

I wish I could run that table over again, and do it properly. I suspect that in a box in Wizards of the Coast headquarters sits a file transferred from TSR that includes a permanent record of any poor feedback scores I received.

I got no complaints, so I cannot be certain that I left unhappy players, but thinking back on this event makes me cringe. As we played, I found myself scrambling to read the adventure ahead, and at the end, my players politely filled me on on the rules I’d forgotten. With the confidence of youth, I gave the adventure a quick read, I assumed I could return to the AD&D rules after a couple of years away, and I expected to dazzle my players. At the con, I ran the game in a classroom–I’ve never enjoyed such a quiet setting for a convention game since. In 1984, Gen Con took place on the campus of University of Wisconsin-Parkside. This module would later see print as I11 Needle. Back then we got mailed pages fresh from a photocopier in Lake Geneva. Nowadays, judges receive adventures as PDF files. Recently, I stumbled on the packet for the adventure that I ran.
