JohnCon '98
I wrote a report for this convention. It can be found at Frank Carver's excellent MIB Page, from whom I have stolen many things (grin).

Ed Elder and his GURPS game, "The Terror of Fallonshire".

Ed, me, and Jim Duncan.

Banners I tricked up to let people know we were there & what they could do about it. 8^)

Balticon '98

Steve Brinich being abused by the winner of the first INWO game, Terri Wells.

Ferret (not his real name), the winner of his very first INWO game (and tournament!)

Ralph Melton, Gary McGath, and Steve Brinich (with the back of Wonder Boy's head).

Wonder Boy and Terri Wells.

"Hi, I'm Ralph Melton, and I'll be your Secret Master..."

Can they possibly look more excited? Well, yes...but someone must have narked on them. They got freaked later, I'm sure. Luckily, neither of them caught a "Hacking" cough.

Me at 3 o'clock, Wonder Boy at 7 o'clock, and our other two contestants at other points on the dial. Chaos! Destruction! Woo hoo! Mattheu Nested (left) was the champion.
 

Balticon Report (summarized & edited)

Balticon is the annual meeting of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. They always run it on Easter weekend because that means that they get the hotels at a decent price (rather than an indecent price, where the staff of the hotel takes off all their clothes).

Ralph Melton came to Baltimore from Pittsburgh to help run things. We went to the 'con on Friday evening to get things set up. We met with the gaming chair, Mark Geary, who had arranged for badges; we checked in with him to discover that the ConCom had lost their records of gaming. This was not good, but easily remedied...we updated him on what we were up to and then went to put up signs of all the games we were running.

The next morning Ralph and I arrived at the game room at opening time. Steve B. met us there. We brought with us a prodigious box of prizes (thanks, SJG!) and sat down to play INWO. Our big winner was Terri Wells, who took home an OWE, a German Booster pack, and a few bumper stickers in a four-player game. Two other people, Gary McGath and "Wonder Boy" Chris Smith each collected some boosters and stickers, as well as a starter set going to Chris. That game wrapped up in under two hours, so we started up another one. That game collected six players, with the winner being "Ferret" Brian Rapp - in his very first INWO game! Of course, he was playing a very clever deck courtesy of Ralph Melton. His winning goal? Up against the Wall. Ferret collected an OWE, an INWO book and some stickers.

We went back to the game room after lunch so that Ralph could run Hacker. We ended up with a 6 player game, which became very competitive. At the end, 4 players were within one or two systems of the 12 system goal...but I was triumphant. All the non-MIB's who didn't run off to other events took home GURPS books (except one who took home an In Nomine book).

Sunday morning: arrived early, and things were already hopping. The con staff had been kind enough to keep an eye on the goodies for us, so we unpacked and began teaching. One of the players was someone I had met at JohnCon; he won the competition after the teaching session. He (Matthau Nested) left with a Dino Hunt box and a couple of boosters. We then noted that we had a few GURPS books (and a Toon book) left, and distributed them to the remaining players and con staff.

Want to go onward?  If not, you can always go Return to the MIB page