This just in: Proto-Con 2005 – Monstrous Success!

If you weren’t fortunate enough to attend this year’s Proto-Con, then you’d better bust out your calendar and start planning to attend the next one! To tide you over till then, here’s a quick run-down of the major events, incidents and adventures.

Star Frontiers -RPG:

Looking at the Star Frontiers‘ box with its Larry Elmore painting brandishing its front, it’s hard not to recall a time when you still had to color in the dice numbers with a white crayon. Star Frontiers is not a game for the White Wolf crowd and their Stanislavski method-acting antics, but those of the old-school hack and slash. And does the introductory adventure, SF-0, Crash of Volturnus ever deliver! Opening on-board a star vessel over-run with space pirates so generic it is shocking they don’t come with their own white labels, the adventure eventually twists and turns to wind up on the planet Volturnus, where if you haven’t guessed already, the party crashes head first into a straight up dungeon (or cavern) crawl. The only thing the adventure is missing is an involved cab combat/chase/bartering sequence that the introductory rule book promised. I think I smell next year’s game: Star Frontiers – Cab WarZ.

The big question on everybody’s mind though is just who won this year’s Proto-Con adventure of choice? The GM or the players embarking on it? Certainly Grue’s successful bonding with the Natives won us XP points, but it doesn’t take finger math to figure out that waking up a giant hibernating albino bear to be a good move. As it turned out, the party beat the livid frak out of that bear and lived to brag about it. Final verdict: Win for the party – that is until next year of course, when the albino bear returns to rampage in the streets of Cab WarZ.

Bags:

Everyone who attended this year’s Proto-Con got a Proto-Bag of mad goodies. Included in every bag were crazy dice, Homestar Runner patches, pens, pins, a mix CD and a boatload of adds. Sound like fun? Well you’d better be sure to come next year so you can get your goodie bag, too!

Canned Biscuit Cook Off:

Canned biscuits taste so good. Heck – even raw canned biscuits taste good. How can you make a canned biscuit taste even better? That is just the question that 2005’s Proto-Con Canned Biscuit Cook-Off put to the test.

I was certain the way to make a canned biscuit better was to have it be honey flavored and amp you like a 30-mega-tons of Red Bull. Or rather, so I thought when I had the divine vision to make the first ever honey-snuff-biscuit (rubbing snuff that is). Evidently though, the snuff biscuit was atrocious. You can’t be a winner every year.

The real winners of the Canned Biscuit Cook-Off were Megan, Dragon and Bear. Bear’s dish, a variation of pigs in a blanket, was not only the most speedily prepared, but it was an oh-so-tasty-feast of grease. Megan’s and Dragon’s dishes on the other hand took a little longer – but wow was the wait ever worth it! Both dishes were not only original recipes, but offered complexity and thought perhaps never devoted to the canned biscuit in the history of the world. Megan’s, a biscuit and chocolate pudding savory sweet, had a presentation so spectacular, it looked like it had been torn right out of the Iron Chef’s cookbook. Dragon’s hearty biscuit quiche may have been more practical in its presentation, but man was it ever hearty! There is little doubt that it could have sustained a tribe of starving Cub Scouts abandoned in the Tundra for a month. Hopefully both Dragon and Megan will post their recipes at some point. If they don’t – badger them, because they’d otherwise be doing a grave injustice by depriving everyone of their culinary delights.

Cardboard Mania & Critical Fowl:

I’m not going to say a whole bunch about this other than: Dick made a 20-sided die, Dragon made a pair of mobile arms and I made a duck in commemoration of the Ward Foundation. We combined them all together to make one construction of pure-duck-insanity called Critical Fowl. The best part is we shot a video. You’ll have to wait until November to see the video though.

Movies:

While Thom genuinely liked Héctor Olivera’s Barbarian Queen (1985) starring Lana Clarkson, the general consensus was stay away – far away. Although Barbarian Queen had some half decent fighting scenes and enough fan-service to keep any high-school virgin busy for a week, the plot left a lot to be desired. My suggestion is, stick to one or the other: for S&F stick to Deathstalker (also starring Clarkson) and for T&A stick to (or get sticky with) Misty Mundae.

Where Barbarian Queen fell a little short, Carl Gottlieb’s Caveman (1981) was a gem in the rough. What could be any better than Ringo Starr and cute-as-a-button Shelly Long running around as caveman and cavegirl? According to DJ Webb, the only person who didn’t give Caveman the thumbs up, a lot. Don’t worry DJ Webb, we’ll watch Fuzz next year.

So there you have it. I’d like to thank everyone who came out to this year’s Proto-Con and made it one of the truly more memorable events that Protozoic.com has done to date. Here’s looking to next year, Kirk!