GamerNation Con is next up on my look at the past few weeks of conventions in reverse order. Hosted by d20Radio and the creators of the Order 66 podcast, GN Con is up to its 6th year, which is pretty amazing and continues to draw people from around the world - Australia, Norway, Canada, the US, and probably others I’m overlooking at the moment. At least one or more of the regulars skipped it due to Star Wars Celebration the following week, which from a health standpoint probably would have been a good idea for me as well…
I attended just Friday afternoon through Sunday this time around. I ended up running just a single Star Wars RPG session, with the rest of the time taken up with playing for a change. The guests of honor were author Michael Witwer and Andy Hurley, drummer for Fall Out Boy and long time Order 66 podcast listener. As usual there were a several gaming/FFG freelancers around like myself and Keith Kappel, but there is actually a growing number of freelancers from people attending this particular con over the years.
GN Con’s theme this year was superheroes, and there was wide variety of superhero offering using the Genesys system. Genesys was seemingly everywhere, with attendees showing a lot of creativity. I played in GM Chris’ Familiar setting, where every PC was a familar of a couple of wizards, who of course needed rescuing by the menagerie of creatures. It was challenging in that the familiars were largely normal animals with normal stats and a couple of unusual magic related powers each.
Michael Witwer hosted a very interesting panel on his book D&D Art and Arcana. It’s a history book of D&D art and it is very well done. I recommend it for any D&D fan, and you can usually find it at Barnes & Noble (special red cover edition) or Amazon. There is a special edition box set that has some fun extras, especially if you like the Tomb of Horrors adventure.
Michael also ran a couple of sessions of the original d6 Star Wars RPG adventure Starfall. It happened to be the first complete adventure I ran as well, back in the day. Running the original rules always shows how much RPGs have developed since 1987. The round sequence alone is far more streamlined.
GNCon 7 will be next year, using a spy theme for fairly obvious reasons…
I was remiss in noting last week that Allies and Adversaries is not only available now in stores, there is a new preview on the FFG website. I’ll discuss more in a future post. Rise of the Separatists, while a few copies were available at Celebration, is actually to be released on May 9.