Brewing a New Pot of Tea

Its August, the Redding table top six sided dice-a-rama, Norcon is over. If you missed it, look it up, it's a great little con that some of my fellow Tea Potters (Tea Pottians?) are highly involved in.

However its now Dundracon-Preparation season! Dundracon is in Feburary of next year, so over the next half a year or so, I'll have time to write for our yearly Tempest in a Teapot Dundracon Swash-buckle fest, that is our LARP. Last year we had a lot of extenuating circumstances that tore our teams LARP troope apart right before the con. It's unfortunate, but we live on. I'm pretty sure each one of us is going to be back in the saddle this year in one way or another.

I don't expect we're actually going to be writings down for several months. However while the writing may not start right away, we've got themes and ideas to kick around in our heads. Eventually character assignments to hand out and progress to slowly hack away at. While we are not there yet, but that won't stop me from getting in the writing mood.

So in honor of our coming LARP, I'm tossing the jumper cables on this really stale blogger account and putting words to the page. Actually this is my first foray into the blogosphere, so please bare with me while I get used to the ecology of this new space.

I plan to dig up our old LARP from years past, and dissect them. I'll post character sheets, plot notes, anything I can dig up, then talk about what worked and what didn't, and why we wrote what we wrote. Hopefully after a while, anyone following this blog (which I estimate will be all of 1.2 persons, including myself) will have a complete set of character sheets, plot points, and some helpful tools to let them run their own version of the LARP's we've written in the past.

Why am I doing this? Well I hope that this outlet will keep me energized and excited about LARP writing. Burnout is a real threat for me and my writing. Its very possible this little outlet may just benefit me more than any unfortunate soul reading this after me.

So stay tuned for more ramblings.

Paint and Play League - League Standings

Well the first night of the Paint and Play League has come and gone.  I have to admit that I was stunned by the turn out.  I really enjoyed hosting the event and seeing four game tables with lots of painted miniatures on them was amazing.  Everyone painted up their 15 points worth of Warmachine and Hordes and did their best on the playing field. 
Here are the current League Standings for Best General.  The win ratio based upon number of wins divided by number of games played, with a minimum of two games played. 

Dave (Cryx) - 3/3 = 100%
Zac (Khador) - 2/2 = 100%
Scott (Menoth) - 3/4 = 75%
Jon (Mercenaries) - 2/3 = 67%
Cody (Cygnar) - 2/3 = 67%
Eric (Retribution) - 1/2 = 50%
John (Khador) - 1/3 = 33%
Amber (Menoth) - 1/3 = 33%
Joel (Khador) - 0/2 = 0%
James (Trollbloods) - 0/4 = 0%
Matt (Cygnar) - 0/1 = 0%  (Disqualified)

Our next league play night is going to be on the 27th of February with 25 point lists.  If you need to get in practice throughout the month, feel free to get with your fellow players and throw down some 25 point games. 

2009 Team Tourney was a success!!!

Well after all of that worry and stress and pulling out of the hair, plus getting a few more grey hairs...everything went over pretty well.

All in all, I'd like to think it was a success. For Joel's and my first outing hosting a tournament we had twenty people show up, for a total of ten teams that participated. It was a bit hectic at first but like everything it always seems so much worse when it first starts out.

It was nice to see a few new faces from the Foxhole (a newer gaming store in town) in the mix and lots of veteran wargamers that came out to take part in the day’s festivities. All of the fielded Armies met the 3 color minimum with a few that went above and beyond what was required. The players were all in good spirits and even at the end of a day full of gaming everyone seemed sincerely happy to have paid their $10 entrance fee.

I got to be logistics, which I didn’t mind at all, it was fun seeing all the points be tallied and watching from round to round as the scoring changed.  The third round of games had to be the most dramatic as some of the last place teams ended up in the top five.  Joel was able to play with one other gentleman, whose teammate didn’t show and the cool thing is that Joel’s Team took best over-all! Thankfully we put in the billing that it was a player run tournament. Some great match ups happened and there were quite a few battles which from the start appeared so lopsided but in the end the underdog team won due to objective captures or better tactics.

Here is a list of all the winners for the tournament

Best Appearance: Jon B. (Tyranids), Team “The Unknowns”
Best General: Scott P. and Zac B. (Orks and Imperial Guard), Team Epic Fail
Best Overall: Joel M. and Sean H. (Space Marines and Tyranids), Team Pretty Boys
Player’s Choice (Supreme Team): Jon B. and Scott R. (Tyranids and Necrons), Team “The Unknowns”

Until next time!
- G -

2009 Warhammer 40k Team Tournament

October 4th is the first Tournament that is being put on by TIAT Gaming! Our first foray into the world of tournament gaming will be a doozy! So far we have 8 teams registered for a total of 16 players. We have room for up to 40 people to come and play some games and maybe win the tourney. Awards will be given for Best Over All, Best Appearance, and Best General! I can't wait to toil away an entire day off just to see a bunch of random strangers (and friends as well) come together to lay waste to the opposing players carefully planned out army. I am also hoping to see some beautifully painted armies as well. Sadly, my contribution to the painted portion will be mediocre at best.

All in all...I think it is going to be great. The process of getting something organized and up and running smoothly is insane. I have always thought that organizing an e vent is like trying to control a bunch of spastic cracked-out monkeys that are all trying to run in a thousand different directions all at once. Usually anything that can go wrong does go wrong and in our case it appears that most of it did. The place that we were going to use to build custom trophies dropped the ball in a royal fashion, so my partner in crime has had to work over-time to build the trophies. I think they will look great and my hats off to Mr. Moore for all of his hard work and dedication to the cause.

I will freely admit that Joel has put in way more work than should be expected of a single person. He has taken it upon himself to deal with the City of Redding, make the terrain, make the trophies, print out all the score cards and packets, get the tables set up and basically he is a one-show. I, on the other hand, have helped to glue together the figures used on top of the trophies and have done some of the background logistics like learning the Tournament Pairing Software, taking some of the pictures used for our packet and generally hounding one of the local gaming stores to see what type of support they are going to be providing for us.

As far as corralling those spastic crack-out monkeys, they are still running all over the place…and honestly are really just a mild distraction that are designed to make things appear more difficult than it really is. Like my cohorts and I learned last year at Dundracon when we hosted our first LARP, we spent so much time trying to figure out every detail and in the end all of our participants applauded us and all had a good time. Which for me at least is the goal, I just want all of our players to have a good time. I hope that all of our participants tomorrow at the Team Tournament have fun and enjoy themselves and ultimately want to come back for our next tournament…when we get around to it and have no worries we will.

- G -

Warmachine Mk. II released!

Privateer Press has amazed this little gaming community here in NorCal with the release of a no-frills/no-fluff PDF version of the Mk. II Rules for Warmachine.  In addition they have also provided a PDF of all of the Unit Cards.   I think this is a remarkable move for Privateer Press in that it shows they care more about the gaming community than the all mighty dollar.  That isn't to say they aren't totally building up hype and getting folks excited about the Fluff version of the rulebook.  I know that I am a Fluff-whore and most likely I will purchase the hardbound version (cause I love hardbound books as well), so Privateer Press will get my hard earned cash. 

http://privateerpress.com/company/mkii-rules-and-model-info-available-for-pdf-download - for your downloading pleasure

- G -

Welcome to the Show

Well this is the first post on the new Tempest in a Teapot Gaming blog.  Should be interesting to see what develops as the founding members of TIAT Gaming and Tempest in a Teapot Productions work day and night to provide content for our LARPS, RPGs and just general posting about our progress as we attempt to expand the gaming community here in Northern California. 

More to follow soon...