>From: "Ian Cooper" <ian_hammond_cooper_at_...>
>
>>I pretty much had as many
>>players as I wanted whenever I wanted to run.
>
>Mike, you are a star.
Oh, I'm somewhat well known, sure, but I was running for people who I'm sure didn't know me from Adam in a lot of cases.
The setup was key. People from the Forge Booth would come up whenever it was too crowded, or they just felt more like playing than selling, and they'd bring along customers who wanted longer demos or just who they could cajole into coming along. I can't say that any one of them came up looking to play Hero Quest. But lots of them came up to room 205 not knowing precisely what they wanted to play. I'd just grab those folks and some ringers and we'd be off and running.
Best HQ story from the convention: Judd (AKA Paka at The Forge) and Jason Morningstar come up to play with two guys they're dragging with them. Thomas is already running for three people (including myself, Shreyas Sampat, another player, and, in fact, one more newb player that had been playing previous to that), and they don't know what they want to play. They see we're doing HQ, and Judd says, "Too bad we didn't get in on the start of this, as I've always wanted to try HQ." Thomas, being a glutton for punishment, tells them that the size, and the fact that they're jumping in midstream, is not a problem. To which I also stipulate. The more the merrier.
Now, this is in Thomas' "Otherworld" game, where we make up the whole setting from scratch (and I get to be a player for once!). Thomas describes our character concepts to the new players, and Judd comes up with the idea that his character is a female descended from some being like Medusa, and that he runs an organization where they raise basilisks for use in making stone columns out of convicts from the big city. Where Judd comes up with his ideas, I'll never know. But he's amazingly creative, which HQ allowed no problem.
The other new players organized around his character, with one (Jason's) being a blind ex-beggar who served as head Basilisk Wrangler, one character who was an outland barbarian who retrieved Basilisk eggs for the organization, and, lastly, the medusine character's male sex slave. Whole process of coming up with this and getting them started on paper took about ten minutes.
Well, in the course of two hours of play, my character (a Geomancy sort of Adept) had gone on a quest with the barbarian to prove his worth in owning a basilisk, and then at a dinner party thrown for all of us, he animated one of the statues in the courtyard with a quick little heroquest. The statue turned out to be the father of both the ex-beggar and the sex-slave, who had not known they were brothers. The beggar then decided that his slave brother must be free, cajoled the local crime lord - who had since fallen for the sex slave - into paying the dowry for the medusine mistress for her to marry the sex-slave, thus making him a free man.
They were then subsequently married in the tradition of Shreyas' character, since he was a priest and handy. Judd's character commented afterwards that the ceremony, which had included sex in the saddle, and then leaping over a fire pit had been a "quaint country ceremony."
And then these players had to leave. But in about two hours they'd developed fascinating characters with heavy issues, and had managed to move the plot of all of them on substantially in an amazingly entertaining manner.
GenCon does so rock. :-)
Mike
P.S. Andy, it's ironic, but I had forgotten that I'd met you. Once I saw you at GenCon, I recalled that we'd met a couple of times at your booth and at the Forge booth or somesuch. I knew your name sounded familiar, and if I'd just looked up your credits, I'd have realized who you are.
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