I survived GenCon Indy. I put a long diary-type report on my LiveJournal, but here I’m going to concentrate on actual gaming stuff rather than complaining about how tired I was or commenting on the restaurants I went to.

I didn’t get all that much gaming in during the con. I’m actually sort of ambivalent about this because I feel like I should’ve gotten much more in (why else does one go to a gaming con?), but I was feeling too physically and emotionally spent to handle much in the way of roleplaying.

I did however run two sessions of Maid RPG as planned. I put together a fairly simple scenario, and had the players make characters and go at it for the remainder of the three hours. The first session was brisk, random, and fun. The second was the single strangest RPG session I’ve ever witnessed, and at times I had to put my head on the table and breathe deep to be able to handle it all. John Kim was there for the second one, so hopefully he can provide more useful commentary than my sleep-deprived brain could hope for.

I think I came home with a total of about 20 or so different books, a mix of indie RPGs and bargains, so I have entirely too much reading material now. I got all inspired to play more of these games with my friends, so I’m going to finally try to organize to play The Mountain Witch in the near future, as well as my neglected Fudge-powered Halo game. I also want to work more on my own games, and try to properly integrate playtesting into the process. Raspberry Heaven and Anime Dreams are actually relatively close to being testable, and I have a very solid idea what I want to do with the next revision of Tokyo Heroes (based largely on Filip’s advice, and in general trying to make it much less handwave-y).

I got to hang out with Andy K a little bit at the RPG.net meetup on Saturday, so in addition to meeting a bunch of cool people I got hooked up with Meikyuu Kingdom, Demon Parasite, and Baka Baka RPG wo Kataru. The latter is a collection of a Japanese gamer’s columns on weird American RPGs, including some indie stuff, and even Panty Explosion (about which he notes that there are only two explicit psychic powers — levitating and making heads explode — but for some reason nothing to make panties explode). Andy did a very short demo of Tenra Bansho there, and I have to say it’s made of pure unadulterated awesome.

I still have a lot of other stuff to post about, but that’ll have to wait. Notably, The Hobby Games: The 100 Best book from Green Ronin is amazing so far, I have lots of games to read, and I went through and wrote down the names of all the RPGs being run in official games that I hadn’t heard of (like Bounty Head Bebop, basically Cowboy Bebop with the serial numbers halfway filed off).