No! Sleep! 'til Columbus! Living Life Four Hours at a Time for Five Days Straight.

Oh, look! It's February already. That means we get to begin the run up to convention season. Early on in January, Wife and I were talking about the fact that I need to get my name out there. Get more eyes on my resume, shake more hands and make more contacts in the industry at large, and we felt that there was no better way than this than to make the rounds of this year's big cons. So I pulled out the calendar, dusted off my pregens and sat down to figure out my plan of attack.




It was a short planning session. The first thing I did was look at what I consider the three biggest and most important cons, PAX, Origins and GenCon, and see how I could fit them into my schedule. Turns out I can't, at least not all of them. First, I find out that PAX is the weekend of March 26th, which is when babby is due. Wife and I figured it'd be inappropriate to be throwing dice with Gabe and Tycho while my first-born daughter comes into the world. Then, I discover that GenCon falls squarely in the week we spend with the family in North Carolina because apparently the powers that be at GenCon LLC can't be arsed to pick one weekend and stick with it. So, that leaves me with Origins which, all things considered, isn't bad at all.

Origins is a nice little con in a town I really like and I've had a great experience every time I've gone. Once the decision was made or, well, made for me I guess, I needed to figure out how to actually, you know, pay for the trip. I'm not sure if you're aware Gentle Readers, but being a freelancer, or "journeyman writer" as I've started calling myself, is pretty much like being professionally unemployed. The lack of a steady paycheck and the fickle nature of freelance work makes budgeting and planning more difficult than normal. It is, in a word, for suckers, but it's what I've got. Anyway, after surfing through Origins' frankly poorly designed website looking for registration info, I came across their policy for reimbursing Game Masters.

That's right kids, if I run enough games I get to go to Origins for free. I thought, hell, I can do that. I did it at GenCon a couple of years ago. Then I did the math and realized that I'll have to run eight games to have enough credits to get in for free. No problem, I thought. I'll just stretch it out over the course of the four days of the con and I'll be good. Wife smiled and nodded, knowing full well that I'm an idiot for even considering it. But, consider it I did, and I'll be running eight, four hour games at Origins this year. The pros are A: I get in to Origins for free and B: I get a voucher to buy delicious food at North Market, which is worth the price of admission alone. Cons are A: that's a lot of games and B: seriously, that's a lot of games.

Anyway, here's my plan. For starters, I'll be running four zombie games using All Flesh Must Be Eaten 1st ed. These will all be part of the same story arc taking place in the Pacific Theater during WWII, starting with Seabees building an airbase on a recently secured island and ending on a major forward base of operations. I'll leave you to ponder the details, but hilarity is bound to ensue. Aside from the zombie games, I'll be running an Iron Kingdoms game, a Rogue Trader game, an AEGIS vs. SPIDER game which is a cold war super hero/super spy game using a combination of Spycraft and Mutants and Masterminds, and one of my Detroit Police games, probably using Unisystem. I've got a lot of work to do between now and the end of June.

So there you have it. If you're coming to Origins this year, keep an eye out for my games and come throw some dice with me. You won't be disappointed.