This past weekend a number of Barliman chat room regulars hooked up for some zaniness in Chicago. It was a great event! One of the things some of us did was jaunt over to GenCon, America’s annual gamefest.
My first impression was that GenCon was sort of like a smaller ComicCon, without the comics industry. Then I found the football-field sized gaming hall, packed wall to wall with die-hard gamers. They looked like they were having some serious fun!
GenCon is all about adventure/fantasy gaming, and the place oozed this kind of action. Once again, you could see that the Lord of the Rings movies are moving into position for a kill on the marketplace. There must have at least four seperate booths featuring or containing LotR film product or information, including Games Workshop, Decipher, Fantasy Flight Games, and Inquest Gamer magazine (best link I could find for Inquest).
Part of our crew went to the Games Workshop distributors meeting and were quite wowed by what they heard and saw. Hopefully one of them will send us a report on that soon! We filmed their LotR miniatures in action with a scenario laid out on a patch of ground dominated by a Nazgul and expect to air this soon.
I made PipeSmoke run around with me, and we hit the floor looking for LotR. Video cam in tow, we shot some footage of the Games Workshop miniatures, and an interview with Decipher creators and an editor at Inquest. Hopefully those will be public at the second TORN Digital release.
It looks like Decipher has put together a roll-playing scenario for beginners to the gaming world; at GenCon they used some of Game Workshops’ miniatures to flesh out the scenario… very cool! More info to come on this soon. On another front, Inquest Gamer magazine will be doing a countdown to LotR, and we’ll have more on that later, too.
One of the Convention highlights again was Decipher. They had their LotR display running and it was getting a LOT of attention. But better than this were the promotional large-sized LotR Trading Card Game samples they were handing out.
If you want some of this great Con action, don’t miss DragonCon on Labor Day Weekend in Atlanta. Wish I was going!!
