Hello Gamers,

Sorry this is a little bit late, but I got my rat tail tangled on a Street Fighter II machine and it took forever for the paramedics to arrive after we called them on the car phone.

I have to say this is a great time to be a traditional gamer. I attended DexCon in NJ and had a blast. If you are in the NY/NJ area, and enjoy any kind of tabletop gaming, you need to make this con. It is a good size (that’s what she said), not so big that you get lost, but there is enough people to support all kinds of gaming.

I was only able to attend one afternoon and evening of the con, but it was worth the trip. Without a doubt, the best part of the con was meeting Joe from Greyhawk Grognard and Eric from The Mule Abides. Joe was running sessions of his awesome version of Castle Greyhawk, The Castle of the Mad Archmage. Joe was also killing PCs in The Tomb of Horrors.  Eric was running his own megadungeon using the Moldvay/Cook version of Basic D&D. They were both very nice guys. Joe had set up an Invasion of the Grognards for people who wanted to play older versions of the game. Rumor has it that Joe is also working on his own version of 2nd Edition AD&D.

I was scheduled to run two Labyrinth Lord games. Labyrinth Lord is a clone of the Moldvay/Cook D&D Basic Rules. Sadly I did not think far enough ahead to realize that while people might know what Basic D&D was, they would have never heard of Labyrinth Lord. Since no one knew what I was running, no one showed up to play. Woops. Valuable lesson learned. If you are running an old school game at a con, use the brand name not the generic. Despite my problems, there were plenty of people playing classic gaming. In fact there were two tables running at once.

I managed to get into Eric’s D&D game and it really showed the strength of the more abstract early rules. We managed to take out a monster our weapons couldn’t touch by lassoing him and dropping him down a pit. Plus there were nine players at the table, and the game MOVED.

I will certainly be returning next year and for their winter con in February. I’ll come prepared to educate the crowd on what I am running next time. Hopefully I will be able to bring some kind of promotional material or demo for a certain robot fighting game too.