The Blog of Roon

OddCon has been a lot of fun; wish you were here and all that.

My talk on inventing languages yesterday, which predictably I did not find sufficient prep time for, nevertheless went fairly smoothly. One of my gaming buddies came through on his threatpromise to come to the con; he and I went to dinner, came back, and spent the rest of the evening learning a game called Munchkin, from Steve Jackson Games.

Munchkin is a meta-RPG. Those who have played Illuminati (another Jackson game) will understand general game play for Munchkin already: plenty of opportunities to help or backstab other players, highly clever and well-designed game mechanics, and total mastery of off-the-wall tone. You know it’s been done by folks who understand RPGs when there’s a monster card for the famous Dread Gazebo. You know it’s been done by folks who love RPGs when you realize that no two cards in the substantial deck are alike, even cards of a type (no Dwarf card has the same art as any other Dwarf card). John Kovalic, as one would expect, contributes memorably funny art.

I met John Kovalic (of Dork Tower) today, at a lively panel on black humor and satire. Got his autograph (and a cute Huzzah! cartoon) on a copy of Dork Covenant for my husband. As nice as he is smart (and he is plenty of both), John bears a suspicious physical resemblance to Carson the Muskrat from Dork Tower and Wild Life. His success in his field provides reassurance that sometimes the nice guys do win.

Husband and I arrived for our Exhibit-A “here is the Lord of the Rings movie linguist” talk in plenty of time. I wasn’t entirely sure just what the heck I was doing up there with him, to tell the truth. It turns out, though, that he and I have a hitherto unsuspected talent for playing off each other (nicely, no sarcasm or other nastiness). If we do more cons, we should work up a bit of patter, but both of us thought the talk went swimmingly.

I’m sitting in the con suite typing this, next to my poor worn-out husband who is trying to catch a few winks. I have two more panels tonight, though I may try to beg off the last one on the grounds of utter incompetence to discuss the subject (the “publishing” panel turns out to be on ’zine publishing, which I know nothing about).

All told, a nice, laid-back con with nice, laid-back people. I may well be back next year. I even got some coding done in the con suite (yes, I am a geek, thank you, move along). Should be able to release the Roustabout XT entity handler shortly.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 13th, 2002 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.