Gen Con 2010 – Day 1 Update

Gen Con is packed full of entertainers, in one form or another, but some of the most visible are the singers. There aren’t many of them, but they do stand out … mostly because they’re playing musical instruments.
In this case, it was the musical stylings of Dan the Bard and Water Street Bridge, carefully positioned in the high traffic areas right outside of the Exhibition Hall. Dan the Bard seems to be taking a page from the Old Spice Guy promotional playbook, as his business card indicates that he is “Now accepting commissions for songs about characters and campaigns!” Now you, too, can have your half-elf bard

While the entertainment is great, it doesn’t look like any of the big media guests show up until tomorrow. Sorry, no Wil Wheaton or “The Guild” cast members today … although at one point, I did believe that I passed Mo Rocca in a hallway. (And, it turns out, I may very well have been right. From his Twitter feed, @MoRocca said, about 7 hours ago “At #GenCon in Indianapolis. Far more authentically nerdy than ComicCon. That’s a compliment.”)
This gave me an opportunity to head into the Exhibition Hall and poke around the periphery a bit. I was able to check in with a couple of old friends from last year.
First, I talked with the folks over at the Shard RPG to see what fun they had coming. It turns out their game of Eastern mythology-based anthropomorphic animals (it’s a lot cooler than that just made it sound, honest) is going strong, and they’re expecting to have their new supplement, Magic and Martial Arts, out by Christmas. Their own website doesn’t even have this information yet, they said, but they had a preliminary copy of the book available. It looks like it will really expand the possibilities of the game in great ways.