It’s now the day after the day after the day before, and I’ve had a chance to get some sleep and muse a bit on my second time at Dragonmeet as a Podcast Zoner.

I’ll be honest, last year I didn’t really have a clue but this time I felt much more at home: I’ve got to know a few of the other podcasters a little bit; The Coriolis Effect ‘cast has had another year to spread its tentacles and more people know of us; I was more confident just talking to “people”; and I met a few actual listeners who were kind enough to seek us out, shake our hands and tell us to our faces how much they liked what we’ve been doing.  A new experience for me, a bit weird, cool and affirmatory all at the same time!

Wow!  And thank you!

AJ, Ben, Matthew and Tony at The Podcast Zone

It was also great to catch up with Nils and Mattias from the Free League, have them play in the Forbidden Lands Grindbone Slavers’ Tournament (more on that anon!), grab some dinner, some beers in a cool local pub (resulting in a The Coriolis Effect / Free League collaboration in hangovers…) and get an interview in the can (which will be coming out on The Coriolis Effect in the next couple of weeks – listen out for it!).

And then there was the Grindbone Slavers’ Tournament, an ambitious idea that came to me in a weak moment, that needed a bit of a reality check from Dan from the Formal Gamers podcast, and ended up being a great – if exhausting – event!  At this point I want to give a huge thank you to Dan and Kalum (from The Rolistes podcast) for helping me and Matt make this tournament happen: they got behind the idea right from the start and made sure we had enough time in the recording room to see it done (and even then we overran a smidge!).  There was a slight gremlin with the recording, but Matt and I really hope we’ll have some great content to put out (and at the worst we will talk about it endlessly).

The tournament was a 2 vs 2 knockout arena event, with 8 teams of 2 fighting it out for the wonderful prize of a copy of Forbidden Lands (donated by Free League – thank you Nils!). Our 16 players signed up and rolled their characters using the Forbidden Lands excellent random generation system.  We were over-subscribed and sadly had to turn some players away for lack of places (and at this point I want to thank my brother Tony for stepping out of the tournament to let a listener take his place – he’s not such a bad guy after all…).

I’m not going to give you a blow by blow account here, as I don’t want to spoil the podcast when it comes out.  But, once we broadcast I’ll post a more detailed write up. Needless to say our players made sure it was a brilliant event, everyone seemed to get really stuck in and took good and bad fortune in the same brilliant spirit (and there was plenty of both!).  And we even drew a crowd for the Final!

But there are a couple of quick “not-too-spoiler-filled” shouts I want to make:

• to Justine, for the best and most unexpected death of the whole afternoon, and being dragged into another plane of existence to be a demon’s plaything;
• to Madonna, for killing her enemy with a small cooking pot…;
• and Joseph for taking death by cooking pot so well;
• to Ziz for an excellent bit of tactical play as well as the most pathetic (and unfortunate) death of the day…;
• to Nils, for using Ziz’s bleeding body as the worst bit of cover ever;
• to Frank, for going into battle with nothing but a tent pole;
• to Legs, Ben’s donkey who didn’t take too well to being dragged into the line of fire;
• and to the glorious Finalists!!

I’m not sure what kind of event The Coriolis Effect will run next year, but I’m sure we will do something – it’s a tradition now so keep your eyes and ears peeled so you don’t miss out!

Dragonmeet was a great event – if you didn’t get there this year make a note in your diary for December 2019 NOW!!