After wandering to wakefulness at around 4:00 in the morning (would have been 3:00 back home!), I finally gave up on sleep and resolved to begin my day with a clear head and a cup of Lapsang Souchong. Nice face full of wood smoke and happiness. I hadn’t had a chance to test it, but my new little travel tea kettle worked beautifully.
I eased into my first day of the con. Though events were starting at 8:00, my primary interest for Day One was the exhibit hall, which opened two hours later. Also, given the COVIDs, I didn’t want to risk the traditionally packed opening ceremony shtick and gave it an extra half an hour or so. I took my video camera and started recording immediately as I was leaving the hotel via one of the skywalks over toward the convention center. No one seemed to give me much thought as they maneuvered around me or trudged in my wake, but I did find it interesting that conversations would die as people ventured near, so as not to disrupt the production I assume. Or be caught on tape being an insufferable nerd or something.
All in all,, folks were terribly polite.
And masked! And largely keeping their distance. This was – and still is – my biggest concern about this trip. Beyond a mask mandate and a general attempt to space tables further apart, the convention has taken no extraordinary measures toward crowd control or health and safety. The up side (depending on whether you sit on the convention board, that is) is that the crowds are significantly diminished per their expectations – and they had planned to limit capacity to half of the previous in-person convention. Word is, it’s nowhere close. Although that hardly means that the crowd is small – we’re still probably talking between 15 and 20K, but the immensity of the convention halls and additional spacing allows for much greater freedom of movement than I was given to expect going in. And like I said, the attendees are generally taking the mask thing very seriously.
That immensity, by the way, made my first day at Gen Con a truly surreal experience. I was floored by the expanse filled with gaming tables, walls so far away that I could barely register them as such. I spent hours wandering the dealer hall, stopping occasionally to snap a few photos, purchase some gifts for my gamers, and visiting with industry folks I’ve known for years but never met in person. Truly, I only stopped when I did because I was starving and my feet had registered a complaint with home office.
After a brief nap, some lovely thai food, another brief nap… I geared up for my first game of the con. And by geared up, I really just meant a bag of dice, as I wasn’t running this one.
The game was Deadlands Reloaded, and my character was a great explore / big game hunter named Rufus who talked through his mustaches and acted absolutely fearless in the face of exploding dice. The best part, I got to game with the Honorable Peter Hildreth, my guide on this sojourn to Indianapolis, and my friend Dan from the Carpe GM podcast. Dan found out I was going to Gen Con and made the trek from St. Louis – admittedly a less harrowing trip than ours – to hang out. We’d visited many times over the past six or seven years and used to have regular rap sessions over Google Hangouts, recorded bits for each other’s shows, shared industry information and guest contacts, and even collaborated on some jams! But this was our first face-to-face meet ever. And sharing a game table was a fantastic way to start the weekend.
It was midnight before I turned in, still riding high just a bit from the Day One experience.