Gen Con 2008 roundup
I’m knee-deep in uploading media to Flickr and YouTube from this week’s Gathering ‘o Geeks, Gen Con Indy, and thought I’d sum up the high points of the convention. Before I get started, though, I should mention that most of the (presentable) photos I took this weekend are now available for your perusal at our Flickr stream. I can’t guarantee satisfaction, even of the vicarious sort, but there should be something in there for everyone (except, perhaps, David Hasselhoff fans). Enjoy.
That said, here’s what I did on my summer vacation:
- D&D 4th Edition- Yes, I mentioned this already, but I think it needs to be re-instated. I dropped a whole mess of planned stuff just to get in one more session of 4th Edition. If you’ve been holding out due to some wierd loyalty to the bloated corpse that is 3rd Edition, you owe it to yourself to give 4E a try. And not some quickie game-store demo…I’m talking a weekend-long, play until you can’t roll the dice, old skool D&D marathon. Its fast, it’s fun, and – while it won’t shake up your notions of what role-playing games can be, it is one of the most pure expressions of the hobby I’ve played in a very long time. Good times.
- Monsterpocalypse – Privateer Press’ new collectible minatures game Monsterpocalypse is all kinds of fun, even though the rules seem a little bloated. I don’t see why any collectible minis game should have more than three or four stats, but that’s just me. There’s a lot of shifting resources between your big kaiju unit and the smaller support units, which adds quite a bit of strategy. Honestly, though, if I do pick this up, it’ll be for the miniatures. They’re fantastic. Mazinga is going to do a more thorough writeup on this, so I’ll stop here – but if you like kaiju flicks and tabletop gaming, you’ll be in heaven.
- Maid RPG – As I mentioned in my Day 1 roundup, we stopped by the Khepera games booth and chatted up Andy Kitkowski, who is working on bringing the Japanese RPG Tenra Bansho Zero to the States. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t ready to release, even as an ashcan pre-release, but he did have a limited number of copies of their new Japanese import, Maid, in which players play – well – Maids. Sounds weird, I know, and it is weird. But in a good way. The GM plays the ‘Master’, and it is up to the players to gain ‘favor’ by doing things that please their Master. Knowing my gaming group, this would quickly descend into ball-gag and dog-collar territory pretty quickly (we’re a twisted bunch of sicko, I won’t candy-coat it), but in the hands of the right kind of people, this could be really fun. My buddy Ed picked up a copy, so we might be able to do some sort of review in the near future.
- Dragon Age: Origins – I attended a video demonstration of this game, almost as an afterthought, but boy am I glad I did. BioWare’s upcoming computer RPG looks freaking amazing. The gameplay is a bit standard (some would even say old-school) but if the game plays half as good as it looks, I’m totally there. The devs showed off some pretty cool mechanics, like the ability to lay down a ‘grease’ spell to slow down your enemies, and then a ‘flame’ spell to set the grease on fire. Fun. No console version is promised, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. A toolset will allow players to create their own adventures. I might have to sell one of the kids into slavery to upgrade my PC.
- Godlike – If you like superheroes and World War II, Godlike should definitely be on your list. It’s not exactly new, but it is an amazing experience. We dropped by the Arc Dream Publishing booth to see what’s up, and one of the game’s developers offered to run a full-blown session for us (after we bribed him with Steak and Shake). Definitely one of the highlights of the weekend. Centurion was so impressed, he quickly snatched up the Godlike rulebook and every supplement in print. A very nice group of people, and an amazing game.
- Blue Dragon: Role-playing card game – I didn’t check this out, but Mazinga did…he should have a writeup of it in the near future. I did get a t-shirt, though
I did more than this, but that’s the quick and dirty version. I’ll probably add a few more things before the week is out (the aforementioned videos), but those were the highlights.
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