Behind the scenes of GitD

So whats it take to run a Lord of the Rings Indy Grand Tournament for Games Workshop, well I will tell you! It takes allot of time & hard work, below is a picture of what I need to take to the venue (Empire Games), and in the shot you can 4 tubs of terrain, two ice chest for the sodas & water for lunch, a box of shirts, a folder with all our notes for the event, all my LotR books, some of the prizes and a few other things.

The day of the event I will be bringing my camera, and another player as well as a few more things like the Ringer army (No you can't see it!) and other misc stuff. So it takes allot to put on a good event, and since we are on the GW Tourney Circuit, we want to start the session off on the right foot.

Gathering in the Desert (GitD) has been something that Dean & I hatched up back at Adepticon in 2008. After seeing how the Adepticon crew runs there event, we decided that we wanted to put on a similar event here in Phoenix. But the valley of the sun is an interesting place, we have a ton of avid gamers, but not allot of excitement for events. Sure all the gamers want a large event here in Phoenix, but no one really wants to do the work. Also Dean tried in the past to put on Desertcon, but the valley gamers did not really buy into it & it failed. So when Dean & I started talking about GitD, I had told him we need to focus on one event & one system. Since I was playing LotR & Dean had just gotten into it, we decided on LotR.
Hence GitD was born and we ran our first event last July 4th weekend of 2008. Now let me tell you something about Phoenix, it's Hot here in July (Duh!), and it gets hotter as the day goes on. So doing a two day event in the middle of Summer & on a 3 day weekend, some thought we were crazy! (Heck my wife did & she let town to go to San Diego with our son to get away from the Heat!) We had 15 local players & one traveler from Tampa Florida, Frank Brown. I met rank in Chicago at Adepticon while playing Warhammer Acients Battle tourney I ran. Well Frank liked the way I ran the event & made the trip out west. After he said he would come I realizede that I had seen Frank before in White Dwarf, he was the 2007 Grand Tournament US Champion! So we had one of the best players showing up to our event. Anyway after our event Frank gave the GW US Community team know what a great event we ran and we then got put in contact with Dave Taylor & the Community team. And the rest they say is history and we are now holding our second annual event, with hopefully more to come.

So besides this little history lesson I thought I would show you some pictures of what I did two nights ago. As many guys that are attending were posting on the web, they were in a hurried pace of finishing up there armies. Well not to be out done & being a glutten for punishment I decided to build a few more terrain pieces for GitD. So I busted out the LotR terrain pack (4 of them) and started building a few ruined pieces. Now my buddy Rob Brightwell was working on an Angmar, but do to work, he was not going to be able to finish his ruins or the board. So I put these in two night, that building, mounting, texturing & painting, I think I set a new personal best in terrain building & compleating a project! So here they are,

Here is a shot with Dave Pauwels Golden Demon painted Gimli to show how big this ruin is.
Here is a rather simple runied wall.

And here is Gimli making another guest apperance.

This ruin is one of my favorites, it just turned out nice.

And look who is back, man this Dwarf gets around!

So thats it, now its time to pack up and head out, see you either at GitD or next week with results of the event along with a ton of pictures...

TK