PAX is insane. The sheer number of people – I don’t know exactly how may, but it’s thousands – is incredible. I do have to say, though, the tabletop area is very well organised and well-maintained, and ARC did a great job keeping everything running smoothly.
My games all went well. I ended up running 7 sessions, of 2 hours each, so by Sunday night I was exhausted, but I really enjoyed the experience. I am 100% going to organise more people to help run my games next year though (although in my defence, for this year the person who was going to help out got sick at the last minute, so it wasn’t entirely my fault that I was on my own to run the games). I ran 3 games of Revenant, and 4 games of Cats of Ulthar (using Shadowdark rules), and had a blast with all of them. I also launched the Cats of Ulthar kickstarter, which is funded already!
Beyond that, it was really a very quick trip over to Melbourne so I didn’t do much else – caught up with some friends, did a couple’ve interviews about my games in between running them, and chatted to some people in the community about projects they’re working on (there is some amazing stuff coming out of the Australian indie game developer community!). I also picked up my actual physical ARPIA award (for Revenant, in case you didn’t see the last post), which was exciting – it’s the first award I’ve won for any of my games or writing, and it really does feel good to get that (positive) objective feedback. I was pretty happy just to be shortlisted, finding out on Thursday (haha just before I flew out!) that I’d won was super neat.
Now, I’m home again, back with my kitties and my own bed (!) and the farm. Last night when I got home I sat down to have a cup of tea and relax for half an hour before bed and had 4 cats immediately climbing on me, and one rubbing her face on me and purring like an engine. Think they missed me, in spite of excellent care from their petsitters. Or maybe they just know that I’m a soft touch and I know where the treats are kept.
This weekend I’m off to the ECU Festival of Fiction, and after that my plan is to hunker down for a week and finish planning out (replanning, as I go through and make sure I’m addressing all the hanging plot points) Summer King, book 3 of the Black Dragon trilogy series. (I might, possibly, have too much plot for just one more book in that series, so it might end up being a quartet rather than a trilogy. We’ll see.)