Indy's slow-and-not-so-brief After Con Report (ACR)

Friday: arrived early enough to Lancaster to zip over to the Amish
Farmer's Market in order to pick up some of the goodies one can
obtain. Picked up a small packet of cubed cheese as a prize for
the Carnage Con Queso game as well.  :-)  Nothing like a little
fresh cheese for the game!

After that dashed to the hotel, checked in, then moseyed to the con
room. Unloaded the car and started doing my con organizer stuff of
sorting through the prizes so graciously donated by Jon T, Geo-Hex/KR,
DLD Productions, Brigade/Tony F, and others, assigning them as needed.
Wanted to get in on Stuart's "Charlie Don't Surf" game, but alas, he
runs extremely popular CineGrunt events, and there was a waiting line.
I talked to Stuart a little about the painting seminar he was going to
run midday Saturday and he gave me some suggestions about re-priming
those minis I wanted to paint up this weekend. He said it would take
a few hours for the primer to settle and allow the mini to be painted
properly, so I spent a little time glueing some of my 15mm vehicles
(some Brigade and DLD tanks/APCs) together in preparation for this.
After I joined up in Jerry's UNSC vs The Pirates FT game as a Pirate,
siding with Aaron Teske and Jim Flood. We decided to divy our ships up
in the following manner: Jim got the needle ships, Aaron got the THrust-6
ships, and I got the Thrust-4 ships (mainly because I like and wanted
to fly the NAC battleship - yes, yes, I KNOW it has pulse torps! :-P ).
We accomplished our main objective (destroying the rather substantially-
sized UNSC replenishment vessel), but alas, we almost forced a draw in
the scenario; the UNSC won by a hair as they wiped out my entire command
(I could not generate enough speed to outrun their reinforcements; Aaron
and Jim's fleets were able to escape, if not unscathed, at least they
got away). Fun game. I was able to fire my p-torps a couple times, and
actually hit. Addtionally my beam dice either rolled 1s or 6s - I
attribute all this to a sublevel channeling of Beth Fulton (since
she apparently can roll Teske Field-like series of 6s when in the
Northern Hemisphere).

Throughout the evening I kept looking for my brother, who was to be
a vendor at the con (he was rooming with me, after all; I had an extra
key for him). Never saw him. I would learn later (after the con was
well over and done with) that his co-manager sneakily and underhandedly
ignored his request for the weekend off and purposefully scheduled him
to work while she brown-nosed with upper management in their company by
"volunteering" to do inventory. Naturally she waited until Erik was
walking out of the store to drive to Lancaster to tell him; a real
sweetheart...but anyway...

Late in the evening Bill Spring from BR Snasis showed and got set up. He
was beset by people almost immediately that I could tell. Bill Stackpole
of Zeno Games and his wife had arrived earlier in the evening to set
their stand up, so were already established when people arrived.

Saturday Morning: Up early, to breakfast with the main gang: Jon Davis,
Jerry Han, Aaron Teske, plus a few other early risers. After breakfast,
back to the con room. Time for the next events! I spent my morning trying
to re-prime some of my 15mm tanks and sorting & distributing prizes to
the various events running (after 5 years still trying to find a good
organizing system for doing this). Everyone seemed to be having a great
time. I also took submissions for the Miniatures Painting Contest and
got that set up and ready for judging. Then we all broke for lunch.

Saturday Afternoon: I attended Stuart's painting seminar. As we were
sequestered away in a side room, I did not have the opportunity to
see any of the events or fun that went on during this period. But that
was okay! I was learning how to improve my painting of minis (going from
splotchy blob to something that is "getting there" in respectability).
Some of the techniques Stuart taught us was new for me, and some of it I
had found I was already doing unconsciously but not consistently. Gave
us some stuff to chew on. It was a good seminar (for me, anyway; if
nothing else this weekend, I felt I got my money's worth out of just
this one event).

After the painting seminar was a quick dinner break. I grabbed the ballot
box (15 minutes after voting "officially" closed for the minis contest;
sorry to the two guys who didn't get their votes in in time, but I had
time constraints in which to get the votes counted; besides,  given the
weighting of votes to those who won, if you had voted contrary to the
rest of the group, the winners would still have won). Jon, Jerry, and I
took a brief Organizer's Dinner to discuss official con business, while
I counted ballots (multi-tasking!). After a quick stroll back to the
con room in a light rain, we gathered everyone around to announce the
winners of the painting contest and make any general announcements and
stuff. For the record, the winners were:

FT First Place: Jim Bell
FT Second Place: Aaron Newman
FT Third Place: John Crimmins
DSII First Place: Rick Rutherford
DSII Second Place: Martin Connell
DSII Third Place: Brian Bell
SGII-15mm First Place: Rick Rutherford
SGII-15mm Second Place: Rich Rutherford
SGII-15mm Third Place: Chris Deboe
SGII-25mm First Place: Adrian Johnson
SGII-25mm Second Place: Aaron Newman
SGII-25mm Third Place: John Crimmins

A big hand to these guys. They did a great job on their minis.

Jon Davis then announced that we had gotten a couple of cakes for everyone
to partake eating from, in celebration of our 5th year. Most of the two
cakes were gone by 11pm. Hungry gamers.

Due to various sudden cancellations by a number of people this year, we
ended up being either short participants in some instances, or short
game masters. To remedy this, Stuart valiantly took on running yet
*another* event. The poor guy was tired; he should have taken a break!
But he stalwartly set up a StarGrunt II scenario set in the Vietnam
era. I got to join in on this one. It wasn't the light-hearted fun
scenario he ran Friday evening. No, this was a more serious game.
Generally designed for beginners to intro them to SGII, but while I
have played SGII a few times here and there, it has been a long while,
and I wanted to experience a Stuart Game(tm). It was well worth it.

I was on the side of the Viet Cong. We were holding a valley when an
incursion of American troops entered. We had a hidden bunker and two
platoons of infantry, plus a couple of small mortar pieces up on a hill
that the Americans did not know about. The Americans came in with I
think two heavily-armed platoons themselves, but timed it so one came
in a few turns before the other, thus attempting to pull our forces to
one side of the valley. Communication back then was...difficult at
best. No fancy-dancy helmet comm systems. The VC had one radio to
call in arty strikes by our commander. The rest of us had to use runners
in order to pass orders from the upper command structure. Also, to
reflect the rigid doctrine that the VC operated under, during the
pre-game time we had to decide what our forces were going to do (take
a hill, move to a particular thick section of the jungle, prevent the
Americans from taking certain actions, etc). After that we could not
communicate with our company leader unless we sent a runner. Nor were
we allowed to fluidly respond to a situation that developed outside
of our orders. Which proved to be an interesting challenge. However,
also did not have casualty burdens. If we took casualties during a
firefight, we left them (go ahead, kill us; we'll make more!). The
Americans had to try and evacuate theirs. In the end the American forces
were repulsed after taking some lucky VC arty strikes and losing almost
two squads, plus had two other squads pinned down to weapons fire, one
of them being heavily hit (I roll somewhat better in SGII than I do using
FT pulse torps; my rolls are more "average"). However, as a parting
shot, the Americans targetted a hill in which we had almost a full
platoon of VC sitting on top (3 squads and my command element). The
area was seriously *flattened*; ONLY my command element escaped unscathed!
Leaving one remaining squad (3/4 strength) in the area my team was
to hold against the Americans to fend off any further attacks (fortunately
the Americans were effecting a withdr--er, I mean, retreating like screaming
banshees). Stuart runs a fast, tight game. This added to the atmosphere
of trying to make fast decisions (Stuart wasn't fooling around: you had
something like 30 seconds to make up your mind who was going to do what
on your turn - and if you didn't, you lost your activation! "use it or
lose it"). It was fun.The American's objective was to take our bunker.
However, after taking heavy casualties, and after the game learning where
our bunker was, they admitted they would never have found it. Woohoo!
We won. :-)  Chased those pesky pasty evil guys away.

Sunday Morning. After a brief stroll around town to find a small
foodmart (the regular restaurants downtown being closed on Sunday
morning) the last set of events got underway. I had put together a
simple and hopefully fun game called "Who's Your Monkdaddy?", in
which I took Placebo Press' "Ebola Monkey Hunt" game and translated
it into FMA terms, and adding a few extra lethal twists to the game
(replaced the "researchers" with "fire teams" of 5 different governments,
including a Kra'Vak fire team). For "terrain" I used a selection of
floor plans from Azhanti High Lightning to represent the building
the teams had to penetrate and capture virus-infected mutated monkeys.

Being a little presumptuous, the game, I think, was fun (at least it
was fun for me to run, so pththt). Mike Hudak's fire team was wiped out
to a man early on by David Raynes' fire team tossing grenades in the
hallway, so I gave him control of the security force at the bottom
of the complex. Mike grew evil and began thinking of things to do
to the other fire teams I hadn't entertained: like shutting down
elevators, turning on radiation alarms, and as a topper, blasting
the Kra'Vak fire team with Muzak (which, upon first hearing it,
the K'V immediately lost a level of confidence, and subsequent
bombardments of this "music" forced reaction checks at +1; at one
point an entire level/floor was blaring Muzak and the K'V team went
nuts, and began firing at every possible place speakers might be
secluded in the ceilings and walls, and even went so far as to unlimber
their one IAVR and launch it into the ceiling (they took out the main
cluster of speakers; lucky them).

The K'V and one other team decided to give up looking for monkeys and
would wait for the other two teams to get them, and attempt to ambush
them on their way up. However, when the K'V saw the other human team,
they launched an all-out assault. Alas we ran out of time before we
were able to fully resolve that situation, but the humans were beginning
to fall.

The other two teams had penetrated deeper into the compound. The team
which got the deepest ended up in a protracted firefight with the
security team, while the other team managed to find one monkey, lose it,
find another monkey, and were working their way out to their vehicle
when we finally ran out of time.

After this spent some time closing up the con, then a quick drive home
(lucky me I live 1-1/2 hours away! I could afford to stay and essentially
be the last one out, though Brian Bell and his father were staying another
night and were the last last ones to leave).

A good, fun con. Hopefully next year will be even better. And hopefully
we'll see more of you all lot there! I'm already working on the scenarios
for next year (to the screams of Jon Davis, who doesn't want to think
about starting to work out the schedule *now* ;-)

Mk