GENCON! GENCON COMES TO INDY!

Sort of like the mountain coming to Mohammed--except, of course, that Mohammed was perfectly willing for the last 8 years or so to drive up to Milwaukee for Gencon. (Perfecting the analogy, I should point out that Milwaukee's convention center is called MECCA.) Still, now it's in Indianapolis, and I'm in Indianapolis, and there's no avoiding it. I actually was kind of unenthused about going this year, partly because it didn't seem as special and noteworthy somehow when it didn't involve a 6 hour roadtrip. Plus I'm not in the industry anymore, and I haven't gamed a whole lot this summer, and I just felt kind of "blah" about the whole thing. But then, I discovered True Dungeon....

True Dungeon, if you haven't already heard of it, is possibly one of the best nerdy gamer experiences ever offered at Gencon. I cancelled one of my Cthulhu games to do it, and the coolness of the experience far outweighed any guilt I might have felt about ditching. Here's the scoop:
Picture an entire ballroom in a large hotel (The Indy Hiatt) which has been devoted solely to constructing a life-size, 8-room dungeoncrawl in glorious 3-D. Groups of 6 players each are given characters--classic D&D style, you get a fighter, a ranger, a bard, a wizard, a cleric, and a rogue. The group decides who will play which character based on people's real life skills--motor skills for the fighters and thief, memorization for the magic users. Then you are conducted into a darkened room, lit only by little glowing flashlight cubes. Each player gets 15 minutes to practice their "skills." The bard memorizes rune glyphs which may appear on items in the dungeon. The cleric has a number of objects like seashells, stones, etc. which are linked to clerical virtues such as "kindness" or "compassion." The wizard memorizes a chart showing how the elements of the universe relate to one another. In the dungeon, when these characters cast spells, the GM will ask them to remember something from their training. If they remember it correctly, the spell works perfectly; otherwise its potency is reduced. The fighter and the ranger get to practice combat skills, which involve sliding disks down a dry-erase board, kind of a like a shuffleboard, at a target. Depending on where your disk lands on the target outline, you hit and do damage to the attacking monster. (No costumed bugbears, just the GM saying "a bugbear rushes into the room! please move to the combat table.") The rogue gets to practice "disarming traps" which is represented by sliding a metal rod around a maze, kind of like the old Operation boardgame--if the rod touches the edges of the maze, a buzzer goes off and the rogue has "set off the trap." Hit points are marked off on your character sheet, which hangs around your neck on a laminated card. Once the 15 minutes practice are up, you enter the dungeon with your DM and a flashlight mocked up to look like a torch. This is your only light source, and it is entirely up to the players to find secret doors, hidden glyphs and inscriptions, etc. etc. Each room has a puzzle which much be solved or a monster which must be beaten within 15 minutes. If the 15 minutes are up before you finish, you all take 6 hp of damage and move on to the next room. Loud dramatic music covers the sounds of other parties in the rooms before and after you. The object (obviously) is to make it through all 8 rooms without dying and escape from the dungeon victorious.

That's what it's all about. Now, our party was excellent, if I do say so myself. We had Andy (Bard,) Alex (Wizard,) Karen A. (Cleric,) Carl (Ranger,) Karen K. (Fighter,) and me (Rogue.) We agreed ahead of time that the major mandate was "protect the cleric at all costs," and this apparently was the right thing to do--my friend Noah tells me that once their cleric died (appallingly early, in Room #3) they were screwed. The puzzles were challengingly hard--some word puzzles, some logic puzzles, and so on. We discovered quickly that casting "detect magic" was a good tactic in most situations; when you do, they give you a little blacklight flashlight, and you search the room for fluorescent paint markings and inscriptions. Out of 8 rooms, we solved 6 successfully in the time allotted. I blew 2 traps out of 5 or 6, I think, and I maintain this wasn't my fault. :] But here's the best part. Room #4 held a secret passage, small enough so that only the halfling rogue (me) could go down it. I got a red flashlight (infravision) and got sent down the tunnel alone. It closed behind me, so they had to go on around the corner without me. Right before the exit to the tunnel, I found the following sign on the wall:
"CONGRATULATIONS, ROGUE! You are faced with a choice. You may either press a magic button that will heal everyone in the party EXCEPT YOURSELF 2 HP.... or, you may elect to receive a t-shirt that reads "I screwed my party for this awesome T-shirt!" Just tell the DM what you've chosen when you come out of the tunnel, and he will make sure it happens."
Now, contrary to what people may think, I'm really a pretty lawful good type in real life, so I had to think about this. For about 6 seconds. Duh. T-shirt, dude. (Most of the party was near full HP except me at this point anyway.) So I crawl out, there's a "bridge" separating me from the party, and the DM comes over to ask me what I chose. He then gives me a token to present to the staff at the end of the game to get my shirt. We proceed to kill the monster on the bridge and move on to Room #5, where we all take hideous amounts of damage by setting off two traps and totally failing to solve the puzzle. I almost doubt the wisdom of my choice--but what the hell, it's what a rogue would do, right? We all make it alive to room #7, where we meet a huge zombiefied troll who takes all that we've got, combatwise. Just before we kill him, he manages to kill both Andy and Carl, by the EXACT number of HP they'd had left. Oops. The rest of us made it to room #8, one of only >>>SIX<<< groups all weekend to make it to the final room of the dungeon at all! (That's out of, oh, 4 groups per hour for 8 hours a day makes 32 x 3 days of the con is 96 groups.) Only 2 groups made it there with all 6 players still alive.... would have been 3, of course, but..... heh. Anyway, we solved the final puzzle (so we thought) and I was the one to reach across the magic pool to grasp the Gem of GettingOuttaHere--and we were WRONG! A hand in a slimy rubber glove burst up from the pool to grab me and "pull me down into the pool"--ie, I died. But we had 3 of the 5 elements of the puzzle right, so Karen and Alex and Karen swapped around the two we'd been unsure on, and won.

It was unbelievably cool. Hopefully they'll put photos up on their website, when I checked it on Monday it was pretty bare--but the props and scenery must be seen to be believed, they were amazing. I fully recommend it for anyone going to gencon next year.

Everything else was nice too, of course. I ran 3 sessions of Call of Cthulhu for the con, and it went quite well except that I won't be able to get my badge reimbursed so I essentially did it for free. Which is fine, but it doesn't really inspire me to run anything again next year. If they offered partial badge reimbursement instead of it being all-or-nothing, I think that'd be far more encouraging to potential dm's and volunteers. I didn't run into the registration hell that so many others did, because I got there at 4:10 on Friday and there was hardly a line at all by that point. I had one friend who waited 5 hours for a badge on Thursday, and that's just WRONG. They've been doing this for years, they're run by a professional convention company now for god's sake, you'd think they could avoid the pitfalls of individually printed badges, slow data entry, and understaffing. The move to Indy is a good one, and I don't just say this because it's my town. The convention center is larger, better organized, attached to 3 major hotels and in easy walking distance of a variety of food and entertainment. MECCA just didn't have all that. I love Milwaukee, I'll miss going there--but Gencon Indy just rocked.