GamerNationCon: An Opportunity Missed...

If you follow me on Twitter (and haven't been chased away by all the cute critter retweets), then you probably saw that the past few days have had some major ups and downs for me.

For months, I'd been eagerly anticipating going to the first (and hopefully not only) GamerNationCon, or 3 Days of Gaming Goodness as it had also been called.  A big part of it was the opportunity to met folks from the d20 Radio forums, such as Wayne "Maarkeen" Basta and Kevin "Rikoshi" Frane amongst others.  The first blow was finding out that Ben "Cyril" Erikson couldn't make it down as his employer didn't approve his time-off request, though that itself had been preceded by the disappointment that his wife Nateal wouldn't make it due to the cost of plane tickets for them.

Well, this past Thursday, the Capital District of the semi-glorious state of New York got hammered with a major winter storm that forecasts had been saying "wouldn't be all that bad" up until the night before. Now, my flight was scheduled to head out Thursday morning and get me to Dallas in the afternoon.  So I was a bit upset to find that my flight had been cancelled, though I was able to rebook to a later flight that would have gotten me there in the late evening instead, but still there on Thursday so that I could enjoy the con and be there to run my two events.  Well, I show up at the airport, after driving through barely-cleared roads and spending 10 minutes trying to find a parking spot in the long-term parking lot, only to learn that my re-booked flight has also been cancelled, as had a bunch of other morning flights.  I tried just about every option I could think of, including seeing if they could get me to Little Rock that night, hoping that my friend Linda and her husband Mark wouldn't object to me catching a ride down to Dallas with them.  But the only way I was getting to Dallas would be through doing a lot of plane-hopping and overnight stays at either airport hotels or airports themselves, and without some extreme amounts of luck, I'd get there late evening on Saturday.  So yeah, not really worth the sheer volume of aggravation just to show up when the convention was pretty much over.  At least I've got a voucher for my flight that I can put towards the air fare of my trip to GenCon this August.

And from what I've seen on Twitter and heard from Linda, the 3DoGG was a blast, with some of the highlights being Jay "Ynnen" Little being made an Honorary Member of the Rebel Legion.  Part of the set-up to surprise him was that I was scheduled to co-host a seminar with him about "RPG Writing."  From what I've been told, he was quite surprised when a bunch of Rebel Legion folks came out and presented him with this plaque.  I really wanted to be there, as Jay Little is a very cool guy, but alas.

Rikoshi and one his friends also ran an Age of Rebellion module which I can only assume will be a blast to run/play given how much Linda was gushing about it when I talked with her last night.  It does require two GMs to run it, although a really good GM could probably handle the two separate tables that the adventure has.  Said GM will probably need a mental break afterwards though.

I'd been looking forward to running my Star Wars convention module "Tales of the Blue Zephyrs" at the convention.  I've run it a bunch of times, including as a pick-up at GenCon (which infamously was the only time the players got wiped out), and it's a pretty fun adventure, having started out under the Revised Core Rules then being converted to Saga Edition.  I also had a Dragon Age adventure, this being "Duty Unto Death" which was what Chris Pramas ran for Wil Wheaton and his crew on the "Table Top" web series, only I'd opted to create my own set of pre-gen characters.  And I'd plenty of folks looking forward to playing both of those.  But, thanks to the wonderful Northeast weather, those plans got scuttled.

As the Jedi adage goes, "we accept what we are given, we take what is offered."  I wasn't able to go to GamerNationCon, but I might just be able to pull it off for next year, and will probably adjust my plans to hopefully account for any weather issues so that I can avoid a repeat of this year's fiasco.