Gen Con Indy 2007 Friday

Today was a good day to die. Except that I didn't, despite one heck of an attempt.

Before 9 AM I staggered over to the Hyatt to join in the Hackmaster Wurld Championship after missing it for the last couple years due to scheduling problems. (I'd schedule the events I was running based on when the Hackmaster tournament was the previous year and then they'd rearrange the tournament so that I couldn't advance. Aww....)

Anyway, eventually I joined up with another group with my quite nice pregen and we headed off to adventure! We reached a monastery early on, then got into a huge fight that ended our day. The other players had home characters that were below the level of the pregens, but even if we were all that level we would have been hosed at that point. Only myself, another pregen guy, and the guy we raised survived. It was still fun since the other players were fun to play with, but I think that the one encounter would have been too much for us even if we'd been better players and chosen the right path through it. Ah, well. That's tournament Hackmaster for you.

I almost didn't go to my Shadowrun event (Round-Up Time), but I decided to stay and check it out. It was OK but not great, thanks to me choosing the weapon-oriented pregen in an event that turned out to have no combat. Again, some goofy moments and the other players kept it from completely sucking.

It also finished an hour early, giving me time to stop by the Dealer's Room again and pick up some art and some Lost Worlds books. Cool stuff.

I will say that the GMs in both events did a good job and I wasn't unhappy with them at all. The adventures could have maybe been improved IMHO, but I'm pretty certain both of them were stock adventures being run by volunteer GMs who may not have had any input into their creation. (I know the HM tournament works this way; I don't know if the SR event was, but it certainly felt that way.)

I spent the evening hanging out with Brian at the Collectibles Auction. More cool stuff. They had a Blade Runner board game (using the movie license) that was designed by a company that went under before the game was released. Only ~100 were made and the one on sale was someone's play copy...and they'd just opened a new copy to be their new play copy. Ooo...

There was all the usual cool stuff you see too, like woodgrain box D&D sets and prototype dice from Crystal Caste. More cool stuff!

Tomorrow: Car Wars, Star Trek, and more Shadowrun. Or maybe packing and testing M.U.L.E.