Which exit for the regional demon?

We spent the weekend feeling not-particularly-honored at Jersey Devil Con. The con was a lot lower in attendance than last year, as far as I can tell. They weren't able to sustain the momentum they'd built by having Terry Prachett there the year before, and by advertising insanely. In fact, most of the guest list was the same, which made for a nice friendly visit among those of us who came back but probably wasn’t that interesting for the fans. Just by a vague survey of people’s badges in the elevators, I suspect the staff + guest:attendee ratio was something around 1:1.

They haven’t gotten the idea of a green room or any explicit thank-yous to the guests down yet, but they did pay for our room. They even put us on the 11th floor, which gave us the added “convenience” of having to use the room key to get the elevator to go there, which worked about one time out of three. The rooms, as far as I could tell, were the same. Gaming was placed somewhere that could have been inconvenient – behind the hotel restaurant, but the location actually turned out to be pretty good, and the area pretty busy throughout the con. I ran two demos, one of our classics, and the new one, which ran barely adequately for the two players who wanted to play; and Bard ran a spontaneously-generated game. aprivatefox also ran two demos, which was fun to see, even for the few minutes I got to peek in. He also escorted us to a very homey sort of vegetarian Indian restaurant, at which we ordered Way Too Much Food, and then ate it.

We also got to hang out with our publisher a bit, and got a brief dose of optimism around eventually getting paid for all of the copies of World Tree that Wizards’ Attic sold before going kaplooie, some encouragement around finishing the Bestiary, and some planning around a possible limited-edition hardcopy version of World Tree. The book was spammed all over the con—Padwolf was there selling, Larry Smith is still carrying it, and Tony diGerolamo had it with his collection of gaming stuff. Got some time with midnightserval, though not quite enough, a good bit of mutual teasing with the Continuum/Narcissist folks, and general friendliness from the other repeat guests.

In unrelated news, today is my seventh wedding anniversary with the most marvelous, incomparable sythyry. I must be doing something right!