FridayI sort of want to burn through the rest of my time at Origins. I'm sure I'll talk about it more in future posts and through other venues, but there are some noteworthy things from the 3rd and 4th day of the con.
World Building in an HourThis seminar with
Filamena Young and David A. Hill Jr. was basically a brainstorming session in the style that Filamena has experienced in her work as a feelancer in the gaming industry. We tried to work as if we were writers pitching a concept to Filamena and David, our editors. We started with a general statement about our genre - we came up a setting which was a non-Earth with about our technological level world populated by humans who are not connected to Earth in the wake of an apocalypse.
When then moved on to talk about the "currency" of the setting, which we decided would be the past itself, since as was pointed out, in a post-apocalypse world, the past was better than the now in ever way. We talked about who the protagonists would be, and who would be the big groups, each motivated to go after the currency of the past for a different reason.
Our efforts were hampered by this guy who kept interrupting and answering every rhetorical question as if it was aimed at him. If you've met my wife - he even moved Pam to tell him off. So he was that serious.
Asshattery aside, I actually got a lot out of it, but I had to leave, because I'd seen a tweet from
Ryan Macklin (yes, "Ryan Fucking Macklin from the Internet", which he had custom laser-etched on a huge stainless steel flask that he bought at the con) who was going to be running a demo of
The Dresden Files. I got in! The game was good. Here is our group -
Chad Underkoffler was there too, but he was out of this shot.
That game was definitely one highlight of the con. I played Salvador, a monster-hunting social-worker in Gotham City. We went through abbreviated character-creation and a whole intro scenario, worked out at the table by Mr. Macklin. It was good fun, and I'm very impressed with the way they've adapted FATE to Dresden.
I next returned to the vendor hall and went to find the
Jolly Roger booth and talk to Jim Dietz about the state of Parsec, the rpg I started working on for him 3 years ago now. We have new plans, and I'm ok with them - they're kind of a step down but also possibly a step in the right direction. You can bet I'll talk about the new plans for the game a lot in the future.
Pam was getting stir-crazy with con-fever, and so we left the con for a while and walked down the street to
Com Fest. Com Fest is a lot of fun - lots of live music and hippies and weed and dogs and delicious Jeni's Ice Cream.
We returned to the con reinvigorated (and also overheated), and ended up playing board games with Pam, among others, a college friend we bumped into the previous day at the North Market.
SaturdayI am a bad, bad gamer. I slept in, mis-setting my alarm for the wrong day, and I slept through a demo of
Free Market I was signed up for with
Jared Sorenson running it. This is one significant regret, but we'll see if I can get some other chance sometime in the future. (I did get a glimpse at the boxed set, since I only have the beta, and it is fantastically gorgeous.)
We arrived late and wandered for a bit. Moods were fraying at this point, but we ended up in the vendor hall, which was a great thing. The highlight was getting to listen to Rob Donoghue pitch Evil Hat's game line to my wife with Fred Hicks interposing now and then. It was a geek moment, and I enjoyed it. We ended up with a copy of
Don't Rest Your Head, which Pam is very excited about (and I am excited that she is excited) as well as
Action Castle, a one-page game by Jared Sorenson designed for up to 300 players at one time.
After another delicious lunch at North Market with our friend Sarah, we returned to the vendor hall seemingly Hell-bent on spending money. It was a lot of fun - and I hate shopping as a rule. We picked up a cool hand-carved wooden puzzle-box from
New World Mugs & Woods:
We also went back to the Jolly Roger booth to continue talking with them, and in the meantime Pam picked up
Clocktowers and
Grave Robbers:
We also found copies of Lost Cities, which we had played the night before and enjoyed, as well as a copy of The Hobbit board game for only $15. Being who I am, I could not resist.
We stopped by the
Looney Labs room before moving on to the art exhibitor hall. We ended up collecting a lot of business cards from artists:
We ended up talking to a lot of artists, and for us this was the sleeper hit of the entire convention. I want to at least mention each of the artists we spoke to. If nothing else than because I have designs - wheels within wheels. I hope to work with some of them in the future on publishing projects.
We began by talking to Matthew Lee Keith, fantasy artist and web developer with
Arcane Machinist. He caught my eye with his graphite art as well as with the fact that he is a newcomer to the gaming art scene - meaning I might actually be able to afford some of his work.
Next to him in his booth was
Lance T. Miller, who is not only an artist using vector art to great effect, but also a magician with custom-made playing cards serving as his business cards. His vector art is an advantage because it is fully scalable without losing detail, meaning an image can be shrunk or stretched and not get that grainy effect you get with, say, all of the art in H.A.R.P.
We also took a look of the metalsmithing knotwork of
Loren Damewood from my old stomping grounds of St. Petersburg, Florida. She is far beyond our means at this time, but has a lot of beautiful work, such as Celtic knotwork chainmail pieces.
We ended up talking for a while with
Doug Kovacs. Turns out, he grew up going to a Presbyterian church, and though he is an Atheist now, we had a lot to talk about, or at least it seemed so. He also cut us an incredible deal on prints of some of his work. He broke our resistance, and we picked up a triptych of his works:
We ended up next coming to rest at the booth of
Andy Hopp, the illustrator of Where the Deep Ones Are written by
Kenneth Hite. he chatted us up and invited us to come to
Con on the Cob, and we ended up registering for it in October of this year near Akron. In return, we got both a tee-shirt and a print of some of Andy Hopp's work. Not only that, but if Con on the Cob is not the most fun we've ever had standing up and clothed, we can punch him in the stomach.
He has not been punched yet.
Next we ended up talking with
Lydia Burris, looking at some beautifully eerie art. She has worked on a couple of books already, and said she was most excited by the prospect of her stuff being in print. That's exciting, because that is exactly how I feel. I hope that we can collaborate in the future. Here is her work on her bookmark, postcard, and two magnets that we picked up (at this point, we were running very low on money, but we wanted to support her in some small way).
Pam ended up visiting with
Kelly Brightbill, and we ended our visit to the artist hall by talking with
Allison Minor, who is as enthusiastic as she is talented. She is also way out of our financial league at this point - certainly after a long convention.
It turns out that the art hall was a fantastic way to end our Origins 2010 experience. I hope it leads to some future collaboration.
