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Wednesday : Two gamer related films - Geekin', and Gamers 2. Both excellent, and the latter a definite one I want to buy.

Thursday : Champions, 5th Edition - JSA vs. the Spectre. Scion - Golden Age Superheroes. Arkham Horror.

Friday : Mutants and Masterminds - Modern Superheroes. The Smithee Awards.

Saturday : Mutants and Masterminds - Paragons. (Think 'Heroes') Champions, 5th - Golden Age Champions.

Two movies, five superhero RPG sessions, one board game demo, and the Smithees. Pretty good year, all in all. Was slightly dismayed about a few vendors not showing up in the exhibit hall, but found enough to spend money on.

Making preparations for my trip. Including finally setting up the voicemail on my cellphone nearly a year after I got it.

I still can't register. That's bad.

I called the head office and got a live person. That's good.

The registration guru was unavailable. That's bad.

The guy I talked to said that most of the registration problems are taken care of, except for 90 or so people who have 'stuck shopping carts' like me. For those people, they've administratively frozen the events they wanted, so they don't lose out on them while a solution is devised. That's good.

Can I go now?

I've made out my list of Origins events that I want to attend at the convention next month - registration was supposed to open yesterday, but got pushed back to today which was about the only lucky break I had yesterday.

As an aside, I love when the department of highways closes a lane for construction purposes and then doesn't actually do any construction on it. Not one person or truck, the entire stretch. Road still entirely driveable if not for the orange cones.

Saturday was a fairly light day for me at the convention - I'd left some open time for shopping, which I didn't much need as it turns out.

From 10AM to Noon I had an event called 'This Game Sucks' - the players of this board game play event cards to try and knock out a number of players from a roleplaying session represented on the board. Very funny little game with a lot of metahumor for those of us familiar with D&D game night. You can also win by driving off the GM.

From 2 to 4PM I was supposed to have a game called Alibi, sort of a more complex version of Clue, without the board element. Unfortunately, only two people showed up, and it was canceled. That sometimes happens, though rarely, in my experience.

From 4 to 5PM, I attended a seminar on collaborative storytelling which wasn't what I had expected from the title - it was about GMs and Players communicating more openly for the betterment of a campaign. Interesting, but I had been hoping for something else.

And at 7PM, the star of the convention. The Smithee Awards. An Awards show for bad movies, where hilariously awful clips are shown in each of 19 categories. The Smithees run for over five hours, and this is my third year attending. (This year was the 17th annual Smithee Awards.) It's my favorite part of the show, and I intend to go every year I can.

The next morning, I did make one more run out to the convention hall to buy one or two items - And I noticed that Ed Greenwood was signing autographs. So I bought a copy of Grand History of the Realms, which I already own, and had him sign it. Really nice guy, I was very happy to meet him. (I actually bumped into him on Friday as well.. and had nothing handy for him to sign, and actually bought a Gary Gygax novel for which he had written the foreword, to sign.. but when I saw him Sunday I figured it was my chance yo get him to sign something more appropriate.)

And that's about it. I left the convention Sunday, driving home and stopping for pizza at Massey's. Had a great time.

Friday. Mercifully, Friday was a little more loose.

My first event was at 9AM - Sherlock Holmes Beginner Mystery. It's one of a series of 'competitive fiction' games, by a guy named Engle. They're called 'Engle Matrix' games. The premise was fairly simple - the players take on the roles of Holmes and the suspects, and take turns making 'arguments'. An argument can introduce new facts about the crimes, and the arguing player then picks another player to act as a judge, who assigns the argument a plausibility rating - then the arguer makes a roll to see if it actually happened. In that way, the players construct a murder mystery. That event was a mere hour in length, but fairly fun.

I had free time from 10AM to 1PM, and it was then that I did the bulk of my shopping in the exhibit hall. I make a habit of making sure to look at each and every vendor booth in the hall - lots of RPGs for sale, as well as board games, dice, collectible cards, t-shirts, anime and anime related items, replica weapons, chainmail and leather armor .. lots of stuff. Just about everything that could possibly appeal to gaming nerds. My major purchases this year weren't too huge - I purchased the Campaign Cartographer software suite, for mapmaking, and Bendy Dungeon Walls, which are a fantastic little plastic set of interlocking wall-tiles for use with miniatures. I also picked up a few sundries here and there - and I always buy a t-shirt at Origins. It's tradition! (Tradition!)

All Fiddling aside, my next event was from 1PM to 5PM - The Tick vs. Miss Goosey's Day Care Center. The game used the d6 Adventure System by West End Games (familiar to Star Wars RPG aficionados) and was based on the animated incarnation of the Tick. It was probably the best fun I had the entire convention. Players picked from amongst : The Tick, Arthur, Die Fledermaus, American Maid, Sewer Urchin, and the Caped Chameleon. I ended up with my second choice, (after Die Fledermaus) the Tick. The scenario was, in fact, three smaller scenarios - each opening with the Tick and Arthur on patrol, and closing with one of the Tick's rambling rants that I had to spontaneously invent.

The first scenario was 'The Tick Versus Lot 1-X457', where the heroes took on a gigantic mutant earthworm that had escaped from a gourmet worm farm. (Quoth me, as the Tick : 'This worm has taken a sinister turn!')

The second was the titular scenario, pitting The Tick and Friends against Miss Goosey and her villainous allies. (Quoth me, as the Tick, from the ending rant : 'Proust wrote about man's existential journey through life, Arthur, and it's really hard to understand, even with the little pop-up pictures. But when people are throwing babies, you gotta make sure not to throw out the bathwater too! Or maybe that's supposed to be the other way around.')

I believe the last was entitled 'The Tick vs. Henchman', wherein Charles steals Die Fledermaus's brain and plants it in a giant robot, menacing the city, while the Tick and Arthur are stuck trying to help the City's villainous sidekicks to negotiate better deals with their villainous masters. (Quoth me, as the Tick, from the ending rant : 'When evil negotiates with evil, that's a win-win situation for evil. And that's no good.')

I can barely put into words how much fun it was. The players were great about getting into character, and Sewer Urchin and I were even doing the voices. It honestly felt like living three episodes of the Tick. A++, would play again.

My final event of the day ran from 7PM-11PM, entitled Power Corps : Grand Rapids. This was a Champions scenario about a group of office workers - slash - superheroes charged with protecting Grand Rapids, Michigan. If not for the superlative Tick scenario preceding, it would be in contention for favorite session of the convention. Basically, the characters were based on The Office. I'm not a regular watcher of the show, but the humor of the banality of office life came through loud and clear.

The capper of the evening was our battle with 'The Hate Staff', a bunch of former restaurant employees who'd sold their souls to the devil for super-powers. Each of them had a theme based on a restaurant. Super-Size, for instance, used to work at McDonald's, and was the team's brick. There was TGI McApplegan, Sizzler, and of course - their martial artist - Night Owl. She wears a white shirt and orange shorts. You figure it out. The restaurant puns flowed freely in the banter that ensued.

Thursday. Thursday was my 'filled to overflowing' day.

I had a six hour sessions of Champions starting at 8AM, followed immediately by a four-hour session of Champions at 2PM, then a 1-hour break before a three-hour board game session, from 7 to 10PM. I think I'll be loosening things up a little more, next year.

The first session was 'The JSA vs. Fafnir'. This same GM runs a JSA session, every year, at 8AM on Thursday. Different scenario each time - fairly light on the roleplaying, but a hoot to play. It stars the pre-Crisis JSA versus a giant monster of some kind, plus assorted guest villains. This was my fourth time playing his JSA game at Origins. One of the neat things about the sessions is that he has miniatures for the entire team - miniatures composed of colored twist-ties. They look awesome.

In '04, I played Flash, and that was the first time I'd played Champions, and I became a big fan of the Hero system. In '05, it was Mr. Terrific. I missed the session in '06, since I couldn't get there early enough. Last year, I played Starman in the JSA vs. King Kong. This year, a strange thing happened. Only three people showed up for the game. Out of eight seats. That never happens. This game is always sold out, with people wanting to get in. The low attendance would turn out to be an indicator of a trend, which I'll discuss in my next post.

In any case, this year each player took on two characters - I grabbed Superman and Hawkman. We had some tough going in the first big fight, but handled the second one more readily - repeatedly using poor Baron Blitzkrieg as an improvised throwing weapon against Fafnir.

The next session was NextWAVE : Agents of HATE. Since someone else called dibs on Machine Man, I picked up Elsa Bloodstone for the session. We unravelled a conspiracy involving martial arts dojos and mind control on the children attending, spearheaded by 'Cody Walker', AKA Chuck Norris. And by unravelled, I mean 'beat it to death with a car'. Our player for Monica Rambeau was very young, and didn't quite get the character, but most of the people were solidly entertaining. My best quote of the session : "Stupid girl. She brought revolvers to an Uzi fight." Followed by sounds of automatic gunfire.

The final event of the day was a board game session with an essentially home-made board game, albeit one that's been run at Origins in years past : Schlock. Schlock is, regrettably, not available in any store. Schlock is a game based on the Smithee Awards - about which, more later. The goal is to describe the worst movie imaginable based on your chosen hero, sidekick, villain, and plot cards. The players then vote on whose was worst in each of the 19 standard Smithee categories.

I had tremendous fun at this game, coming up with 'Machinobi'. (Machine + Shinobi). My hero was a Robot Ninja. I may write up this event in more detail later, because I don't know if I can do it justice without my notes. A fun thing happened, though - most of the people who run the Smithees actually stopped by to watch us play, and even voted in the early rounds as to who was making the worst movie. They also gave us free buttons, which was cool.

Convention summaries to follow.

The Origins Game Fair will be consuming my presence from Wednesday, June 25th until Sunday, June 29th. With both D&D and Hero entering new editions of their respective games, I imagine my spending is going to be a little lighter than in previous years. As long as I don't go nuts in the Reaper Miniatures booth. Again. Or the Dwarven Forge MasterMaze booth. Again. Or.. well, you get the idea.

I think the big risk for spending will be board games. I need to resist buying boardgames, because I have absolutely nobody to play them with, and they will gather dust.

Thank god I've managed to wean myself off of Magic : The Gathering again..

The event schedule is up. I swear, it seems like they get later every year..