Borrowed from The Evil DM’s blog (and adapted):
World-Wide GaryCon this weekend!
By now everyone I’m sure has heard of the passing of Gary Gygax. One of the best suggestions so far for a fitting tribute is GaryCon.
Basically GaryCon is about gaming.
This weekend take some time and play a game. Run a game for your kids, play a game with your buddies, teach someone new about gaming-any gaming.
Dungeons and Dragons would be great, but have a game of GURPS if you like, or Candyland, or Monopoly, or even Pokemon!
It doesn’t matter – just sling the dice, deal the cards, move the tokens. Interact, have fun, laugh and remember Gary and all he gave us.
Game On!
Thanks Jeff!
This weekend, I’ll take out the D&D minis and Dungeon Tiles and show my 6 year old son a little more complex version of the ‘Let’s kill the monsters in Miss Storeowner’s cellar’ game we play every so often.
I’ll introduce him to polyhedral dice and Hit Points!
I ‘ll also play some My Little Pony/Barbie make-believe with my 4 year old daughter (she’s got a Superman doll, weee!).
Finally, next week, in my Ptolus game, I’ll make each creature the players fight come from Gary’s books and modules (damn I’m happy that the Mezzoloth and Nycaloths were originally Mezzodaemons and Nycadaemons).
Conveniently, book 2 of the Rise of the Runelords path (starting it this weekend) starts off very Ghast-focused. (And Ghouls, of course, but that is hard to get away from.)
In E.Gary’s honour, I just might expose the players to the room of death. Lurker Above, Trapper, and Stunjelly, with a Mimic chest in the middle.
If I make it a 10×10 room, it can also be filled with a gelatinous cube!
Ooooo….. Put the Cube in a 10X10’X10′ Gygaxian Pit trap underneath!
My regular DND group is definitely going to do something to commemorate the passing. I’m not sure exactly what, since I’m not the DM of that group, but it will definitely be very old school.
I am running a Living Arcanis game day this weekend. In Gary’s honor, we shall lift caffeinated beverages in his honor!
Trask
Awesome! My kids were 6 & 4 too when I started them out with the ‘Basic Rules’. I ran them through the Sunless Citadel and was amazed at how they picked up on all the finer nuances of role playing – rather than hack & slash – like forming alliances, and pitting the two other factions against each other. My daughter would sit and draw stick figure depictions of all the major scenes like lowering each other into the deeper levels using the dangling vines. 100% quality time, no doubt about it!
Following ELG’s lead I set up a little D&D lite game with my 6 year old son (playing a Knight called Sir Nico) and my 4 year old daughter playing a Barbarian Princess.
We played for one hour, the usual quest of helping Ms. Storowner get rid of the monsters in her cellar.
Both kids got to invent one power for their character. Sir Nico was able to chop up monsters really fast (2 attacks per round) up to 4 times a day. Laurela was able to charge and hit a monster ‘real hard’ (+2 atk, +2 damage) also 4 times a day.
They had to cooperate to open a door, they fought a Medium Spider and 3 Dire rats and had to flee from a bad Ogre guarding an underground River pass.
All in all, a great experience!
Gary Con was a Success!
Awesome work, Phil.
I’m definitely wanting to do this once I have kids.
And with my fiancee being a gamer as well, I think they’ll probably have the gamer gene. 🙂
I’m spending my evenings this week rolling up one of each possible combination of AD&D 1e class and race and will be running them through a randomly generated dungeon using the tables in the back of the DMG. If a player’s character dies, grab another from the pile and jump in when they go back to town.
Sweet and very Old School… I played whole solo campaigns with the Generator and the Monster tables…
I had an opportune moment in our campaign to do add a little GaryCon to the campaign. The party is hot on the trail of some tomb raiders working on behalf of the evil mastermind. They just went down a hole and entered the lesser caverns portion of the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Great fun, they played it wonderfully, enlisting the pech to help them past a clay golem and a gibbering mouther that I placed in the stream.
Vive le Gygax!
Vive Gary indeed… 🙂
I’ve never played nor read through the Lost Caverns… There sure were a lot of new creatures and a huge dungeon in that thing!
How long did those Tournament modules take to play through?
ChattyDM: “Sweet and very Old School… I played whole solo campaigns with the Generator and the Monster tables…”
Ditto!
Hmmm…one tournament perhaps?
I have been running the kids through the new ‘DD’ series from WotC. We are just transitioning from DD1 to DD2, on the way down to the UnderEarth, and the lesser caverns are a perfect old school interlude. I’ll try to update the campaign journal soon!
By the way, if I didn’t do it before, I’d like to welcome to the blog James!
Those charts alone were worth the price I paid for that book when I was 12…. I probably learned more of that game using those charts (and the Monster stat table in the appendix) than playing modules like the Village of Homlet.