Hi, there! Thanks for stopping by. I haven’t posted in quite
a while, so I thought I’d share a few quick updates about what I was up to. I
just returned from GenCon, where I spent four days running Alternity games,
participating in the “GenCon 50” special presentation track, and meeting
interesting people. Here are my ten takeaways from GenCon, in no particular
order:
10. It was great to sit down side-by-side with Peter
Adkison, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, and Jonathan Tweet to reminisce about the
job of designing D&D 3rd Edition. I haven’t been in the same
room with all four of those guys in almost twenty years. I know that the whole
seminar was recorded; if you’re interested in D&D history and 3e in
particular, I think it would be worth your time to track it down.
9. Pearl Street Pizzeria is one of Indianapolis’s hidden
gems. I picked up pizzas there to bring to a game session we ran for a special
backer, and I gotta say, that’s a damned good pie. I find myself doubting
whether I should tell you about it, because I don’t want to see it buried under
a Ram-like avalanche of hungry con-goers. Anyway, twenty beers on tap and the
best pizza in Indy. You heard it here first.
8. No, Sasquatch Game Studio didn’t have a booth in the
Exhibitor Hall this year. We didn’t have any new products to debut at the show,
and without something new, we weren’t sure we’d see the sort of sales it would
take to justify the expense of the booth. Instead, we focused on running
Alternity with Baldman Games and the Herald’s Guild event management, and spent
most of our time actually playing games for once. But there’s a good chance
that we’ll try to booth-up again next year.
7. Wow, companies left money on the table this year. Paizo
sold through their Starfinder stock on Thursday. Ditto Fantasy Flight Games
with some of their new releases. I guess I’d rather sell out early than overprint
for the show, but Thursday’s a little too soon to run out, isn’t it?
6. Flying in late on Wednesday is rough. I didn’t get to bed
until 2 am on Wednesday night, and I had to get up a little after 6. Even
without a booth to set up, it might be better to fly in on Tuesday.
5. There’s a great little game store called Good Games just
a couple of blocks from the convention center. They ran a 40% off sale on
Warmachine and Hordes during the show. I took the opportunity to break into a
second faction: I now have a lot of Skorne to assemble and paint after I get
through some more of my Menoth painting.
4. I happened to run into Mark Tassin of the Writer’s
Symposium while looking for somebody else, and we had a great chat. I’ll be
adding some Symposium panels to my schedule next year, somehow; I’ll also be
trying to run games and maybe staff a booth!
3. The Baldman Games team at GenCon is first-rate. They’ve
got a great set-up and they’re providing hundreds of tables of great gaming
throughout the show. They really took care of us, even though our Alternity presence
was small potatoes compared to D&D. If you’re looking for games to play at
GenCon, you really should check out the Baldman Games events over in the JW
Marriott.
2. I played Alternity with a lot of awesome gamers over the
weekend. Every single player I had the pleasure of hosting at my table was
smart, engaged, and happy to be there; when you’ve got a good table of players,
running a fun game is a breeze. Thanks to any of you who might be reading this!
You guys really made my show.
1. Wow, I think we’ve got something with Alternity. People
picked it up fast, they had a lot of fun playing, and I heard the things every
publisher wants to hear (“where can I get this?” and “when does it come out?”) Kudos
to my fellow Sasquatch Steve Schubert for creating a great adventure; it was a
little bit of a tight fit for a con slot, but the players seemed to enjoy it
quite a lot and there were a lot of ways for those of us GMing to try out different
endings.
Current Events
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Confederate statues and what to do with them. As
it happens, I just finished reading Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels (a fascinating study of military leadership, as well
as a great historical novel). As a history buff, my default position is don’t remove monuments. To me it seems
like an effort to erase history, and I put a lot of stock in the Santayana
quote about what happens to people who don’t remember history. But . . . then I
thought about what it would be like to be a person of color who has to walk by
a Confederate statue every day. And I also recalled that quite a few of those
monuments were built by people in the early 20th century who were
trying to rewrite history for their own purposes. Leaving the statues in place
endorses the narrative of the Lost Cause, and that narrative’s done a lot of
harm to a lot of people.
I do think that some Confederates deserve remembering. Robert E. Lee performed an enormous service to our country by
convincing his fellow Confederates to lay down their arms; without his
courageous choice to surrender at Appomattox the war could have tapered off
into years of unrest, local uprisings, and guerilla fighting. James Longstreet endured
vicious opprobrium for his support of recently freed slaves after the war; it
seems to me he tried to atone for the part he played. Perhaps because of my
recent reading of Killer Angels, I
feel some compassion toward men who felt that they couldn’t participate in a
war against their home states. People of the time saw their states like we see
our country; Lee loved Virginia the way you love America. Could you imagine
helping the United Nations to subjugate America, even if you thought America
might be in the wrong? I wouldn’t want to make that choice.
Anyway, I guess I come down on the side of removing statues
to places where they no longer symbolize state power. They don’t belong in
courthouses or capitol buildings or maybe even city parks. Leave them in museums, battlefields, and
cemeteries—and make sure the true story of those men, both good and bad, is
told. And I wouldn’t destroy works of significant artistic merit. Stone
Mountain is wrongheaded, but destroying that relief would be a terrible thing
to do. Tell its story instead, including how and why it came to be built and
why we would never build it today.
