This is the first of three GenCon-related posts this week, covering the ENnies, the Mastering Your GM-Fu seminar and the TT meetup at the Ram on Saturday afternoon.

The next two posts will be about GMing products at GenCon (Wednesday) and GMing lessons I learned as a player over the course of six events at this year’s con (Thursday).

The ENnie Awards

Treasure Tables was nominated for Best Fan Site, but we didn’t win. The gold went to Dragonlance Nexus and the silver was awarded to Planewalker. Congratulations to both sites — they’re excellent resources, and their awards were well-deserved.

Thank you very much to everyone who voted for TT in the ENnies — every vote was appreciated. I’m 99% likely to enter TT again next year, and hopefully 2008 will be our year to take the gold!

Mastering Your GM-Fu

If you came to our GMing seminar, I hope you had a great time — I know all four panelists enjoyed it. While Zachary, Vicki, Phil and myself all provided some good GMing advice, a lot of the best answers to questions came from members of the audience.

That was the upside to using a more “open forum” format this year than we did last year: lots of kickass advice from attendees. The downside was that some questions ran long, which meant that fewer questions were answered overall. That’s our fault for trying a slightly different approach this time around, and I apologize to anyone who didn’t get as much out of the seminar as they’d hoped — that certainly wasn’t our intention!

It’s also worth noting that this seminar marked the largest gathering of TT members ever (at least, as far as I know): Cassandra, Dante, DNAphil, myself, stupidranger, Svisionguy, Telas, thedangerranger, VV_GM, Walt C. and zacharythefirst. Very cool!

(Pictured at the beginning of this post is one of the official GM-Fu d2s we handed out at the end of the seminar, which we had made by Dragonfire Laser Crafts.)

Treasure Tables Meetup

After the seminar, 11 of us headed over to the Ram for drinks and an early dinner, which was a lot of fun. It was great to finally be able to put faces to names, and for everyone to get a chance to swap war stories and talk about gaming with people we’d previously only known online.

From left to right, with TT forum names in parentheses where applicable: Stef (with her face chopped off — sorry, Stef!), Matt (thedangerranger), Michael (Svisionguy), Phil (DNAphil), Patrick (VV_GM), a fellow from Phil’s gaming group, Vicki (Cassandra), Walt (Walt C.), Darren and Kurt (Telas). Between the beer, my poor memory and the dim lighting, this photo isn’t exactly my finest work…

Much better! Standing outside the Ram, in front of Privateer’s huge banner (with Darren behind the camera — thanks!): (back row) me, Walt, Phil and Patrick; (front row) Stef, Matt and Kurt.

Not that I expected otherwise, but I was pleased to find out that these guys were just as friendly offline as they are online. To my mind, that’s a large part of what TT’s all about: genuinely nice people talking about GMing — and funnily enough, that works in person, too.

This was an excellent GenCon, made all the better by getting to attend the ENnies, run a fun seminar and meet some great TT members. Tomorrow, it’s on to GMing products — and I’ve got three great ones in mind.