GH notes from GenCon

Date: Wed, 11 Aug 99 09:26AM PDT
From: Stéphane Tanguay Add To Address Book Add To Junk To: GREYTALK@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: [GREYTALK] GH notes from GenCon

Hi everybody !

> Is THIS the "exciting" news TSR had to tell us about Greyhawk? I sure hope not!

From my own GH notes at GenCon (please remember that english is not my first language so I could stand corrected):

NO Hardcover or Faith and Avatars style book are coming.

Sean did finish a "Return to the Slave Lord", set in 591 CY. The story begin in Dyvers and goes along the wild Coast, into the buffer zone and the Pomarj. It is a 128 pages document, divided in 4 sections, each section containing about 25 % source material, 25% informations on the Slave Lords, 25% on how to introduce your group to this adventure and 25% of adventure hooks. Should be for level 4-7 at the beggining. I think it will be released in spring 2000, in 2nd edition format.

If there is ever a Faith and Avatars product done, chances are that the Avatars part will be slim since Greyhawk don,t have much of an history in term of avatars intervention.

There is no deadline set for the Big Flanaess map that Kij Jonhson was working on. The map is about 4' by 5' and defy most attemps at printing it. At this moment, the map is in the Cartography department at TSR, being rendered in suitable format (it was originnaly hand drawn). In the meanwhile, the map is used as an internal tools by GH products designers. We may see some excerpt of it in future products featuring GH.

They will be other novels like Against the Giant. White Plum Mountain, by Paul Kidd, is due October and a Descent into the Depths of the Earth is announced for spring 2000.

Chances are that we will see other "Return to..." type modules.

There is also a chance that we will see something with Iuz as someone at WotC (Adkinson ? I can't remeber...) is quit fond of this villain.

A new Rogue Gallery is on the wish list. Some of these NPC make an appearance in the Return to the Slaves Lord adventure.

It is possible that we see a "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil" since Gary is back in WotC fold and that it is hard not to imagine him NOT doing it.

There is plans to put everything GH on a CD-ROM.

WotC will keep the timeline in GH at 591 CY and, in fact, will probably don't release more GH specific products, since GH will be the default world for the core products, the same way GH was the default world for the first edition rulebooks and modules. Supposedly that Return to White Plume Montain will be a good exemple of this new philosophy (RTTKOTB was NOT a good example !). Even the map in the core products shall fit nicely in Greyhawk New development in Greyhawk proper will be done by the Living Greyhawk campaign. Erik Mona is presently working on a gazetter which will include 2-3 pages on each nation and a timeline, for the least. He hope to be able to send this information to regional triad by november. There is a good chance that this information will be more generally released by the begginning of 2000, either as an RPGA only thing, or for general public consumption, with maybe a RPGA pre-release. They just don't know yet so please don't jump at them ! As Erik is making good use of Roger Moore's notes, there is even a lesser chance that we see an new hardcover one day.

WotC want the RPGA (and Living Greyhawk) to become a big thing. There is a lot of activity going on there and we shall expect to see more and more GH articles in Polyhedron

Against the Giants was sold out at GenCon on the second day IIRC. Sean added 65 000 words to the original 32 000 words of the trilogy. I won't go further into this, since Samwise already posted a review.

Morgan Rodwell is gonna be the new OJ editor. He plan to accept shorter articles (along with the longer ones) and non-canon GH articles. They are always looking for volontary editor.

At Gary's "Evolution of the Greyhawk world", we were able to get some interesting tidbits, the most surprising being that Nyrond was indeed behind the Scarlet Brotherhood when this one kidnapped Thrommel. How about that for an interesting twist ?

Gary also found his originals notes for Castle Greyhawk and I hope someday they are going to see the light. Lisa Stevens and a few others had a chance to have a look at it.

Looks like someone from Texas really has the original of Gary's Stoink map. Gary told us how surprised he was when that guy contacted him to certify the authenticity of this map.

Hope this help !

Stéphane Tanguay
stanguay@francomm.com

P.S. it was great fun to meet with other GH fans before that only known online. I met Paul Stormberg, Scott Casper, Erik Mona, Steve Wilson, Morgan Rodwell, Nathan Irving, Rick Miller, Wayne Rossi, Tom Harrison, Nathan Irving, Kenneth Newkist and two other Blackrazor guild members, etc. Many of them looks quite different in real life than you can imagine online. I look forward to meet them again.

I survived GenCon99 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt....

Date: Tue, 10 Aug 99 14:41PM PDT
From: Tom Harrison Add To Address Book Add To Junk Mail
To: GREYTALK@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: [GREYTALK] I survived GenCon99 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt....

Ahhhh....its good to be back home.

For all you guys who missed it, GenCon 99 was pretty damn cool. Lots of new stuff to gawk at -- including Gold Rush Game's new SENGOKU Japanese historical fantasy rpg, Pinnacle's BRAVE NEW WORLD alternate history superhero rpg, Gary Gygax's Lejendary Adventures FRPG (Yes! It's finally out!), and AEG has 7th Sea going full steam ahead. I have to admit, I predicte the 3E announcement would spark the next major flame war here, so I'm looking forward to a flood of creative posts in the next two weeks. ;)

But I'm sure ALL of you want to know how the Council events went, don't you. Don't deny it! You're just itching to know!

Thanks to all you attendees that made it to the meeting. I recognized a few of you from 98. I didn't get a chance to meet nearly as many of you as I wanted to (there was some disagreement over reservation arrangements some of us had talked about prior to the Con). The meeting was different than I had envisioned -- great and fun, but different. Next year, I'll make sure there are more goodies for everyone -- and yes, we'll have a banner or something with the web address.

The Masters of the Azure trilogy was likewise very successful. All but the first event was full (Part One was only short one). It was great to see Scott Casper, Russell Timm, and Stéphane Tanguay at those events (Stephane is due dual credit for being drug into a Lejendary Adventures demo Friday night, where we all had a good time -- "MAY!!!!") Steve Wilson made it up from Oklahoma City to run the third installment -- missing his son's B-Day in the process (how's that for priorities? ;)

Scott Casper suggested I post a campaign synopsis of the trilogy online, which I thought was a very good idea. But we have also been approached by the organizer of a con in Omaha, who was interested in us running the game there. And since we're planning on bringing Masters of the Azure back for next year's GenCon (and yes, it will still be 2nd ed), I think we'll forgo that. Besides, I've been receiving lots of requests for copies and I've saved every one of them. Steve and I are going to get the adventures cleaned up for this October Omaha con, and once we're happy with it, we'll be sending out copies to those who requested it -- and to our two playtesters across the pond, of course!

So all in all, it was a big and exciting event for us and I hope those of you who attended our events had even more fun than we had. If not, I wanna know how we can make that so.

What we'd like to is hold a meeting sometime next week (I'm thinking Monday @ 9pm EST) for everyone to offer us feedback. It'll be held in our big and spacious chat room (chat.psionics.net, #GreyCouncil) and will be all about making next year 100% better than this one. I have some ideas of my own, as I'm sure the other officers do, but we're only a few small fish in a big pool. I'll make sure Keldreth sends out a set time once we get everything hammered out -- right now priority #1 is recovery and reading all the new stuff we blew our budgets on -- but there WILL be a meeting NEXT WEEK! So expect to hear something by Wednesday.

BTW, even if you didn't make GenCon this year, don't be shy. We wanna hear from everyone.

I hope I'll see all 2,000+ of you there. :D

One last thing before I close this off. Thanks to Nathan, Morgan and Steve for being there for the Thursday meeting -- it was great to have all of you there and I couldn't have done it without you (next year maybe we can talk Chris out of his shell for an appearance). And its always great to see Lisa Steven, resident mega-babe, hanging around with the rest of us. But none of us could have done it if it hadn't been for everyone who showed up.

So **THANK YOU** for making this GenCon so special for me and the rest of us officers. Its times like this when its all worth it.

Yours,
Tom Harrison
Chairman, Council of Greyhawk

ps. in the interests of not crossposting, this message is only being posted here. If you have a Greyhawk buddy who refuses, or is unable, to subscribe to Greytalk, please forward this post to him.

pps. GO TEAM TANGENT!

-------
See the OERTH JOURNAL at the Council of Greyhawk website:
http://members.xoom.com/cogh

BluSponge's Gray Matter Website (RANTS, 7th Sea, and Greyhawk SAGA)
http://web2.airmail.net/sponge2

Winter Fantasy 2000

Date: Thu, 27 Jan 00 10:02AM PST
From: Scott Casper Add To Address Book Add To Junk Mail
To: GREYTALK@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: [GREYTALK] Winter Fantasy 2000

Hi! Here at last is my much-delayed report on Winter Fantasy 2000. Erik Mona has already shared with us the only big news to come from the convention, but this may be useful to anyone else thinking of attending Winter Fantasy in the future. If you
learn nothing else, make sure to never play a tournament module written by Gregory Detwiller!

Hi again! This last weekend, I attended Winter Fantasy 2000 for Saturday only. This is my story.

I drove to the convention, making sure to arrive the night before so I could get to the convention quickly in the morning. However, I had chosen a Motel 6 to save money. This motel was located in the red light district of Ft. Wayne, which consisted of the entire west side of town. There were more strip clubs on one street then there were fire hydrants.

That's all I'll say on that subject...

Ft. Wayne has a very tiny downtown. In fact, it's so small that some residents one might ask for directions do not even know where it is. "Head that way and look for the tall buildings," one of them might say. But such a person not only is clueless as to where their downtown is, but has also clearly never been to Chicago. As a Chicagoan, Ft. Wayne's "tall buildings" looked more like speed bumps to me.

So I arrived for the convention, but ten minutes past the start of the first time slot. My disappointment was not lessened when I learned that two-thirds of the events I had wanted for that day were booked solid already. I also discovered soon enough what a small con Winter Fantasy was. There was no open gaming. What passed for an exhibit hall looked more like somebody's closet with a lot of people crammed into it. Kenzer was the only big name company with a booth. Later, I compared notes with the guy manning the booth about how hard it is to get published by DUNGEON Magazine.

Luckily, I ran into my friend Darren almost right away. He is big-time into the RPGA, and had actually signed up for the Living Greyhawk Preview even ahead of time (I had assumed it would be more like a seminar for a larger crowd). I sat at the table next to his and listened in as some TSR guy explained how 3rd edition is supposed to work. I've since read more about 3rd ed. rules than I was able to overhear, but I was impressed at the time by aspects of the initiative system (though I detest the 6-second round), disappointed with clerical spell domains which seem to limit selection even more than spheres did, and shivered at the thought of Find Familiar being reduced to a cantrip.

Erik Mona was running the same thing at the table on the other side of me. Darren was with a group of Living City players who were curious about Living Greyhawk, but Erik's group consisted almost entirely of the Dyvers triad and their entourage. The Dyvers team was the most visible triad at the convention, and even had spiffy Dyvers T-shirts! Erik Mona seemed to recognize me and asked me how I was doing. I bored him for a bit about how awful my morning was turning out. Most of the time, I just sat there working on Greyhawk material.

After the Previews ended, and after exhausting what little there was to do at the con without an event ticket, I wandered outdoors to see what "downtown" Ft. Wayne had to offer. It turned out to be much more interesting than the convention! In addition to a variety of neighboring fast food places, there was a conservatory (but I balked at the thought of having to pay to enter when Chicago's conservatory is free). A few blocks away, however, was the County Public Library -- and was that place ever great! Comicbook racks of the latest titles that could be checked out, an impressive graphic novel collection in Young Adults (all the trade paperbacks of BONE, plus two USAGI YOJIMBO collections), a Government Documents department that put my own to shame, and -- coincidentally -- the Children's Dept. was having Middle Ages-inspired activities!

I killed a lot of time there, but came back to the convention late that afternoon. There was a seminar about Living Greyhawk where we got to meet the Council and all the triads in attendance, and hear a little about their progress and plans. I was looking for the Verbobonc triad, and heard that one of them was there, but never saw him. I also heard from some people in the crowd that Gamma World was coming back (yeah!), but as an Alternity setting (boo!). Erik Mona announced the Living Greyhawk newsletter, as well as Polhedron's commitment to publishing Greyhawk material. I asked if the newsletter would require a separate subscription from Polyhedron, and was told it wouldn't. After the seminar, I wanted to ask Erik if there were plans to assign Ahlissa yet, and if Polyhedron would like articles on Ahlissa, but the Council members were all hungry for dinner and didn't seem to be in the mood to answer more questions.

I had managed to get just ONE event ticket for something I had wanted to play, and that was the Call of Cthulu Open. As luck would have it, my friend Darren had signed up for it as well. And he knew our Keeper personally from his RPGA experience, so it looked to be a good time. I could not have been more wrong. The adventure was a piece of excrement written by a bed-wettting moron named Gregory Detwiller. The adventure started out with our characters being drugged and then mind-transferred into the bodies of members of the Great (though not in this context) Race of Yith. From there the module squashes all chances to role-play, as the Yithians punish you for showing any signs of denial. Everyone is expected to blindly accept life as a Yithian, as there is no chance of escape UNTIL a certain section of the tournament when a ridiculously huge window of opportunity presents itself. From there it's just wandering Cthulu encounters until everyone runs out of Sanity points. Of course, long before that happened, my character strangled himself to death to spare himself from the pain and frustration which is a Gregory Detwiller tournament.

I never did find out who won that round. Thankfully there wasn't a second round of it. The Keeper apologized for the tournament module afterwards, confessing that it had gone so badly the day before that it had made her cry. Darren and I complained to somebody (Darren said he was important) about the appaling lack of intelligence in Gregory Detwiller's writing, to which he replied that this was not the first time he had heard as much.

And so, having experienced what the RPGA has to offer, I returned to my motel, and the next day left to come home.