A Weekend in Indianapolis

I have come to believe that Indianapolis doesn’t believe in signage.

This is unfortunate.

Really, it only interfered once. Finding our way in and out of the Embassy Suites to attend the Goodman Games seminar on adventure design was an adventure in itself. It was like we got to attend the True Dungeon for free!

…except not fun.

Other than that, Gen Con was pretty good, though I didn’t get to spend enough time there and hadn’t really planned enough.

Time was spent in the exhibit hall. I picked up a copy of Spirit of the Century. Finding fudge dice to use with it was a bit of a challenge, but the folks at the IPR booth helped me to track them down. I chatted a bit with Jerry at the Khepera Publishing booth. Grace has done some art for them, and their new book, Hellas, looks beautiful. Angela picked up some art from Devon Schiller, whom she’d met in the art show last year (specifically, a ceramic tile printed with this). She also raided the bins of cheap D&D minis for her campaign.

I attended the aforementioned seminar on module design. It wasn’t bad, but it devolved into people asking for GMing advice… and one guy who kept telling us about the campaign he was running. I didn’t care about his campaign. At all.

I also went to the rpg blogging seminar, which was cool. Among other things, I determined that I really need to start using stumbleupon and digg and things like that.

Other than that, there was a lot of people-watching (including some of the costume contest), some boardgame-playing, running into friends (including two who just got engaged at Gen Con), and things of that sort.

Good times.

Sunday, we went to the Indianapolis Zoo, and I got to hang out with lemurs and otters and donkeys. Yay.

In the car, Angela and I totally reworked the game that we’ve been planning on co-GMing. I’d been having some serious hang-ups about it, so we scrapped a lot – including the setting – and moved back toward something like what she’d originally been thinking, and which I think I will be happier with: we are still refining it, but it looks like the game has gone from post-apocalyptic to modern fantasy and will exist somewhere within the triangle defined by (1) Hellboy II, (2) the X-Files, and (3) Neverwhere. We might toss a bit of Men in Black in there for flavoring. We’ll see.