Origins 2009
Jul. 14th, 2009 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jl8eBeen a while since I posted here. I blame Facebook. It's so much easier to toss out a quick status update than to write something that feels worth posting to LJ.
(This will be lacking in detail, since I don't have any notes beyond my event schedule. If I played something I didn't write down, I may not remember.)
I set out for Origins the day before, spending the night at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladymondegreen and akawil's place, which is conveniently right by the PATH to Newark.
Made my flight easily, picked up my hotel key, went to pick up my badge...
Oops. They didn't have it. Fortunately, after waiting an hour on the customer service line, they were able to find me in the system.
I looked through the event catalog, registered for a bunch of events (preregistration? Is that a useful idea?), ate food (probably at the North Market, where I try to eat all of my meals at Origins while it's open.), visitied the Board Room where I bought a copy of Dominion Intrigue and saw my first ever Pepsi bottle with this year's summer promotional caps (free Rock Band tracks!), and made my first event:
D&D 4th edition. Turned out to be a variant setting with at least one new class, which I ended up playing -- a paladinesque striker who uses firearms. It would've been nice if they'd been able to provide me with my powers earlier than right before the first real fight.
The scenario itself was kind of meh, but I finally got to play 4th ed, and I like it.
Thursday:
I had a noon game of InSpectres in space (an indie ghostbustersesque RPG). I came up with a Spock-esque character, who ended up being the semi-sane one in a crew of lunatics and idiots, trying to hold things together while oozing sarcasm from every pore.
Later, I tried to play Cosmic, but it was full so I drifted into Andy Looney vs everybody, where I beat him and the event-runner in one out of two games of Chrononauts.
Next up was Dread, a horror game using Jenga as a resolution mechanism. (If you need to do something, pull from the tower. If you fail, you die.) At some point, one of the players had to make six pulls from an already-rickety tower to save himself and the rest of the party. Or he could've left us to our own devices. He pulled. It didn't fall. In fact, the tower never fell until somebody took it down in a noble sacrifice. I have photos of that tower. It's scary.
I should think about running Dread sometime. I have the book, if not a Jenga set.
If I played anything else thursday, I forget what. It might have been the night I got persuaded to sit in in a game of Werewolf, but I don't remember.
Friday:
Got to play Cosmic in the morning, Pillars of the Earth in the afternoon (a fun game in the Agricola genre, but not one I'm necessarily going to get for myself), and the uberchrononauts tournament in the evening.
I think this was the day I tried the new Looney Labs game: Are You the Traitor. It's a smaller, quicker game in the Werewolf genre, which I find to be closer to being a game rather than a social activity than Werewolf is. When the Lab closed, we moved to the boardgame room and played some more, including a very odd run where I and one of the other players were the wizards most rounds, and one of us was every round.
Saturday:
I played in the chrononauts tournament in the morning, and the XXth Icehouse Championships in the afternoon. I continued my record of not winning a single game in the qualifiers since I won the whole thing in 2006.
I have many photos of the tournament which I shall link to later.
I don't know what, if anything, I played afterward. I may have gone to the Board Room and actually played something there. (I only did so once, making the ribon a bad investment).
Afterwards, I think the AYTT? I described above happened.
Sunday:
Not a clue what, if anything, I played. I ended up helping the mob of Looney Labs folks do booth teardown, which is so much easier with twenty sets of hands than with about four. (At a Gencon a few years back, Zev, Paul, and I had the same early flight, and we managed to pack up the booth in about an hour, somehow. We may have had another helper or two, but that's it.)
All in all, a good con, with no significant low points other than my inability to operate the Board Room. I spent more time in the Looney Labs room this year, and played no Shadowfist. (The only event I was willing to play and had a deck for clashed with Icehouse.)
(This will be lacking in detail, since I don't have any notes beyond my event schedule. If I played something I didn't write down, I may not remember.)
I set out for Origins the day before, spending the night at
ladymondegreen and akawil's place, which is conveniently right by the PATH to Newark.Made my flight easily, picked up my hotel key, went to pick up my badge...
Oops. They didn't have it. Fortunately, after waiting an hour on the customer service line, they were able to find me in the system.
I looked through the event catalog, registered for a bunch of events (preregistration? Is that a useful idea?), ate food (probably at the North Market, where I try to eat all of my meals at Origins while it's open.), visitied the Board Room where I bought a copy of Dominion Intrigue and saw my first ever Pepsi bottle with this year's summer promotional caps (free Rock Band tracks!), and made my first event:
D&D 4th edition. Turned out to be a variant setting with at least one new class, which I ended up playing -- a paladinesque striker who uses firearms. It would've been nice if they'd been able to provide me with my powers earlier than right before the first real fight.
The scenario itself was kind of meh, but I finally got to play 4th ed, and I like it.
Thursday:
I had a noon game of InSpectres in space (an indie ghostbustersesque RPG). I came up with a Spock-esque character, who ended up being the semi-sane one in a crew of lunatics and idiots, trying to hold things together while oozing sarcasm from every pore.
Later, I tried to play Cosmic, but it was full so I drifted into Andy Looney vs everybody, where I beat him and the event-runner in one out of two games of Chrononauts.
Next up was Dread, a horror game using Jenga as a resolution mechanism. (If you need to do something, pull from the tower. If you fail, you die.) At some point, one of the players had to make six pulls from an already-rickety tower to save himself and the rest of the party. Or he could've left us to our own devices. He pulled. It didn't fall. In fact, the tower never fell until somebody took it down in a noble sacrifice. I have photos of that tower. It's scary.
I should think about running Dread sometime. I have the book, if not a Jenga set.
If I played anything else thursday, I forget what. It might have been the night I got persuaded to sit in in a game of Werewolf, but I don't remember.
Friday:
Got to play Cosmic in the morning, Pillars of the Earth in the afternoon (a fun game in the Agricola genre, but not one I'm necessarily going to get for myself), and the uberchrononauts tournament in the evening.
I think this was the day I tried the new Looney Labs game: Are You the Traitor. It's a smaller, quicker game in the Werewolf genre, which I find to be closer to being a game rather than a social activity than Werewolf is. When the Lab closed, we moved to the boardgame room and played some more, including a very odd run where I and one of the other players were the wizards most rounds, and one of us was every round.
Saturday:
I played in the chrononauts tournament in the morning, and the XXth Icehouse Championships in the afternoon. I continued my record of not winning a single game in the qualifiers since I won the whole thing in 2006.
I have many photos of the tournament which I shall link to later.
I don't know what, if anything, I played afterward. I may have gone to the Board Room and actually played something there. (I only did so once, making the ribon a bad investment).
Afterwards, I think the AYTT? I described above happened.
Sunday:
Not a clue what, if anything, I played. I ended up helping the mob of Looney Labs folks do booth teardown, which is so much easier with twenty sets of hands than with about four. (At a Gencon a few years back, Zev, Paul, and I had the same early flight, and we managed to pack up the booth in about an hour, somehow. We may have had another helper or two, but that's it.)
All in all, a good con, with no significant low points other than my inability to operate the Board Room. I spent more time in the Looney Labs room this year, and played no Shadowfist. (The only event I was willing to play and had a deck for clashed with Icehouse.)
