Gen Con 2010 Thursday Overview

One of the games I was most looking forward to play was my first game of the con, Trouble in Hochen a Burning Wheel game.  I arrived in the room a little early so I was killing time looking at the events in the book.  As game time approached I began to worry that I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, so I double checked the event time with the con program . . . and was surprised to see that Luke Crane himself was listed as running the game, the creator of Burning Wheel himself.  As it turned out the person running the game showed up shortly in the person of Thor Olavsrud an editor / developer of the game.

The four slot game had immediately sold out as do all Burning Wheel events but somehow we had only three of the four slots filled, without anyone with generics tickets waiting in the wings.  We bravely soldiered on and ended up becoming the heroes of Hochen.  I had a great time playing in Trouble as I have been wanting to see what  the Burning Wheel system looked like in action.  Action was what we had in this adventure, we had a Duel of Wits as well as a three on one sided combat that was both very satisfying and informative.

Everyone who participated in this event seemed to have a good time and I got many of my questions answered so I considered this event a great start to the con.  If things keep getting better from here by Sunday I will be rolling nothing but crits and shooting laser beams from my eyes . . . unfortunately I was wrong.

My other game on Thursday was The Raiders of Meadbrook Mine and could well be descibed as my inspiration to follow up on my events in the blog.  Adventures in Fantasy 2nd edition is a homebrewed system lovingly crafted with obviously a lot of work put into it. Unfortunately, lots of work and loving crafting in this case still didn't add up to a system that was better than Savage Worlds, which from here on out will be considered my Mendoza line when it comes to this style of gaming.  The actual adventure itself was standard dungeon crawling which was fine as most of the players were very nice funny people, excepting a 13ish year old girl who had been drinking caffeinated beverages and eating COCAINE all day.  To the GM's and other player's credit we kept her mosly in check, mostly, so playing was still enjoyable.  I will not be playing in any more Adventures in Fantasy games not because they are bad people, or have a bad system, just after two playings I feel I have gotten all that I can out of the system.