Gen Con Wrap

Another Gen Con has steamrollered by. Now we the legions of gamers and game designers straggle our way home, heads full of ideas and colons full of chain restaurant food. I'm happy to have seen my various homies and comrades and already looking forward to our next grand convocation.

Sales went smashingly at the Pelgrane booth. The beautiful blue shiny tome that is Ashen Stars flew off the shelves like a crew of freelance interplanetary troubleshooters fleeing a swarm of Class-K entities. We ran out of Mutant City Blues, Skulduggery, and Bookhounds of London. Trail of Cthulhu sold out multiple times, sending chief Pelgranista Simon Rogers scrounging through the hall to round up additional copies from retail partners. A stack of Graham Walmsley’s Stealing Cthulhu also vanished amid the onslaught of the book-snaffling hordes. I'll let Simon crow as loudly as his British reserve will allow him, over on the Pelgrane blog, but let's just say it was a big leap over last year, which itself was hardly chopped liver.

In addition to signing tons of Ashen Stars, I was asked to deface a good many copies of The Worldwound Gambit and Hamlet's Hit Points. With the latter book out for a year, I got to hear readers' responses to it, and found them immensely gratifying.

But enough with the residual glow. It's time to buckle down to the elevation of a victor and the lamentation of the also-rans. I speak of course of the buzzword competition. In previous years judges required self-reporting to occur at the show. Given how busy Gen Con has become, and thus how hard it is to buttonhole any specific person, the judges have now generously ruled that post-convention accounts of one's statusing efforts will be considered before a winner is declared. So please tell your story of buzzword use, preferably in the comments here at the newly inaugurated blogspot HQ.

Considerable panache will be required to topple the clear front-runner, Kevin Kulp, who uttered the dread phrase with utter straightfacedness in his opening speech at the ENnies. Only a nigh imperceptible puff of vapor rising up behind him indicated that a portion of his soul had detached from the rest of him, died, and evaporated.

Can anyone top this chilling act of linguistic vandalism?