GAMA Trade Show: Was it only...?

...last week I was in Vegas, working the GAMA Trade Show for Goodman Games. Unlike Gen Con, the GTS is first and foremost a chance for game publishers to meet up with gaming stores and vendors. After hours, it is a chance to meet up with other publishers. 

If you're a long time publisher, this is old hat. If you're a newbie fresh off the farm, this is pretty impressive. Over the course of the 3 days I had the chance to spend time with Kenzer (Co. didn't make it this year), the publisher of Black Gate, folks from Mongoose, Eric Rodriguez (Conan and Soloman Kane writer), the notorious Chainmail Girl, Eric Mona and Lisa Stevens of Paizo fame, and the brilliant Brendan LaSalle - designer of the X Crawl Game. 

All in all, a good time, along with the opportunity to talk to shop owners about the DCCs (big Deathy shout out to the good folks of Rooks, Bozeman MT) and generally get a sense of where we are as an industry. 

But Harley, you might be asking. What about Sin City? 

Sadly, not many stories to tell here. Troll Lord Games didn't attend so alcohol sales were actually down this year. The night the Goodman crew went out to play test the not-soon-to-be-patented Kenzer Guide to Winning at Craps, I laid low and worked on upcoming DCCs. GAMA is pretty relaxed, so I did play in an X Crawl drinking game, where shots of rum we passed around each time something died. (Kill a monster, you drink. GM kills you, he gets to drink.) But all in all, pretty tame fair.  

In terms of sheer excitement, the height of our Vegas adventure came with my last night. I was running on a cumulative sleep total of 10 hours over 3 nights, which – when combined with a bit of stress – is an invitation to some serious sleep walking. Details are still pretty fuzzy, but it went down something like this: 

In the "middle" of the night (somewhere around 3 am) I dream I see my Vegas roommates up out of bed killing one another. Naturally, I  –the real life, physical Harley– start shouting at them to, "Stop! Stop!" and being the heroic type, I leap up, tear off the covers to the bed and ready myself for a fight. 

Though I am asleep, my passionate exhortations rally my sleeping roommates. Bredan of X Crawl fame, thinking that something serious must be going down, wakes up and makes a break for the hotel door. Our publicist, the gaming industry version of Entourage's Ari, leaps up and starts demanding to know what the hell is going on. My publisher and boss, trying to sleep before his industry wide meeting the next morning, shouts at us all to get back in bed. 

All seems well, but  I'm still half asleep, which translates to groggy, embarrassed and (driven by a full head of adrenaline) fairly confrontational. Someone says something along the lines of "What the hell?! Turn on the lights."

And me, being half asleep, groggy and confrontational, reply in my best sociopathic dead pan:

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

The room went *dead* silent and it took us the next couple days to sort everything out.  

 

City of the Gods

PDF out now, courtesy of Code Monkey Publishing. Print version to be released before Gen Con.

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//H