Saturday wraps up my scheduled events for GaryCon VII and it was a fun day. The morning started off simply enough, though I had to park quite a ways from the door to the Geneva Ridge resort – no surprise there, since Saturday is typically the busiest day of most cons! But I got to my table in time and got setup without issue. Before too long I was running a group of players through WK2 Curse of the Kobold Eye, which I was honestly a bit surprised about. This was my only game that did not sell out during pre-registration, and in fact NO tickets for it were sold! I half expected to sit at the table alone for 10 minutes or so before packing it up to find a pick up game elsewhere.

But lo and behold players showed up! I had a blast running the AD&D 1st Edition game, which I generally play fast and loose for the sake of game speed and excitement. It just feels natural, and given the haphazard fashion with which the rules are put together for that early edition, I can be forgiven (I hope!) for not having it all memorized. The players seemed to have a blast too.

After my first game, I wandered down to the lower levels of the con to check out the dealer room. I hadn’t had much of a chance to wander through it before so I decided to poke around at what was available. I ended up with a handful of Robert J Kuntz adventure modules put out by Black Blade Publishing and a copy of WEGS Old Skool. I then found myself in the “VIP” area where the tables are a bit larger and the names are a bit bigger than the rest of the con sites.

I have always wanted to play in a board game called Dawn Patrol at GaryCon – it is a WWI game of flying aces and the descriptions made it sound like so much fun. They’ve bee running the game at GenCon since the beginning (longer than any other game!) and they had a nice setup here at GaryCon. Big table, friendly people, and it caught my eye. I listened for a couple of minutes on how to play and immediately knew I wanted to give it a shot, so I ordered pizza from the resort to be delivered to the table and sat down.

Little did I know I would be sitting down with Mike Carr, the designer of the Dawn Patrol game originally so many years ago! He was incredibly friendly and, though the sheet for my plane (a French SPAD XIII http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPAD_S.XIII) was quite daunting I was eventually picking it up. Turns out Mike Carr grew up in St. Paul a stone’s throw away from my current location! Small world, that’s for sure. It was a lot of fun playing and I’m going to try and look up the Dawn Patrol players in the Twin Cities to see what I can get in on.

As a side note, Mike Carr also has done a lot with AD&D at the beginning. He was an editor on a lot of the original books (PHB, DMG, and MM!) and wrote In Search of the Unknown, an introductory module for AD&D. That blew me away when I looked him later – that module was a big influence on my early gaming days at the Mound Westonka Library in Mound, MN. Holy crap!

The Dawn Patrol game went right up to my last schedule game for GaryCon, AD&D 1st Edition WK3 Revenge of the Over-Kobold. I had a player who wrapped up the trilogy in this session (amazing!), and the players were victorious over the wicked Over-Kobold in the final showdown. Afterwards, one of the players pointed out a few things I forgot about AD&D that I truly appreciated, and I’m even more glad he waited until after the game. He was right, of course, but in the midst of things I neglected a few mechanics. I’ll remember them now!

A great day of gaming  behind me, I am quite exhausted. I think I’m going to try and look up some WWI movies in the next few weeks …

Wow, what a day. It’s Friday, it’s just after 8 PM, and I am bushed. My throat is raw from doing kobold yips and yaps all day, which I should probably tone down for tomorrow – but we’ll see. It’s so much fun! And it’s one of those easy things I can do to really make the scenarios stand out for the players at my tables.

This morning I ran WK3 Revenge of the Over-Kobold for 5th Edition and it went incredibly well. Great table of players, and I wound up with 7 instead of 6 – which worked out quite well actually. Two of the players were brand new to 5th Edition, but I got the sense that they picked up on the system pretty quickly. Which is good because I realized WK3 is a tough module, especially in a con setting. I shuffled some things around for the final confrontation and really made it a tough one – perhaps too tough, since things were not going well for the party by the end of the slot. We stopped with the characters escaping but the Over-Kobold was unharmed. Very fun.

My 4 PM slot was WK1 Caves of the Kobold Queen for AD&D 1st Edition (the stat blocks were written for Swords & Wizardry which is very functionally the same thing as far as monster stats go). I only had 5 out of the 6 players show up and no one came over to join as a walk up, and 2 of the players were new to con settings. I knew going into it, but it was really brought home how much low-level magic-users in 1st Edition are really weak. At 2nd level you can cast 2 spells, and while one of them could be sleep (incredibly powerful against 1d4 HD kobolds!) it still only has a limited radius. The players took some unexpected directions and ended up face-to-face with the Kobold Queen – only to have an INCREDIBLE series of bad die rolls run against them that turned every character into puppy chow. It was a knock down, drag out fight that the characters were up to their necks in, but in the end their bad luck cost them their lives. Oh well. I had a lot of fun and I think the players did too.

Tomorrow I’ve got WK2 and WK3 for 1st Edition AD&D and I’m a little nervous about them to be honest. Low-level 1E is so dangerous! And I’ve only got 6 pregens for them to take, and you really need all 6 to survive I think. We’ll see.

It has been a good day at GaryCon VII in Lake Geneva, WI. A good night’s sleep (well, OK night’s sleep) and I was fresh for WK1 Caves of the Kobold Queen at 10 AM. The players at the table were great, and though it ended with a total TPK I think they all had a good time. I know I did.

Break for lunch, chat with a few people, getting excited for GameHole Con in November, and then it was back in the trenches at 4 PM for WK2 Curse of the Kobold Eye. I was looking forward to this one as I only finished writing a few weeks ago – this was the inaugural run of the module. There were points I now know I need to shore up, some clarifications that need to be added, and a map handout that would have been convenient – but overall a good experience. Also had a great table of players (7 of them!) that really made the session shine. Favorite use of my favorite spell so far (gust of wind).

Tired and exhausted, I retired to my hotel after cleaning up after WK2. Tomorrow is another full day – the final D&D 5E session for the weekend for me (WK3 Revenge of the Over-Kobold) and then it’s a switch over to good ol’ 1st Edition AD&D with the Wrath of the Kobolds series all over again.

Good times. Noodle salad.

GaryCon 2015 called and I have made the journey into the hallowed depths of Wisconsin into the very heart of Midwestern Gaming, Lake Geneva! Today has been a largely uneventful day, filled with driving mainly, but I made good time and managed to get my badge for GaryCon before the lines were too long. I have a sneaky suspicion that there’s going to be quite a wait for badges in the morning.

I’m running the Wrath of the Kobolds series while I’m here in two sets, one for 5th Edition D&D and one for 1st Edition D&D. Writing the modules and converting them to each of the editions was surprisingly easy – the differences come in how they play more than how modules are written for them! Combat specifically is a bit more loose in 1st Edition, but that’s part of the fun! This con marks the first time I’ll have run the entire trilogy for an audience (WK1 Caves of the Kobold Queen, WK2 Curse of the Kobold Eye, and WK3 Revenge of the Over-Kobold). The first one I ran last year at GaryCon VI and before that I had GM’d it a few times for my home group.

Sadly, I did not get one of the convenient rooms at the Geneva Ridge Resort – I’m down the road a bit in Delavan at the Sky Lodge Inn. It’s a nice if generic place, clean and reasonable for rates. I’m NOT looking forward to parking at the resort, that’s for sure. Previous years has proven that’s quite a gamble and with the con only growing in size I’m sure this will be the worst of the years. Time will tell.