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Post by grodog on Mar 28, 2020 11:43:36 GMT -5
Our Greyhawk seminar recording from last night is split into two parts: - part 1 @ www.twitch.tv/videos/577105210- part 2 @ www.twitch.tv/videos/577184807The prize winners were (based on my notes, so the usernames/etc. may not be 100% accurate): Donated by GreyhawkOnline and the Oerth Journal: 1. Oerth Journal 32 print copy #1: won by Shade Mage 2. Oerth Journal 32 print copy #2: won by Eddy Ragnarok Donated by Bryan Blumklotz: 3. Custom heraldry design of winner's choice: won by Asher Donated by Gabor "Melan" Lux: 4. OSR bundle #1: complete set of Echoes from Fomalhaut zine #1-6, Barbarian King, Lost Valley of Kishar, Nocturnal Table, Castle Xyntillan: won by Azure Liz Cerulia (I really mangled this one, I think, sorry!) Donated by Black Blade Publishing and Chaotic Henchmen Productions: 5. OSR Bundle #2: OSRIC (AD&D retro-clone, brand-new 3rd printing), 1 11"x17" double-sided graph pad (6 and 5 squares per inch), 1 8.5"x11" double-sided graph pad (6 and 5 squares per inch), 1 11"x17" double-sided dual-layered hex pad (Wilderlands and Greyhawk sized hexes), 1 8.5"x11" three-hole drilled layered campaign hex pad (three-layer WG5-style hex and Wilderlands-style two-layer hex), F4 Withered Crag by Guy Fullerton (Chaotic Henchmen), C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, S2 White Plume Mountain, U1-3 The Saltmarsh Series: won by ParaJosh Donated by Black Blade, Three Line Studio (Rob Kuntz), and TLB Games (Paul Stormberg): 6. Greyhawk Bundle #1 = Rob Kuntz Books: El Raja Key Archive Standard Edition with K1 Sunken City (DVD or USB version for archive), Bottle City (Black Blade edition), Dark Druids (Chaotic Henchmen edition), WG5 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure: won by Zudrak Donated by Allan Grohe and Black Blade Publishing: 7. Greyhawk Bundle #2 - Gary Gygax Books: complete set of Gord the Rogue novels (2 from TSR, 5 from New Infinities Productions), G1-3 Against the Giants, S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth: won by Celestian Congratulations to all of the winners, and many thanks to the donors who keep Greyhawk and old-school gaming alive at our tables! Allan.
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 30, 2020 13:16:40 GMT -5
I was impressed with how much was there was for virtual Gary Con over the weekend. Gene's seminar was Thursday, Allan's was Friday, and on Saturday I got to play "Haunted Keep" with Paul Stormberg and "The Blight of Moonglow Glade" with Jon Hook, and yesterday I got to watch "The Trouble at Loch Jineeva" DMed by Jeff Talanian with Luke Gygax as one of the players. There is also a making of Gaxmoor seminar I want to watch. For those of you who contributed: THANKS! We made the best of a bad situation and got in some gaming-related fun this weekend!
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 30, 2020 16:07:13 GMT -5
This whole atmosphere of the last couple of weeks is absolutely not anything that I planned on. I really wanted to find out what was going on. I literally feel mugged. Hopefully a second wind will reinvigorate my sails. Right now I'm in the midst of stress balls almost every day so I really need a vacation.
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Post by grodog on Mar 30, 2020 17:12:18 GMT -5
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Post by Scott on Mar 30, 2020 18:36:00 GMT -5
This whole atmosphere of the last couple of weeks is absolutely not anything that I planned on. I really wanted to find out what was going on. I literally feel mugged. Hopefully a second wind will reinvigorate my sails. Right now I'm in the midst of stress balls almost every day so I really need a vacation. I was supposed to be on vacation right now, but had to cancel it. And I sure could use one. Liana took the vacation days she had scheduled. She definitely needed the break, but she'll be back at the hospital soon enough and I know that stresses her out. I couldn't imagine being back in Brooklyn now. You could probably find Sasquatch before you could manage social distancing.
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Post by Scott on Mar 30, 2020 18:43:47 GMT -5
I was impressed with how much was there was for virtual Gary Con over the weekend. Gene's seminar was Thursday, Allan's was Friday, and on Saturday I got to play "Haunted Keep" with Paul Stormberg and "The Blight of Moonglow Glade" with Jon Hook, and yesterday I got to watch "The Trouble at Loch Jineeva" DMed by Jeff Talanian with Luke Gygax as one of the players. There is also a making of Gaxmoor seminar I want to watch. For those of you who contributed: THANKS! We made the best of a bad situation and got in some gaming-related fun this weekend! Yeah, I had a busy few days, but I know there was a lot of cool content. I caught Gene's seminar and watched the same Loch Jineeva game, and I'm planning on watching the Greyhawk and Gaxmoor recordings. I would have liked to have gotten into a game. It's been forever since I played a character.
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 30, 2020 22:33:43 GMT -5
The weird thing, speaking of "vacations", is my mood for alcohol which I at least have a glass a week has reached 0% and usually when I'm not drinking I get creative. But I'm serious when I say I can't get in the mood. Its almost like I'm looking from the outside in these days.
My younger daughter said I should make the seminar into a regular half hour show but stem out with subjects from my blog with the art popped up to talk over. That actually sounds kind of cool. I wish I had thought of that. Maybe commentary on posts after the different series accumulate. Then externalize and read excerpts of fiction?
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 31, 2020 10:11:56 GMT -5
The "Gene Show" sounds like a good idea. You probably have the time to do it now, and maybe it will help you get your creativity back. It's a stressful time, but I think we all need projects to focus on now more than ever just to stay sane. I can't just focus on Coronavirus updates all day every day anymore... I'm doing what I'm supposed to with physical distancing and so on, but I need other things to think about. A friend of mine who is a nurse practitioner is hoping this will go away by June, but no one knows for sure. So we could all be doing this isolation thing for a very long time. I was thinking businesses would start to re-open in May, but now I'm mentally preparing for it to possibly be longer than that. If I run out of alcohol, I'll probably sleep better! I think drinking wine at night before bed is contributing to my insomnia...
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 31, 2020 14:25:52 GMT -5
This whole thing is like a flashback to when I couldn't go to that first convention (in 1990 or so) because of being force marched to a lawful evil relatives' wedding by my lawful good significant other. There is this horrible "what now" feeling that I have. Brian Blume died. I saw that. I wasn't even in the mood to feel anything good or bad. I don't know any of these people. I suppose we have to look at his good side but seriously, I don't think it helps D&D at all by looking the other way too too much. We have to at least say he is going to purgatory.... Seriously, Blume was there for original TSR. He was enthusiastic but was a mixed results type designer. So at the end of the day he has to be recognized for probably ruining D&D with overwhelming push for Dragonlance (And the sketchy "Marvel" game.). You can't just walk that back its a big mess that caused harm to people's campaigns. Validating Blume is hard for fans. I'm sure if there was a hard retrospective that there might be something good in there besides Gary-stilted projects like BOOT HILL, ELDRITCH WIZARDRY and WARRIORS OF MARS.
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Post by GRWelsh on Apr 1, 2020 7:46:14 GMT -5
If I have to say something nice about Brian Blume, I suppose I can say he invented the iconic character VECNA, whose name was an anagram of VANCE, who was EGG's favorite author and my favorite as well. The Eye and Hand of Vecna are some of the coolest artifacts ever created for the game. In his younger years, at least, Blume was legitimately a gamer, and seemed to want to help more than to grab power. Original D&D was printed with Blume's money, and his investment helped TSR get off the ground. Without hindsight, consider how this would have been a very risky investment to make at the time... Possibly even seen as throwing money away. $2,000 in 1973 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $11,652.16 in 2020. So, he deserves credit there as well. It is mostly in later years when TSR was grossing millions that the trouble occurred. They went from $300,000 in revenues in 1976 to $12.9 million in revenues in 1981. When I think of Brian Blume, I think of sayings like "A little money helps a lot, but a lot of money ruins everything."
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Post by Zenopus on Apr 1, 2020 22:39:32 GMT -5
... on Saturday I got to play "Haunted Keep" with Paul Stormberg and "The Blight of Moonglow Glade" with Jon Hook... Hey, I was in that game with you! I was the one playing with my kids who ran Black Dougal and Morgan Ironwolf. It was a great experience for them, and I had fun too. I'm toying with continuing the Haunted Keep adventure, making up the lower levels myself, since they seemed to like the pre-gens a lot. They already have somewhat of a "bullpen" of characters already, so it's just another one each. And I also played in a game with Jon Hook on Sunday night! He ran the sample adventure from the new Alien RPG, which is called "Hope's Last Day" and is a prequel to the movie Aliens. It's set in Hadley's Hope, the colony that the marines in Aliens investigate, right when everything goes bad. I was a synthetic named Holroyd. One of the best sessions I played in at Virtual Gary Con. Z
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Post by geneweigel on Apr 1, 2020 23:35:45 GMT -5
This still pisses me off that this whole thing just imploded. Couldn't it have gone down during some horrible event from the past?
Heh. The last few weddings that I attended? Ha! I wish.
What an odd thing this whole thing is. I hope no one got really burned over this virus shit for that weekend.
Worst thing for me is that I might have to have my books shipped back to me at some point if there is no opportunity to sell. I really thought it was going to be somewhat eventful in that regard but what a dud this whole thing has been so far. Totally weird.
When all this shit blows over, I'm thinking about running online regularly but right now it ain't happening. I can't even get shit done at home right now. Too much stress and reviewing everything.
My trip to the store earlier was like living on the moon and going out to collect samples.
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Post by GRWelsh on Apr 6, 2020 9:12:24 GMT -5
... on Saturday I got to play "Haunted Keep" with Paul Stormberg and "The Blight of Moonglow Glade" with Jon Hook... Hey, I was in that game with you! I was the one playing with my kids who ran Black Dougal and Morgan Ironwolf. It was a great experience for them, and I had fun too. I'm toying with continuing the Haunted Keep adventure, making up the lower levels myself, since they seemed to like the pre-gens a lot. They already have somewhat of a "bullpen" of characters already, so it's just another one each. And I also played in a game with Jon Hook on Sunday night! He ran the sample adventure from the new Alien RPG, which is called "Hope's Last Day" and is a prequel to the movie Aliens. It's set in Hadley's Hope, the colony that the marines in Aliens investigate, right when everything goes bad. I was a synthetic named Holroyd. One of the best sessions I played in at Virtual Gary Con. Z Yes, "Haunted Keep" was a fun game. I thought it was nice that everyone let the kids take the lead. Paul did a good job of expanding on it in a way that was consistent with the original Moldvay material. I haven't played the ALIEN RPG yet, but did listen to a game session of it on a recent MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY podcast and it really captured the feeling of the movies.
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