons, I’m sure you’re familiar with the need to talk above the din of a typical gaming hall.

I ran the first session on Thursday. The scenario was pretty straightforward: A number of barbarian men and women had been captured by a rival tribe who were allied with some nefarious cultists. The PCs needed to rescue the captives by infiltrating a ruined jungle temple and defeating the cultists in the dungeon below. While I figured the PCs could try to either sneak past the barbarians guarding the temple grounds or just fight them, this group of players did both! The party barbarian and ranger charged in behind a fusillade of magic missiles from the wizard. But the cleric decided to cast invisibility and follow the rogue into the temple directly. The highlight of the session was when the barbarian chieftain heard the commotion from inside the temple and reached for his massive sword to go join the battle, only to find it missing after that the invisible cleric had grabbed it and scurried down some stairs. Of course, the cleric and rogue subsequently started a fight with the cultists down in the caverns while the fight above still raged, a tactic my old raid group in WoW used to call “pulling the dungeon”, but due to some truly epic low rolling on my part the party managed to defeat the cultists and rescue the captives.

Fun at Rich’s table

One of our $500 backers had found his way in to Rich’s game. Where his character was promptly killed outright in the first round of a fight against some sabre-toothed tigers. Luckily we had some backup characters.

Dave running with a view

In one of Dave’s games, Dave managed to drop the party rogue in every fight. What I’ve learned from this is that I clearly need to design more deadly encounters. Or maybe get better dice (seriously, I think I rolled below a 10 in over 10 consecutive rolls).

So there you have it – a brief look in to our time at Gen Con. On our moderate, unengaging drive (seriously, Camry!) back to Chicago we were already talking about what we might put together for next year!

Back to the word mines!

-Stephen