Where do we go from here???

Well,

It has been a while since I posted here at GitD and I thought I would give a brief note on why and the direction we are going. First up are a few things that brought GitD for Lord of the Rings to a close.

1st Attendance - Our attendance for GitD LotR has been on a slow decline, from local to out of town folks. The sad fact is that the LotR community here in Phoenix has never been great and the whole reason for GitD was to build a LotR community here. With that being said, if I ran GitD again next year for LotR, we would only have 6 locals playing. For the folks that travel to GitD, it is costly and it is not cheap to come all the way out to Phoenix when they can play at home. So if I ran GitD for LotR, maybe we would hit 12 people? 14 if we were lucky and I am sorry to say, but 14 people is not really "Grand", it more like a RTT event.

2nd Army Books/Hobbit Rules - Once again, here in Phoenix, all the LotR players hate how the new books either screwed armies or allow weird combos of army builds. In order to have a chance, you have to now do some crazy builds with strange allies. I know one Far Harad player here locally (Jerry A) who is ticked off that his army got hosed by the new books. From a TO's side of things, this means more work for me to try to either come up with scoring for themed forces or put restrictions on what is allowed. This is more work than what it is worth. Then GW released the Hobbit Rules, which changed some core aspects for the game and many of the local players left the game for good.

3rd Not Fun - This is perhaps the most important one, but running GitD for LotR was sapping the fun out of it for me. My hobby for the past 5 years was GitD, for 6 months out of each year I did nothing but work on GitD LotR. My hobby was all about making sure I put together the best GT I could for you guys. I started GitD for one reason, for you guys! I wanted a cool LotR event like the ones I saw at Adepticon here in my own back yard. It was fun, but I have realized that it was consuming all of my hobby time ( which never seems to be enough of!) I had always hoped that someone here would step up to run GitD, but the folks that still play LotR did not want to take the baton from me.

So what does this all mean and where are we going? That is a great question! After taking a year off from running any sort of event, I am getting that itch to run something Grand again! Well what is that you ask? Well I am still getting everything together and will announce it here within the next few weeks. I am waiting to hear from a few people, but once I hear, I will be announcing the next Gathering in the Desert Event, so stay tuned!

Oh here is a teaser photo of what we are looking at!

TK