It's almost here.  Or, there, really.  And I'll be there soon.  

This year we're going to be only playing in one tournament, because the Goodman one (the one we won last year) won't be happening.  Apparently we broke it?  Anyway, the other problem with the tournament scene this year is that the big D&D Championship is only two rounds -- the first round is going to be a huge bloodbath, I fear, and there won't be much time for getting our bearings.  

Of course, that doesn't mean we're not excited. 

I'm not doing a whole lot of DMing at the moment, but I have some planning to do -- in a few months I'll be taking over the main group's game and trying to figure out what to do with a group of 7 very good players that will take them from level 21 to 26.  That's right, Epic Level play.

This is the first time doing the Battle Interactive. I'm going to make some notes as we go along.

We are playing with a DM we have played with before -- he uses candy for minis, which is isn't always my favorite, but we know Penn is good, so it's all cool.

The format is pretty cool -- a massive, thirty table collaborative paralell adventure.

The dark sun preview adventure is pretty cool. I never played DS back in the day, so it's all pretty new to me.

I'm playing a Thri'kreen shaman, and enjoying little pleasures like calling the Goliath "mud man" and the humans "pinks.

My favorite new mechanic, though, is Reckless Breakage. This is the mechanic that represents the poor quality of equipment.

The parade of the geeks has started -- we're trickling down from our hotel rooms and in off the street to kick off the convention.  I was surprised, walking up to the registration table, to see that only a few of the games are sold out yet.  I hope that just means people are coming to the con without having preregistered. 

Is it a bad sign that Tom and I were the first ones to register this morning?  Are we desperate nerds, or just early rising nerds?