Playing Around at Stellarcon
Stellarcon seemed small to me, but maybe that was just the overtaxed elevators.
Downtown High Point is not a great place for a con. No good dinner restaurants in walking distance and Elm Street Café, the only good lunch place, closed on Sunday. I completely failed to find a place to buy wine, which meant at one point Saturday night I actually drank a Miller lite. I had forgotten how it doesn't taste even a little like beer.
Food at the Raddison restaurant was just OK, and as is typical for a hotel restaurant, was overpriced for what you got. Joys of a captive market.
For a Raddison, which should be middling higher end, my room seemed a little shabby. The weird internet appliance (in-room DSL?) didn't work. No reliable wireless except in the lobby, even though I got good signal in the conference rooms on the same floor. It was a signal that wouldn't connect.
But as far as I'm concerned, it could have been called Staffordcon. Since there weren't dozens of other Glorantha or Pendragon fans there and none of "inner circle" Greg usually spends lots of time with at the con, I got to monopolize quite a bit of his time. I played in both of his Pendragon sessions where I got to work on my "fake Gascon accent" for Sir Hervé de Gascon, a Salisbury knight who has never been to Gascony. He nearly died in the Adventure of the Best Wine in the World, but killed a 15' tall giant with two blows and helped rescue Arthur himself from a Saxon sorceress in the Adventure Whose Name I Never Got but was Probably of the Appearing Castle with the Evil Garden.
Saturday night there was nothing going on and I didn't have enough of the right players to run the scenario I had started designing, tentatively called I Saw Final Illumination II. So Greg and I got a game of Carcasonne together, pictured here. Got my ass royally kicked in that, because I put all my resources into one city, which I never got lucky enough to complete.
At the end of the con, I got to play some list method HeroQuest that Greg ran, where everyone cooperated on coming up with the setting and the problem. My character ended up being a 40-is Dara Happan widow secretly running the Raibanth chapter of the Nathan Veil Burners, an underground organization that helps abused and dominated Dara Happan women escape their husbands. Or kill their abusers. Unfortunately, after some excellent early progress by my Hero's son in finding a very important lost Celestiomantic device, he proved less than competent in dealing with larcenous Buserian priests.
