Welcome back, Dragon-Con attendees!

Oh. My. Gosh. I've now seen the portal an the alternate universe
where reality doesn't exist. I'll give you a quick run of what I did
and saw there. Thanks to Bernadette for allowing me to go! I would
not have made it without you! I'm totally endebted to you.

A quick rundown of what I did:

Friday 12:30 PM - While the guys I drove up with slept from their all
night driving, I arrived at DragonCon and immediated found our very
own Heather, who was so kind pointing me in the right direction to
everything there. I swapped out the registrations,

Found that Heather was going to do all the Tokien track events
(natch!) I went right into the Tolkien track Greebriar room a bit
late, The room was packed! found Tehanu, who has gone from fan to
celebrity, from TheOneRing.net hosting a bit of the Two Towers clip
from the DVD.

I schmoozed up to her and asked her about what would make some great
line party activities and I'll y'all tell that in another post.

I won a door prize - LOTR movie pic guide. Pretty cool!

Friday 2PM - How to run LOTR websites. This was a sparsely populated
event, only about 15 in attendance. Webmaster guys from
ThereandBackAgain.net and TheOneRing.net talked about bandwidth,
costs, how to pay for them, server power, and issues about legality,
licensing, and anonymity for staffers.

Friday 3-7PM I rotated between the Lord of the Rings Decipher gang
with my "boss" Dan Bojanowski from Decipher in the gaming room, the
Star Wars FanForce chapter and their 501st Stormtrooper garrison in
full Imperial plastoid outfits, and the retailers area in the
Marriott.

Friday 7PM - I was in the line for Evening At Bree, which was a LOTR
costume celebration with Celtic music, but there were too many
people, and I remembered I made a spur of the moment promise that I'd
hang with the Atlanta Star Wars Fan Force for dinner, so I gracefully
bowed out.

Friday 7PM-10PM Dinner with Minacia Brightstar, Timothy Zahn and the gang from the HothLanta Rebels at Trader Vic's. Timothy is very nice. His wife was wearing flashing nodes on her temples. Very cool.
I had the salmon and ice tea. It was da bomb,baby. I did get Zahn's fan business card. Planning to ship him some Star Wars CCG cards with his pic on it (Tallon Kaarde , of course!) for his autograph.


Friday 10 PM- More wild and Cray Zee Ness that is DragonCon

Saturday 10 AM - LOTR DGMA premier event - 80 of the top LOTR TCG
players in the country and Canada show up to play. By 5PM I must
suffer the eternal shame of my tush handed to me on a platter, having
gone to pathetic but not unexpected 1-5 record (ok, I never bragged I
was best in the US in the game!) but all 3 of my guys, Fred and bro
Nat Foure, and John Irving, who come down with me and who play in my
local tournaments, made 7-1 records and made it into day 2 finals
where the big money is! I'z jez so of dem guys! A quick review of
all the decks at the end of the 8 game tourney showed the winners had
big and beefy ranger decks (many possessions on Boromir and Legolas)
and a smattering of Moria Orcs swarming, or Nazgul, or Uruk-Hai.

Saturday 5:30 PM - Freedoms Defender found me and Deb it was awesome
to see you there too! I dropped from the big tourney to get into the
sealed deck tourney of 20 people. I got lucky and tourney director
Bill gave me a Legolas Realms starter with Uruk-Hai and Isengard Orcs
for bad guys. Long Knives of Legolas singlehandedly made me win
games. I finish the 4 game tourney ut with a respectable 3-1 record,
tied for 3rd with 10 points. The one game I lost was because I got
overly excited and double moved when I should have stayed put. Moving
from site 3 Galadriels Glade to site 5 Bridge of Kazad-Dum meant a
ton of twilight for the bad guys to come beat down on poor Frodo.
Frodo gets overwhelmed. My 3-1 record is good enough for me.

Deb did great! I asked Bill to help her build her sealed deck since
legally I could not since I was playing. I'm so proud of you, Deb!

Sunday -

 

LOL! Dragon*Con is definitely another world.

I've very glad that I got to meet you, Don. It was great hanging out with you at the Dragon*Con dinner. I do hope that you can join us again next year.

 

Mandy, you and team HothLanta Rebels were just stupendous. Warm welcomes all around. Count on me to go back next year, and maybe next time with a contingency from the gang here!

 

I look forward to seeing you, as well as other Raleigh folks, at Dragon*Con next year.

I hope to send our intrepid webmistress pictures from the Con soon so that everyone can see them.

 

Sounds like a great time! I'm glad you had fun! I can't wait to see the pictures!