Mid South Con and some rambling thoughts...

 My wife and I got to take a break from work, school and the kids to go to Mid South Con; a local Gaming Convention this weekend.   I took her to her first game con years ago and she loved it.  We've tried to make going to the local one a regular event, sadly due to work we've missed the past two years.  She especially loves the art auction and we always come home with a new art piece for the house, I spend alot of my time in the dealer room seeing what kinds of interesting items I can find.  We got to go to some cool discussion panels, including one about Steampunk (my wife saw the Apparition Abolishers walking the halls in full gear and she didn't know what Steampunk was so this was a perfect opportunity). The local 501st was there, as well as, Klingons, a roving pack of pre-teen anime kids (yikes), and other folks.  Here's an example of what the hall traffic was like.

The White Spy is actually a good buddy of mine, he and the Black Spy ran about all day doing skits, it was great!
   It was great to see old gaming buddies of mine that I don't get to game with these days, made some new friends too.  I did notice something though, to me the RPG games were a fraction of what they used to be. This year was in a different venue (they apparently changed hotels last year) from what I was used to so maybe that was part of it, but it seemed that there weren't nearly the variety of RPG games being played in the gamerooms (*sigh* no Mutant Future).  There was a decent amount of "Living" RPG games, a local gaming group is really into Living games and runs alot of those at Cons. But, personally I'm not a fan of those, to each his own.  I like to try out different games at cons, ones that I haven't had the chance to play before.  Cons are where I first got to play Mutants & Masterminds, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Deadlands etc..  I saw just a few games of interest that I would have liked to try out but they were filled up with several on waiting lists. What also seemed to be missing to me were the random pick up games, I'm used to seeing people just getting together on a free table, rolling up some characters and slinging dice, but I saw none of that this time around. Maybe I just wasn't in the right place at the right time. What I did see alot of was Board Games, in fact three of my old Die Hard RPG gaming buddies that I ran into said they had quit RPG's and now only played Board Games! Some of them said it was cause of real life time schedules, others had soured on 4E.  Don't get me wrong there was some definate RPG gaming going on, it just seemed to be "less" than what I remember from the past. 
     All in all, we had a blast. I liked the new venue, the old one was in a bad part of town, with limited local eating opportunities.  I hear next year it will move again and the new location will be even closer to where I live.  My wife and I are even talking about trying to go to Dragon Con next year, with costumes!! How cool is that!  Neither of us have ever been and we've heard great things about it.  So in closing it was a great weekend and for us Mid South Con 28 was a success!