Kumoricon was great. I had a wonderful time, and I’ll definitely be doing the “Manga Hell” panel (and perhaps “The Scariest Manga in the World”) at a future convention if possible. The Mangaka playtests seemed to go nicely as well, even though we got kicked out of the room at 2 AM by the hotel staff before we could finish one of the games, but that’s life. My deepest thanks to everyone who played the games and gave me your feedback! I hope you had as good a time as I did!

The only rocky event I was involved in was probably the D&D Next “Tomb of Horrors” game, which was a bit of a mess simply because 25 people showed up to play and I insanely decided to try to let everyone be involved somehow. Since there were only 12 pregenerated characters (itself an excessively huge party), most of the people ended up playing various henchmen and 0-level flunkies, which actually provided lots of entertainment and aid to the survivors as they fell into pits, triggered poison needle traps and cave-ins, and generally protected the higher-level characters from harm. I’m not sure how much fun those players actually had, though, especially as many of them were new to D&D and deserved better than that chaos. Between attrition and boredom/sleepiness, the group was whitted down to about 8 players by the time the hotel booted us out of the room. However, on the good side, I enjoyed using the D&D Next rules and I was actually pleasantly surprised how well “Tomb of Horrors” ran as a tournament game; its arbitrary murderousness, its scads of secret doors and deathtraps, actually seemed really fun to players coming at it from the perspective of a one-shot game (rather than, presumably, seeing their cherished homegrown 10th-level characters die horribly). It makes me want to run more D&D events.

NEXT UPDATE: Friday!