GenCon Days 3 and 4

Day 3 was 3 big events.

First of was Killer Breakfast. It's a long standing event where Dragonlance and Ravenloft author Tracy Hickman (along with his wife Laura and many friends) run a two hour long D&D session with hundreds of players, with the goal being to kill as many players as possible. The only way to survive is by being "incredibly brave, incredibly stupid, or incredibly funny."  A couple of highlights included soothing the zombie horde of Ravenloft with a rendition of "The Ballad of Jayne Cobb" and opening a souvenir shop to distract the zombies (complete with Killer Breakfast shirts, mousepads, mugs, etc). This year they had some special guests, including Gary Gygax. It was a great time.

My NASCRAG team, The Missionary Men (cheer: We're on top! We're on top! We screw with tradition!), made it into the semi-finals and on to the finals. Unfortunately, we never really clicked with our DM and he was constantly irritated by a younger "helper" who kept interrupting him. We were tired as well, as the finals were 7-11pm. We did manage to finish the adventure, but I know we missed a few things. Out of the 69 teams, we finished somewhere between 7th and 12th (they haven't disclosed any other details), and one of our players was named as the best "Lord Innis" in the tournament. I grabbed the three adventure modules, as they fit my style of DMing very well (less combat and rules-lawyering, more role playing and fun).

All that said, I may have the "Manah Manah" song stuck in my head for weeks. One of the teams that made the finals used that as their team name. Their cheer was the appropriate musical refrain, which the marshallers were more than happy to encourage. At the awards ceremony, we all joined in, making for a very loud room. Hopefully no one was trying to sleep in that hotel.

We used Sunday to finish out the dealer hall. I finally got in a pretty thorough look at the place, including some last-day sales. Didn't win anything in the Mayfair booth, but we did pick up Downfall of Pompeii, a fun little game about throwing your friends and neighbors in the path of a volcano so you can escape.

I was disappointed that they didn't run the auction on Sunday. It was always a nice way to sit and relax for a while, especially while waiting for the last second, don't-want-to-ship-this-stuff-back sales.

I wish I had been able to fit in more, but NASCRAG tied up 12 hours of con time. I'm definitely doing it again next year. If it weren't for silly things like jobs and kids, I could get a team together of me, Kathy, Rob, Morgan, Abigail, and Callan and take another solid run at the finals!

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GenCon Day 2

What I Played:
Leonardo da Vinci
Elk Fest
Hey, That's My Fish!
The Downfall of Pompeii
NASCRAG: A Little Revenge

I didn't have my auction card for more than 30 seconds before Kathy had me bidding on something. It has artwork from one of her favorite artists.

I finally tried the NASCRAG thing and had a blast. It's a D&D tournament, but your goal is to entertain the DM more than getting the adventure done. My pre-generated character was supposed to be a CIA type with a Cockney accent, but I ended up playing him more like a beat cop that sounds like Red Green. "A fake tree, eh? Sounds like a case of Magical Arborial Forgery. Have to write up a ticket for that…"  By luck, I ended up with a group who does RP tournaments all the time that was short a player. They've won this particular tournament in the past. We call ourselves The Missionary Men!  If we move on, that means I'll have to miss out on some games with Kathy tomorrow, but I think I've got a good chance of winning with this group. The worst part is that things probably won't end until after midnight. Hopefully Kathy can make it.

She did some extra demos while I was in the game: Alchemist, Bleach TCG, and Kinder Bunnies.

Master Chief was at the WizKids booth. I'll upload some pictures after the end of the weekend.

Harry and Izzy's restaurant was a bust. We didn't want to spend a fortune on steaks, so we got some items further down the menu. Disappointing, and the service was slow (because we didn't order wine?) and the place was loud.

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GenCon Day 1

What I played:
Infernal Contraption
Cineplexity
Ticket To Ride Marklin
Ticket To Ride Europe
Catan: Struggle for Rome

The dealer hall is huge this year, though the new video game section was smaller than I expected. The did have Rise of the Lich King and StarCraft II playable there, but I didn't get a chance to try them. Got to see Eye of Judgement in person. Seems like a huge investment (PS3 + EyeToy) just to add visuals to a TCG game…

Our friends Lucas and Carrie have a huge booth this year and tons of new products. They are also up for an Ennie award.

Seems like they tightened the requirements down on what qualifies you for the Mayfair ribbons this year. I've gotta imagine that they lost their shirt last year, handing out so many 50% off discounts.

Both times we saw it, the badge registration line was out the door and about halfway down to the dome on Capitol. At least they took water out to the people this year. Thank goodness for preordering.

I never even got to the auction today. Maybe tomorrow…

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Trifecta

With the baby coming, I wanted to try and get some nagging home issues out of the way. It made for an entertaining week.

Trees: I'd noticed some large (4 inches or more) dead branches in the silver maple. This is no surprise. The tree is junk. So, I knew I needed to have the guys come out and clean it up, and that they'd probably recommend removal again. Last week, I noticed an unusual amount of bark and leaves around the oak tree. That made me bring them over and have a look. Sure enough, the slow decay of the maple was accelerating: rotting roots, ants, and a dead leader I hadn't even noticed. It was either going to be $300/year to clean up for a few years until it dies, or $900 to take out then and there. Thankfully, the oak just needed thinning, as one of the inner leaders had developed some mold from lack of airflow.

We use Complete Tree Care for our tree work. They do a great, efficient job. They trimmed large trees and removed our maple in less than 3 hours, with only 6 people. My neighbor could not believe it, as she had 12 people spend an entire day on her five trees. Their lead cutters would be so far into the tree that you couldn't see them, making cuts that were just the right size so that they could handle the material without the bother of tie lines. My neighbor walked away that day with an estimate, she was so impressed. I personally cannot recommend these guys highly enough. Ask for Rob Engledow to come out and do the estimate. He's a good guy and he knows his stuff.

Air Conditioning: For the past couple of years, our furnace just hasn't been moving a lot of air. Our den, which is on a slab, tends to stay at a chilly 62 unless we break out the space heater. With the baby coming, that's not a good thing. So, I wanted them to come out and propose some solutions. We'd tried this with Broad Ripple Heating before, and the guy just shrugged and said that we'd have to deal. This time, I tried Bob Pepper, a name I had gotten from my financial adviser.

On Wednesday, a guy showed up and was sure that we had a bad control module, and that we'd probably need to add a whole second system to handle the side of the house on the slab. The next day, Bob Pepper himself showed up to measure the house and windows. He was going to punch all that into a gain/loss simulation to help determine how much power we needed. He thinks we need a much larger blower, possibly some new ducts, and definitely more air returns. He'd get back to us next week with an answer. Once he left, I noticed the temperature started climbing…

By the evening, it was 83 in the house. The cats were sprawled out on the floor in front of a box fan. My wife and I were sweating. I was remembering the warnings the flooring guys gave us when they installed our hardwood. We ended up sleeping with two box fans in the room, just to keep the air moving. Friday morning, I had to be in the office, but Kathy worked up her best I'm-pregnant-overheated-and-angry tone and let poor Bob Pepper have it. He swears he didn't do anything, but would send someone over at noon. It turns out that our exterior junction box for the compressor unit had two old bar fuses in it, one for each 120V line. One had blown, and the other had fused open. This is way, way out of code, and the charred remains of those fuses are less than two feet from my head as I'm sleeping.  He removed the fuses and wired the lines straight through, so that in case of another failure, the breaker would trip instead. Thankfully, the system is back to it's old self.

Roof: We've had a small leak for months, the kind that only shows itself and some brown spots when it pours. Nothing major, but that's part of the problem. Ever since the big hailstorm, it's been hard to get a company to come out and do minor work, or even an estimate on minor work. We got Universal Roofing to come out. He said both valleys over the den needed work (we were pretty sure of that). But, when we moved in, our inspector said we had about five years of roof life left. Guess what….dry rot around vents, broken shingles, incorrect installations all over the place. It would be $750 to repair the valleys, $7200 to replace the roof. He did say he'd give us some credit if we did the repair now and the replacement after saving up. I'm going to get some more estimates, particularly since that's about $2000 more than I was guessing. He did send me a whole sheet of references without me having to ask, which is a good sign.

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