Tag Archives: comic books

AmberCon Northwest 2011 Recap

For those of you who I’ve only recently met, let me first explain a little about AmberCon Northwest.  ACNW is a yearly game convention based mostly around Erick Wujcik’s Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. Which in turn is based on Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series. Over the years, the strict adherence to only playing Amber Diceless has slackened. There continue to be Amber games, but there are also lots of other off beat games that now get run there. There are several of these cons each year. I’ve only been to two of them, and this is my favorite of them.

The convention is run at the McMenamin’s Edgefield, a beautiful resort just east of Portland, OR. Not only does the Edgefield have an on-site brewery, distillery and winery, but it also has a spa and salt-water soaking pool. The convention has no dealer room and almost never has panels. Instead from Thursday through Sunday the weekend is all about gaming.

The community of 120 some odd people is very open and welcoming. New people often speak of how friendly and helpful people are, and many of the people I’ve gotten to know over the last twelve years feel like family.

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Thoughts on the “New 52”

For those of you who don’t follow comic books, you may or may not know that DC Comics (which is responsible for characters like Superman, Batman, etc) did a reboot of all their comics, starting everything over at #1. I don’t follow these things too closely, normally. I’ve gotten a little burnt out by their unending series of crossover events. But there was a lot of energy around this so I asked my local comic shop guy to hook me up with the new line of #1s so I could see what it was all about. I figured, at the very least, this would be a chance to read about some characters I don’t normally read about. Overall I’ve found it to be a bit incomprehensible.

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