I can’t give you perfect general advice because my experience is very different from yours.  I tend to be packing for two to four people, have business concerns to deal with at any given time, and may have more of a need to feel pretty than you do as your packing up for the adventure ahead.  That said, pick and choose, and for godsake, don’t forget your business cards.

Business cards. Did I mention those yet? Have some. Have extra. Even if you aren’t going to conventions as a professional, it might be the very best way to stay in touch with new friends you’ve made at the convention. If they’re not professional cards, make sure you have all your social networking listed on them. (Twitter, facebook, whathave you.) That way I can look up who you are when I’m looking through my stacks of cards after a few weeks of convention recovery.

Get a water proof folder, or binder with page protectors in it. I print out this stuff:

• Maps of all the locations I’ll be walking/driving. Yes, GPS and Smartphones are nice. Yes, they can break, not function, think the town you’re in doesn’t exist. Don’t let technology get the best of you.
• Print outs of all your confermations. Hotels, buses, planes, con tickets and any other thing you can preregister for. Also, preregister for everything you can possibly preregister for. Seriously, save yourself the hassle.
• A list of phone numbers and addresses. Emergency contacts, the people you want to hook up with at the Con, the local guy you’ve gotten in touch with ahead of time to ask questions of should you need to. (You do have that guy, right?) The hotels and centers you’re going to visit. It also never hurts to scope out a restaurant or two ahead of time. If you’re in a place you’ve never been too, knowing what the locals love might give you the chance to try something awesome as only the locals can do it, but that’s going to take some research. (Case in point, have you ever heard of a Lobster roll? me either. If I can find one while I’m in Boston, I am noming the hell out of that!)
• Blank character sheets for your game of choice. You never know when the moment will strike and be lost to have a great pick up game because no one has sheets.

Other important stuff.

Fresh clean socks. This is mostly a thing for my husband, but it can make all the difference. For him, we buy a new bag each time.

Clothes, sure, but extra clothes for weather hiccups. Layers are always the way to go in unfamiliar locations. Strip or stack on as needed.  (With the little ones, I try to pack 1 and a half outfits per day. That is, for two days, three outfits, and so on. Kids are very good at ruining clothes in inverse proportion to the rarity of clothing you brought.)

I like bags inside of bags. I section off bags for my makeup, for toiletries, for road-medicine. (You bring soap? Good. You bring aspirin and Tums to handle headaches, backaches, and stomach upset from crappy con eating? You are a master.) Also, stop buying little travel sized shampoo. Seriously. Get some empty bottles and fill ‘em up. You don’t need to spend a dollar on a nickel’s worth of soap. )

Also, don’t forget a little febreeze. I have kids and cats, and sometimes you don’t notice something has a … special added scent… to it until you’re outside of your home environment. Carrying a little fabric refresher can help and help you feel more confident and relaxed on your trip which is a big part of having a good time.

So there’s most of my Con pre guide. (Maybe I’ll examine traveling with kids more closely another time.) Now, I should probably stop typing and get back to packing for PAX East! Wooo! Wish me luck stalking Wil Wheaton!

Why? Well, because you can get you geek on, talk about vampires AND see my husband, (David Hill’s,) hit panel “Design an RPG in an Hour.” Come see that, grab some lunch, and after lunch come back to see us talking about Vampires at your gaming table. Here are the blurbs.

Design an RPG in an Hour

We’re making a pen and paper RPG, and you’re invited to the design meeting. During the panel, you’ll address the problem-solving and analytical questions required to design a successful game. During the discussion, we’ll discuss the basics of game theory and how to outline, centered around an example you’re participating in. Soon after, the fruits of your labor will be published online as a downloadable ebook.

and

Filamena Young, a fiction and game writer, and David Hill, an Ennie Award winning game writer, want you to bring more fang to into your roleplaying. Both Filamena and David have worked on numerous products from White Wolf Publishing, (publishers of Vampire: the Requiem,) but also write for many types of pen and paper games. With a strong understanding of the vampire myth from early Slavic plagues of the undead to the modern Paranormal Romantic dreamboats, there isn’t a vampire that can’t find a comfortable way into your game, no matter what you play.

They’ll be lots of other stuff going on, but I wanted to make sure you all knew to check it out. Have a great weekend and if I don’t see you at the Con, tell Obama I said hi!

I’d seen the core book, my sister in law got a copy as a gift and was really impressed by the full color lay out and the in character feel that carried through even the out of character information. While this PDF isn’t full color, I still get that in character in theme feel throughout. As a White Wolf fan and freelancer, I’m a big advocate of a gaming book that helps you feel the setting just by flipping through it, and I think you get a feel of that in the adventure as well. If you didn’t know the show, I think you’d still vibe on the setting pretty well running this as a way to get started playing.

This adventure, like the game, uses the Cortex system, which I was well familiar with from playing Serenity before. I felt like the adventure had a great refresher/ quickstart description of how the system works and I basically explained it to my new players in about ten minutes. From what they said, their pre gen sheets also did a pretty good job of giving them an idea of what the character could do. The descriptions of what their sheets meant seemed to be helpful.

I played the game with four players. Two didn’t know anything about the show, two watched just about every episode. I’d seen a few, but didn’t feel like I needed to be an expert in order to run the story, which was nice. My two experts ended up playing Sam and Dean, the characters from the show, and it amused us all to listen to them bicker like the brothers. They both said the sheets were pretty good descriptions of the brothers, and while I was a little surprised to see the main characters from the show in an adventure I’d use at cons, they reported they had a blast playing them and that’d be a selling point if they were just trying out the game. The other two characters were pretty well fleshed out.

I think my only real problem with the adventure, and I’m just trying to be honest here, was the female PC. She’s bookish and intellectual, which is great for setting, but her whole sheet build borders on insulting, and as the player of said character pointed out, she’s basically a background character. She’s bookish and useless in a fight, tends to get overly curious and wander off by herself and isn’t much help outside of researching. She smacks of an interesting if clichéd NPC, but for an active player there to shoot monsters and make wisecracks, she’ll get lost in the crowd. She doesn’t feel like a PC. A hapless victim female PC in a group of dudes who get things done leaves one player on his or her thumbs most of the time.

Without giving away to much, (or going on too long,) the adventure is a straight forward ‘chase/uncover the monster.’ I think the writer did a pretty good job of anticipating what there characters might do on the investigation. I will say, if your going to run this, read it all the way through first just incase the characters make some logic leaps and skip anticipated steps as my characters did. The pacing is decent too. Starting with a lot of social investigation and moving on to a short fight immediately gives the players a good feel of most of the system and what their sheets can do in short order. This is not an adventure you want to run cold, which makes sense since it’s at the core, a mystery. The PDF includes some hyperlinks to information to the real Beast of Bray street which I thought was a great touch. If I were to run this again for friends, I think I’d email my players ahead of time with an email from their source with the links included as a way to invite them to the game.

All in all, we had a good time, shouted at one another a lot in character, and saw a lot of the characters come out as the mystery unfolded. (That’s particularly neat with pregens.) I’d be happy to run it again and with some good prep time and maybe a replacement of the one PC just for the sake of my personal tastes, but I’d use this if I wanted to introduce players to the game. It’s a great introduction.

That said, today, I wrote such a peace in response to a contest about geektatude. You can read it here, and see the photo that inspired the totally-true-if-not-for-the-made-up-parts account that explains why JR Blackwell dances with Stormtroopers. I’ll let you decide for yourself which parts are made up. (Hint: Not Much.)

This is not a challenge to Mrs. Blackwell, as I know well and good that the Missus is far geeker than I. Still, it had to be done.

PS. Yes, there are better ways I should have spent those thousand words, but not many.