 A preview of the day's finale  Cardhalla begins... An early start to the day - we rolled out of the rack at 6:00 AM. After breakfast at the hotel, we drove to the ICC. The weather was great - cool and breezy. Sean headed off to an 8:00 writing seminar while Dan and I waited outside the Exhibition Hall. My Trade Day badge gave me 9:00 AM access to the Exhibition Hall. Everyone else got access at 10. This is one great reason to get a Trade Day badge if you're a retailer or educator. Folks were slowly massing in the hallways and soon the Trade Day early access line was huge. I hopped into line in hopes of making it to the Paizo booth before too many others got in their. Unfortunately, there was some confusion when I and a few others got to the entrance about whether we had early access or not. I got pretty upset as I watched the long line of people stream by while I had to wait at the door. This totally nullified the 30 minutes I had waited in line so that I wouldn't have to wait in another line once I was in. Needless to say I was pretty pissed off about that.
 Pelgrane Press By the time I finally made it into the hall, the Paizo booth was packed. The new Pathfinder card game was Paizo's "hot" item. I decided to start at the Pelgrane Press booth instead. I picked up a copy of their much anticipated 13th Age RPG. 13th Age is a beautiful book and it looks like it is going to be a great system to play.
I then made my way to the Gale Force 9 booth. I needed to pick up a few copies of the D&D Next GenCon exclusive "Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle". This is the first official D&D Next product and it was starting to fly off the shelves. When I got to their booth I also had the pleasant surprise of seeing that the new Firefly Board Game was available. It seemed like everyone was toting around a Firefly game later that morning. After GF9, I headed over to Palladium Books. Palladium just finished a kickstarter for Robotech RPG Tactics a miniatures game based on the hit anime series. They were offering a few limited edition GenCon exclusive models that I had to pick up. The minis looked great.
 Privateer is overrun I continued roaming around the hall. Then a low roar began that grew into a loud thunder. It was 10 AM and the hordes had descended upon the hall! The situation rapidly changed from one of being fairly crowded to one of almost human gridlock. It was something to behold the river of geeks that flooded the hall.  Frank Mentzer at the OSR booth I stopped by the OSR booth and visited with Bill Barsh and Frank Mentzer. They had a great assortment of new products for use with AD&D 1st Edition. Bill and I chatted about one of his modules I had recently run at Space City Con, and I let him know how much fun we had. Frank showed off some of his new work with Eldritch Enterprises. I didn't leave their booth empty handed. Dan, Sean, and I met up about 12:30 and walked several blocks over to Scotty's Brewhouse. Scotty's had a Pathfinder theme going on and they were offering special Dogslicer Ale t-shirts for sale. We had a great lunch and got to watch Galaxy Quest while we ate. The place was packed with geeks.  Troll Lord Games booth We returned to the ICC and hit up the Exhibition Hall again. One of my first stops was at the Troll Lord Games booth where I had some great conversation with Todd and Steve. They showed me several of their new Castles & Crusades products and we talked about what projects were coming up. I also took the time to thank them for their sponsorship of MAG Con. I continued exploring more of the hall after that. I met up with Dan after a while and we decided to make our way to a table where we could relax for a bit. We found a table by one of the concession stands in the hall and played a game of Wyrd's new Icons Showdown.
 A Night With D&D - Sold Out! Dan and I met up with Sean around 6:30 and headed to our big finale for the day: A Night with D&D. It was a murder mystery dinner theater set in Baldur's Gate. There were over 600 attendees who converged upon the Indiana Roof Ballroom just north of the ICC. The event was also the official launch of "The Sundering" story line which coincides with the gradual move towards the release of D&D Next. The event was a lot of fun. Several authors, including Ed Greenwood, R.A. Salvatore, Troy Denning, Richard Lee Byers, and Erin Evans were in attendance and signing autographs. There were door prizes, music, and, of course, a murder mystery to solve. We finished up the night around 11:00 and headed back to the hotel to rest up for another fun day to come.
2 Comments
Deryk
8/17/2013 05:17:01 pm
you left out Scott Kurtz in that last photo. He writes/draws some pretty cool, decent comics: 8/19/2013 10:47:09 am
You're right, Deryk. He was doing personal sketches for everyone in line. He probably did at least 400 sketches that night! Leave a Reply. |
Dave DonohooAvid gamer, historian, teacher, organizer of the MAG Con gaming convention, and owner of Ettin Games and Hobbies. Archives
October 2019
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
