Hello all! A brave cadre of crawl heroes played throughout the day on October 19th, 2024 to pit their heroic neophytes against the vastly superior forces of the dark god Set, and emerged victorious through their pluck and donations to the noble cause! Through their donations in-game and in raffles (of awesome arts – plushie and drawn!), we have a current total of $4,040 to give to the American Cancer Society! That is a full $1,000 more than last year’s totals minus our $2,000 angel donation; that is incredible! Additionally, That puts our Jerry Stefek Memorial Crawl for the Cure’s 5 years of charity events over our $20K mark, to a revised total of $23,579.95! Thank you to all who contributed so generously to the cause! You can see our wrap up blog post here!
71 players (and some first-timers through our Golden Ticket trial characters!) ran through the DCC OAR release of Dark Tower with their 0-level crawlers, taking on this high-level adventure with their cleverness and moxy, uncovering Mitra’s Lions avatars to battle for the cause, while using the power of their donations to move the story and skirmishes forward! The players were able to recover the pieces of the sacred Lion of Mitra statue and defeat the malevolent lich Pnessutt and his Sons of Set minions to cleanse the defiled Dark and White Towers of Set’s overreaching evil!
This force of heroes has enabled the American Cancer Society to perform their vital research and education, helping to prevent the disease and aid those afflicted in their time of need. THANK YOU, heroes, for giving your treasure to make this possible!
We do have a few things to wrap up for the event, so please read over the following:
- We are wrapping up on items being awarded – thank you sponsors providing your awesome works! Check out the tournament prizes awarded!
- We do have an issue with the Jennell Jaquays/Thanatar original artwork that we raffled off; the winner never collected it! We want to get this into the winner’s hands, however they did not leave any contact information on the raffle ticket. If you did participate in the Thanatar raffle and still have your tickets, the winner number was: Green Ticket 326202
If you are the winner and can send us a picture of the ticket, we’d love to get this awarded to you. Please contact us at jerryscrawlforthecure@gmail.com. Thank you! - Finally, we need to emphasize our policy on sending physical rewards post-convention. We posted it this year, but it wasn’t as visible as we would have wanted, so we’ll reiterate it here for future events, as well as display it prominently:
- We cannot send out physical rewards after the convention, shipping is costly these days, and we cannot continue the process.
- You can pick up your physical rewards: 1) During the event throughout the day, 2) At the end of the event – we wrap up at 8 PM, 3) In the Atrium on Sunday from 12:00 PM until 2:30 PM.
- For this round, we’re going to send the items to donors; we’ll have them pay us for shipping if they’d like to still receive them, however, we will foot the shipping cost for this year and add the collected total to this year’s donations giving an extra boost for the American Cancer Society.
- In the future, uncollected physical items will be reserved for the next year’s event.
- Please note this policy for future events. We want to get you your rewards for your generous donations, but the post-Con mailing is too much of a burden in time and treasure! Thank you for your continued consideration in this matter!
Finally, we wanted to thank the incredible people involved with making Crawl for the Cure Gamehole: Dark Tower possible:
- Our incredible Sponsors! The amount of generosity our sponsors give us to award you for your donations is staggering. Please visit our sponsors list, review their incredible products and consider purchasing their wonderful works for your holiday and birthday shopping! Thank you, sponsors for providing so much to encourage our donors to give!
- Our incredible Judges:
- Julian Bernick
- Gary Cunningham
- Jason Hobbs
- Brian Martin
- Jim Meyers
- Edwin Nagy
- Keith Nelson
- Bjorn Nelson
- Christophor Rick
- Paul Smith
- Jim Meyers – “the builder” – Thank you Jim for your incredible works making the Crawl for the Cure even better! Jim provided the awesome Judge stands to keep us organized, the Lions Statue of Mitra prop for the event, and if you rang the Gong of Doom in celebration of your character’s demise, was also from the hands of Jim Meyers! Thank you for making things awesome, Jim!
- Peter Garancis – Peter created the beautiful Pillar of Strength, to visually display and celebrate those loved ones lost to cancer and the strength of those who have survived! Thank you, Peter, for this wonderful reminder of the effect of cancer in our lives!
- Bill Walters – for contributing awesome stuff from your collection for donor benefit every year AND being the main support gopher at the Crawl!
- Keith Nelson – for the concept of the Lion Statue of Mitra, which helped cement a lot to of the mechanics together!
- Bjorn Nelson – for taking an 8-hour day (probably more!) of Judging Dark Tower, ON HIS BIRTHDAY, taking up HIS ENTIRE SATURDAY of Gamehole Con! Thank you SO much for your dedication, Bjorn!
- Bridget Traut – for creating awesome plushies to raffle for the Crawl! And, she has pledged for more next year! Thank you, Bridget!
- Nate Marcel – Nate put together the awesome artworks of Thanator/Jennell Jaquays and Akaerrian Keenblade with a few weeks notice! THANK YOU for your incredible efforts to get them to us in time for the event – we appreciate it and the beauty contributed, Nate!
- Bob Brinkman – For creating the stats for Thanatar, the favorite character of Jennell Jaquays, a red wyrm transforming herself into a human wizard to walk the realms of man. Thanatar was instrumental as an NPC who provided guidance in the Dark Tower and assisted in the end game! Stay tuned for the Crawl for the Cure to present this awesome content to you for your games from this website!
- Thank you, Ray Teresi, for helping us with the Crawl Operations!
- Finally, the Crawl for the Cure would not exist if it were not for Steve Seminerio and my wonderful wife Hazel Welch, spending many hours under me as task master! THANK YOU – it was a very crazy preparation time for Dark Tower this year, and the Crawl for the Cure would never have made it (nor would it any other year!) without their above and beyond, dedicated help for the event! THANK YOU!
I want to express my love and gratitude to everyone involved: sponsors, players, Judges and support staff! We continue to make this world a better place every year, and I am deeply in your debt!
Don’t forget, the second week of December (Saturday the 14th this year) we take the Crawl into the sea of bits with The Jerry Stefek Memorial Crawl for the Cure: Ethermeet 2024! Our dedicated Judges will once again go into the wee hours of the morning to entertain you! (Take advantage, West Coast – the Luau Lou and Brian Shutter “late-night horror” events are confirmed!) It will be another awesome event with the opportunity to spread some Good to the world! We hope to see you there!
