The Valley of the Rhine : A Modern Viking voyage--Pt. 1

Author’s Note: As I will probably be sharing this in bits and pieces, the final result may seem a bit disjointed compared to what will come here. I think I will follow my tangents and worry about ordering them later. I thank you for your indulgence.

The whole trip experience is becoming a bit surreal; I know we did it, my wife Cheryl, and I, but the warm fog of remembering is already stealing in…

After days of packing and weighing suitcases and deciding on clothes (the weather had been frightful, for Europe, in the days previous), The Day arrived. It was a 1st Class experience from the beginning when the limo pulled up out front to take us to the airport. Check in was relatively smooth and off we went for our requisite dehumanization by the friendly folks at TSA. Even that was not awful, but then came the pat-down. It seems that something about me set off the something-or-other and I got a bit-too-familiar pat down. Nothing discovered, off we went to await our departure to Philly.

Then we landed at the most awful airport on the East Coast, in my experience—PHL. What is the story with this place? Every single time I have had to fly into Philly’s airport, whether stopping or connecting, there have been delays. We sat in that plane for almost 90 minutes waiting to take off! I pity anyone trying to make a connection in Amsterdam, our destination and the embarkation point of our Viking River Cruise to Basel, Switzerland.

In Tim’s World™, children over 15 months and less than 10 years old would not be allowed on flights lasting more than 3 hours. Imagine sitting in one of those super-expensive massage chairs that run up and down your spine. Now imagine sitting in that chair while it experiences electrical shorts at irregular intervals in random spots up and down your spine. Got the picture? Doze..JOLT!...doze…doze…JOLT! That was the kid behind me kicking my seat. And this a trans-Atlantic flight lasting forever. If the seat-kicker behind me was not enough, we had a drunken bimbo. I had noticed when we first took off that she seemed to be sort of high-maintenance with her imperious demand/requests. She got so drunk that she caused an incident back in the plane not once but several times near the restrooms. At one point two attendants, one male, escorted her back to her seat and forbade her to have contact whatsoever with any other passenger, on pain of arrest upon landing. I honestly think that if we had been over land, and not the Atlantic, that they would have put down and had her carted off. Needless to say, it was not a restful night.

At last, we land in Amsterdam, breeze through the airport and are met by a Viking person and whisked off to a bus and thence to the boat, Cheryl somewhat fresh, having grabbed few hours sleep, and me feeling like I have been dragged behind a bus for 6 or 7 blocks.

The boat is really nice and we are in luck as our stateroom is ready. The word “stateroom” is somewhat misleading, unless you think of Rhode Island every time you hear the word “state”. Still and all, it was very nice and no bigger than it needed to be. Believe me, it was far finer digs than ever I had in the good old USN. For one thing, we had a really nice shower and all the hot water we could want. If only, back then…

We crashed for a nap of a few hours and then found out we had 3 or 4 more hours before Departure, so we walked into Amsterdam; we were there three years ago and feeling confident. What a city! We wandered here and there, never once feeling anything but safe, no matter the width of the alley. I discovered a lovely little establishment, a coffee house, by the name of The Jolly Joker. I found it following my nose. It is both disconcerting and amazing in Amsterdam for the lovely odors wafting on the breeze. When I glanced at the menu, I got no farther than the eponymously-named Jack Herer. It did not disappoint. Not a teeny bit. Back to the boat for dinner.

The first dinner was a harbinger of good times to come; three courses, side dishes, cheese plates, fruit plates and all the beer, wine or soft drinks you could hold. (Sidebar: Cheryl and I are not heavy, or even frequent drinkers, so we got the regular deal which consists of unlimited “house wine”, “house beer” and Coke products, not to mention lemonade and tea or coffee during all meal times. The beer was Bitburger—a mighty tasty brew. There were various wines, both red and white and they kept giving you more if you weren’t attentive, along with fresh glasses of beer every time you looked away. There was a premium perk called the “Silver Package”; that cost $65 per person and was unlimited booze all over the boat. I met not a few that were punishing Viking on that deal.) We had interesting table mates every night, some more interesting than others, one obnoxious, but more about him later. Next day was the first stop on our tour, to look at working windmills at a place called Kinderdijk.

I’m gonna stop here and share. I have to make sure my notes are in order before regaling you with tales of our other stops. TK

Candidate for Weirdest Game

What’s the dumbest thing to make a game of that you can think of? I think I discovered the exemplar last week when I saw an ad touting fantasy golf. Yes, that is not a typo; it promised more stats! More action! Making a paper/pencil/cardboard/dice-type game out of an actual sport is complicated and I only know of two that have done it well, and they are also fantasy sports leagues now: Strat-o-Matic’s Baseball and Football.

You can make a pretty convincing argument that fantasy baseball and football are a logical evolution of the S-o-M classics. I played the baseball version for a couple of seasons and even have a friend that was National Champion three times. The batting and fielding stats were pretty exacting and detailed. While I never played in one of the football leagues, I know the S-o-M game well enough to see the corollary.

Fantasy baseball became much like the teams we played in our league; they were super-teams of nearly all All-Stars.

I pondered the possible structure of fantasy golf as a game, because fantasy baseball and football rely on a game-system with its own rules and conventions. But golf? In fantasy, you always have a guy on your team that you want to start against lefties because he clobbers them all over the park, even though he couldn’t hit a right-handed nun throwing watermelons. That mirrors MLB. But golf?

I am not knocking golf; I played it a bunch in HS but got away from it in the Navy. (You can smack the shit out of a ball with a driver off the flight deck, but damn, it’s hard getting your balls back.) Putting was out of the question. I have lots of friends that golf.

Fantasy golf? Just how do you do that? If it’s a course with notoriously tricky greens, do you have a ‘designated putter”, a “designated chipper”? Let’s face it, watching golf on TV is excruciating, in the sense that root-canals can be excruciating. The only thing that comes close is watching a darts tournament where two rotund blokes flick darts better than you can ever hope to do.

I just had an idea for a game show on one of the fix-‘em-up networks. We will call it Glory Rolls. The competition will be three teams covering identical rooms with wallpaper with a wicked pattern match in a given amount of time. They could be scored on waste, pattern-matching, viscosity of their paste and the mess they left all over the room.  They would be penalized for potty breaks.

Now tell me, is that any dumber than fantasy golf?

I took 14 pages of notes on our trip, and have at least half that many still floating in my head. I will not be surprised if it reaches 8000 words, or more, by the time I am done. I will share little bits and pieces here once in a while, then make the whole thing available to read from my webpage

A Different Point of View

I just finished a very interesting (in many different ways) writing project for my friends at Iron Wind Miniatures. It was a good experience, but also yet another good lesson about being careful what you promise.

Iron Wind (hereafter IW) was running a KS in March to re-issue the old Ral Partha Chaos Wars figures. This was a line of elves and other goodie-two-shoes vs orcs and goblins, who also had a smattering of wicked allies. Their original goal was $7K. At the time of CincyCon in March, they had hit $17K and looking at stretch goal premiums. In a brief spasm of lunacy I told them that if they hit $25K in the 8 or 9 days left on the KS, I would write them an RPG adventure as a stretch goal.

To be completely and embarrassingly honest, I never thought they had that archetypal snowball’s chance and I would not have to deliver. They put up the announcement of FB with a picture of me at the Con that afternoon. The joke was on me when they closed out at $36K. Sometimes grandiose gestures come back to bite you in the butt—hard.

The folks at IW and I sat down to talk out the parameters. I would write an adventure for up to 10 Player Characters, I would design a minis battle and tie the two together.

As most that know me well, or have played with me often enough, will tell you, I am not a fan of Elves, at least not as routinely played in fantasy RPG’s or portrayed in fantasy literature. They’re just too damned goodie-two-shoes in too many books. (I hate that two-weapon freak with the white hair, Drizzle(?), from a DM and game-designer point of view. I met the author and he’s a really nice guy, by the way.) The snobby, nose-in-the-air elves as portrayed in the last Hobbit movie fit much more closely with my image of elves. “Hello, you inferior, laughingly mortal man. We are superior to you and we neither excrete nor fart, ever.” (Gary Gygax really despised JRRT’s vision of elves; at one point he thought they might ruin his nascent game. Gary never understood why anyone playing his game would wish to be anything but humans; nothing else fit his heroic fantasy mold. They are the main reason people started wanting to multi-class. He was not a fan of multi-classing, either. Hence, he made it so hard he thought nobody would bother trying. Lesson learned…)

So I went the other direction, in the main part because of a couple of books I read by Stan Nicholls. His Orc series is a great read and cannot but change your POV in regard to orcs. So I developed a pool of 10 orc and goblin PC’s (based on actual figures in the line, as pre-gens for the adventure and wrote up little backgrounds to help them play them. It was a refreshing change.

The basic premise is that the orc and goblins, in their endless strife with elves, are on an upswing right now having driven the elves from the mountains, thereby enabling this side-mission to loot a dwarven tomb where there is supposed to some sort of super-weapon from the last cycle of wars. Eeezy-peezy: duck off into the mountains while the elves are battling the main army, find the tomb, loot the tomb, return with the super weapon. But nothing is ever quite that simple, is it?

A swarm of irascible bugbears are but one of the obstacles the doughty heroes must overcome to complete their mission. There are things that should be dead, things that have no business being where they are, several ways to die and a few mysteries and puzzles along the way. At the “cheese screen” (anyone remember that term?) I got to channel Gary for a bit when I was forced to describe something hitherto unknown to the party in terms and comparisons they could relate to. (He drove us nuts when playtesting Metamorphosis Alpha; it took three nights for us to finally realize that those “neatly stacked piles of wood” were steps.)

Lou Reed said it best: Everyone should “Take a walk on the wild side…” now and again. There was a craze of sorts years ago with something that was called Monster Dungeon (or something like that) where players played the monsters eating and killing anonymous adventurer types. It is not that, by any means. In it, I have advised the DM’s to have some input and encourage their players to get evil, but not dumb-brute, unthinking evil.

Because I refuse to kowtow to the OGL, and my partners at Eldritch Enterprises share my vehement disregard for it, we developed a new set of stats or classifications, or whatever you may choose to call those ratings that define the physical and mental parameters of player characters, and dubbed it Gamer Common, and copyrighted it. We also licensed IW to use it in the adventure I wrote so that anyone buying the figs and planning to play it can, with whatever RPG system they use, and we will do the same for others that wish to write non-system-specific stuff for RPG’s

I went a step further in this one: I came up with some new ratings/stats/parameters and encouraged the DM to interpret them as they like. The numbers that the 3d6 generated for OD&D were meant to generate the iconic Bell Curve. A rating/result of 9-12 was average; below that range was lacking and above that range was exceptional. It is all relative. An orc with a Smarts (one of my new ratings) of 16 is damned smart, for an orc! That does not mean he can find a scroll of differential equations and even recognize them as such, let alone understand them. (Hell, I might not recognize them, for that matter.)

So I got to create an assessment system that bears little or no resemblance to any other, but can, I hope, still be easily translated into any other system. I used terms like Cunning and Force of Will; the context is the main guide.

Damn! It was fun walking on the wild side and creating a new POV for RPG’ers to try on for size. Now I just hope they have as much fun playing it as I did writing it. If only I could come up with a good title…still working on that.

   Notice of Hiatus

On July 6, my wife, Cheryl, and I are leaving for Europe. It is only our second time to Europe and we are doing a Viking River Cruise up the Rhine. We have stuff we are doing or seeing in Kinderdijk, Cologne, Koblenz & Rudesheim, Heidelberg & Speyer, Strasbourg, Breisach and Basel. On the 10^th of July we will celebrate 45 years married.

I will not be posting again until the 3^rd or 4^th week of July. Have a happy 4^th of July and blow up some stuff for me, OK? Stay safe…

Tales from The Red Road--Nexus 2015

Full disclosure: I was not in the least looking forward to the drive by myself. But, that brings me to the new title I will be using, Tales from the Red Road.

I have been blessed with a pretty good sense of direction, and could, more often than not, find my way to somewhere new. And then I got a TomTom, and it has Dennis Hopper’s voice. For those of you that rely on a GPS unit, you know what the Red Road is; it is the right road, lane, turn-off, etc. Follow the Red Road and you can’t go wrong. Usually. It can also be a tyrant.

So anyway, I couldn’t wait past about noon to leave; I was antsy to get it over with and to time it to miss the most of the awful traffic around the Windy City. My first goal was Corky’s Dogg House, in Cedar Lake, IN. It has been my custom since I first went to the last LGGC with the Axeman to stop in and enjoy a real Chicago-style Dog, with the real ingredients, particularly Vienna Sausage Natural casing Hot dogs. Poppy-seed roll, cucumber slices (I take off), a tomato wedge, a pickle wedge, onions, bilious green relish and mustard, with a sport pepper to top it off, all dusted in celery salt. OMG… A couple cons ago, the Mad Wizard, Jim Wampler, gave up his no-bread thing to try them and has never regretted it. It adds about 40 minutes and miles to the trip, but worth the stop.

Traffic and weather up through IN was not too bad, but there was a stretch of about 35 miles that worried me. Too bad I was right when I came back, but more on that later. A few brief sprinkles but no downpours, although  I saw a few in the distance. Too bad Indiana is so damned boring to drive across. Going from Cincinnati to Chicago or Milwaukee necessitates driving the whole lifeless stae diagonally. Once you have been lulled into a near-stupor, you hit the Tollways. Thank the State of Illinois for I-Pass, the electronic toll thing on my windshield.

No stopping and slowing in those long lines for the folks using money, nosirree. Cruise on down the middle and hardly slow.

Now there is something: what are apparently “Suggested speed limits” on the tollways. I guess they figured that if they post it at 55, they will only go about 70, in all the lanes! What a joke; I would set the cruise at a scary level above the limit simply so I would not become a sitting duck and I was still getting passed on both sides.

Finally got to the Crowne Plaza in Oak Creek, WI, out near the Milwaukee airport. It was a nice venue and shows promise should the Game Fair continue to grow. The venue was large enough that I could not give you any numbers on attendees, but it seemed busier than last year.

Side tip: if you are ever in the area, or it is there next year (which will be Memorial Day Weekend) check out di Carlos Restaurant. They do carryout and I can personally vouch for the pizzas and meatball sandwiches—the rest looks equally yummy.

I ran an adventure in Curse of the Weaver Queen on Friday that was pretty good. I had run that particular adventure nearly a dozen times, but this group made it really fun again. Sadly, they all died.

There was a screening of the second installment of the Knights of the Dinner Table Live Action. It was pretty rough but seemed to get an enthusiastic response. As troubled as this production has been, one can only hope that certain people make good on pledges and promises and see it to a good resolution. Past track records seem to weigh against that.

There was a vendor there I felt worthy of note called ZZipEtch (www.zipetchlaserengraving.com) that had some very nice custom-etched glassware for sale at a very decent price. I got a wine glass for Cheryl with two very-Oriental-looking dragons etched on it. Melinda and Gordon seemed nice folks; hop over and check them out sometime. Tell ‘em you heard about them here.

KenzerCo was playtesting a new Expansion for The Great Space Race, their very creative and highly addictive game of spaceship racing. In my mind, any rules changes that allow you to shove the competitor into a black hole are OK by me.

There were lots of boardgames played as well as a fair bit of minis. Sadly, the guys with the water table did not show up this year. I missed their steampunk dirigible fights and the fleet action of quadremes on the water table was a sight to see last year.

I ran a session of Snakeriders on Sat afternoon. I must admit that I am getting a bit tired of running it now for over three years (my partner says we sell more if I run it) but this group was very enjoyable and provided me with more fun that I have had in at least the last 10 times I have run it. All but one died, but they did it in a novel and entertaining fashion. The lone survivor hopped aboard his magic giant beetle and flew away to fight another day. “Live to fight another day” was always the first mantra of Old School playing; no shame in recognizing the odds against you and beating feet for the door.

Chris Hoffner, Harold Johnson and the rest are putting together a well run show. It seemed well organized and there was never a dearth of con folks if you needed one. The site could be a winner; the hotel set up a lunch-serving area and the prices on the wraps and salads were reasonable. The dogs, however, were overpriced and the buns too doughy and cold, to boot. Sorry, if you can’t do a decent dog, you lose at least on star from my rating. That’s like a Chinese restaurant that can’t do a decent shrimp fried rice.

Gaming went long into the night, well after I had retreated to my room. It began distressingly early as well, but that’s what cons are all about—non-stop binge-gaming.

Personally, I think their decision to move it next year to the Memorial Day Weekend is a wise one. It is too hard for too many gamers get that Friday off that you need for a con; that weekend it is expected and so should work out rather well. So far as we plan right now, Eldritch will return next May.

I was planning to get an early start back on Sunday to attend my oldest’s birthday get-together, and did start early, to no avail. Here begins my tale of woe…

Dear State of Indiana: What the hell is going on in your legislature? Did you spend so much time figuring out a law that would allow Hoosiers to discriminate against whomsoever they choose that you forgot you have an infrastructure that includes highways? What bunch of hare-brained loonies in your DOT did not see the problem involved with working on two major bridges in a span of 28 miles on I-65? They should be flogged, publicly humiliated and forced to pick up roadside litter until they die.

As you might recall (I certainly hope your memory lasts several paragraphs), I earlier mentioned a patch of road construction going up that I thought might be a problem coming back. Sunday I wished harder than I ever had that I had been wrong in my foreboding. What should have been a 5.5 hour drive became 7 hours. It took two hours to traverse an approximately 35 mile stretch of I-65. I sat there the entire time watching my ETA clock on the GPS spin off minute after minute. I finally hit Indy about the time that I was originally supposed to be getting home, which was over 100 miles away at that point. There was no getting out of the two lines of creeping traffic to get off to a service station, restroom or Rest Area—you might never get back on. In both cases, two lanes merged into one. In one case it was Right Lane Closed, in the other Left lane Closed. Now I hit this patch of treacly traffic in mid-afternon; I can only shudder to think of what it must have been like two or three hours later. That was also my last con that I will drive that far to attend by myself.

That 7 hour journey through the purgatory that central Indiana/I-65 has become sealed the deal for me. I am just not suited to do this shit anymore by myself. My usual traveling buddy, Jim Wampler, was unable to get off of work. Axeman was in the same boat with his work. Both of them are absolutely great travelling companions. In future if I can’t find somebody to drive to a given con with me, I will not go it alone. Eazy-peezy.

I had a good time at the con—it was the drive home that sucked and certainly no fault of Nexus. We (Eldritch Ent.) plan to attend next year, and I plan to have at least two new-that-year adventures to run. Start looking at your calendars now, and maybe we’ll meet across a table there next year.

  

                                                                 Notice of Hiatus

On July 6, my wife, Cheryl, and I are leaving for Europe. It is only our second time to Europe and we are doing a Viking River Cruise up the Rhine. We have stuff we are doing or seeing in Kinderdijk, Cologne, Koblenz & Rudesheim, Heidelberg & Speyer, Strasbourg, Breisach and Basel. On the 10^th of July we will celebrate 45 years married.

I will not be posting again until the 3^rd or 4^th week of July. Have a happy 4^th of July and blow up some stuff for me, OK? Stay safe…

Short vacation

Gone to Nexus Game Fair in Milwaukee this weekend. I will write about the con when I return.

The games within games we gamers play

Humans, by nature, are competitive, just like all the other organisms, sentient or not, that inhabit this speck of dust in the vast cosmos that we call Earth. (If sentient beings lived on Mars, would they call the soil “mars” as we that live on Earth call it “earth”?)

It was competition that formed our species; the other hominids, the ones that did not learn to stand on their two hind legs, were eaten by predators they did not see coming in the tall grass. In most forms of gaming, it is competition. In boards and mini’s (my preferred abbreviation for “miniature figurines”), it is often a situation of 1 v 1; two players playing head-to-head or two teams going at it; i.e., a winner and a loser. The difference today is that if I defeat my opponent in a spirited game of, say, Samurai Battles, for example, I do not get to jump up and down on the corpse(s) of my vanquished foe(s), I can’t take all their stuff and steal their mate(s).

When I discovered wargaming, oh so many years ago, I saw in it the ultimate problem-solving competition that I did not find in chess or bridge. (I am an avid card player as well as gamer; care for some poker? Or cribbage, or pinochle, euchre, canasta, gin, big casino?) I was drawn to the intricacies and fluidity of problems-to-be-solved posed by wargames.

I have been playing wargames for more than 50 years; ofttimes, I find the games we play within the games we are playing to be an intricate dance of psych warfare.

Role-playing games are no exception to all of this. Never believe that they are not competitive; players vie with each other to get the best goodies, even in the most amicable parties. As a group, the party is contesting both the DM and the circumstances he (or, all too seldom, she) has presented the party with. The very basic problem of “What do we do next?” spurs our competitive nature as differing suggestions and opinions are put forth by the players.

I first stumbled on to this phenomenon while in college. (I was in college so long ago that while the following might sound preposterous in today’s social climate, it happened just like this.) It was the day of a long-awaited big mini’s battle. I had gotten into the habit of buying cigars that came in wooden cigar boxes that mini’s fit in nicely; if you bought the last cigar or two, you could have the box. (It was also how I developed a taste for a good seegar.) I had a large Joya de Nicarauga stuffed in my pocket when I arrived; when asked about it I joked that it was my “Victory Cigar” that I would smoke when I had won. It was just normal BS and braggadocio amongst buddies. Except it worked, in an unforeseen way. It was a hell of a game and we had been at it for over six hours with the outcome still in the balance. Despairing of getting the battle finished before I had to leave, without any fanfare, I lit the cigar (yes, children, this was way back in the day when you could smoke cigars indoors almost anywhere) and proceeded to work up a good coal on it and returned my attention to the game. You would have thought that Boney had just watched his Old Guard retreat, so profound a scare did my lighting up throw into the other side. They commenced to hurried whispering amongst, and second-guessing, themselves and soon their plan lacked any pressure as they began to become hesitant and made a couple of little errors that we were able to exploit. Three turns later we had beaten them soundly. To this day I believe they psyched themselves out.

The next year at GenCon I did the same thing in a mini’s game I had entered, and got the same result: sudden doubt and indecision leading to their loss.

RPG’ers are by far the most into playing games within games. My friend Gary was often quoted to the effect that DM’s rolled dice for the sound they make. He was right, in more ways than just that, as we often discussed. I plead guilty to using the sound of a wad of dice being rolled all at once when something like a barrage of stones or arrows is launched. I plead equally guilty to just picking up a die and rolling it for no reason in the middle of something; sometimes I mutter. Muttering is almost always effective. (For those reading this that plan to be in one of my games someday, know that I am not giving away all my secrets.)

The DM trickbook is nearly infinite; I know we all have our methods and devices for shaking up a party, whether to get them to pay more attention or to possibly think their plan through one more time. My f-t-f players soon learned to listen carefully to my adverbs and adjectives; I was never, ever completely arbitrary and never misled inappropriately. There is a ton of nuance in simple words or phrases such as appears, apparently, nothing visible, seems to and the like.

In the past 10 years it has been my privilege to attend some three or four dozen game cons all over the US east of the Rocky Mountains. I have developed a (thoroughly undeserved, in my opinion) reputation for slaughtering players; my TPK rate is somewhere north of 80%. As often as not, it is the game-within-the-game that ends up getting parties killed. Now I know that the style of play at cons is not much at all like the play in home face-to-face campaigns (I know of a couple online that have long track records). Their pecking order has long since been established; in con games there is a very subtle (perhaps so subtle most are unaware of it) striving for dominance in the form of party leadership. I have had players try to argue rules with me to change outcomes or mitigate circumstances in their favor—now it becomes PC’s v. DM. They might just as well howl their lamentations at the moon; I play OD&D where it works that way cuz’ I say so, being my world and all, doncha know?

This is a sorry note to end on, but touch on it I must. I refer to cheating. Now I have never been able to understand what cheaters, in particular RPG cheaters, actually gain from this. I mean, c’mon. Is using “funny dice” that have a predilection for a certain range of numbers any different than reloading the Autosave on a PC game when you lose a battle? Who wins, exactly? I never demand to see the die roll of any player at my tables; I trust them to not cheat themselves. They certainly are not cheating me. (After all, over 80% end up dead anyway, cheating or not. It is hard to cheat your way out of being paralyzed by a lich that had the initiative on you.)

I find it interesting to note that the first type of gaming in which I used a dice box was mini’s. No dice were rolled near the precious figures and diceboxes seldom had cocked-die results. Most importantly, everyone playing saw the roll and the result. Let the dice fall where they may!

Still don’t believe me? Go watch a game of Ticket to Ride and watch the maneuvering that goes on in a simple family-oriented board game. Games within games…I love it.

I’ll be playing until the day I can no longer remember the rules or roll my dice. (If ever I win the Lottery, I fully intend to buy a property that I can turn into an Old Gamers Home. Really.)

Fear & Loathing in Dallas--NorTex 2015

I am a most fortunate gamer—I get to go to several game cons each year and play games with old friends and new strangers, some of whom become friends. Each of them has its own vibe that makes it special. NorTex, formally known as the North Texas Role Playing Game Convention, is no exception. I would describe it as “collegial community”; it is small, by design, and very heavy on “name” guests. The atmosphere is ever so Texas-polite (and I mean that in the best sense possible); no brash cries and demands to sign things; instead folks wait as long as it takes as they would never be so rude as to interrupt. I have been to all of these cons now and I never tire of going. Doug Rhea puts on one hell of a con; I hope to, in the ensuing ramble, to convey some of that to you. In my best HST style, I will now try to relate my gaming experience in a mostly/ sort of chronological order.

The first thing I noticed as we started maneuvering for our approach to DFW was a hell of a lot of water; it was like coming in over a swamp or ocean in other airports I have landed in. Parts of Texas have so much water standing around they look like they ought to be growing rice or raising shrimp.

By virtue of an insane schedule, I was scheduled to land at DFW ten minutes before a game they had scheduled me to run on Wed. evening was to begin. Needless to say, that got somewhat delayed. I had sent a bunch of heavy stuff ahead to my son’s home in Flower Mound, so he brought it to me when he picked me up at the airport and whisked me off to the venue. I got checked into the hotel and informed the powers that be that I would certainly run a game, but needed a bite first and would be ready by 7 or 7:30, and we were scheduled to run until midnight, and it was not like we were going somewhere else later. So I walked over to the Jersey Mike’s and snagged a Giant #13. I ate a quarter of it. (Another qtr. after the game, then the other half the next day for lunch and I had two meals covered. Good start…)

We played an adventure that I wrote a few years back and am still tweaking. Everyone lived. (For some reason I have a reputation for mercilessly killing Player Characters in gobs. I repeat for the umpteenth time that I do not kill PC’s; in my sacred role of DM I am compelled to provide them with novel and excruciatingly ignominious means for them to do that to themselves. It is not my fault that they continually do it and that my TPK ratio is somewhere around 85%.) The fact that they woke up outside of the mysterious tower (now disappeared) they had been exploring/trying to plunder with no bleeding and wearing exactly what they went in with did not seem to do much in the way of compensating for their now-vanished dreams of wealth and easy living. Hey, they were alive…

I took some interesting figures, made on a 3-D printer, to “award” to one player in each game I ran. The figures look to be a sub-species of my signature critter that I created for Dragon #1. (I have to beat around the bush a little here to keep the Hasborg off everyone’s butt and not provoke a flurry of C&D orders; no money exchanged hands anywhere in the whole process, except when plastic stock was purchased for the printer.) I told each game that the award could be for best play, dumbest move, thinking outside the box, whatever. On a couple of them I could not choose a winner so I let them decide amongst themselves; it was very amusing to watch.

We had a nice luncheon in the hotel grill on Thursday. It is nice to get to say Hi to the other Guests and catch up a little.

By a quirk of scheduling, none of my games were scheduled to start before 6 PM. (One of my stipulations is that I don’t do anything except some sort of charity thing before noon.) This gave me ample time to wander about each day and both renew old acquaintances and make new ones, as well as watching other games being played. Watching boardgames being played is the best way I know to learn new ones.

For me, one of the best reasons to attend this con is all the time I get to spend talking to my peers in the industry, and a few betters. I won’t be so pretentious as to drop a bunch names here—what would that serve?—but it is great to be able to do so much more than say Hello in the Dealer area or Howdy as you pass in the halls. It was great fun; those I spoke with that are reading this know who they are. If they are not reading this, it hardly matters. My one regret was missing Steve marsh’s lovely daughters, Rachel and new mom Heather. They did not forget me, however and enabled me to start a new tradition at NorTex.

For a few years now I have had a tradition at GaryCon of a “Pie Game”. There is a person that brings me a cherry pie each year. I pick a game that I am running and we all eat pie and play. (Cherry pie can look like brain pie if you squint a little.) Thanks to heather, I have now started the Cinnamon Roll Game. She brought me an entire tray of yummy cinnamon rolls that I shared with the gamers that night; we ordered out for pizza about two and a half hours into the game.

The charity game was a hoot. I very seldom play on that side of the screen, but I always make an exception for Doug’s Charity Game. (It’s probably all over YouTube by now.) The entire party was made up of industry folks and the high bidders for the other seats, and for the life of me the only one I remember was Margaret Weis, who was playing a kender with a certain malicious zeal. All we did was watch our pockets and belongings and keep an eye on the kender. The party fractured 

immediately when the paladin, who thought he was leading the group, bought stew for three smelly, uncouth and incomprehensible villeins, but would not offer the same to me (I was a druid) and the other (neutral) cleric. The rift continued through the adventure and provoked a lot of fun.

As far as my games went, someone with my reputation could not ask for more: 3 TPK’s and a CHO (complete Hose-over, as in “You’ve been hosed, man.” I seem to have found an 87% effective “party-killer” attraction in Curse of the Weaver Queen, and Return to Aradondo promises to hold my rating of 8 Skulls (out of 10). The most fun I had was watching a couple of the groups decide who got the prize. Sadly, no brawling or stabbings occurred.

There was a painter there in hall across from Darlene name of Martin Jones. He paints very, very well. Check out his site at invictus-miniatures.com. Tell him I sent you. (Maybe if enough of you do, he’ll paint me a bugbear or something.) Seriously, though; serious good painter and nice guy.

NorTex got it’s own little sample of Tracy Hickman’s Killer Breakfast, and a good time was had by all. Oh, did I forget to mention that Tracy Hickman was also there?

Now there was something that went on during the con that I am still puzzled over. I was walking by a large room holding three tables in a big “U” shape and were quite full. Standing on a chair in front of the room was Matt Finch; he was waving his arms about and seemingly talking to the entire room at once. The tables held the gamut of attendees of both sexes and all ages. A couple of hours later I walked by again and they were still there. A couple more hours had passed by the time I walked by again, and they were still at whatever it was they were doing. A couple hours passed when I saw them again! Now I am not sure just what Matt, and later, Bill Webb who seemingly relieved him at the front of the room, were doing, but I smell a rat. I think they are plotting deep plots concerning world domination and a monopoly on Moon Pies, or something equally threatening and sinister.

The weather started out fairly nice, for Dallas, where it is all relative. When we got there, it was in the mid-80’s—balmy for Dallas in June. By Sat the temp was up to 108°; more the norm for this time of year. Walking out of the hotel into that was like getting hit in the face.

If you live down in that part of the world, you really ought to look into NorTex. It is fun, very low-key and low-pressure and relaxed. Sort of makes it an anomaly of the finest kind.