Traveled to a Crown Plaza in Plymouth, Minnesota on the west side of the Twin Cities to attend the Con of the North. Wasn't able to go until getting my son to bed on Friday night but my friend from the local gaming group wanted to get an 8 AM start on Saturday in an Adventurer's League game so thought it would be best to get up there the night before and not have to rush there in the morning and deal with registration (I had issues with online registration this year). Got there in time to register at 11 PM or so.
Saturday and Sunday morning had coffee and a bagel at what is my favorite Einstein Bros. Bagels in Minnetonka just off of Highway 62 before it intersects 494. Not sure why it is my favorite, but was a regular almost 20 years ago while commuting from St. Paul to an internship in Minnetonka and have returned somewhat frequently since when I find myself in that area. It is right next door to a Caribou Coffee and just across the parking lot from another Caribou Coffee, and this state of affairs has persisted for quite some time despite all being part of the same coffee conglomerate. Keep expecting at least one of the places to close at some point...
Adventurer's League
Enjoyed my time at the convention. Played in an 8 AM tier 1 AL adventure about a midwinter festival in the tropics getting disrupted by a distressed elemental. Got to play Kanut, my new Celestial Warlock from the Inuit-themed culture from the Forgotten Realms. Not entirely sure how he got all the way to the tropics in Chult, but find I like playing this PC, personality starting to come together for me.
That night we played in the D&D AL Epic adventure that filled up with around 100 participants. Did one of these at the same convention last year and found it a very unique game experience with everybody sharing in the experience. These are pretty combat encounter heavy experiences, the one this year was "The Reclamation of Phlan" which involved liberating the city of Phlan from the forces of a dragon that had conquered it during 5th edition AL's Season 1. We were griffin mounted air support in this Epic, starting the evening going on a bombing run.
I used Wilbur, the half-elf great old ones warlock in service to Ghaunadar I'd created a couple years ago as my first AL character (oozes are misunderstood natural phenomena! Give the pudding some love!). Haven't played him a ton, but used DM rewards accumulated as I ran the first half of Out of the Abyss and also used him at the last two Cons of the North, including last year's epic (which also happens to be the last time I had played this PC). Finding that I don't have much of a personality or back story really sorted out, as I've mostly been using him to figure out the mechanics of the warlock class and earlier on 5th edition more generally. So not a great PC either in terms of role playing or in optimization. Do have a level of fighter along with 6 of warlock (pact of the blade, so there is some synergy, also focusing on dual wielding and Dex), not quite enough XP for another level after this but close, last year he picked up a Ring of Spell Storing so my goal is to get the fighter class to 3rd level to do the Eldritch Knight subclass and get some more spell slots so the Ring becomes a more useful item and for Wilbur to be all around more effective. I felt like I was spending most of the adventure running away, occasionally zapping something from the air with an eldrictch blast. Got into a melee once or twice and nearly died a couple times too; the adventure's constraint of only being able to take one short rest certainly impacted my warlock game play. Ended up with a griffin mount as a story reward though, so that was pretty cool. Imagine I won't break Wilbur out until the next time I'm at a convention AL event. There were two kobold PCs at our table and a human rival of one of the kobolds, so it fun watching the rivalry and bantering and attempts at upstaging the others between the three. As we closed on two in the morning, everyone was getting pretty loopy and unfocused (or maybe it was just me), would have been nice to get a little earlier start, the end felt a little rushed though our DM did an awesome job keeping things moving throughout the adventure, and I was quite impressed to see her running another game after I blearily came back through the convention Sunday morning around 10.
Other Games
We got to try out Starfinder, which our group hopes to include in our Sunday rotation soon. Basically the Pathfinder in space game that it promises to be, I see it as essentially a fantasy game set in a science fiction setting. Imagine that doesn't work for everybody, but I like having the familiar d20 rule set and they have done a lot of work to flesh out the setting. Some of it, like magic, feels pretty integral to the game - I wouldn't recommend trying to use the rule set to play a science fiction game without the fantasy elements, there are a lot of science fiction games and settings (some using the d20 rules as well) that would probably work much better for that. There are some rules about limiting access to powerful technology (treating it somewhat like how some fantasy games treat access to magic items) to certain character levels that just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Why would people not use or buy the most effective equipment available, borrowing the funds if necessary? And I can't quite suspend my disbelief that wealth in any society would somehow scale in a directly proportional relationship with experience and personal ability, but all this serves of course to reliably make low level characters less powerful than higher level ones. Still, willing to give this a shot as a player if our group commits to a campaign.
Also played some Axis and Allies War at Sea naval miniatures yesterday. Really one of my favorite games of all time. Good to meet another player who felt the same way about this out of print game, got a lot of use of the A&A Forumini expansion decks, which were helpful with the early war year limits we decided to use, played two 1941 Pacific 100 point matches followed by a 1940 European theater match, my fleet with the two old Japanese battleships performed better than my US fleet with the USS Arkansas and Texas. Kirishima destroyed my opponent's USS Arizona with a vital hit while also being sunk itself in the first round of gunnery combat in the first match - fortunately I had a second battleship! Had a bunch of weak early war submarines with my cheap battleships in the second match. Narrowly lost that one (Arkansas held up to a great deal of aerial battering before slipping beneath the waves and my torpedoes failed to find the mark on the last Japanese carrier) and in the third my Italians struggled against a superior British battleship.
So all in all a good convention experience. Expect I will try to attend again next year.
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