Väl mött, äventyrare! Our monthly Absalom Lodge Conclave is coming up on September 24th at Tri-States Games & Hobbies in Quincy, Illinois. This month is “Invite Someone to Play Pathfinder” month at the Conclave. If you bring a new player to Conclave who we give a new Org Play number to and they register it on paizo.com, I will award you FOUR bonus Achievement Points. As we have been finding out in the surrounding area, there are a lot of people who would really like to get involved in roleplaying. They just are not aware of what we are doing. Therefore, we have to be the ambassadors for this wonderful hobby and invite them to our Conclave.
Cue the 70’s disco music! I still have fond, warm, fuzzy memories of my first D&D game, way back in 1979. My friend, Mark Arterburn, invited several of us to his birthday party. It was a sleepover and he was going to run this new game his parents had bought him during the summer. When we talked about the game, he held up this slim paperbook book that had a red dragon sitting on a pile of gold being attacked by a wizard and a knight.
We had the party and a few kids had to go home, but six or seven of us stayed to play. None of us had played before, but Mark had really been pumping up the anticipation factor for a couple of weeks, so we were eager to play. After whipping up a few characters, the party assembled and met at the Keep on the Borderlands. There, my Elf (remember, this was the Basic D&D box that later became the Basic version of the D&D rules, not AD&D) equipped his bow, nocked an arrow and scouted on the way to some valley where we would find the dreaded Caves of Chaos. We slaughtered the kobolds, but ran into some trouble with the goblins who fought back a bit harder. Early in the morning, we all fell asleep satisfied with our treasure haul. Little did I realize my life’s hobby had begun!
The essence of this story is that I might never have rolled my first d20 unless someone had invited me to play D&D 43 years ago. This is one of two months during the year that we celebrate our hobby at Quincy. September is becoming our new PFS2 kickoff month and what better time than this month, when Fall begins to turn the leaves orange and the weather acts weirdly as way, way, WAY too eager Pumpkin Spice fanatics decorate everything in Halloween themes to have our “Invite Someone to Play Pathfinder” month? Invite someone to play Pathfinder with us at Conclave this month and help them find our hobby. Who knows? You might be introducing someone to their lifelong hobby!
With that thought in mind, let’s look at this month’s scenarios! First up is the introduction to Season Four of Pathfinder Society, 4-01 Intro: Year of Boundless Wonder which is a L1-4 tier and repeatable scenario. Last year’s Season Three launch was wildly well received, which is why you see us having a repeating introductory scenario for Season Four occurring. This scenario was specially designed to introduce everyone to the Season Four metaplot which has strong ties to Season Three’s metaplot. There has been some very good planning of the Society content lately and I hope it continues for a long time. I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say I really enjoyed running this scenario and the players said they thought it was one of the best PFS2 scenarios for the 1-4 tier yet.
Not to be outdone though, we have the second scenario from Season Four in the second slot for this month’s Conclave. One of my favorite scenarios was 1-03 Escape from the Grave which came out in the initial launch of Pathfinder Second Edition. We are going to feature its indirect sequel, 4-02 Return to the Grave, a 1-4 tier scenario in that 5:00 PM slot. The advance word from those that have played it has been very encouraging. It has some pep to it and a good story to work with. I am looking forward to running it for you on the 24th.
But wait! There’s more! Our wonderful hosts at Tri-States Games & Hobbies, who are kind enough not to charge us anything to play our games at their store, are also offering us 15% off all roleplaying game materials on September 24th as part of this special event. They’ve been adding more and more miniatures, dice, Pathfinder books, maps, and accessories ever since they’ve opened up last year. I personally am happy to have such awesome support from them. Buying my gaming supplies at my Friendly Local Game Store is quite satisfying when I know they want our business and value me and you as not only customers, but friends in this great hobby.
You can sign up to play these scenarios right now at our Absalom Lodge Conclave Warhorn page. I really want to stress the importance of signing up on our Warhorn page for all of our events, whether it is the Absalom Lodge Conclave or any other League of Aroden event. Your venture-officers want to provide all of you with the best experience possible at our events. It is important for us to know how many people are coming, so that we can be sure to have enough GMs available. Not only that, but enough trained and prepared GMs available. We have created a training program for our GMs here in the League of Aroden called GM Academy for the purpose of recruiting and training people who want to GM for you. We did this because we take pride in our program, our players, and our GMs. A well-ran table is a very enjoyable and exhilarating experience for both the players and the GMs. In order to make that happen, we need quality GMs, but most of all, we need players. So, when you sign up on Warhorn for our events, you are taking the first step to creating the conditions for that wonderful experience at your table.
So, please, do your part to help us out. Sign up on Warhorn for the tables you want to play at. If you are not already registered on Warhorn, please take a minute to do that and then sign up to play. Remember, players who have signed up for a table on the Warhorn page have their seats reserved. We will not turn them away if we are short of GMs. If we have to turn players away, and you know I go to extreme lengths to avoid that, we will turn away those who did not sign up for that particular table.
Website
With all of that said, I quickly want to point out that I am overhauling the website for League of Aroden. Everything is being updated to reflect changes in information and links to webpages. The goal is to have a website that either has the information for you on it or has the links to the major webpages with the information you need. I am hoping that you can go to the site, and find the information or location of the information so that it makes it much easier for all of us to be on the same page.
Finally, I added a new feature to the website, a Google Calendar! You can find it in two places on the site. Over on the right sidebar and at the bottom of the HOME page. Just look up there on the toolbar and click the far left tab that says HOME. We are going to do our best from now on to have two months of events set up in advance for all monthly events and three to four weeks of events for our bi-weekly and weekly events. At the very least, we want to have the next month’s or week’s event already listed before the current month’s event takes place. We feel it will help with planning for everyone. This way, you can come to Conclave on the 24th and know what will be ran at the October 22nd Conclave (which is the March of the Dead special).
Okay, enough said! I hope to see you all at the September 24th Conclave!
Explore! Cooperate! Report!
– Xathos
The League of Aroden 