Gary Con XI Annotated Slideshow (2017)

"The Battle of the Brown Hills" - Chainmail Fantasy Supplement game

I had a fantastic time at Gary Con IX last weekend! I've put the photos up in a public FB album and annotated each photo:

Gary Con IX Annotated Slideshow

The slideshow should be viewable even if you don't have a FB account. Follow the link and click on the first photo (of the Zenopus Archives badge) to start viewing the photos.

Thanks to everyone who made Gary Con happen! 

I plan to return next year and run a game - something Holmes-related.

Gary Con Bound!

I'll be at Gary Con for the first time this year, from Fri at 11 AM until Sun at 4 PM.
The event is being held in the same hotel (now the Grand Geneva) as Gen Con X, almost forty years ago in Aug 1977. This was the year the Holmes Basic set debuted and the first Gen Con that J. Eric Holmes attended. This summer is also Gen Con 50.

I'll wear the above homemade id in addition to my official GC badge. Please say hello. 

Here is my schedule of games: 

Fri
12-4 Acrid Herald (espionage RPG) scenario with Merle Rasmussen (author of Top Secret)
4-8 "The Last Great Adventure - in 3D" AD&D adventure with Harold Johnson (author of C1 Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan)
9-12 Gen Con 50 celebration at Horticultural Hall, original home of Gen Con

Sat
8-12 Orc's Drift CHAINMAIL game
12-2 Caves of Chaos - Cave G - 5E adaptation of B2
2-4 Dungeon! boardgame with the designer David Megarry
4-6 Auction run by Frank Mentzer
7-12 Battle of the Brown Hills CHAINMAIL written by Gygax, run by Paul Stormberg

Sun
10-12 Dragon Lairds card game with Tom Wham (a Holmes Basic artist!)
12-4 Braunstein IV: Banania with David Wesely

(I signed up late for the con, so I am not scheduled to run any games, though I will bring my Basic Rulebook)

Fantastic Exciting Imaginative zine

A different perspective...

Fantastic Exciting Imaginative is a new zine of content for Holmes Basic or any old-D&D, compiled by Jon Wilson (aka bygrinstow) of the Appendix M blog. Contributors were drawn from G+ and include Jon, Paul Wolfe, JV West, Robert Fairbanks, Shane Ward, Tony A. Rowe, James George, Robyn George, Grandpa Chet, and myself. Jon is the primary artist, with one piece each by Denis McCarthy and Chris Holmes (!)

The name comes from Holmes' first line in the Introduction to the Basic Rulebook: "Dungeons & Dragons is a fantastic, exciting and imaginative game of role playing for adults 12 years and up".

For the theme, Jon's brilliant idea was to compile material inspired by each piece of art in the Basic rulebook (2nd/3rd edition) by the artists David C. Sutherland III, Dave Trampier and Tom Wham. Multiple contributions per artwork were accepted. For instance, my main contribution is the Regal Lizard Man*, a write-up of the lizardman in Sutherland's artwork accompanying the Foreword (shown in the header of this blog). But the same art also inspired the Iguanadyte by Robert Fairbanks. My other minor contribution is the Harpy Axe, a magic item inspired by the Harpy battle scene, which appeared previously as part of a list of "Lesser Magic Items" in the zine Dungeon Crawl.

Click here to download the free zine from DTRPG**
(It's only available in pdf, but the pdf does include a version optimized for printing at home).

*Inspired by the Regal Horned Lizard of the American Southwest
**link includes my Drivethrurpg affiliate # that gives me 5% credit if you do buy something while you are there