PS if you have an item that I think will get $50 or more in the auction, contact me. Several of the items in the auction this year (including the GH reference sheets, City of Greyhawk Box, Treasury of Archaic Names, City State, and some Kuntz items) were donated by attendees.  They got to keep 80% of the total!  Contact me if you think you have something.

Mike B.

RAFFLE ITEM WINNERS:

DCC 9 Module x 2
-Ben Burns
-Bill Webb

Holloway Art pack x 2
-Skeeter Green
-Zack Glazer

DCC 51 box set in shrink
-Brian Kawano

Swords & Wizardry white box
-Dawn Fisher

NTRPGCon Mini - Lord of the Great Plains
-Justin David

Tourist Trap - player copy 4 of 5
-Allan Grohe

NTRPGCon reprint - Dwarven Glory
-Joan MacDonald

NTRPGCon reprint - Misty Isles
-Allan Grohe

Dungeon Morph Dice
-Robert Badolato

Strategic Review # 7
-Mike Cary

Strategic Review # 6
-Marshall Mahurin

Strategic Review # 5
-Joan MacDonald

Strategic Review # 4
-Brian Kwano

Strategic Review # 3
-Zach Glazer

Strategic Review # 1
-Mike Cary

Dungeon Magazine # 1
-Joan MacDonald

Castle Zagyg
-Marshall Mahurin

Mini - to be painted by Angela Imrie
(this should be a idol with thieves from players handbook)
-Zach Glazer

Dragon Magazine # 1
-Norman Harmon

"Free" trip to NTRPGCon 2013
($550.00 reimbursement if attended)
-Joan MacDonald

Player Copy of Hive of the Wasp Men 4 of 5
(Steve Winter module from previous Con)
-Don Chainsaw

Starships & Spacemen
-John Adams

Great pics, John and Brian.  Do you guys mind if I snag them for my Facebook album (with proper credit, of course)?

Bracton wrote:Great pictures, John.  Thanks for posting them.  All I can say is, there is no way I am missing NTRPGCon next year.  And congratulations to Doug and Mike for yet again putting on the premier old school game convention in the country.  I don't know how you manage to keep topping yourselves every year, but you do.

We missed you, Mark.  How was your nephew's celebration?

I don't think it was in shrink, I think Mike just got carried away

Echohawk wrote:

Badmike wrote:Castle Zagyg - shrink (signed by Jeff Talanian)

I hope this isn't a stupid question, but how can something in shrink be signed? Was it signed before being wrapped, or is the shrink itself signed somehow?

Sometimes items will be signed, then shrinked (especially in the case of Castle Zagyg, in which some copies were shrinked and others weren't).  But in this case I might have been mistaken.

Mike B.

Fear & Loathing in The Big D
Hard to believe that this was the fourth time that I attended The North Texas Role Playing Gaming Convention, otherwise known as NTRPGCon, NTRPGC, or simply NorTex. As the latter is the easiest, I opt for it.

Getting there was like a day in Purgatory, and not the one in the cool western/horror thing. We trooped aboard our shiny Embraer and sat; and then we all got back up, collected our stuff and trooped off the plane. Wow! Did they beam me to Dallas? Wait! That's CVG, right where I started from. It seems Dallas was experiencing a rain shower and the airport was closed. Check back in one hour. One hour-nope; another half-hour and we all troop back onto the plane and take off. The pilot announces that our route is going to take us to west bejeebers, way out of the way, then we would fool the rain and approach from the West. Oooh, good plan if it had worked. We ended up coming into Dallas from the accustomed direction after all, in the middle of a thunder storm and the ramps were all full from the chaotic day; then one opened up and we moved forward when more lightning flashed and they closed the ramps. We were 35 yards from gate, staring at it for another hour; total delay on ground in Dallas? 1:40.

The hotel was a Keystone Kops fire drill. All the canceled and delayed flights had stranded people everywhere; at 3 AM there were still six in line in the lobby. Of course I was in the computer, but the paperwork was absent on our room ("our" being me and Frank, with whom I've roomed at many a con for many years) so I charmed her into a keycard anyway and promised to make all right in the morning. I am suspicious, however, that the nine people in line behind me might have had more to do with it than my Char rating.  After a bunch of us had arrived, they took us to an IHOP for sustenance. All's well that ends well. Goodbye, Wednesday, Child of Woe.

Thursday was Take it Easy on the Old Guys in the morning, then we all went out for lunch at the Texas land & Cattle joint we ate at the first year. Great meal. That afternoon we had the celebrity game for this year's charity organization. The lineup featured Sandy Petersen, Jennell Jaquays, Jim Ward, Frank Mentzer, Steve Winter, me and two others. Zach (nogrod online) got his for the high bid for the permanent seat; others bought $10 raffle tickets for an hour of fun and humiliation with us. Con Master Doug wrote up a scenario for 1E (eek!) and gave most of us real low-level pukes for characters, including Jennell playing some really intensely annoying half-orc 6'6" clerical type who kept wanting to give anything away as a tithe, Zach was a low level dwarf, Sandy Peterson (who turned out to be one of the most fun people I have ever played with, ever) was a chaotic hobbit thief, Frank was some sort of (must have been) Lawful Annoying with some sort of Germanic accent and a strange fondness for horse apples, and for the life of me, I really don't remember who was who for the rest, as I will explain later.

He gave most of us some really twisted quirks. You will have to watch the video when it is posted to get in on those. If he wasn't such a great guy, I would be really ticked for the one he gave me. With youngsters in the room, we couldn't do a hell of a lot with it, not to mention that it was far more bizarre than the one he gave Jennell: does not need to drink water. Hunh? A half-orc camel?

When the adventure involved a 40 mile horse ride, us shorties squawked. As we were being outfitted from the King's stables, I innocently asked Doug if they surely must have some big wicker panniers that they fasten on each side of a horse to carry stuff? When he said sure, I informed him that I was climbing into one, Sandy was hopping into the other, and the dwarf (Zach) was "…steering the horse." As a 4'3" gnome illusionist (I had taken whiskey and had no intention of dying sober in this madcap quest) with no useful spells beyond Light and Spray, I rarely left the basket the rest of the adventure, preferring to peek over the rim and draw no attention to my pitiful self while the party was dealing with goblins with bad manners and bad attitudes, and worse things later yet. I think I may have contributed two useful spells the whole expedition.

Jim played a spell-caster of some sort that really needled the poor victims in the rotating seat (they were playing some 6'11" juggernaut—badly). The rest of the time I was either laughing so hard at what was going on or whispering with the other two shorties figuring out how we could be of use while staying well out of harm's way. Somehow we did what we set out to do, successfully, and all ended well with no PC deaths. We also had a great time, and all for a good cause. Gamer's Bliss.

One of the great traditions being carried on has to do with names. A number of us do it in conscious imitation of our friend Gary, and it is not unique to him. There was no "Mr." at any table Gary played at, and that applied to game cons as well. NorTex does a great job of capturing that informality that exists between a band of brothers and sisters. None of the guests are the kind to stand on formality; we all know each to one degree or another and share the mystical/magical feeling that exists at a good con.

NorTex is a Role Playing Con; that said they have embraced the Open Gaming model that allows and encourages spontaneous games to spring up, and spring up they did. I saw a couple of Epic OGRE minis games, Allen Grohe's Aliens table is a gem , and boardgames were in evidence. I am the cause; I infected the once-pure con with Circus Maximus, which had a big presence this year.

I ran the finals for ten chariots; I had four youngsters at the table-- which I love to see—they are the ones that will come play with us in the home some day. It was a great race on a special track that is 44 squares more around on each lap. At the end there was only one chariot un-flipped, and Place and Show went to two dragged drivers that flipped on the final curve. The mob in Rome went home happy.

Steve Marsh brought all of the Guests swords. A couple were real, a couple were carbon fiber of some sort and being early, I got the wooden cutlass. I had all the other Guests sign it, and I'll hang it in sight to remind myself to keep working on my dwarven pirate opus. Doug is sending it to me; I don't think TSA would find it nearly as funny as we did.
The venue had nice rooms, good areas to game in, a nice outdoor area around a nice pool, and that is the end of the nice list. The restaurant was a joke. Their serving hours were bizarre. The menu was very small and unimaginative. On my last morning they couldn't even get my  English muffin to me warm, it was stone cold. Everything about the restaurant said "Don't come back", which is a shame. The two ladies I dealt with at the desk were great at the job and good people; the hotel did not fulfill requirements previously agreed to. To top it all off, they were in the middle of mud jungle of massive highway work; you almost needed an SUV to get off the street. But, hey, it's the people that make the con. NorTex was great.

I sincerely hope that the individual that found my cigar case and did not turn it in is struck in the head whilst outdoors by a two hundred pound block of frozen lavatory waste accidentally falling out of a huge military transport that just happens to be flying over after a twelve hour flight.

Ran my new Snakeriders adventure twice; one was a TPK. There were two deaths in the other adventure. I have found that when I run the same adventure more than once, even though each groups plays it differently, I have trouble sorting out exact sequences of who did what. Giant caimans chewed up several PCs; several others had serious hassles with frogs the size of hippos. Giant carnivorous apes threatened both parties. One party went overland through the jungle, the other poled up the Aradondo River on a raft they built, pulling an extra behind "for the loot"—nothing like the smell of greedy, optimistic PCs in the morning—the scent of TPK.

Lessons learned: 1. Don't climb trees to be on watch in Giant Carnivorous (and arboreal) Apes' territory and fall asleep. If you do, on a protein-poor island as you had already ascertained, don't get too upset when the party determines your fate when they find you missing in the morning by poking through G-C Ape scat. 2. Don't look at the eyes of a dumok. If you should, and fail to save, you too will soon become scat. 2a. Don't go blundering about for hours in the dark making noise and then be surprised when greeted with a shower of tiny darts. 3. When dealing with gnats, don't be surprised when your shotgun blast brings the neighbors. See 2 above

Question Still Unanswered: What makes different parties want to skin a 20' snake they just killed?

One of the wonderful things about NorTex is the chance to sit and chat with new friends about really odd things in odd places around the venue. This year Erol Otus was there, Jeff Dee was there, Dave "Deisel" LaForce was there and Jennell Jaquays was there. Talk about some art talent—wow!

Frank, Jim and I did a seminar/Q&A thing about the old days as well as where we are going with Eldritch.

An hour after that ended, my new friend Michael Curtis, winner of last year's 3 Castles Award for Dungeon Alphabet, and I did a seminar on Gonzo Gaming. Never let the rules get in the way of the fun. Who says something has to happen the same every time? The exception proves the rule. Its my world and that's the way it works. It works that way because I said so. About trusting your DM to provide a good time and not screw you. About trusting that your players will try to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate your Grand Design because that is what good players are supposed to do. Most importantly, it is to never lose sight of the Story that you all are helping to create and write as you go along. I hope Michael had as much fun as I did and I hope to do one with him again sometime.

I had the distinct pleasure to sit in on one of Jim Ward's games. I think I know why Jim has the reputation for TPKs, or at least I have a hypothesis. Something Jims does, or a combination of things Jim does, causes the collective consciousness of his players to drop 35 IQ points and do really dumb things. I love listening to Jim; his kindly manner, his concerned demeanor and expressive face all combine to make PCs' brains dribble right out of their ears. A case in point would be the game I came up on: a table full of players versus a horde of aliens (100+) that they are blasting to bits in chunks. However, they take radiation every round, except for the guy that got into a suit. Still they blast away, killing six and eight at a time, but still taking radiation. I look at my watch and see only 34 minutes before we have our seminar, and all players are alive. How could I doubt Jim? In the next 32 minutes all but one dies; the last guy mutates into some horrible thing with no mind—I think it was a Tea Bagger, or maybe not. Then I found out what fearsome alien beasties they had succumbed to: slugs that they could have crawled away from on their knees! Dribble, dribble…

I got to do a little time travel with Cimmerian when he brought out his mint, un-punched copy of William the Conqueror—1066. We tried to get in a game and could not shoehorn it in. Maybe next time.

To make my weekend extra tasty, my son was in Dallas that weekend so we had some most tasty BBQ and watched most of Croatia v. Ireland whilst sipping a Summer Shandy. From there he ran me to DFW and I had a smooth and uneventful flight home.

NorTex is a great con for a number of reasons, not the least being that Doug assembles a magnificent array of old timers and Old Schoolers while not neglecting other tastes and flavors. It is sort of a "boutique con", and not by design, but evolution. It grows about 20% every year and more kinds of gaming are breaking out. After all, don't all of us that go to cons play different kinds of "our games"? I know I do and will continue to do so at NorTex as long as they will have me. Thanks for having me, Doug. Thanks to all the attendees who always make me feel so welcome.

Before I post my own con recap, I'd like to thank a few people because I'm afraid I'll forget and not get around to it later.....

Thanks to all the special guests, of course.  The con would be a far less interesting animal without their presence.

Chris Cain, thanks so much for the assist at the auction. Looking back I have no clue how I could have done it solo.

Thanks John January, Zach Glazar, and Mike Carey for help setting up.  90-+ degrees and then a monsoon!  We got it done in time, though.

Thanks to Bill Meinhardt, Jeff Imrie and John Lile for finally making the auction legit.  $1350 for Greyhawk Reference Sheets shows that this little con is not messing around when it comes to RPG rarities.  Thanks John for donating the item because you took a chance that the big names at the con would bid the item up; Thanks to Bill and Jeff for getting into a battle there at the end to drive up the price, and for buying some of the higher priced items.

Thanks to everyone that offered to watch my booth when I had to deal with a problem or travel to the other side of the con.  Off the top of my head, I know that John January, Mike Carey, and Jason Braun watched it for awhile, anyone else I forgot I thank you also.

Thanks to everyone that played in my Thursday night B1 game.....Shaun Hibbs, Bill Barsh, Liz Stewart, Glen Hallstrom, Lars Larsen, Ian Wheat, and the couple whose names I can't find now....Bill you can go to hell for missing my game!  Just because Sandy Petersen asks you to spend the night and root through his collection is no reason to miss a game of B1!

Thanks to David Rhea for the awesome video feed. It looked great!!!

Thanks to Allan Grohe for explaining the Aliens game to my grandson, then letting him help put it up, and giving him an alien's figure as a reward. He'll surely be playing in a game in the years to come!

Thanks to everyone who donated something to the con...John Lile, Artisan Dice, Pat Wetmore, Jeff Talanian, Guy Fullerton, and many more (that I seem to have forgotten).

Thanks to Bill Barsh for donating profits from his version of POTVQ to the con.

Thanks to Bill Webb and Frog God Games (and his entire staff) for making NTRPG con one of only two cons they attend each year, and the site of their annual meeting from here on out.  We love being attached to Bill and his great game company.

Thanks to Doug Rhea for hosting this and letting me be such an essential cog in the machine....it's been a lifelong dream to help run/host a con and I get to do the best old school con in the US every year now, how cool is that.

Thanks to everyone that helped us break down and pack up the con in record time!  I can't remember all the faces but I think I saw Charlie, Martin Britt, John Lile, John January, Ryan Simm, and others hauling stuff, if I forgot you let me know and I'll edit your name in here. There was so much help we got everyone in the truck and ready to go in about 2 hours, amazing.

Thanks to everyone who bought raffle tickets, it helps support the con, but we were $500 less than last year (which puzzles me, the prizes are simply amazing, I'll try to get the word out even more for next year). Buying multiple tickets pays off, ask Lucyjoyce, Grodog, Nogrod, JohnGaunt, Leadjunkie and Mike Cary who won multiple items in the raffle.

Anyone else I forgot?  Let me know!

Mike B.

Bracton wrote:...  But I do think I need to make sure they understand going forward that the first weekend of June is sacrosanct....

Please don't make this mistake ...

it's NOT the first weekend of June, it's the first THURSDAY of June every year.

So sometimes that is the first weekend, and sometime it's the second weekend ie: this year it was the second weekend since June 1st was on a Friday.

If you start marking the first weekend of every year, you might miss one !

Got it -- the first THURSDAY of June.  Course, I may just set aside the whole month, just to be on the safe side.