2025 Mag Comic Expo

  

 

Rocky Top Gaming Con - Around Wood Booger

Wood Booger Sighting

 

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

- William Carlos Williamson

A Walking Tour of Wood Booger

2025 Rocky Top Game Con AAR

This year I elected to run two sessions of It Came from Beyond the Still: Hillbillies vs. Aliens at Knoxville’s annual Rocky Top Game Con under the recently created banner of Historical Wargaming at the event. The set up came Friday, starting at 2:30, and  the six foot by twenty foot map wasn’t completed until 7:15 that evening. Before heading to our hotel we toured the convention, focusing primarily on the dealer’s area. 

We arrived an hour before the show opened on Saturday to make last minute preparations for the games, slated from noon until 3 and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. My blood sugar bombed just as session one was commencing, and I scarfed down a cupcake while the five players, representing the Hatfields, the 4th Doctor, the Cult of Skaro, the Meddling Kids: Scouts and the Cyberdudes, began to mix it up.

The game was called at 3:30 for time, with the Hatfields getting in just under the wire to win the thing with their eighth inflicted casualty of the contest. With the human’s win, the 10th Doctor’s victory condition is the factions share victory; if humans win the game the Doctor also wins, should an alien faction of any type win the game, well, ya know.

Game two went much more rapidly. With an early start of 4:05 we wrapped play at 6:30 in an Area 51: Easy Co. victory over rival Men In Black, the Revenuers, Cultists, and two separate factions of alien bounty hunters.

See images elsewhere on this site for even more details about those games.

It took around 2 1/2 hours to break everything down and pack our vehicle and we departed shortly before the con wrapped for the day. We considered going back for a low key Sunday and ended up staying home after learning I had strained my vocal folds on Saturday with all the game gab. Looking forward to next year.

Rivalry Week

Game two featured four differing sets of rivals squaring off. Brother and sister shot it out in a revenge game. Brother’s Grey Aliens probed sister’s characters a year ago at Rocky Top Game Con. Another real-world pair of friendly rivals faced off, as two members of the regional gaming society the HAWKS dueled for the right to eliminate all aliens in Wood Booger with the in-game rivalry of the shadow government’s Men In Black and the government’s Area 51. Meanwhile, two factions of opposing Intergalactic Bounty Hunters arrived on scene. They fought a turf war all while being assaulted by Area 51’s Easy Co. and the Men in Black.  Back on the opposite side of town, Sheriff Buford T. Justis broke up a still while also leading the Revenuers in a battle with Cultists hell-bent on summoning Great Cthulhu. The game culminated in a victory for Area 51, which eliminated a total of a dozen characters combined from the various factions while losing only one of his six figures, essentially becoming the last man standing.

See Rock City

 

Battle Royale in the slop

 "Well the emperor's in the pigsty and the geisha's in the shack and you better believe I'll hold 'em there till the feds they pay me back." - Neil Fallon, Tim Sult, Dan Maines, and Jean-Paul Gaster, Clutch ("A Shotgun Named Marcus" from Transnational Speedway).

The most excitement of Saturday at Rocky Top Game Con came in game one with an all-out brawl in the pigsty. Michael the Boy Scout earned his knot tying merit badge by tying up Dalek Sek in the sty while the 10th Doctor used his Sonic screwdriver to force the Dalek to eject into the mud. Jenny Hatfield shotgunned it. The Pigs ate it.

Welcome

Welcome to Wood Booger, Va., population 839, and shrinking.

This is a fan page for Rob Adams and Dastardly Designed Games’ It Came From Beyond the Still: Hillbillies vs. Aliens, a silly little war game that I love. I have been a fan of his game since 2012, and actually added the Green Menace From Uranus, the Meddling Kids: Scouts, the Intergalactic Bounty Hunters, and Masked Minions to the official game, with many of those seeing publication in Rob’s subsequent supplemental books. I have since added numerous pop culture factions unofficially for the 6’x20’ game I set up at conventions around the country, which all are set in Wood Booger, Va., a fictional town named for Virginia’s Woodbooger Sanctuary in Norton.

Here I’ll share after action reports, announcements about upcoming events, photos of all the factions available to play, including all the newer unofficial ones I have since added, convention reports, and more.

In Wood Booger you can find the Grangers and the O’Dairies constantly feuding, much like their fellow hillbilly families the Hatfields and McCoys. Those Meddling Kids are always skulking about causing trouble, and the local Cultists are forever up to no good. Reports of cattle mutilations, abductions, and saucer sightings are becoming all too frequent in this neck of the woods, and the MIB have arrived to take charge of things, potentially upsetting the government which sent a faction from Area 51 to investigate, all while Revenuers are busy going around busting up stills, and arresting the locals. 

The hi jinx doesn’t stop there. The Doctor has made an appearance or two of late, attempting to thwart the influx of alien species in Wood Booger, including the recently arrived Cult of Skaro, the Weedians, the Blobs, and Cephalopods. The Intergalactic Government has even responded to the eyebrow raising influx of aliens to the area, and has dispatched a couple of Intergalactic Bounty Hunter groups to Virginia to quell the uptick.

If you can’t find a good time in Wood Booger, you’re just not trying hard enough.