3/05/2018

Thinking About GaryCon....

Thinking About GaryCon....
Today....well technically yesterday as I'm posting this at 1 AM, was the 10th Anniversary of Gary Gygax's passing. I'm disappointed that I never got to meet the man, especially since his life's work has had such an impact on my life.


It's no secret that HackMaster is my game of choice and back in 2008 HackMaster was on it's "4th Edition." It was actually the 1st edition, but it was the spiritual successor to AD&D when the official 3rd Edition came out (and quickly followed by 3.5). HackMaster was a fictional game in the Knights of the Dinner Table (KoDT) comic strip.

HackMaster owes it's existence to WotC deciding to publish/create the Dragon Magazine archive on PDF. In short, they didn't have the rights to republish the one-page Knights of the Dinner Table strips and KoDT had recently become part of KenzerCo. I won't get more into the minutia, but basically KenzerCo go the rights to AD&D from WotC/Hasbro. They probably thought something along the lines of "Since we're making 3rd Edition nobody will want to play with the old rules and these guys will burn out in a year, so no big loss." I contend this makes HackMaster the 1st OSR game (outside of AD&D, duh) and HackMaster is basically 50% 1st Edition, 25% 2nd Edition, and 25% Home Rules from the KenzerCo D-Team.

Anyway....back to March, 2008. I was in the process of inviting friends from across the country to play here in Boise when we got word about Gary Gygax's passing. The gaming weekend was re-dubbed GaryCon Boise and we had players from Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

Little did we know that there would be a "real" GaryCon, which is celebrating it's 10th year next weekend in Lake Geneva, WI. I've only been once and I do plan on attending in the future, assuming I have the resources to do so.

This was the graphic for a refrigerator magnet I made for GaryCon Boise. I made enough for all attendees and a few extra to give to friends who couldn't attend. I still have one or two floating about.....

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