Here is the report of the fifth day of the trip to GenCon 2012. The report on the fourth day can be found in this journal entry.


August 18th, 2012

I woke up on Saturday morning ten minutes before the alarm went off, as spross was snoring. With 4-1/2 hours sleep under my belt, I feel a bit tired, but oddly enough not as badly as I expected to feel given the amount of gaming I've done the last two days and the late nights. My shoulders were aching something fierce, but I showered under some glorious *hot* water, and the should pain eased off. Had a spot of diarrhea, but it wasn't too bad.

I'd had a bit of time to think about stuff, and I wanted to possibly play in a game of Broken Rooms or Desolation on Saturday, and maybe spend a bit of time in the Exhibit Hall. I also needed to ship the purchases I made in the Exhibit Home back to Ottawa via UPS during the day, minus the copy of Primeval RPG that I had purchased. I also hoped that Saturday would be easier on my bowels as well, especially in light of the somewhat "raw" steak I ate the night before. Ah, well, one step at a time.

spross and I went down to breakfast after the morning ablutions and I had the usual, but added some ham to the omelette on Saturday. It was a pretty good breakfast. After breakfast, spross went to get some traveller's cheques cashed, and then he handed in the tickets from his game that ended the night before. It was a painless process. We stopped off at JW 206 to check out the gaming this morning, and I rather enjoyed watching some of the games going on. mytholder was running The One Ring, and doing his usual stellar job of it. We watched him run the game for a bit, and then headed back upstairs to the room.

I brushed my teeth and took care of a few other things, anbd I packed up the stuff for shipping to UPS. spross helped me haul that stuff, and took his own as well, to the UPS make-shift booth near the Exhibit Hall in the ICC. That was a *difficult* walk with all that gaming gear! We showed up at the booth, but they hadn't opened up yet. When the two fellows from UPS arrived and opened the booth, the package ended up weighing 14 lbs. and cost me $33 plus tax to ship! We didn't get away from the UPS booth until close to 10:45 am, so went straight to the Exhibit Hall from there. I picked up another couple of t-shirts (Philoso-raptor and Target of Opportunity), went and spoke to the guys from the Doctor Who North America location, and a few other folks. Saw my Exile Games friend, Bob Bretz, and got the shock of my life when I saw Kate Masters with one of her little ones in a stroller! I hadn't seen Kate since GenCon 2008, and really hadn't expected to see her here! Lovely surprise! We caught up for a few minutes, and then moved on, though promised to see her later on. I went over to the Cubicle 7 booth, and Dominic was there. He had a bit of time for me, so we went outside and chatted during his
smoke, and then went back inside.





I managed to get a copy of Yggdrasill (signed; the books had come in on Friday), the latest two The Laundry supplements, an extra copy of Primeval RPG, and the DW: AiTaS 11th Doctor boxed set from him...at a good price. The photo above is the Yggdrasill books at the booth (courtesy of corone). spross snapped a photo of Edel Ryder-Hanrahan at the booth, and you can clearly see that the Primeval RPG is on sale at the Cubicle 7 booth.





spross picked up a copy of Broken Rooms and Primeval RPG for himself, among other stuff. We stopped off at the Exile Games booth, and saw Jeff Combos, lena_of_fargo, and Shawn Hilton there. I chatted with them for a while, and learned about the plans for Revelations of Mars and some of their Kickstarter plans. Here's a pair of photos of several of my favourite Exile Games folks, first lena_of_fargo and Jeff.







By that time, it was half past noon, and so spross and I went back to the UPS booth, and I shipped another 11 lbs. worth of books (at a cost of $33) home to Ottawa. Both spross and I were pretty hungry by then, so we went back to the JW to eat. I had the onion soup with a half club sandwich in High Velocity again (it was only $9, and pretty good food!).

After lunch, we went back up to the hotel room in the JW to drop off the t-shirts and stuff, as spross had to get ready to run the Airship Pirates game that he was going to run at 4:00 pm. We went downstairs and I cashed another of my traveller's cheques (as did SteveR), and then I went over to the JW desk to get a business card and take it over to the C7 booth to give to Dom (as it would have the JW hotel number and our room number on it), as there was the possibility of the gang doing something on Sunday evening.

While spross did stuff in the hotel room and got ready for his game at 4:00 pm, I headed back to the Exhibit Hall. Dom wasn't there, so I gave the card to Jon Hodgson, who promised me that he would give it to Dom when I explained what it was for. I chatted with several people at the Cubicle 7 booth with several people who expressed interest in the Primeval RPG, and even managed to encourage one sale of the game while I was there.

By that time, it was getting close to 3:20 pm, and I needed to make a dash for it to the Downtown Marriott hotel (just the Marriott to differentiate it from the JW) to see if I could use Generic tickets to get into a game of the Broken Rooms RPG. The walk from the Exhibit Hall to the Marriott wasn't too difficult, but that hotel is laid out so strangely in terms of the ballrooms (and I had forgotten to look at the GenCon maps to see where the Indiana Ballroom C was!) that I got lost. I managed to orient myself eventually, and managed to make it down to the room. I got down to the room in question, and found that Jamie Gooch (who would be running the game), nearside, and Matt Somers were all there. Had a chance to have a quick chat or three with the three of them, before the game started. I was lucky, as Jamie had a seventh character available for the game as all six players showed up for the game. Lucky me! :)

Broken Rooms is a really fabulous game system and the premise of the game is quite superb. Oddly enough, the game system wasn't as intuitive for me as I had expected, though the Momentum game mechanics are easy to learn and pick up. The game uses 12-sided dice in a rather cool way. I had wondered why the game system was called the Momentum system, but once I started to play and had rolled the dice a few times, it became crystal clear why it's called that. And so obvious, too. The scenario that Jamie ran, called "Dread Mission", was a pretty basic one for a two-hour slot, and had a good assortment of player characters. I played an ex-cop and with a chip on his shoulder named Patrick Murphy, who was also a Finder (no, I'm not going to tell you what that is; you'll have to check out the game!). I had a very good time playing the game, got to do some interesting stuff, and really got into the game, although the basic mechanics confused me for the first couple of rounds of dice rolling. Momentum, indeed! :)

By the time we were finished with the scenario, I was hooked on the game totally! I had been hesitant about picking up the game when I did, given the intimidating size of the rulebook (I'll do a separate post about this when I get the chance after the convention reports), but when Jamie wrapped up the scenario, I *knew* that I'm going to run this game on the two gaming groups. After we finished the scenario, I sat and chatted a bit with Jamie and nearside (the real force behind the game). I learned a bit more about the origins of the mechanics, and would have loved to chat more, but by that time I needed to get back to the JW and get a bit of relaxing in and prepare for supper. I made it back to the hotel no problem, though I had a bit of a stitch in my side, and had a snack of crackers, cream cheese, and some carrots and celery. Yumm! After taking a sitz bath, I sat down and wrote part of this journal entry while waiting.

I sat and did some reading after finishing the journal entry, waiting for spross to return. He came back after running his game around 8:15 pm, and we went to eat dinner at TGI Friday. In some ways, this was a huge mistake. On the way to the restaurant, I misjudged the depth of the curb in one spot, and when I stepped off with my right foot, I plunged down further than I expected; as my body twisted a bit, I felt my back tweak on the left side, and felt incredible pain. It seemed to ease off a bit at that point, so we continued on our way. The restaurant was packed, and we didn't get a table until around 9:35 pm. I ended up with a side salad (I ordered a small, but ended with a big one, though paid for the side salad), a batch of six potstickers (which were pretty poor imitations of the real Chinese thing), and a flat iron steak which was undercooked due to the phrase "On the well side of medium" instead of what I should have said. It was edible, so I can't complain. We finished dinner by around 10:45, and took spross's side salad back to the JW and room 206, where Mike was running until midnight, and he accepted it as a snack.

spross and I headed back down to the lobby, and I saw a great Peter Davison Doctor, complete with celery and sonic screwdriver. spross didn't have his camera, but we went back up to the hotel room, he grabbed the camera, we went back down, and the fellow graciously posed for the two photos below - call them Pre-Terileptil and Post-Terileptil! :)







Afterwards, we both headed back up to the hotel room, but they hadn't sent up the extra wash clothes and face towels that we needed, so we called down for those and were assured they'd come up with them soonest. Very accommodating hotel staff, the JW! My back was killing me by this time, due to the incident noted above on the walk to TGI Friday's, and spross called down for an ice pack. The majority of this last part of the journal entry was written while I lay for 20 minutes on my stomach with the ice pack on my left hip and part of my back. I finally felt a little bit better, and so spross and I crashed for the evening. I hoped I'd be functional the next day.


An extremely long post, with lots of photos as you saw, so I hope you all enjoyed it. Even though I wasn't running any games, the Saturday at GenCon was a busy day, and though it ended on a bit of a sour note, I had a terrific day of it. Oddly enough, while I was tired at the end of the day, I wasn't as exhausted as I expected to be after the previous two days. Lots of adrenalin, I guess.

That's the wrap-up on the fifth day of the trip to Indy, and the second official day of GenCon 2012. The Sunday report on events will follow when I get the chance to transcribe them up.

Time for a bit of supper on this Sunday evening now, methinks. :)