Minis, Gencon and True Dungeon
This has been a really good week for gaming. First, Reaper Mini is running a kickstarter that's nearly complete. At the Vampire Pledge level it's over 180 minis for $100 and there are add ons like awesome dragons, orcs, fire giants, and paints for reasonable prices! So many minis to paint! I'm really excited. I'll simply have to find the time for painting them. Before this kickstarter I never would've bought a large dragon for my D&D group since most unpainted ones would cost around $70 (available in the kickstarter for $10!). This kickstarter overlapped with Gencon and started crushing stretch goals once the con started, bringing the total count up to 180 minis. Counting addons I'm going to have over 250 minis to paint, some very large ones included. Did I mention I'm excited for this kickstarter? Because I am.
The second really good bit of gaming this week was GenCon. It was the first Gencon my group had been to (myself included) and we had so much fun! Before attending the con I had played D&D 4e, the first version of the D&D Next playtest and Mouseguard. At the con we got to play the latest playtest of D&D Next (DRAGON SORCERER WOOOOO!!), my first session of the Mistborn RPG (fun system, very RP heavy and quite a change from D&D), lots of True Dungeon, and bought copies of HackMaster & The Red Dragon Inn (box 2 since their full run of box 1 and 3 were stolen... seriously). We also got signatures from Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Alex Flagg & Ben McSweeney (the designer and the artist for the Mistborn RPG) and the creators of HackMaster. We didn't get a chance to swing by the mini painting area because there was simply too much to do. However I did see many pre-painted plastic minis going for crazy prices. I definitely thought I could do better and with 200+ minis on their way I plan to.
Going back to True Dungeon. Wow, that was more fun than I expected. Not knowing what to expect we signed up for 4 sessions. Giants Travail, Draco-Lich Undone Puzzle Oriented (2x) and Combat Oriented. The puzzles were really well done and interactive, it took all of us working together to solve them. For anyone who hasn't done it, think of the first time doing a raid in WoW. You have some sense of what will be involved from other people talking about it and once you go in you need to solve puzzles or kill things in a certain amount of time or you trigger the rage and take damage (push damage they call it). That said, once you know the solution to a puzzle, the second time through is less fun and the third time gets a little boring. When we do it again next year we'll make sure to run the combat version first, then the puzzle version in nightmare mode (more damage for failing and stricter DMs). Oh, and we were two groups behind the Wil Wheaton / Brandon Sanderson / Patrick Rothfuss / John Scalzi juggernaut group when we ran Saturday night. Just knowing that was exciting.
Outside the dungeon there were daily quests to complete in the TrueCraft area. While we overbooked dungeon runs we should've booked more TrueCraft days. The roaming quests changed every day, were fun and required some back and forth while the repeatable quests (Abjure, Enchant, Divine) were the same each day and became very repetitive very quickly. If you're a fan of the WoW Auction House you'll love the TD Token economy. People were buying, selling, and trading true craft tokens (aka, gear) in the common area so they'd get what they needed to upgrade to better purples. It truly is a multi year commitment to run.
Overall, I had an absolute blast at GenCon and plan to go back next year. I believe everyone in the group plans the same.
The second really good bit of gaming this week was GenCon. It was the first Gencon my group had been to (myself included) and we had so much fun! Before attending the con I had played D&D 4e, the first version of the D&D Next playtest and Mouseguard. At the con we got to play the latest playtest of D&D Next (DRAGON SORCERER WOOOOO!!), my first session of the Mistborn RPG (fun system, very RP heavy and quite a change from D&D), lots of True Dungeon, and bought copies of HackMaster & The Red Dragon Inn (box 2 since their full run of box 1 and 3 were stolen... seriously). We also got signatures from Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Alex Flagg & Ben McSweeney (the designer and the artist for the Mistborn RPG) and the creators of HackMaster. We didn't get a chance to swing by the mini painting area because there was simply too much to do. However I did see many pre-painted plastic minis going for crazy prices. I definitely thought I could do better and with 200+ minis on their way I plan to.
Going back to True Dungeon. Wow, that was more fun than I expected. Not knowing what to expect we signed up for 4 sessions. Giants Travail, Draco-Lich Undone Puzzle Oriented (2x) and Combat Oriented. The puzzles were really well done and interactive, it took all of us working together to solve them. For anyone who hasn't done it, think of the first time doing a raid in WoW. You have some sense of what will be involved from other people talking about it and once you go in you need to solve puzzles or kill things in a certain amount of time or you trigger the rage and take damage (push damage they call it). That said, once you know the solution to a puzzle, the second time through is less fun and the third time gets a little boring. When we do it again next year we'll make sure to run the combat version first, then the puzzle version in nightmare mode (more damage for failing and stricter DMs). Oh, and we were two groups behind the Wil Wheaton / Brandon Sanderson / Patrick Rothfuss / John Scalzi juggernaut group when we ran Saturday night. Just knowing that was exciting.
Outside the dungeon there were daily quests to complete in the TrueCraft area. While we overbooked dungeon runs we should've booked more TrueCraft days. The roaming quests changed every day, were fun and required some back and forth while the repeatable quests (Abjure, Enchant, Divine) were the same each day and became very repetitive very quickly. If you're a fan of the WoW Auction House you'll love the TD Token economy. People were buying, selling, and trading true craft tokens (aka, gear) in the common area so they'd get what they needed to upgrade to better purples. It truly is a multi year commitment to run.
Overall, I had an absolute blast at GenCon and plan to go back next year. I believe everyone in the group plans the same.
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