August 14, 2006

Fandemonium 2006


Well, another Fademonium has come and gone. This year we had another van-load of players come up from Salt lake City. Rob also came down from Spokane, WA to demo for Steve Jackson Games. We had a total of of 8 guests, which is a little more than my tiny 3 bedroom house can handle. My boss was generous enought to lend us the use of his house for Carolyn, the Tolmans, and I to crash on Friday night, and we got a couple of hotel rooms for Saturday night. Still the house was crowded, smelled kind of funny on Saturday morning. Oh, and my &%^#$ electric bill was doubled for the month! I guess lowering the AC for the weekend coupled with all those guys staying up playing video games didn't help any.


Now to be fair, my bill is a bit on the low side....I was just a bit shocked to get this last one. Also, Shad...one of our house guests, made sure that everyone cleaned up the house so it was just as clean as it was when they arrived. I for one was super thankful when we ended the con and were so damned tired we just wanted to sleep.....

We started the Con in typical fashion: haul all of our crap over to the site, stand in line for registration, get everything set-up, and figure out how TU the plan of attack is. Luckily the registration went pretty smooth. Set-up was easier than expected so all we had to do was wait for the first event.

My idea for Saturday was we'd spend the morning doing nothing but character creation. The afternoon event was for 1st level PCs that were created at the Con. We had 6 players show up to create HackMaster PCs and three of the players that came up from SLC helped them with their PCs. About an hour before the afternoon tournament we started the Roll-n-Run. I was actually suprised that some almost didn't get their PCs finished in time.

The afternoon tournament started around 2 PM. We were a little flexible on the start time to accomodate everyone who wanted to play. We also discovered that the Fandemonium program had a different time listed than what we were expecting. Not really a problem as we had more than enough time to work with. We had enough new players show up to fill one table (with an experienced HackMaster player to help) and another table of more experienced tables. My table bowed out in the third (maybe 4th, can't remember exactly) encounter, which suprised me since they were doing very well up until that point. Basically their tactics weren't as good as they could have been and they paid a rather heavy price. The other table worked well together and made it all the way to the last encounter, which they only didn't finish because they ran out of time. If they had finished every PC would have come away with some coin and a magic weapon.

Sunday we played the same mid-level tournament we played last year. There were only two players who played in it before and they only got partway through. One of the players, Joe Tolman, stepped in to GM for Carolyn so that wasn't a big deal even. We just put Bethany (Joe's wife and the other player) at his table with the less experienced group. This adventure went well and Joe's table won it what ended up being a very close decision that came down to role-playing points.

We all kicked around the con for a while after the tournament then went back to the house to say goodbye to our guests. It was an interesting weekend....

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