January 4, 2006

Mountain Con 2005


The Mrs. and I just got back from Mountain Con, which was held at the Salt Lake City Airport Hilton. This was the first year for the con and it showed. Actually anything I might have to say about the con specifically probably isn't the best source for review since I went there to game and its NOT a gaming convention. We ended up being able to field one table and there was one other table with a guy running some miniatures battle using pretty much whatever toys he could come up with.


As far as HackMaster went, well it didn't go very well. I GM'd the sole table and I don't think I did all that well. Fortunately neither did the players. It was very easy to bumble along in this particular adventure and it was practically a set-up for the PCs. Taking everything into consideration from the GM side of the table, the players who were actively involved did well. I should have gotten two kills, but I was denied. There were a couple of clarification issues with the adventure that helped deny me my kills, but I'm almost glad nobody died because the adventure was very unfulfilling, so adding some PC deaths could've been just insult to injury.

There was a punk band by the name of Switchblade Kittens playing at the Con. They sucked. We bought their CD well before the gig (it was cheap) and just listened to it this morning. They were OK. I think they are probably only as popular as they are because they glomed onto two popular schticks: doing a punk cover of "My Heart Will Go On" and singing a Harry Potter song. Actually some of the songs were OK, but their performance seemed contrived and sounded terrible. We couldn't make out more than half of the words and the lead singer didn't sing.....it was more of a spoken-word act.

Of course I can't get some of the lyrics out of my mind, so I'll probably end up liking them after a while......




After the game we got a very small amount of other gaming in. On Sunday we went over to the Tolmans for lunch and a good round of Ticket to Ride. We ended up leaving way too early (at 5:40 PM) because our flight was delayed until 9:15 PM. Oh well, if we dind't leave early we'd have had some dumb problem come up.

I should give a special thanks to my boss, John Southworth, who pretty much paid for our entire trip. He needed me to visit a treatment facility in Orem and knew that I was going to be in the area. Added all together it was still cheaper to pay for Carolyn and I to spend the weekend than it would have been for he and I to go down. Thanks, John!

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