Running 13th Age at Emerald City ComicCon

27 Feb

13th Age Escalation Edition v6I’ll be joining fellow Game Masters Ash Law, Eric Franklin, Cail Musick-Slater and Daniel Splitter to run demo sessions of 13th Age, the upcoming pen-and-paper fantasy roleplaying game, at Emerald City ComicCon this weekend.

Gamerati is kindly giving us table space. My shift is on Sunday, but you pretty much can’t go wrong with this lineup, so drop by anytime.

Also! 13th Age artist Aaron McConnell will be selling prints and doing sketches in Artist’s Alley, Table 2617 on Level 4 Show Floor.

Hope to see you there!

Locked in for Gen Con Indy 2013

5 Feb

Gen Con 2013Huzzah! I’ve purchased my Gen Con pass and booked my hotel.

Last year I told myself that any amount of money was worth NOT staying way out by the airport, and by gum, I stuck to it. I’ll be at the Marriott, a stone’s throw away from the convention center.

In my experience at least, here’s what happens when you’re at Gen Con on business and you stay out by the airport. You spend your morning in your hotel room, on your laptop, coordinating things by email — because all kinds of crap comes up first thing in the morning, and if you’re not onsite to handle it in person, you have to handle it remotely. You can’t go offline for 45 minutes while you putter along in rush hour traffic.*

Once everything’s settled down for the moment you head out for the con. You eventually make it downtown, where you search for parking. You hike to the convention center. Maybe you stay there. Or maybe something important that you arranged to be shipped to the hotel arrives late, and you have to go all the way back. Because your stuff is being shipped not to the convention center, but a spot miles and miles away. Repeat every day.

And the kicker last year was that all the money I spent on a rental car and parking totaled to as much as, if not more than, what I would have spent if I’d gotten a pricey downtown hotel. Bah.

I’m really looking forward to just sauntering across the street this year, coffee in hand. Good times.

*Oh, also? Don’t launch a Kickstarter campaign the first day of Gen Con. Seriously.

Hillfolk: sneak peek at the art for Secret of Warlock Mountain

28 Jan

ImageRobin D. Laws posted a status update on his Hillfolk tabletop roleplaying game today. Exciting enough, but I was thrilled to see that he included an image that I described to him in an email weeks (months?) ago: the illustration for my Series Pitch “Secret of Warlock Mountain”.

See, in Hillfolk you and your group play characters in an ongoing dramatic series, such as The Sopranos, or Carnivale. The default setting is an Iron Age drama of tribal conflict, but as part of Robin’s recent Kickstarter for the game, he invited people to write “series pitches” for other dramas that gaming groups could choose to play out. For my pitch I imagined a 1960s televisions series that would be a prequel to one of my favorite movies as a kid. (It’s about an orphaned brother and sister with mysterious psychic powers and a map in a metal case. You know the one.)

I don’t want to give away too much about the pitch, so I’ll stop there. Suffice to say that ”Secret of Warlock Mountain” got accepted into the game’s companion book Blood On The Snow, and I responded to Robin’s request for an art brief with a detailed description of the image in my head. I even included a link to a reference photo I found showing “ordinary Joe” type young men circa 1965.

And look! Here it is, in living color by Jonathan Wyke. Very neat.

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