Catch Your Hare

Dragonmeet didn’t seem like fun at 6am, when I needed to get up to go to it. I nearly didn’t.

I was working For The Man, in his guise as Pelgrane Press. The Man gave me a Pelgrane Press T-shirt to wear, a little like working for McDonald’s, and I went to give Dying Earth rules to the queue.

In retrospect, we timed this badly. Last year, people in the queue seemed happy to chat. This year, we were giving stuff out at 9.45am, and I think that, by that stage, people were more interested in going inside.

At 10.30am, I played Steve’s demo of Trail of Cthulhu. It was excellent: we met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which is always a bonus. Since I was running that demo later, I asked Steve for his notes, and he showed me a bit of paper with ten words on it.

For the remainder of the morning, I did Pelgrane duty. I was rather superfluous, since Ken Hite and Robin Laws were there and, understandably, people wanted to talk to them rather than me.

At 1.30pm, I ran my Trail of Cthulhu demo for some very pleasant Italians. I made lots of hand gestures, in case their English was at the level of my Italian. The demo went well.

3pm was Houses of the Blooded, with one Mr Wick. Interesting. It was an excellent play group and a fun game. I’m still wondering how much came from the system and how much from the group. I’m keen to play again and for longer.

Then final duties on the Pelgrane stall. I sold my last copy of Play Unsafe, which was deeply satisfying.

The charity auction afterwards lasted far too long – over two hours – and the crowd were rather hard work.

It was a superb day. Then on to Wagamamas. And so to bed.