Setting up DIAF-CON North 2013

Jeff spoke on Heroes of Faith, from the book of Hebrews and I had to focus to keep from getting distracted. Every time he said the word heroes I kept thinking about what the coming days would bring. More nervously, how much work it seemed still needed to be done before the start time. Our first guests would be in at 11 tomorrow and our first event started at 1.

When service ended, I rounded up the kids, took my niece and nephew home and after stepping into my house and telling the kids to go to bed, quickly got to work. I packed up my Warhammer models, made sure I had my magic decks, brought my Dungeons and Dragon's props upstairs and made sure I have all the miniatures I needed for the game I was running. Tick Tock, the first mate of Captian Renior and Shield, the likely sacrificial dwarf who would see the crypt of Strahd Von Zarovich. I also needed to round up all the games I would take, my paints, the tokens that would be needed for Magic vintage play, my Orc rulebooks and copies of the schedule. By the time I had gathered everything my dining room table was covered and it appeared there had been a minor avalanche of gaming stuff onto the floor beside it.

Shelly got home and I took off for Warriors 3, the location we would spend the next four days. James, who is the other half of the production of this con, arrived just 30 seconds after I did. Perfect timing we hoped was a sign of the days to come. Don was behind the counter of The game shop and with almost no struggle, he got us the key and told us we didn't need to worry about the role players who were using the room that evening.

In probably 45 minutes, we had each unloaded the dozens of things we had packed in all of the available spaces of our minivans. The far end of the room, away from the roleplayers, had tables which held our maps and bags and game boxes and papers. We decided how we would set up the tables, two big tables at one end, smaller tables in the middle of the room, games and food against the wall. We laid out and weighted down the Star Wars trench run and called it a night. We would be back the next morning around 10:30 to finish getting the room set.

It would be hard to sleep that night, but the bulk of the work was done. Success or failure was already determined, we thought we had done well, but we wouldn't know until events unfolded.