This is the first time I've really come up for air since yesterday morning.
Thursday, 8am... I was in Kent King's My Mother! My Wife! scenario, where we played a band of merry females off to help the Prince (who has a habit of fainting and being basically useless) by rescuing his mother (the Queen) and his bride from a mean nasty bad man. It was pretty good, and I was really impressed with Kent's DMing. I also found out Kent will be in my Saturday night Barroom Blitz session, so I'll get to turn the tables on him a little bit.
After that, I skipped out on my afternoon session because I decided I wanted to hit the retail floor. Let me just say now how convenient it is to be in the Westin, attached to the convention center, in the room that is the closest possible room to the skybridge to the convention center (out door, across hall, down one flight of stairs, turn left onto skybridge). Between the things "I wanted" and the various and sundries which my gamers back home have been demanding, I've been warming up the MasterCard quite a bit. Luckily, almost none of what I've spent money on is mine, so I'll get that money back (and make some frequent flier miles in the process *grin*).
After that, George and I headed over to the 30th Anniversary Party, where there were plenty of goodies to be had. I had already eaten, as had George, so we didn't stick around too long, just long enough to get the free stuff and leave (it had been open for about 10 minutes and was already packed to the rafters, sticking around in a rock-concert-like crowd was just not worth it without someone like Megadeth up on stage).
For the final event of Thursday evening, George got his first-ever experience playing Illuminati. We managed to squeeze in two games (with, for those who care, The Bavarian Illuminati winning the first, and a surprising win for George in the second game playing The Discordian Society). Given that the question he asked as we went back to the room (at 2-freaking-a.m.!!) was "Do you have that game??", I have a vision of that seeing some play sessions back home now.
I totally slept through my Friday morning Diplomacy session (get to room at 2:15, get to sleep by 2:45,... be ready to get up by 7:15 to be out the door by 7:55? ugh, I'm old). George and I patrolled the floor this morning picking up (still more) stuff that the locals had asked for.
Afterwards, I went to Demons In The Drink by, surprisingly, Kent King again. It was an odd mix of D&D and space aliens (who are demons, as far as we can tell), but it was quite entertaining. But, after watching Kent use these 3x5 cards to keep track of initiative stats on, I was hooked, and proceeded to steal some of his blanks, so that I could make up similar cards for the 'Blitz this evening. It's hard enough keeping track of eight players, let alone sixteen, and those would be really useful.
My late-afternoon session was a "room changed" session, except it appears that nobody knew except, I guess, the DM. There were three players at our table in the old room with "pre-registered" event tickets, but no DM. By the time I found out about the room change, it was 20 minutes into the game slot, so I convinced the Hall Captain to authorize a refund for me.
It was probably just as well, because then I went up to my room to do up my 3x5 cards for the characters in my session. As I was doing them I realized I'd made a horrible mistake and left out the Town Guard character sheets when I printed everything out back in New York. The guards don't play a pivotal role, but that may be necessary in some fashion to break things up if a particular character is going overboard in capability, or as a story-device to end the session as the time limit approaches.
Luckily, the business center let me download the PDFs I'd stashed on my web server (for just this sort of emergency!!) and print them out. It only cost me an arm, no leg, to use the computer and printer for two minutes (total cost about $5 for use of the printer and use of the computer for that long, I swear to god).
Anyhow, I'm now winding down a bit, getting ready to go get some grub and relax before tonight's GenCon debut of the 'Blitz. I'll post more when I can scrape together some more time.