GZG ECC V: Indy's ACR (after con report)

Finally I am getting a chance to write this up (well, it's only been a week,
but man, a LOT has happened in this past week!)

         Indy's slow-and-not-so-brief After Con Report (ACR)

Friday: arrived early enough to Lancaster to zip over to the Amish Farmer's
Market in order to pick up some of the goodies one can obtain. Picked up a
small packet of cubed cheese as a prize for
the Carnage Con Queso game as well.  :-)  Nothing like a little
fresh cheese for the game!

After that dashed to the hotel, checked in, then moseyed to the con room.
Unloaded the car and started doing my con organizer stuff of
sorting through the prizes so graciously donated by Jon T, Geo-Hex/KR,
DLD Productions, Brigade/Tony F, and others, assigning them as needed.
Wanted to get in on Stuart's "Charlie Don't Surf" game, but alas, he runs
extremely popular CineGrunt events, and there was a waiting line. I talked to
Stuart a little about the painting seminar he was going to
run midday Saturday and he gave me some suggestions about re-priming
those minis I wanted to paint up this weekend. He said it would take a few
hours for the primer to settle and allow the mini to be painted properly, so I
spent a little time glueing some of my 15mm vehicles
(some Brigade and DLD tanks/APCs) together in preparation for this.
After I joined up in Jerry's UNSC vs The Pirates FT game as a Pirate, siding
with Aaron Teske and Jim Flood. We decided to divy our ships up in the
following manner: Jim got the needle ships, Aaron got the
THrust-6
ships, and I got the Thrust-4 ships (mainly because I like and wanted
to fly the NAC battleship - yes, yes, I KNOW it has pulse torps! :-P ).
We accomplished our main objective (destroying the rather substantially-
sized UNSC replenishment vessel), but alas, we almost forced a draw in the
scenario; the UNSC won by a hair as they wiped out my entire command (I could
not generate enough speed to outrun their reinforcements; Aaron and Jim's
fleets were able to escape, if not unscathed, at least they
got away). Fun game. I was able to fire my p-torps a couple times, and
actually hit. Addtionally my beam dice either rolled 1s or 6s - I
attribute all this to a sublevel channeling of Beth Fulton (since
she apparently can roll Teske Field-like series of 6s when in the
Northern Hemisphere).

Throughout the evening I kept looking for my brother, who was to be a vendor
at the con (he was rooming with me, after all; I had an extra key for him).
Never saw him. I would learn later (after the con was
well over and done with) that his co-manager sneakily and underhandedly
ignored his request for the weekend off and purposefully scheduled him
to work while she brown-nosed with upper management in their company by
"volunteering" to do inventory. Naturally she waited until Erik was walking
out of the store to drive to Lancaster to tell him; a real sweetheart...but
anyway...

Late in the evening Bill Spring from BR Snasis showed and got set up. He was
beset by people almost immediately that I could tell. Bill Stackpole of Zeno
Games and his wife had arrived earlier in the evening to set their stand up,
so were already established when people arrived.

Saturday Morning: Up early, to breakfast with the main gang: Jon Davis, Jerry
Han, Aaron Teske, plus a few other early risers. After breakfast, back to the
con room. Time for the next events! I spent my morning trying
to re-prime some of my 15mm tanks and sorting & distributing prizes to
the various events running (after 5 years still trying to find a good
organizing system for doing this). Everyone seemed to be having a great time.
I also took submissions for the Miniatures Painting Contest and got that set
up and ready for judging. Then we all broke for lunch.

Saturday Afternoon: I attended Stuart's painting seminar. As we were
sequestered away in a side room, I did not have the opportunity to see any of
the events or fun that went on during this period. But that was okay! I was
learning how to improve my painting of minis (going from splotchy blob to
something that is "getting there" in respectability). Some of the techniques
Stuart taught us was new for me, and some of it I had found I was already
doing unconsciously but not consistently. Gave us some stuff to chew on. It
was a good seminar (for me, anyway; if nothing else this weekend, I felt I got
my money's worth out of just this one event).

After the painting seminar was a quick dinner break. I grabbed the ballot box
(15 minutes after voting "officially" closed for the minis contest; sorry to
the two guys who didn't get their votes in in time, but I had time constraints
in which to get the votes counted; besides, given the weighting of votes to
those who won, if you had voted contrary to the rest of the group, the winners
would still have won). Jon, Jerry, and I took a brief Organizer's Dinner to
discuss official con business, while
I counted ballots (multi-tasking!). After a quick stroll back to the
con room in a light rain, we gathered everyone around to announce the winners
of the painting contest and make any general announcements and stuff. For the
record, the winners were:

FT First Place: Jim Bell FT Second Place: Aaron Newman FT Third Place: John
Crimmins DSII First Place: Rick Rutherford DSII Second Place: Martin Connell
DSII Third Place: Brian Bell
SGII-15mm First Place: Rick Rutherford
SGII-15mm Second Place: Rich Rutherford
SGII-15mm Third Place: Chris Deboe
SGII-25mm First Place: Adrian Johnson
SGII-25mm Second Place: Aaron Newman
SGII-25mm Third Place: John Crimmins

A big hand to these guys. They did a great job on their minis.

Jon Davis then announced that we had gotten a couple of cakes for everyone to
partake eating from, in celebration of our 5th year. Most of the two cakes
were gone by 11pm. Hungry gamers.

Due to various sudden cancellations by a number of people this year, we ended
up being either short participants in some instances, or short game masters.
To remedy this, Stuart valiantly took on running yet *another* event. The poor
guy was tired; he should have taken a break! But he stalwartly set up a
StarGrunt II scenario set in the Vietnam
era. I got to join in on this one. It wasn't the light-hearted fun
scenario he ran Friday evening. No, this was a more serious game. Generally
designed for beginners to intro them to SGII, but while I have played SGII a
few times here and there, it has been a long while, and I wanted to experience
a Stuart Game(tm). It was well worth it.

I was on the side of the Viet Cong. We were holding a valley when an incursion
of American troops entered. We had a hidden bunker and two platoons of
infantry, plus a couple of small mortar pieces up on a hill that the Americans
did not know about. The Americans came in with I
think two heavily-armed platoons themselves, but timed it so one came
in a few turns before the other, thus attempting to pull our forces to one
side of the valley. Communication back then was...difficult at
best. No fancy-dancy helmet comm systems. The VC had one radio to
call in arty strikes by our commander. The rest of us had to use runners in
order to pass orders from the upper command structure. Also, to reflect the
rigid doctrine that the VC operated under, during the
pre-game time we had to decide what our forces were going to do (take
a hill, move to a particular thick section of the jungle, prevent the
Americans from taking certain actions, etc). After that we could not
communicate with our company leader unless we sent a runner. Nor were we
allowed to fluidly respond to a situation that developed outside of our
orders. Which proved to be an interesting challenge. However, also did not
have casualty burdens. If we took casualties during a firefight, we left them
(go ahead, kill us; we'll make more!). The Americans had to try and evacuate
theirs. In the end the American forces were repulsed after taking some lucky
VC arty strikes and losing almost two squads, plus had two other squads pinned
down to weapons fire, one of them being heavily hit (I roll somewhat better in
SGII than I do using FT pulse torps; my rolls are more "average"). However, as
a parting shot, the Americans targetted a hill in which we had almost a full
platoon of VC sitting on top (3 squads and my command element). The area was
seriously *flattened*; ONLY my command element escaped unscathed!
Leaving one remaining squad (3/4 strength) in the area my team was
to hold against the Americans to fend off any further attacks (fortunately
the Americans were effecting a withdr--er, I mean, retreating like
screaming banshees). Stuart runs a fast, tight game. This added to the
atmosphere of trying to make fast decisions (Stuart wasn't fooling around: you
had something like 30 seconds to make up your mind who was going to do what
on your turn - and if you didn't, you lost your activation! "use it or
lose it"). It was fun.The American's objective was to take our bunker.
However, after taking heavy casualties, and after the game learning where our
bunker was, they admitted they would never have found it. Woohoo!
We won. :-)  Chased those pesky pasty evil guys away.

Sunday Morning. After a brief stroll around town to find a small foodmart (the
regular restaurants downtown being closed on Sunday morning) the last set of
events got underway. I had put together a simple and hopefully fun game called
"Who's Your Monkdaddy?", in which I took Placebo Press' "Ebola Monkey Hunt"
game and translated it into FMA terms, and adding a few extra lethal twists to
the game (replaced the "researchers" with "fire teams" of 5 different
governments, including a Kra'Vak fire team). For "terrain" I used a selection
of floor plans from Azhanti High Lightning to represent the building
the teams had to penetrate and capture virus-infected mutated monkeys.

Being a little presumptuous, the game, I think, was fun (at least it was fun
for me to run, so pththt). Mike Hudak's fire team was wiped out to a man early
on by David Raynes' fire team tossing grenades in the hallway, so I gave him
control of the security force at the bottom of the complex. Mike grew evil and
began thinking of things to do to the other fire teams I hadn't entertained:
like shutting down elevators, turning on radiation alarms, and as a topper,
blasting the Kra'Vak fire team with Muzak (which, upon first hearing it, the
K'V immediately lost a level of confidence, and subsequent
bombardments of this "music" forced reaction checks at +1; at one
point an entire level/floor was blaring Muzak and the K'V team went
nuts, and began firing at every possible place speakers might be secluded in
the ceilings and walls, and even went so far as to unlimber their one IAVR and
launch it into the ceiling (they took out the main cluster of speakers; lucky
them).

The K'V and one other team decided to give up looking for monkeys and would
wait for the other two teams to get them, and attempt to ambush them on their
way up. However, when the K'V saw the other human team,
they launched an all-out assault. Alas we ran out of time before we
were able to fully resolve that situation, but the humans were beginning to
fall.

The other two teams had penetrated deeper into the compound. The team which
got the deepest ended up in a protracted firefight with the security team,
while the other team managed to find one monkey, lose it, find another monkey,
and were working their way out to their vehicle when we finally ran out of
time.

After this spent some time closing up the con, then a quick drive home
(lucky me I live 1-1/2 hours away! I could afford to stay and
essentially be the last one out, though Brian Bell and his father were staying
another night and were the last last ones to leave).

A good, fun con. Hopefully next year will be even better. And hopefully we'll
see more of you all lot there! I'm already working on the scenarios for next
year (to the screams of Jon Davis, who doesn't want to think
about starting to work out the schedule *now* ;-)