The Adventures of Keith Garrett

MidSouthCon 2018 continues! If you missed the previous post, here’s a link: Day 1.

Day two of Midsouthcon, on Saturday, is always the biggest day—because it’s the only full day for this con. It’s also the day of the costume contest, which gives me more photos to show off.

Dealer’s Room

This is always a highlight of the show for me. Yes, I did buy some dice, but it didn’t count, because they were for my wife! (If I sound defensive, it’s because some unbalanced people have implied that I already own enough dice.) There weren’t many RPGs available for sale, and none I needed, but I did score a copy of the Necronomicon. I thought about buying The Captain is Dead or Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate, but snoozed too long and they sold out.

Panel: What Does an Editor Do?

Panelists (left to right): April Jones, Ellen Datlow, Toni Weisskopf, Mike Resnick, and Tommy Hancock.

A few tidbits from this panel:

• Toni (publisher of Baen Books, who has been there for 31 years) says that an editor’s job is to “protect readers from crap.”
• Ellen (editor at Omni for 17 years, anthology editor since around 1989, and currently editing for Tor) said that when she solicits stories for an anthology, she has had as many as a third of the writers end up dropping out.
• Mike (who is currently editing “Galaxy’s Edge” magazine and has edited 45 anthologies) suggests not sending query letters for short stories.
• Ellen gets questions about how she is an editor but not a writer. She used the analogy of a room decorator, and said that she can’t decorate the room, but she’s great at redecorating it.
• Mike said that it’s important for an editor to know what their audience is looking for.
• Toni said that in her mind every mark on a manuscript is a suggestion to the writer, and that sometimes suggestions are general (such as “My eyes glazed over here.”)
• Regarding getting started as an editor, the panel recommended starting as an assistant editor (Mike), volunteering to read slush (Ellen), and taking unpaid work for a while (Tommy). Tommy warned, though, “Don’t make a career of not being paid.”

Game: Greek Gods

We got in some more time at the board game library today.

We tried playing this one but couldn’t figure out the rules in the time we had available. Next!

Game: The Captain is Dead

This was a fun one! It took a while to set it up and understand what we were doing, but once that was done we liked it. It’s a cooperative game where you’re the crew of a starship that’s been struck with disaster, and you have to work together to fight off enemies and hold the ship together long enough to fix the drive and escape. I had to get to my next game before we finished this one, but my fellow player Jenny said that even though they lost, she plans to buy the game.

Paranoia (2017 edition)

Kerry Jordan, my favorite Paranoia GM, ran an introductory game of the latest edition of Paranoia. I’ve read this version but this was my first time playing. It was a surprisingly low-lethality adventure, I think because we started it without mutant powers, secret societies, built-in rivalries, weapons, equipment, or team roles. So I can’t really report on much of the game. (This was an adventure from the core box itself, so I hold Kerry blameless for the lack of clone churn.) I kinda liked the cards, and as usual my wife demonstrated that she was born to excel in a world like that of Paranoia. (Which is good news, considering the way our government is going!)

Costumes

Let’s wrap this up with the best costume photos I took today…

[ Back to Day 1 ]

As I do most years, I’m attending Midsouthcon again this weekend. (If you are too, let me know so I can say hi!) Mike Resnick is one of the guests of honor, and I really hope I get to meet him.

Here’s how the first day of the con went for me.

Masks

I kicked off the con by playing an RPG in the very first gaming slot (2pm Friday). The game was one I’d been wanting to try: Masks: A New Generation by Magpie Games. It uses the Apocalypse World engine that I liked so much in our Dungeon World adventure at last year’s Midsouthcon.

We spent at least half the time crafting our characters and their relationships and team dynamics, which seems in line with a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games. I felt an affinity for the Janus playbook, the one our GM Jesse likened to a Spider-Man type, burdened with a lot of secret identity conflict. I used this to create Melting Pot, a political-minded (and patriotically-dressed) hero who is active in student government and has the ability to melt into a liquidy goo and also take on the properties of anything he touches. The last hour of our adventure happened at a place I chose–a women’s rally–where the Greek god Dionysus showed up to turn things into a wild drunken party.

Board Game Library

We spend the rest of the evening checking out board games from the con’s board game library. I like trying games I haven’t played before, and usually find something I like enough to eventually add to our own collection.

This first one we tried was Macroscope. The goal is to be the first to identify a drawing through small holes that each player reveals in turn. I stunk at this game. It was still pretty fun, but I think I’d like this one better as a video game, because adding and removing the tokens covering the holes each round, and having to carefully slide out the drawing when it’s revealed, were both tedious acts of manual dexterity.

Then we played Hoard, in which you compete to steal as much of a dragon’s treasure as you can before he wakes up. I wasn’t amazingly horrible at this game.

That’s it for day 1, though I want to show off how my wife was the star of the show with her new meeple earrings…

Watch for my Day 2 update tomorrow…