This being our first experience with Gen Con, the world's biggest gaming convention, we thought we'd take it pretty easy the first day. We're staying in a lovely little B&B/inn just a few minutes from the convention center and several hotels participating in the convention. It's an arts and crafts era mansion that's been divided up into rooms, and ours has a charmingly high bed and ceilings, with tall windows overlooking the garden. It wasn't exactly what we'd planned on, but everything else was booked--with 27,000 geeks coming to town at once, that's hardly surprising. It was a happy accident, which we may consider doing again.
Gen Con Day One Highlights:
1. It is very weird to suddenly be surrounded by thousands of people with the same interests. As we walked from the parking garage, I had a growing odd feeling until I suddenly realized that we were surrounded entirely by nerds. Ahh. My people!
2. Is that Chewbacca I see? Why yes. It IS Chewbacca. Or at least, it was the very imposingly tall Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the orginal Star Wars movies. Interestingly, his hair looks pretty much like Chewbacca's hairdo.
3. We met and chatted with Luke Crane, the creator of our current indie game favorite: Burning Wheel. This is something that's true throughout the con--several times today we walked up to a booth to find that the person selling the game is actually the person who designed and wrote it. Surprisingly, designers and writers are more than willing to spend time chatting with you about things--not just hawking their wares, but chatting about what types of games you're interested in, their current favorites, etc. Other interesting chats with game designers included Ron Edwards (the father of indie gaming) who actually ran a demo for 4 of us to show us Spione, his recent project. It's a WWII game set in Berlin that uses playing cards to advance the story. We also had a chance to chat with Robert Bohl, who designed the game Misspent Youth, which we picked up.
4. This kind of goes along with #3 in terms of the sheer amount of interesting people we talked to. We ran into some of the guys from a favorite podcast, and had a chance to hang out with a couple of the guys who did translation and publishing for some of the first Japanese RPGs ever released in English.
5.
Rebecca Guay. She was there. I waved. I love her art.
6. Indianapolis. It's a really lovely city. Lots of neat parks and squares, very clean, interesting architechture. It's been a pleasure to bumble around in it.
7. Tomas the
Lapidary. He was not only selling a whole lot of very beautiful metal and stone jewelry, but he had his grinder right there and was making pieces. We got talking and it was really interesting to learn a little bit about working with copper. Fun human interest story: He was working on a headpiece for a woman who'd requested something to wear for her wedding--it was beautiful, incidentally. She'd expected it to take a few months, so it was a bit of a shock when he told her to come back in a couple hours for it. He was brushing and buffing it when I saw it, and I happened to be there when the bride-to-be stopped back. He'd exceeded her expectations so much that she burst into tears. He patted her with his big leather-gloved hand. It was very sweet.
A+ Number One Highlight of Day One was the lecture on Medieval Food Preservation by
Daniel Meyers. It was absolutely fascinating stuff--the man was a veritable encyclopedia of information, and the lecture ended up with a huge question and answer session that yielded all kinds of interesting tidbits. I jotted down several recipes and ideas he mentioned. As if going to the lecture wasn't good enough, we ran into him as we were wandering toward the car, and got talking some more about medieval cookery and recipes. The topic wandered all over Western Europe as we stood on a street corner, and eventually the three of us ended up wandering into a cushy hotel lobby and ordering drinks, and talking. It turns out he and his wife and family live fairly near us, and he's going to have us over and teach us some more hearty medieval recipes! He was a really great guy. I'm kind of ridiculously excited to have made such a neat friend who's such a well of knowledge.
A recipe to round the night out:
Snowe (no exact measurements, I'm afraid)
Whipping cream
egg whites
sugar
rose water--not the tiny perfume kind, the bigger bottles
Apparently if you add the egg whites to the cream, whip it, and add the sugar and rose water, it's just divine. As I was scribbling the recipe down, Ed started to ask if we were going to try making it. I nodded vigorously.
