The Winners, We Has Them

And now, Internets, I give you the winners of the Great Stupid Ranger Gen Con Badge Giveaway of 2009!

I must admit I was amused (but not particularly surprised) to see that more people wanted a free pass to avoid the lines rather than save money. I must also admit that having been through those lines many times myself, I deeply understand this and would likely have been in the same position had I not discovered the magic of pre-registration!

Our winners were carefully selected using an incredibly scientific process that did not, repeat NOT, involve the rolling of any dice, the flipping of any coins, or the reading of any entrails. So, without further ado, here are our winners!!

• Samuel K
  We here at Stupid Ranger are all about the business of getting new players to try things out  (and keeping them going in those awful first few sessions when you feel like you have no idea what you are doing and everyone else is crunching numbers and LOOKING AT YOU).  Samuel K is a man in such a predicament. Gen Con is a great place (maybe even the best place!) for a person to get fired up about gaming. In that spirit, we award the first of our weekend passes to Samuel K.

  Also, you can buy swords there. But I definitely don’t recommend stabbing any of your gaming group if they make fun of you for being a noob. I also definitely don’t recommend dissolving their corpses with lye so that nobody ever finds out, and I certainly don’t advise you to ventilate the area properly so the fumes don’t overcome you.

• Jess Hartley
  What’s this, you say? This person is quite capable of getting their own badge! Why would we give them a free one? I’ll tell you why. It’s not because she’s a long-time gamer and an acclaimed industry veteran. Yes, we enjoy making people like her happy because they are cool and they tend to hang out with other cool people that make us happy too. Guilty as charged!
  However, Jess is getting this pass for one reason in particular: her GenCon for the Aspiring Professional series. For bloggers like us who are quaking in our Boots of Elvenkind about giving interviews and talking to industry professionals, this series contains a lot of things our desperate little minds can cling to so that we may at least appear sane. This pass is to say “thanks” for that.

• Bill Spytma (a.k.a. Giant Sack Guy)
  It was not Giant Sack Guy’s circumstances that led us to choose him for a free weekend pass. Nor was it his skill in creative writing.

  Nay, it was that his tale was the D&D equivalent of “the dog ate my homework”. Also we enjoy calling him “Giant Sack Guy”.

TO COLLECT YOUR PRIZE: We’ll be sending the winners an email with how to contact us and collect the goods at the con shortly. Be prepared to show  some ID, or at the very least a lot of cookies to bribe us with. But be warned. It takes a LOT of cookies to bribe us.

Once again, these are WEEKEND passes. That means they won’t do you much good on Thursday or Friday. But feel free to collect anyway, and give it to someone who can use it.

Correction: These are 4-DAY badges.  So you’re set for Thursday through Sunday zany goodness. (SR)

(NOTE: Any unclaimed passes will be taken by me Saturday morning to the registration line, where I will hand it to some poor person with a kid throwing a tantrum in line. Because Pelor knows everyone involved wants him out of that line as fast as possible.)

Special thanks once again to the Procrastination Fairy for hooking us up with free passes to give out! Congrats to our winners, and we hope everybody has a great time at the ‘con this year!