I went to Adrian Michigan last weekend to be Guest of Honor at the 2007 ACGA-Con. This is a long story, so let me start at the beginning. To make this more visually stimulating I’ll sporadically include art from Classroom Deathmatch.
It started last year at Gencon when I slept with Prof. Phil Howe. Or, to be more precise, when we were forced by poverty to split a bed in a cramped Indianapolis hotel room that we also shared with Matt, his wife Kim and their children. This was the same Gencon that Matt and I launched Panty Explosion at, and we had a pretty crazy weekend overall.
Phil is a professor of something or other at Adrain College, which is located in a very cold and flat part of Michigan. The college has a yearly student organized gaming convention called ACGA-Con. Last year they had a prominent D&D writer as guest of honor. I’m not sure what happened this year, but I imagine it went something along the lines of (and you can read this part aloud if you like):
Student Organizers: (said with much pathos) We need a guest for ACGA-Con 2007, but nobody cool will come to Adrian! What will we do?
Prof. Howe: (stepping forward like a Greek chorus) Actually, I know some guys who publish an obscure game you’ve never heard of. Maybe you should pay to fly them across the country!
So somehow the nice kids at Adrian College decided to invite Matt and I to their con as Guests of Honor. Naturally we were very excited. I can’t speak for Matt, but I rarely get invited downstairs to watch Battlestar with the rest of the house, let alone to another state. Let alone as a GUEST OF HONOR!
So it was a huge thrill. We decided not to tell anyone about it until we got the whole thing confirmed. This was back in October. A nice fellow named Cory was putting the whole thing together and was sending us sporadic but informative emails. What we would do is run a few games, give a few talks on whatever subjects interested us and just hang out and have fun. I was either asked or volunteered to design a poster (I can’t remember which). I ended up submitting a black and white version of the Darth Vader with Schoolgirls drawing that I had done as a Panty Explosion wallpaper.
Matt and I decided that we would each run a game of Panty Explosion. I planned to bring along stuff to run CrossRoads of Eternity (the game I did with Travis Brown) if there was any interest, and we talked briefly about maybe trying to organize a Heavy Gear game. Cory assured us that nobody in Adrian had any interest in playing Heavy Gear, but that there would be plenty of scheduled events and we were welcome to participate in whatever we wanted.
Christmas came and went, and the new year came around. We hadn’t heard from Cory for awhile, so I emailed him to make sure everything was okay. Cory said that it looked like everything was awsome, but they’d only be able to pay to fly one of us out. Cory was pretty apologetic, but really it was pretty damn generous of him (or the school I guess) to arrange to fly one of us out there anyway. Matt and I talked about it for awhile and eventually decided that I would go. n an insane it of irony Cory found cheaper tickets at the last minute and could have flown us both out, but a flooded basement and a backlog of school work kept Matt at home. I was dead sick the entire month of Jan, so it was very much up in the air as to whether this would happen at all. On top of that there were some weird problems with the plane tickets. The end result was that we pretty much kind of forgot to tell anyone that I was going to this thing in Adrian. I didn’t even mention it to my Sat gaming group until Travis and Gabe asked me what I wanted to play that weekend.
I left Portland Friday afternoon and arrived in Detroit at about midnight. Prof. Howe was waiting for me at the airport. I have an interesting relationship with Phil in that we don’t actually know each other very well. I first met Phil through Matt years ago when we were both working at a Wizards of the Coast store here in Portland. Phil and Matt were housemates, and I would come over very rarely to played Settlers of Catan or something. A few years later Phil left Portland to teach in Adrian. I ended up moving into the room Phil had lived in. So we had that in common. A year later we hung out for a week at Gencon and got to know each other a bit. We share an interest in Howard’s Conan, and I find Phil very easy to talk to. He’s one of those great people who very easily carries the conversation, and he has plenty of neat things to talk about.
The hour and a half drive from the airport to Adrian was pretty easy. The roads were empty and the landscape was dark and snow covered. We passed through several small towns, and Phil gave me a brief driving tour of Adrian before we arrived at his apartment. I went to sleep fast.
We were supposed to arrive at the con by 10 am, but I didn’t wake up till after 10:30. As we climbed into Phil’s car I was struck by a revelation: Adrian is fucking cold! Living in Portland I’m used to cold being in the 25-40 degree range. I was wearing both a sweater and my old black leather coat, but I wasn’t prepared for the -14 degree weather.
The con was to be held in the Colleges student center, an neat looking building that had at one point been a gym or stadium or something. Cory and Jessica were waiting for us at the door. Jessica is Cory’ girlfriend and was responsible for planning past ACGC-Cons. She had just recently gotten back from Japan, which to me made her an instant friend. Jessica and Cory showed us to “con central”, a group of tables set up in the middle of the student hall. I was hoping that the con would be low key, and I wasn’t disappointed. A leisurely magic game had just started, and I was told that the anime room and LAN were running 24 hours. I asked when my first even was scheduled, and was told I could give my first talk anytime I wanted. Excellent.I sat around and chatted with Cory, Jessica and several other students while building a D&D character for the game Jessica would GM later that night. Phil and I played a brief game of Nuclear War with some girls from what I gather was the schools geek sorority. Does that sound bad? I mean that in a good way. I was eliminated from the game immediately and took over the distribution of bodies from the games world bank. Our game was interrupted by a pretty good demonstration of a foam weapons game that I’m unfamiliar with. After that I was sent upstairs to prepare for my “big speech”.
Back when this all started we had asked Cory what we should talk about. Matt and I eventually decided that we would give one talk on independent game design and publishing, one on working in the game industry and one on a subject that neither of us can now remember. I actually enjoy public speaking in a very limited way, and I thought this would be fun and easy since I would have Matt to bounce stuff off of. Doing stuff like this is always easier with a friend. After we found out that Matt could’nt go I agonized over this a bit, but decided that it would’nt be to big a deal. I’m not much for preparation, so I just made a short list of things I wanted to talk about. I spent all of 10 minutes creating some hand outs that offered various resources for both game design and finding work in the game industry. I figured I’d just improvise the rest.
About 20 students showed up. That may not sound like to many, but it was a nice little crowd. Either Jessica or Cory asked me how long I would talk, and I said maybe it would be best if I combined all three talks into one super speech. This worked well for me because it covered the fact that I had never thought of anything to discuss for my third presentation. This had the downside of being potentially very long and boring, but everyone seemed amendable so I just went ahead and started talking.
Of course I fucked it up right off. Whenever I speak in front of a crowd I do this thing where about 2 minutes in I completely choke and can’t think of anything to say. I was expecting it because it happens every time. After a long and very awkward pause I got my shit back together and continued. I think I talked for about an hour and a half. I covered a number of topics and jumped back an forth between stuff pretty randomly. I paced the entire time. I started out explaining what Panty Explosion was and giving my standard defense of the title. The audience seemed pretty understanding of this, so I went ahead and continued. The audience asked a number of really great questions throughout the whole thing and we ended up talking about how games are designed, how women feel about Panty Explosion, how to get freelance work, what Matt and I did to research Panty Explosion, how to publish a small game, why POD is awesome and will change your life, whether RPGs can be art, what games I think are really cool, why working for small companies can be really worthwhile and several other topics that I just can’t remember. I can’t tell if the audience was bored stupid or not, but I certainly enjoyed myself, and I probably would have talked for another hour except I was losing my voice.
After my long (and possibly deadly boring) speech I decided to go ahead and participate in what I was told would be a short game of Diplomacy. I hadn’t played since high school, and had forgotten that short and Diplomacy are two words that don’t go together. We started at 4, took a break at 7 for dinner, and kept playing until midnight. I want to tell you about Diplomacy because 1) this was an awesome game, 2) it was completely exhausting and actually kept me from participating in anything else (including running any games of Panty Explosion) and 3) because I won! We randomly drew for countries. Cory (who has played before and recently) took Austria/Hungary. Sam took France. Matt had Germany, Chris had Italy and Jacob had Turkey. Phil, the most experienced player among us had Russia (which terrified us all). I got England, which I am told is somewhat of an advantage. I won’t go into details, but play was both deliberate and intense. I broke an early alliance with Russia (which I later renewed) and sustained a long and profitable partnership with France that won me all of Germany. I betrayed France with the help of Italy and devoured Sam’s territories before turning my attention toward Spain. That’s where we ended for the evening.
At midnight we were all exhausted and ready to go home, but it was not to be. Instead we sat down for Jessica’s D&D game that we had written up characters for much earlier in the day (what already seemed like a lifetime ago). Cory retreated early to sleep off a migraine in another part of the building, but the rest of us wrestled through a satisfying game that was unfortunately predestined to end too early simply because we were all exhausted. I havn’t played D&D since before Trav and I started working on CrossRoads, but it came back pretty quick. I always randomly role my characters, and ended up with an Elf Paladin that was generic in a way that only D&D characters can be. I decided that my character would do everything “in a manly fashion” (which mostly meant that I talked in a deed voice and would say “let us do this in a manly fashion” a lot). Very early in the game it was suggested that my character might be gay. That seemed to stick. Despite Jessica’s valiant efforts the game descended into comedy pretty quickly. Syphilitic roosters (my people call that a cock disease), dire whales, critical failures, stoned deities, rivers of shit and doing everything in a “manly fashion” brought the game it a quick but enjoyable end. By 5 am we we’re out the door and by 5:30 I was asleep.
Let me backtrack to dinner. This is important as it goes to establishing character and morality. We broke from Diplomacy at around 7pm to head out to a local Chinese buffet. The food was pretty passable. I ate enough shrimp to make myself sick. At some point someone said “do you want to hear a joke”. It went down hill from there. The Adrian students are as far as I can tell a pretty descent group of kids. Polite, friendly, helpful, good humored and willing to listen to me talk about my games for an hour and a half. But deep in their hearts is the kind of filth and vulgarness that makes me feel warm and fuzzy (in a “I’m going to puke up my shrimp” kind of way). The jokes started out simply enough. A little bit of feces. A little profanity. But as diner went on they grew in complexity and offensiveness. Pedophilia, scat, racism, mutilation, infacide, sexual depravity and incest. these kids didn’t stop until the poor waitress was afraid to come back into the room. Now this may sound like I’m condemning these nice students as being horrible foul mouthed creatures. They are. But I thought this was worth mentioning as a kind of bragging point. I went to Adrian and heard the most disgusting jokes I’ve heard all year. Thats something you can be proud of.
The Diplomacy players had agreed to meet again at 10am to finish our game, but I didn’t wake up till 12:30. We arrived at the hall around 1pm and played as late as we could without risking me missing my plane. The game ended with Turkey eliminated, France holding onto a single fleet in Portugal, Italy struggling to reclaim lost territory, Austria marching North toward English occupied Germany and Phil betraying me in a push to retake Norway. I had planned on pushing South to eliminate Italy, but with the Russian betrayal I swung North and took Sweden and Warsaw. Unfortunately we had to cut the game short so I could make my flight. I ended with 13 points (Phil was 2nd with, I think, 9 or 10). I call that a victory, but if the game had gone on I don’t know if I would have won against the combined Russian/Austria front. And Italy was still to my South.
So that was that. I’d like to think Jessica and Cory for putting on a really fun con and for flying me out. I don’t feel like I did much to justify my cost, but I had a really good time. I’d also like to thank Prof. Phil Howe for being a great host. I really appreciate it!
NEW ACTUAL PLAY!
Joel posted an Actual Play report on Story Games based on the game we played last month. This is the same game that Colin reported on by the way. I plan to (with their permission) add both reports to our actual play page. In the meantime you can read all about it here.
Panties & Dragons
Berin Kinsman (always a friend of the game) has posted about his project moding Panty Explosion to be played like classic D&D. Worth checking out.Read all about it here!
-Jake
Posted by Jake 
Posted by Jake 
Posted by Jake 
