Gen Con 2025: The Way

I got on a plane to Indianapolis after three days of unrelenting anxiety with nights ranging from one to four hours of sleep. I normally prefer the road trip, but there were Reasons. 

Some of the anxiety was about the trip, but most of it was just my stupid life. Somehow I made it through the shoddy cardboard halls of an airport under construction (again) and shambled my way through two flights and a layover without freaking out or completely losing consciousness. I drifted off occasionally and jolted back to reality when I forgot where I was and thought I was falling asleep at the wheel of a car. 

Tom couldn't get away, but one of his friends from work was kind enough to pick me up and deliver me to his apartment. Tom came home later and found me passed out on his couch. He fed me something. I think we watched TV. Then sleep. Real sleep. That was Tuesday. 

The next day, we picked up our badges at GM HQ, had a look around, and settled at the Level One bar in the Hyatt, one of my favorites of the Gen Con hotels. They had some special Gen Con drinks, one of which was a black Manhattan. I've had plenty of regular Manhattans, but that was my first black one. The difference was a Sicilian cordial instead of vermouth, and it was really, really good. I only had one, though, because they were expensive and I still didn't feel quite myself after all the stress stuff before. 

The "old home" dinner was at High Velocity in the JW Marriott. Mostly familiar faces. John brought Kirsten, his new lady friend. Mark, who I had previously only known through social media, was there, and excited to be at Gen Con promoting all the new material coming out for his cool B/X Gangbusters game (a new printing of the one I ran at BASH Con a few years ago). His energy was infectious. 

Tom and I also went to the most depressing (and hot) office supply store ever, and I think I helped him adjust some margins or something so he could print stuff that would fit on index cards. Later that night, a storm came through. We were already home, so it was just pleasant rumbles of thunder and rain. And it left behind the nicest Gen Con weather I've ever seen. It was like, on top of all the other things we were taking a vacation from, we got to take a break from summer, too. 

We grabbed a parking space in the Oort Cloud lot we had used last year. There was a little bit of friction as we walked to the convention center because I thought Tom's game was an hour later than it was, so I didn't understand why he was rushing us and he didn't understand why I was acting like we had plenty of time. Anyway, we got to his Gotham City police game and I wandered off. 

Apparently I'm not the only one who loved the old carpet pattern. In the course of my wanderings, I was asked by a woman sitting in the Marriott skywalk (Marriott Classic, not that upstart JW) if this was my first Gen Con. When I said it wasn't, she offered me a badge sticker with nothing but the old carpet pattern on it. I was delighted. This year suddenly became the first year I ever cared about making sure my badge was turned frontside-forward all the time. 

Also, I visited the exhibit hall and came back to watch Tom's players take on the menace of the Condiment King. 

Tom had a Crawlspace game later with a hilarious crew. It was so much fun to watch that, when someone else in the room offered me a spot in his Apocalypse World game, I turned him down in favor of continuing to watch the show. I probably should have taken the offer. I mean, try new stuff, right? But it really was a great show. He had these ghost hunter media personalities all competing for attention and our friend Brett giving a hilarious performance as the constantly-maligned groundskeeper and I couldn't look away.

Somebody in this or maybe one of Tom's other sessions said he had actually run TerrorHog! I knew one or two people bought and liked it, but actually playing the game is a whole other thing. 

At some point on Thursday, I got out of the first of the two games I had scheduled. Tom had asked me to run two Qalidar games, so I scheduled two sessions of "The Cave of Crystal Souls," the scenario I had written for the Qalidar Basic book in one of my previous lives. I didn't really want to run it. Funny, though: I read through the adventure again in case someone did show up and was like, "Damn, this is good! Who wrote this?" But, as expected, nobody signed up and nobody appeared at the last minute. 

Saturday, Tom had accidentally signed himself to run a game at the unholy hour of eight in the morning, and, for reasons I will never understand, didn't correct it when he had the chance. I scheduled an Uber the night before, for 2PM, and slept in while he went off to punish himself for his short-sightedness. 

Some of that might have been Friday. I was just enjoying life and doing fun stuff. The best thing about this vacation was that I was only thinking of time in terms of what's up next, rather than trying to look down the road. There were drinks at bars and delicious big salads and foldable slices of pizza outside in the beautiful weather where everyone was happy. And there were a couple of Crawlspace games where I got to ham it up just like the players I had enjoyed watching on whatever day I was watching them play. 

One exchange:

Tom: You can each choose one item that's always with your character no matter what movie they're in. 

Liam: (I don't remember what Liam had.)

Me: I've got a pet rat, Nibbler. And the whiskey flask from when I leveled up. 

Tom: I was hoping you wouldn't mention the whiskey flask when we've got teenagers here.

Teenager2: I've got a bag of cocaine. 

Me: Good thing we're not talking about whiskey in front of the teenagers. 

Player5: I've got one of those short novelty baseball bats. 

Tom: Okay, that works. 

Player5: It's full of heroin.  

I didn't come home with much loot. Crystal Caste was selling Gen Con d6's for two dollars apiece. I felt kind of ripped-off, even at that price, because, in addition to the Gen Con 2025 logo on the six spot, they put their own logo on the spot opposite. I mean, come on! You sell dice, so maybe just sell dice; don't sell commercials for yourself on the dice you've already been paid for. Gen Con used to give us those things for free, and, even when they were free, we didn't have to get them with extra pimp stamps burned into them. At least I've got the carpet-pattern sticker.  

We didn't go the con on Sunday. It felt wrong to miss a day, but, parking and other things considered, it made sense. We went to see the new Fantastic Four movie (which rocked) and continued testing our theory that there is no such thing as a weekend with too much pizza. So far, we have found no evidence that this "too much pizza" thing exists. Research continues. 

We chilled in Tom's apartment and I helped him do some computer stuff. Just took it easy. 

Monday, I had to begin my journey back to summer and anxiety and drudgery, but at least I'd have my cats and I was ready to get back to finishing my novel (in between drudgeries, of course). I'm getting really close!

And, in the halls of the Indianapolis airport, people were still gaming.  

 I've been experimenting with Substack, so I posted this over there, too. 

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Mary Shelley

I'm thinking about doing more with Substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/christinalea/p/mary-shelley

White Trash Mint Julep

• Drop peppermint candy in glass.
• Pour bottom-shelf bourbon over candy.
• Marvel at the candy's complete failure to dissolve.
• Drink the appallingly un-minty bourbon anyway, while thinking about the choices that brought you to this point in your life.

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2024(-ish): More Than I Thought

A while back, I lamented that it had taken me nine years to write 55,000 (now closer to 60) words of The Nameless Way, and I still had a long way to go. I was thinking about how that happened. I don't much feel like recapping 2024, at least not in public, but the New Year seems to be a good time to look back on the stuff I've been doing since I started this novel in 2015.

I committed to the book as my main project in June of 2015, and started writing the draft (except for the prologue, which I wrote in 1999 or 2000 or so) in August or September. The first chapter was based on the adventure I started the original campaign with. Getting that down was the most fun I had had writing in a long time. I think the second chapter was pretty easy too, although it was an almost entirely new story to explain some stuff from a segment I couldn't use. That's a topic for another blog, though. 

I think it was 2016 when other stuff started eating into my progress. I don't mean the usual stuff. I don't mean the dayjob, or gaming, or conventions, or eBay, or even random crises like bouts of depression. Those are all issues, but not issues worth commenting on. That's just life. The delays I'm looking at now are the side projects. 

Some of those projects were things I felt committed to because I had already done most of the creative part and just never shared it. Some of them were things I thought would make me some money to keep me going while I finished The Nameless Way. On that second purpose, it's worth noting that none of them succeeded. In retrospect, it's almost like I was being scolded for straying from The Plan. 

So, the first thing was Qalidar. I had already given up on my original vision for a Qalidar Role-Playing Game, partly because my soul was crushed in mid-stream by personal shit, but also because I had been thinking for a while that designing games was never going to keep my demons fed. So I settled on a less ambitious way to finish what I started. I made a "basic" book with an adventure and introductory rules. This was before I started on The Nameless Way. Rather than making a book of complete rules or something like that, I decided that I would follow the basic book with supplements, which would eventually expand it to a more complete game. Less satisfying and, obviously, less marketable, but honest. 

I published Supplement 1: The Fire Within, in 2016. The original idea was that each supplement would highlight a particular culture/race/whatever. This got fudged right at the start, though, because my real goal for the first supplement was to make sure the game worked all the way to the standard d20 level cap of twenty, to finish the rules for organizations, and to cover any missing equipment and stuff like that from the basic book. Ultimately, it was obvious to even a casual reader that the cultural focus on the Stardust was just an afterthought. I already knew there would be no more culture-focused books when I finished this one. I was just paying lip service to that plan. 

In another year, there was Supplement 2, the Qalidar Qritter Qatalog. As before, this was something I felt I owed to the two or three people who had actually played or purchased Qalidar. Also, part of the main artist's pay was a cut of PDF sales, so, having already delivered some amazing work, he deserved at least a little effort on my part. By this time, I knew I was never going to go on with the culture-focused supplements. I did have a bunch of creatures I could share, though, and I knew the game wouldn't be complete without them. It was just a matter of formatting it all. And of course formatting takes time. 

Because of its weird production history, the Qalidar game is a little awkward if you want to put it all together and dive right in to the full game. It still works well, I think, if you play the intro scenario and move on to the rest from there. I still enjoy playing it. Well, running it. I'm the only GM, so that's all I can do. Every once in a while, I think I'd like to put it all together into one book like a normal RPG. I know I shouldn't. 

There was a little bit of ghostwriting. Four projects, scattered across the time I was doing this other work. That actually did pay, but not nearly enough to justify the time it ate. And yes, that's all I'm going to say about it.

HOGZILLA! HOGZILLA! HOGZILLA! Or TerrorHog. Whatever. The Hogzilla episode of The Last Drive-In was lots of fun. Not long after that, we had planned one of our "hoot" get-togethers. I started putting together a Hogzilla Crawlspace scenario to run at that event, complete with insanity rules and a drinking game. However, most of our gaming friends in Ohio had become unreliable, so that hoot never happened. 

Anyway, Tom convinced me that I should put it together for publication, because that would be easy. There's a big difference between my convention-event notes and an intelligible scenario that someone else could run. Like, seriously, I'll go to Gen Con with only some pre-gens, a vague idea, and some names scribbled down. If I had to actually prepare for the games I ran at conventions, I would never run games at conventions. 

Thinking I might reach a new audience, I dove into the rabbit hole and made TerrorHog, the Hogzilla game. Joe Bob Briggs held the book up on TV in his goofy Biedermeir/pimp costume, Shudder tweeted about it on their official account, and still nobody bought it. To paraphrase Joe Bob's introduction of the movie, I did all that work, only to find that the world was not clamoring for Hogzilla role-playing games. Another cosmic rebuke for my infidelity.  

The next thing was that Amazon announced this new feature for publishing serials in 2020. I immediately thought of Blackridge, which had originally been patterned after serial format stuff. I had just moved and, obviously, lost my job, so I thought this could help. It inspired me to start a second serial on a different platform, just to, you know, feel out the market. This stuff actually overlapped the Hogzilla thing, by the way.

The first one was the Blackridge serial on Amazon. I still feel that it's a great story. I like the characters and it had a great plot. Unfortunately, the episodes I published were some of the worst writing I've ever done. Well, the worst since college, anyway. It was more like the Cliff's Notes of a story than an actual story. 

At the same time, I also tried to serialize the Komar novel I had been outlining, the sort-of sequel to Losing Lanterns, starring Aradoc, with characters from my high school D&D group as the sociopathic treasure hunters he gets stuck in the desert with. The stuff I wrote for this was better, but also rushed. As before, I was cranking it out for all the wrong reasons. It was very much a story worth telling. It's still a story I want to tell, but it wasn't the right time. I also think the weird proprietary token buy-in thing Amazon and this other platform were pushing was stupid, but that doesn't redeem my infidelity. 

Part of the plan for TerrorHog was to make it a complete game, since we couldn't assume that the audience we were trying to reach would have any interest in investing in a new game on top of the pig monster book. To make it easier to get into, I made a customized version of Crawlspace, made only for the one-shot with the pre-generated characters. That being the case, we thought it might be nice to have a version of those rules that could stand on its own with character generation and stuff like that. So I put Crawlspace: 21 & Over together for that. 

I collaborated on a novella with a friend. She had already written most of it. All I did was go back through to insert some weird stuff about nephilim and write the end. As it happens, both of us had done much better work on our own projects. Her part was probably the better of the two, but I did enjoy sinking Columbus and a lot of southern Ohio into a giant magma pit. 

After all that, there's another edition of Stars, Specters, and Super-Powers. The first edition had a terrible cover, and I had omitted a story that should have been in it. I also added some background stuff and art Mike did for the comic book plot that led to "The Man Comes Around." Having this book and Losing Lanterns out there and looking good when The Nameless Way finally drops, has been part of The Plan for a long time, so that was unquestionably worth doing. 

So, why blather on about all this? Mostly as a reminder to myself. Memory plays tricks on you. I keep coming back to, "What have I been doing all this time? What's the point if this is all I've got after nine years?" I sometimes wonder if it was all like the past couple of weeks, during which I've hardly written anything because I've been buried in life garbage and it messes with my head even when it's not stealing my time. I can look at this, though, and remind myself that I wasn't just staring at the wall the whole time. 

And I guess it's also a reminder that the time side projects take up isn't free. 

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