Bell Digest v940727p3

From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer)
To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest)
Reply-To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RuneQuest Daily)
Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Wed, 27 Jul 1994, part 3
Sender: Henk.Langeveld@Holland.Sun.COM
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From: joe@sartar.toppoint.de (Joerg Baumgartner)
Subject: Re:vulsions
Message-ID: 
Date: 27 Jul 94 06:43:04 GMT
X-RQ-ID: 5312

Tuesday, and no short Convulsions comments on the Daily?

I just returned after 1300 km and about as many minutes from 
Convulsions, and still am a bit (a lot) exhausted.

First of all, it was lots of fun to meet all of you present, and to 
exchange words instead of email messages with you. Under the guidance 
of Henk we even developed the ultimate thread resolution method - I 
hope Hans will manage the jpeg of my memorable final argument with Alex 
about Aeolians, Initiation etc from the Trollball ditches.

So, down to the details:

Accommodation: good.

Beer: good, but the bar dried up too early.

Convulsions: great.

Discussions: lots, mainly off the panels, 

(I'll spare you the rest of the alphabet.)


I arrived at Friday morning, 6 o'clock, directly from the boat from 
Dover. We managed to sneak into a common breakfast with the guests and 
guestettes, and to occupy our rooms early, so Ingo was ready to display 
all of our products when the rest of you came. I started the 
interesting part by sneaking off to a pub with Sandy and Greg Fried, 
learning lots about the East of Glorantha and other matters in the 
process. Nick Brooke redirected us to another pub before the official 
opening, where this time Tarsh was my field of battle^H^H^H^H^H^H 
discussion with Chris Gidlow, Nick et al.

Then Convulsions 94 were declared opened.

I decided to leave the Cthulhu Party Party preparations early to meet 
other regulars of the Daily, but I still have Ken Rolston's (aka Great 
Cthulhu) "Feed me" with our thundering "Eat me now!" replies and the 
voting song "We are the Food, We are the Gruel" (melody by M. Jackson) 
in my ears.

The RQ Renaissance panel was somewhat ambivalent to my expectations; 
neither the future of RQ nor Glorantha publications were made very 
clear. The situation between Chaosium and AH still seems to be 
difficult, however both parties seem to be eager to get both RQ and 
Glorantha pushed. I wish they'd push harder instead...

Special topic was the fate of RQ:AiG, which caused some heated 
discussion between the panel and the daily punters. I hope David Cheng 
had his recorder ready - I forgot to bring mine. David, if you intend 
to have transcripts made, look out for volunteers - I might (if only 
for getting access to an acoustic copy of one of your recordings ), 
there might be others as well.

Later I found a willing victim for my Dragon Pass boardgame fantasies 
and fell victim myself... The bar room, although cut off liquid 
reserves, kept a lot of us up deep into the night.


Saturday saw me again at the Breakfast (a really important social 
component of the con), after which it became physical - the Life Action 
All European Trollball Championship. Showing our disregard for Yelm's 
searing rays, four teams had assembled to go for the championship. 
Several memorable moments occured, like when the giant referee slipped 
in my squishy remains and caused a small earthquake. Too bad the 
audience was so rude to abstain from throwing missiles...

Directly after the four team all for one game (the winner was the last 
troll standing - actually crawling to the touchdown...) Henk presided 
over the ultimate innovation for resolving endless Daily discussions. 
Alex and I fought out our initiation and Heortland debate, where each 
hit scored was followed by a statement of proof. "Wizards in 
Heortland", yeah! Details hopefully available as 3 minute jpeg on soda 
soon.

I missed Eat at Geos :-(

Then there was How The West Was One. The to-be-sainted Notslor had 
called all of us bishops, knights etc. to Sog City. I cannot go into 
the details now...

In the break I managed to sneak into the heroquest panel which was a 
continuation of our Daily debates, involving non-netters as well. 
(Imagine: there are RuneQuesters without Internet access!)

Another informal meeting in the bar room carried over as endless 
discussion into the morning...


Sunday began with a breakfast again. Afterwards there were lots of 
panels. I missed most of them, such as the Nick Brooke Cultural 
Exchange, but I couldn't afford to miss the Meet the Digest event. 
After being properly chastised, I promised to be good (for a while...)

Then came the Lore Auction. I invested almost ten pounds, we learned 
that apart from the six questions Greg won't answer there is another 
type of trick questions like: "apart from 'What are the six questions 
you won't answer', 'What's the God Learner Secret', etc., what's one of 
the questions you won't answer?", and that there are questions to which 
Greg doesn't know the answer. Once again David Cheng was recording our 
dialogs...

I missed most of Greg's Address - trollball makes real hungry if you 
mustn't eat the trollkin.

Then came The Auction. Vast amounts of money and goodies were traded. 
Did anybody manage to record the prizes?

Too bad I missed parts of it - Greg's newest writings went for 
amazingly fair prices, and boy they look great from just flipping 
through them. I really should have bidded for them... Still I managed 
to get half of the RQ2 stuff I was missing for not too high bids. 
Respects to David Cheng, he was the most aggressive auctioner I've ever 
seen.

The closing ceremony wasn't the end of it all - afterwards we had the 
ultimate Griselda experience: Oliver Dickinson read from "The 
Matchmaker", a sequel to "The Hero Bit", and part of his contribution 
to the Sartar book, a Griselda story told differently... We learned a 
new Griselda song, too.

The Story Telling Final followed; I hope to see the stories I missed on 
the digest soon. Lewis promised his winner story about Vinga and Eurmal 
would come soon.

Then Greg read (egged on and on, much more than originally planned) 
from his pre-Solar Pelorian myths. If you thought you knew what 
happened in Godtime Peloria from GRoY, you learned how wrong you were. 
The myths came right from the soil...

Once again, the evening ended late in the night.

I heard that some people actually managed to play RuneQuest or other 
games during Convulsions. Where did they steal that time? I feel I 
missed half of the "must" acts myself...

Loads of fun, I still haven't quite recovered (for one thing, my throat 
still is sore from all the debate. You thought I write long? Talk to 
me, then...).


As an epilogue: Monday afternoon in London we visited Forbidden Planet, 
and guess who we met there - almost half the foreign country attendees 
of Convulsions...

-- 
--  Joerg Baumgartner   joe@sartar.toppoint.de

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