GenCon, GenCon, GenCon

How a single event can manage to be both so much work and so very much fun, I haven't quite figured out.

Work highlights: I thought the "How D&D Minis Changed My Life... or at least my game" seminar went really well. The Eberron Delve seemed to be well-received, which is good considering that I put so much work into it that I'm far behind on my current project. The D&D Open, which I helped Andy Collins write and ran one of the semifinal rounds for, was a big success. The Eberron seminar was great.

Fun highlights: Friday night I stayed up very late playing D&D (gasp!) with Andy Collins , Gwen Kestrel , Steve Schubert (a regular in my Eberron campaign and, starting Monday, a new member of our development team), Ari Marmell (an established freelancer who's done a lot of work for White Wolf and is now working on a project with me) and his wife George, and Colin Suleiman (ditto what I said about Ari). Colin was gracious enough to run an Eberron adventure on the spur of the moment for us. Now, that's gutsy! Running an Eberron game for me, and without prep time! All right! It was enormous fun. I played a kalashtar bard named Halharath, whose stats I'll have to put up here later.

Saturday night I stayed up very late talking with Jesse Decker (development manager) and Charles Ryan (brand manager for D&D), mostly about work stuff—but high-end work stuff, business decisions I have no part of, that sort of thing. It was a little strange for me, because most of the time I think of myself as just a designer who wants to sit in his cube with his head down and design stuff, dammit, and not be bothered with discussions about how we run the business. But then I find myself in conversations like this and discover that I'm actually very interested in how we run the business. Go figure.

Fortunately, after a week back at work, I'm pretty much back in head-down-in-the-cube mode. Which is why I got up at 5:00 A.M. this morning—to WORK! And it's 6:20 and all I've done is post in my stupid blog! Aaagh!