Gary Con XII

[Necron 99]

the working title The Skull of Tamoachan.

Oooooo...
aaahhhhhh...
oooooohhhhh!

Sounds shmancy.

[Necron 99]

Luke sent out a newletter/update via the GaryCon site, I assume anyone registered there got this:

Greetings Seekers,

Gary Gygax Day is almost here and we have some great things planned to celebrate what would have been my Dad's 81st birthday on Saturday July 27th.

A. Badges go on sale for Gay Con XII at Noon CENTRAL time. So please make sure to go to Garycon.com and click on Buy A Badge to get to the Tabletop.events site to get your badge. I'll talk about changes to how we do events below.

B. Founders & Legends Stream begins at Noon PACIFIC. F&L is something I started last year to celebrate the people that created D&D and founded the RPG industry as well as recognize the people today who are making great contributions. And speaking of contributions we will be raising money for Extra Life - so tune in and pledge your support! This year Gary Con is sponsoring and hosting the stream on the Gary Con Twitch Channel (http://twitch.tv/GaryCon)_. We will have interviews, live musical performances by Gygax and Jason Charles Miller, and three games of D&D! The tentative game schedule is:

First Game: Chris Lindsay and Special Guests Satine Phoenix, Elisa Teague, THE BEAST, Alex Kammer, yours truly and Murder Hobo Member and CEO of Titmouse Studios, Chris Prynoski.

Second Game: Stefan Pokorny and Special Guests Kate Welch, Jason Charles Miller, B. Dave Walters, David Baxter, Pat Kilbane and the Head Troll himself, Steve Chenault.

Third Game: I get to DM Special Guests Matthew Mercer, Debra Ann Woll, Matt Colville, Tj Storm, Kyle Newman and Eric Jordan of Idle Champions (no pressure right?!?!!!)

This is an amazing celebration of D&D on Gary Gygax Day, so don't miss it!

C. Changes to the GC Events Process So what changes are we making to the beloved GC event process? In the past we categorized events as "Featured" or "Regular". Featured events were limited by the type of badge that an attendee purchased, with Diamond badges having 6, Platinum 3, Gold 2 , AND Silver 1. This created some problems with players who either couldn't get into a game they wanted and GMs that had many empty seats for Featured events.

The team came up with a simple and effective solution to resolve these concerns and retain the benefits of our tiered badge system. For GC XII there will be no event categories, all events will be the same. However a specific percentage of all seats at each event will be available for each tier. We plan on using the following model:

Diamond: 50%,
Platinum: 65%,
Gold: 80%,
Open: 100% of all seats.

This retains the value for those who purchased gold or higher badges, while extending the opportunity for ALL attendees to get a seat at ANY game. And simultaneously removes the staff from making subjective assessments of what games are "Featured". Â I am very excited about this change because I think it will work well and be received well by everyone (or almost everyone- its impossible to make everyone happy!).

I am really excited to be able to host Gary Con along with my family and the support of a group of very dedicated people that work year round to make GC a spectacular show. Thank you for your support and I will see you in Lake Geneva!

Cheers,

Luke

[Ancalagon]

Badges went on sale @ noon CST today.

I had lots of red blocks pop up on my screen indicating server connection errors, too many connections in progress, and one "Something bad Happened" but was still able to snag a gold badge for GCXII. All 248 gold badges were gone within 4 minutes!

Plenty of silver badges remain so anyone who missed out on a gold shouldn't be too distraught as they can still snag a badge and get in on some gaming goodness... while ignoring 5e events, too!

[Necron 99]

I had the same technical issues with registration, also managed to work through and get a Gold. After giving it a lot of thought, I think I'm going to follow in Allan's footsteps for this year, and next year I'm going to take a hiatus from running anything and just enjoy the time as a player. I've run the last 3 years and every year has been great.

This year, the idea of not having to prep, along with being able to just pick from whatever without schedule conflicts sounds like a good idea. For GCXIII I'll probably just grab a silver badge and then pick back up running games again.

[grodog]

I'm now leaning towards running AD&D again GCXII using pre-gen PCs of 5th to 7th level from the old Iron Circle group. As this is Gary Con we're talking about, I'm thinking why not run some AD&D, a system I enjoy and an offering for those interested in the old school goodness. I came up with an adventure idea based in Greyhawk that I gave the working title The Skull of Tamoachan. That should ring a bell for a few folks.

Interesting! Tell us more

Allan.

[Ancalagon]

I'm now leaning towards running AD&D again GCXII using pre-gen PCs of 5th to 7th level from the old Iron Circle group. As this is Gary Con we're talking about, I'm thinking why not run some AD&D, a system I enjoy and an offering for those interested in the old school goodness. I came up with an adventure idea based in Greyhawk that I gave the working title The Skull of Tamoachan. That should ring a bell for a few folks.

Interesting! Tell us more

Allan.

Back from 1989-94 my gaming group in GA met every Sunday, barring big holidays or end-of-semester tests, etc., from 5 PM until midnight or later to game. We had 3 rotating campaigns: Greyhawk, 1400s Europe, and DragnLance which I DMed. A DM would run an adventure for 4-8 Sunday sessions on average then rotate to another DM to run an adventure in his campaign then after 4-8 weeks rotate again. In this way, no DM would get into "burnout" by going non-stop.

The Greyhawk campaign was run by my favorite DM I ever played under, Maximilian the Mad, a member of the 3Ps who really needs to post more. Yeah, Max - I'm talkin' to YOU! :wink: In his campaign, the PC adventuring company became known as The Iron Circle (copyright, all rights reserved, yadda yadda yadda). After a few years, as the gaming group itself became known as The Iron Circle.

Fast forward to 2003. I had become very disenchanted with the poor RPG offerings and DMing at Dragon Con in Atlanta GA so decided I'd run something myself. I wrote up an adventure. When it came to creating pre-gens for the adventure, I decided to memorialize the characters from my old gaming group by presenting them as the pre-gens for my convention games. So as I ran more convention games, I chose characters from all 3 campaigns from to use as pre-gens so as to mix and match classes, races, etc. as I thought best for a particular adventure.

[Ancalagon]

I scale the pre-gens' levels to the adventures I write up for convention play so they aren't always the levels they were when the gaming group started to disband in 1994 as folks graduated college, took jobs elsewhere, moved away, etc. For example, Ancalagon, the magic-user I played in the Greyhawk campaign, topped out at 13th level but for GacyCon XII he will be presented as 6th level.

With that being said, the pre-gens for The Skull of Tamoachan at GCXII will be:
Ancalagon, human 6th level magic-user (played by me in the Greyhawk campaign)
Jean-Pierre du Fleur, human 7th level thief (played by me in the Europe campaign)
Kinslayer Kreel, half-orc 5th level fighter/5th level assassin (from the Greyhwak campaign)
Maximilian Gospar, human 6th level kensai (from the Europe campaign)
Thoradin Goldjacket, dwarf 6th level cleric (from the Greyhawk campaign)

I don't want to say too much about The Skull of Tamoachan for fear of giving away something I might regret later. So for now I'll say this: the setting is World of Greyhawk in a very similar environment as module C1. One or more of the pre-gens will come up with some info and an idea that leads the party to the adventure location which includes some outdoor and dungeon components. More to come as GCXII nears....

[Necron 99]

It may only be August, but yesterday evening I decided to go ahead and check flight costs for travelling to the con next year. Surprisingly, at least 2-3 airlines had some pretty good deals and when I checked my American Airline miles, I saw that I still had fair amount left over after our trip to New York. With some planning, I was able to go ahead and secure tickets for both myself and Quinn. With my airline mileage, I was able to get him round trip tickets from St. Louis to Chicago, non-stop both ways and a flight for me from here in Jacksonville to Chicago. The best flight back for me is via Delta, and I grabbed that one for $122. Essentially, I was able to save $440 on travel next year by booking now.

I checked prices for travel to Milwaukee, but the costs were much higher for me to fly in from JAX, so back to ORD it is. I'm not a huge fan of that airport but for the amount of money saved, imo, I'll take it.

Unless flight times change, which I've seen happen, our scheduled travel is:

Wed, Mar 25th
Me: Arrive ORD, 2:13pm
Quinn: Arrive ORD, 1:52pm

Mon, Mar 30th
Me: Depart ORD, 11:55am
Quinn: Depart ORD, 1:20pm

[Ancalagon]

ORD is probably my least favorite airport to travel through... but it has the advantages of proximity to Lake Geneva and I can actually use two airlines to get there nonstop out of Eppley Airfield in Omaha.

BTW - we will NOT be using that shit show of a rental car company FOX Rent-A-Car!

[Ancalagon]

I scale the pre-gens' levels to the adventures I write up for convention play so they aren't always the levels they were when the gaming group started to disband in 1994 as folks graduated college, took jobs elsewhere, moved away, etc. For example, Ancalagon, the magic-user I played in the Greyhawk campaign, topped out at 13th level but for GacyCon XII he will be presented as 6th level.

With that being said, the pre-gens for The Skull of Tamoachan at GCXII will be:
Ancalagon, human 6th level magic-user (played by me in the Greyhawk campaign)
Jean-Pierre du Fleur, human 7th level thief (played by me in the Europe campaign)
Kinslayer Kreel, half-orc 5th level fighter/5th level assassin (from the Greyhwak campaign)
Maximilian Gospar, human 6th level kensai (from the Europe campaign)
Thoradin Steeljacket, dwarf 6th level cleric (from the Greyhawk campaign)

I don't want to say too much about The Skull of Tamoachan for fear of giving away something I might regret later. So for now I'll say this: the setting is World of Greyhawk in a very similar environment as module C1. One or more of the pre-gens will come up with some info and an idea that leads the party to the adventure location which includes some outdoor and dungeon components. More to come as GCXII nears....

Its been almost 2 months since I posted the above info so figured a little more wouldn't hurt.

There will be multiple opportunities to mix it up with the combat. However, there will also be opportunities for players to use their wits for some instances of problem solving...