Wed - February 27, 2008

Heading to the District of Calamity


Actually, Arlington, Virginia, for D&D Experience. I get to play a lot of D&D!

As at GenCon last year, I'll have a place on the D&D message boards where I post updates. I'll post that link when I put something there.

Here's the link!

See you there! (Either at D&D XP or on the message boards...)

Posted at 09:20 AM    

Wed - September 5, 2007

Interview with me and Keith Baker


An audio interview with me and Keith Baker, done at GenCon, has been posted here at Fist Full of Comics & Games. It's fun!

Posted at 09:05 PM    

Thu - August 16, 2007

My GenCon Blog


For the duration of GenCon, I'm posting blog updates over at gleemax.com. Go check it out! Sneak preview: I was one of the lead designers for Fourth Edition! (I am lacking my iBlog software, so I know I'm messing up this page. Sorry! Go read the other one!)

Posted at 11:35 PM    

Mon - August 13, 2007

My GenCon Schedule


Today I remembered to bring it home at last! Here's what I'll be doing, officially, at GenCon this year:

Thursday
1:00–2:00 Book signing with Keith Baker
4:00–6:00 Dungeon Delve/Wizards booth

Friday
11:00–12:00 Eberron Meet & Greet
2:00–4:00 Dungeon Delve/Wizards booth
4:00–6:00 Eberron seminar

Saturday
10:00–12:00 Dungeon Delve/Wizards booth
12:30–1:30 Book signing with Keith Baker
2:00–4:00 D&D Q&A Seminar
4:00–5:00 Eberron Meet & Greet

Sunday
10:00–12:00 Kids & D&D Seminar
12:00–2:00 Dungeon Delve/Wizards booth

Unofficially, I sure hope to play some D&D in there, and Charles Ryan is talking about gathering folks from his old d20 Apocalypse game for another reunion this year! Should be plenty of fun to be had.

Maybe I'll see you there!

Posted at 09:24 PM    

Sat - August 19, 2006

GenCon: The Year of the Accessory


I'm back from GenCon. Despite the terror scare, I had no travel difficulties, unless you count arriving at the airport for my return trip 3-1/2 hours early and getting to the gate 20 minutes later a "difficulty." I don't.

I was struck by a proliferation of new accessories at GenCon this year. Three different initiative trackers: one from Open Mind Games that seems to have won the popularity contest, one from Ready and Waiting that gets marks for thoroughness, and a third one that failed to impress me enough to find it again. There were magic item cards from Tokkens (of the collectible, tin variety) and from Paizo (of the paper kind). There were cool disks you could use to represent a mount on a battlemat, complete with art and game statistics, from a new company called Conflict Chips.

There was Dreamblade, our new minis game, which made a big hit at the show. I probably never mentioned here that I led the world-design team for that game, though lots more world design happened after my time on that project ended. It was really cool getting to work with people I don't usually come into much contact with: Brady Dommermuth, Ryan Miller, and Jonathan Tweet. It's an awesome game and some really cool minis.

There was the D&D Delve, which this year featured our D&D Icons miniatures: the available-now Gargantuan black dragon and the coming-this-fall Colossal red. It turns out that if you give D&D players a chance to pick up a 20th-level character and fight a really big dragon, they're pretty happy.

Speaking of D&D, I played a bit of it. Friday night I grabbed Chris Sims, Logan Bonner (two of our newest editors), David Noonan, and Mike Mearls and played a random dungeon using our new Dungeon Tiles. I like the DMless random dungeon format, because it lets me put a game together and also play a character. This time, I played a dwarf crusader (from Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords) named Rakhûl the Hammer. If you ask why he's swinging a waraxe when he's called the hammer, he'll tell you: "This is my chisel. I'm the hammer." Fun and hilarity until wee hours.

On Saturday night, Charles Ryan managed to reunite many of the now-scattered former players in his d20 Apocalypse game for a six-hour session. Charles (who is moving to England any day now to start a job with Esdevium) ran, with me, Chris Perkins, Stan! (now at Upper Deck), Jeff Simpson (now living in NYC), and Stan's friend Hyrum Savage (who was not in the original campaign) fought our way through the post-apocalypic landscape, killing lots of nasty demon-dogs.

I did novel signings, both in the Wizards booth and in Author's Avenue. That was pretty cool. I'm pretty sure it drove quite a number of sales of my novel—so thanks to all of you reading this who bought it, either at the show or elsewhere. Actually, when I got back, emboldened by my success at the show, I went to my local Borders and Barnes & Noble and signed copies on the shelves, which now bear "Autographed Copy" stickers. That's also pretty cool.

I led two seminars: Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and Other Adventures, which was pretty small because of a mixup in scheduling with Bob Salvatore, and Getting Your Kids Into D&D, which was a lot of fun. I also sat on the panel for the Secrets of Eberron seminar, which was great. It was really cool to see a strong, active, excited Eberron community there, and a couple of guys who were in that seminar caught me after my Apocalypse game ended (at 4 A.M.) and talked with me some more.

So yeah, I didn't get a lot of sleep. The result was a bit of convention crud and a lingering fatigue that's making it hard for me to get up early and work on the novel.

Favorite T-shirt of the show:
Gay-mers United
+5 Fabulousness
And that about wraps up my convention report, don't you think?

Posted at 07:48 AM    

Mon - August 7, 2006

My GenCon schedule!


I'm heading for GenCon on Wednesday, and I figured I'd better get my schedule up here in case any loyal readers want to find me. Not that it's really that hard to find me at GenCon...

Thursday
11:00-11:30 am Book Signing (with Matt Forbeck) in the WotC booth
2:00-3:00 pm D&D Miniatures area
3:00-4:00 pm Book Signing (with Keith Baker, Ed Bolme, Matt Forbeck, and Tim Waggoner) in Author's Avenue
5:00-6:00 pm D&D Miniatures area

Friday
10:00 am-noon Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and other adventures seminar
2:00-4:00 pm Eberron seminar

Saturday
1:00-2:00 pm D&D Miniatures area
3:00-4:00 pm Getting Your Kids Into D&D seminar
4:00-5:00 pm Book Signing (with Keith Baker, Ed Bolme, Matt Forbeck, and Tim Waggoner) in Author's Avenue

Sunday
11:00 am-noon D&D Miniatures area
1:00-2:00 pm D&D Delve
2:00-4:00 pm D&D Miniatures area

So that's that... One last thing:
Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
28,952 / 120,000
(24.1%)


Apparently I forgot to click Publish the last time I did that. Huh.

Posted at 07:17 AM    

Fri - August 27, 2004

GenCon, GenCon, GenCon


How a single event can manage to be both so much work and so very much fun, I haven't quite figured out.

Work highlights: I thought the "How D&D Minis Changed My Life... or at least my game" seminar went really well. The Eberron Delve seemed to be well-received, which is good considering that I put so much work into it that I'm far behind on my current project. The D&D Open, which I helped Andy Collins write and ran one of the semifinal rounds for, was a big success. The Eberron seminar was great.

Fun highlights: Friday night I stayed up very late playing D&D (gasp!) with Andy Collins , Gwen Kestrel , Steve Schubert (a regular in my Eberron campaign and, starting Monday, a new member of our development team), Ari Marmell (an established freelancer who's done a lot of work for White Wolf and is now working on a project with me) and his wife George, and Colin Suleiman (ditto what I said about Ari). Colin was gracious enough to run an Eberron adventure on the spur of the moment for us. Now, that's gutsy! Running an Eberron game for me, and without prep time! All right! It was enormous fun. I played a kalashtar bard named Halharath, whose stats I'll have to put up here later.

Saturday night I stayed up very late talking with Jesse Decker (development manager) and Charles Ryan (brand manager for D&D), mostly about work stuff—but high-end work stuff, business decisions I have no part of, that sort of thing. It was a little strange for me, because most of the time I think of myself as just a designer who wants to sit in his cube with his head down and design stuff, dammit, and not be bothered with discussions about how we run the business. But then I find myself in conversations like this and discover that I'm actually very interested in how we run the business. Go figure.

Fortunately, after a week back at work, I'm pretty much back in head-down-in-the-cube mode. Which is why I got up at 5:00 A.M. this morning—to WORK! And it's 6:20 and all I've done is post in my stupid blog! Aaagh!

Posted at 06:21 AM    

Thu - August 19, 2004

My GenCon Schedule


Well, I'm about to head over to the exhibit hall for the start of the first day of GenCon, but I wanted to get my schedule posted up here for anyone who might care... Here it is:

Thursday
Supervise D&D Minis demos 12–4
Seminar: How D&D Minis Changed My Life (or at least my game) 4–6
Epic Level Party: 6 on

Friday
Celebrity table 10–12
Seminar: Adventure Building 12–2
Supervise D&D Delve 2–4

Saturday
Seminar: Eberron 10–12
Run semifinal round of D&D Open 1–6

Sunday
Celebrity table 12–4

Hope to see you around!

Posted at 06:28 AM    

Sat - July 3, 2004

Origins


I got back from Origins on Monday, took Tuesday off, and spent Wednesday wading through the emails, expense reports, and missed work waiting for me when I got back. Wheee.

But it was a great trip. I arrived late Tuesday night and pretty much went right to bed. Wednesday I went to help set up the booth and discovered that the diorama we were using for the Dungeon Delve was not there. It got shipped fast and made it there before noon on Thursday—with the exhibit hall opening at 1:00! So I actually skipped out on some of the hard setup and went back to my room to get some work done. In the afternoon I went back and did help more with setup. Then I played a game of Risk Godstorm with Charles Ryan and Eric Cagle. We played right outside the exhibit hall, so lots of people stopped to watch and ask about the game. We told everyone it was going on sale the next day in the WotC booth, and so we take credit for it selling out over the course of the weekend. :) Charles creamed us, despite not having played any form of Risk since college. On my last turn (the last turn of the game), I owned a single territory: plague-ridden Gaul. I got three armies to place in that territory, and two of them promptly died from the plague. Because I hated him at that point, I attacked Charles in Brittania. He rolled a one for his defense! Perhaps I could win one small victory before the end of the game! Alas, no. My plague-ridden Greco-Gauls rolled a feeble one on their attack as well. Game over. I had a ton of guys in the Underworld, but it just didn't matter.

Thursday morning we got the Delve set up in time for the opening of the hall, and I spent pretty much the next four days talking to people about Eberron. I was pleasantly surprised at the very positive reaction it received—lots of people were really excited about it, we sold a whole bunch of the books in our retail area, and I signed quite a number of them.

OK, if I keep trying to write about everything I did the whole weekend, I'm simply never going to finish this entry that I started three days ago. Saturday night I played in a Call of Cthulhu game run by Jeff Simpson, who does web work for the RPGA and must be the nicest person at Wizards. He's been running this game, set in Roman Britain near Hadrian's Wall, at conventions, with the players consisting of volunteers who help out at conventions. Great fun.

So... not enough sleep, too much fun, a couple of great games, and lots and lots of Eberron—I call Origins '04 a success. Just about the only down side was the Origins Award ceremony Friday night—Draconomicon did not win either category it was nominated in (Best Roleplaying Supplement and Best Graphic Design of a Book Product, or something like that), and Wizards as a whole won no awards (though DRAGON Magazine won Best Periodical).

I'm slated to head to GenCon Indy in August, so more convention news then!

Posted at 08:00 AM     Read More  

Sun - June 20, 2004

Summer convention update


On Tuesday I take off for Origins in hot and moist Columbus, Ohio. I've got to say, I love summer on the West Coast. In general, even when it's hot as blazes here (as it was during my D&D game yesterday, at least inside the house) it's not particularly humid. Heading back eastward for summer conventions always makes me realize afresh how much difference humidity makes.

Anyway, that's not what this update is about. So if you're in Columbus next week, make sure to look for me in the Wizards booth. I'll be nominally supervising the volunteers running the D&D and miniatures demos, but my primary purpose there is to talk to as many people as humanly possible about Eberron. We're not doing any seminars, so it's all about the one-on-one evangelism. I'm hoping to have a slideshow running in the booth with art (concept and final) and key points, a copy of the book with me at all times, and lots of energy to talk about how cool the setting is. :) Which means getting over this tonsillitis...

I am also going to GenCon Indianapolis in August. There I'll be participating in seminars as well as staffing the booth, including one seminar all about Eberron. I'll post my seminar schedule when I know it.

I'll try to post some news from Origins when I get back.

Posted at 11:07 AM     Read More  

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