Origins 2009

What I bought at Origins 2009

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One of my favorite parts of hitting the big gaming conventions is spending a few hours (or rather, a few days) browsing and shopping in the exhibit hall. Origins 2009 was no different, and while I’m happy to say I didn’t break the bank, I did come back with a goodly pile of product purchased at the show.

I didn’t go into the show expecting to pick up any Savage Worlds books, as our Weird Pulp campaign never really got off the ground, and we haven’t played the game in months. But then I went to the Studio 2 booth, and found the brand new Fantasy Companion supplement for Savage Worlds. Published in the same folio format as the Savage Worlds: Explorers Edition, this book repackages the fantasy species information from the previous hardcover release of the game and folds in a bunch of edges, magic items, and monsters from the various fantasy toolkit PDFs.

I like PDFs, but I’d been hoping that Pinnacle would release the toolkits in a dead tree edition. when I saw the Fantasy Companion on the shelf, I instantly picked it up.

Origins 2009: Afterwords

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The whirlwind of gaming known as Origins 2009 has come and gone. I had little time bask in the gaming afterglow; after I left the con I flew directly to Vermont to meet with my family so we could spend a week on an island on Lake Champlain.

Going from 24 hour gaming to an island with no indoor plumbing, no net access, and minimal power was a huge shift, but at least the lake does have a wandering monster…

So how was Origins? Good. Great even. It didn’t have the same maniac energy that GenCon has, nor did it have the same crush of people all trying to get somewhere at the same time. All of the events were in the convention center, which made navigating the con far, far easier than GenCon.

Going into Origins I’d heard that it had a great gamer vibe — meaning it was a place that people went to play games, rather than being more of an event-style, vendor-oriented show like GenCon. After going, I can agree with that sentiment. It’s a gamer’s con, with a heavy focus on board, card and miniature games. Indeed, while there was a serious RPG contingent, they didn’t have the same sort of sprawling setup that they have at GenCon.

Origins 2009: Day 4

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Saturday began with the North Market waffles that my friend Cory and I had been craving all week. Strawberries and cream topped waffled cosumed, I headed to my Spirit of the Century game.

The game was run by David Moore (@vandermore) of The Gamemaster Show and included Mur Lafferty, Chris Miller of The Secret Lair podcast, and a host of friends from Twitter and Balticon. We spent the last few weeks creating our characters online – which was one of the best character creation sessions I’ve been in – and it was a blast to finally get to see them in action.

We each created 1920s, pulp versions of ourselves, recast as fictional characters. Drawing on my time as a newspaper reporter, I created Clayton Berkshire aka Clayton Jones aka The Constant Sentinel. He was a world famous reporter for the London Times who covered the Great War as a stringer and was so horrified by what he saw that he created the secret identity of the Sentinel. 

Origins 2009: Day 3

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My day started withthe uneven Star Wars event, Betrayal of Darth Revan. Uneven partly because of poor dice rolls and incompetence on our part, and poor adventure design on the part of it’s RPGA authors. It has too many encounters, and they didn’t obey Order 66’s The List, specifically the Rule of Six, which advocates making sure you have good terrain, and diverse opponents spread out to take advantage of said terrain. Perhaps the Order 66 community could take on rebuilding the problem encounters. 

After stopping by the exhibit hall to pick up Six-siders and Spaceships, and taking some time to drool over starship minis,  I headed to my second Star Wars game of the day: The Death of the Star of Agnor. In this New Republic era game I played a force wizard Jedi named Kava Starshade on a diplomatic mission. 

The Star Wars game was sponsored by d20 Radio, the folks behind the Order 66 podcast. It was a good game, involving a pirate attack on a star cruiser. I played the Jedi as a diplomatic, somewhat pacifistic character, using his powers to nullify threats rather than kill them.

I ended the day hanging out with friends David Moore (@vandermore) and half the crew from our Saturday morning Spirit of the Century game). We put the finish touches on our characters and broke out a new game: Traitor.

Origins 2009: Day 2

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The big difference between going to a big con before and after  having kids is that before your sleep deprived when leaving the con, after kids, you’re sleep deprived from day one.

I woke up Thursday looking forward to gaming, but nursing a headache from too little sleep and too much beer. Nothing a lot of coffee couldn’t fix though. We headed north for coffee and free wifi at Cup o’Joe. Great coffee but unfortunately the wireless network wouldn’t work with our iPod touches.

Coffee in hand and headache tamed, three of the Blackrazors headed to Hackmaster Basic tutorial session.

The first stop on Day 2 was the convention hall and customer service to get a refund on one of my Thursday events, which freed up my afternoon to wander the exhibit  hall.

My first event was Hackmaster Basic, which was an introductory event. It got off to a slow start – our table leader was still learning the rules himself, and we had several false starts. That said, character creation was a fun mix of random rolls and point building, and once we were done we got to run thriuh a scenario with one of the games designers. It’s very crunchy, but I’m looking forward to my own group’s playtest.

Origins 2009: Day 1

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Origins 2009 is off to a good start. After navigating some flight snufus, we checked into the Hyatt Regency without any problems and snagged a late lunch at Barley’s Brew Pub.

Then we headed over to the convention center proper, wandered around a bit looking for the pre-reg counter, found it and managed to get our badges and events in under 5 minutes. That alone was a huge improvement over GenCon.

We’ve sneaked peaks at some of the gaming areas, which are downright cavernous. It’s cool to see all the tables consolidated in one place, unlike GenCon’s scattered approuch. I’m curious to see how it plays out noise-wise tomorrow.

After registering we chatted with David Moore, his wife Erin and various members of the Gamemasters Show while we waited for the rest of our group to arrive. 

When we go to GenCon, we usually spend Wednesday night eating good food, drinking good beer and playing old favorites like Illuminati or Munchkin.

Except this time we forgot the games.

Fortunately Game Base 7 was around to save our Wednesdau They run a boards game library: give them your driver’s license, they go give you a game.

Confident we had a game solution, we headed out to Elevator, a brewpub on High Street, where we drove the bartenders slightly crazy by ordering four 12 beer samplers. The best one? Three Frog.