I did see a few panels, I was hoping to see more but just didn’t have the time.  I didn’t get there on Friday until after 8pm.  I work, sucks.  It was a bit difficult to get there early in the morning for the earlier panels.  Being that this con is held at a small university, University of Houston at Clear Lake, there wasn’t a hotel room to go to to relax or stuff your stuff in while you were there.  The advantage of holding it at the University is the Gaming Guild who runs it has a low overhead.  This is handy, but again, no hotel for the weary.  Owlcon has this problem too.  It helps the organization who runs the con, but the players are at a little bit of a disadvantage.

I had a good time, made a few new friends and collected a few new phone numbers and addresses for my collection.  My phone is starting to die however, so I may be getting a new phone soon.  I hope I don’t lose any of those.

Just check out their reasons.  They think D&D promotes gambling amongst other things.  I feel discriminated against.

Me:  “You all find yourselves in the forest near your village.   The town has been over run by orcs.  Your parents have told you to run as fast as you can to the forest to hide.   You haven’t seen them since and as far as you know the Orcs have burned down your house.  You are there with a few other kids from your village and you are all hiding in the forest.”

Cameron: “What’s an orc?”

Me:  “They are humanoids, tall, scary looking with tusks and such… and they have been burning down your village.”  I show them a picture of an orc from the players hand book.  They all look eagerly.  I ask, “What are you doing?”

Victoria:  “Ahh… I cast … hmmm.. I send my owl to go up and fly around …”

Me:  Your owl flies around and catches a rabbit.  The young paladin with you looks very worried, “I want to find out what has happened to my family, tell your owl to look at the village and see if they can see my house.”

Cameron:  What’s a Paladin?

Me:  He’s a young warrior and a friend you know from church.   He’s got a very nice sword and is hiding with you, his name is Adrian.

Cameron: Is Nicolas there?

Me:  Yes, Taco Fingers is there.  He’s hiding along with you.  (Everyone snickers.  When Nicolas lost interest, his character was christened “Taco Fingers” by his siblings.  I went with it.)

Ok, so we go on with this little adventure for a bit and I finally corral them to exploring the town and looking for what had happened to the parents, and where the orcs have taken them.  They figure out how to cast magic and do things very quickly.  I was amazed how quickly too.  I’ve seen 30 year olds struggle to grasp flinging dice after many weeks of playing and these kids caught on to even the most complicated rules like it was nothing.  Little sponges of wisdom they are…

Finally, they find their parents.  They are held in a pen with all the other village folk and are tied up.  The orcs have a couple of guards and the rest have gone to sleep.  Now’s their chance….

Victoria:  Ok, I’m going to sneek in and try to untie my parents!

Me:  Ok, roll to see if you can do that silently.  (She fails!)  Aoo… the orcs catch you and you are now tied up along with your parents!

So, there we were, orcs everywhere, and Victoria captured.  Oh no!   Victoria manages to cast a noise cantrip that manages to get the orc guards distracted enough for Cameron and his npc friends ambush the orc guards in the forest and they soon leap in there trying to untie everyone else.  After a bit of combat, they go out and stab the sleeping orcs.  Coup de gras all around!

The village is saved.  They are heroes and now level 2!  You never see kids that excited over a video game. 

In other news, I’ve added a color printer to my little computer set up.  I’ve been wanting one for a long time to print out things like charts so I picked up a freecycled HP 720C just the other day.  Its an old parallel printer all it needed was a couple of cartridges and a usb to parallel cable and I was up and running in no time.  It’s networked in through the linux machine and all my computers can print to it except the handheld.  The only problem I’ve run into is that there are no drivers for a Mac or the handheld for this printer.  It’s old, I know, and I’m still working on that problem.  The generic driver works for now, but color doesn’t print very well through the mac but it will print text just fine.  The hand held can’t print at all through it, another problem to solve but it has no problems with printing to the lazer jet.  No problems for the laptop and the linux  machine however.  I did manage to get everything to print to the other HP printer, something I’ve not had time to fool with on the mac and I am pleased about that.

And… here they are: (Behind the cut)

I did this year get a bit of a chance to see much of the costumes before the contest.  I admit I ADD’d out of the improv fan comedy light bulb joke session and didn’t see the actual cosplay, but I did get a chance to see a few of the players standing out in the hall and this year’s selection was very good.  (pictures pending)

I did run that GURPS game in one of the board rooms.  It did turn out very well and they did give me a lot of good RP, I don’t think we had as much action as I wanted.  I still have the characters and I may run a continuation of the game next year as per request.  By then, I will have my rules down better and I won’t be looking stuff up as much.  GURPS is a very easy system and I can fudge a lot if I have to.  lol  The system lacks a good ship battle system so what I did was played the ships like they were battletech mecs with lots of guns and armor and just described movement.   It was fairly easy.  Next time I may bring the hex grid and get serious on ships battles.  That was the best part of the game.  I do need mini ships for this don’t I.  hmm.

Parties.  Lots of parties.  I lent my room out for the Wholigans Dr. Who party both nights.   I think we had most the alcohal on the floor this time around.  Our party could have had a few more signs, but we did have a OMG amount of beer and other things.  We even got one of my gamer friends completely smashed who doens’t usually do that sort of thing as he repeatedly told us over and over again. lol  We had to help him back to his room, gawd he was gone.  lol  I think the highlight of our party was the “Empress Dalek” costume.  I’ve got a bunch of pictures of that and as usual, pictures pending. Next year, we need to top that guy who brought the cello, maybe a whole chamber orchestra lol.