The View from Lake Geneva: A Visit to Gary Con XIV

“Are you playing in the tournament?”
I’m in the back of my Uber to the Grand Geneva Lodge on the last day of GaryCon and making conversation with my very nice Uber driver who’s familiar with the yearly RPG convention. I say I’m not signed up for it, but mention I stopped by Gary Gygax’s house for a picture. She notes that he’s a big deal in town and when D&D was first coming out she was never allowed to play by her parents.
I say “Oh yeah, that was when they were worried about kids summoning demons and stuff.”
She doesn’t smile at this. She politely lets me know she thinks there’s at least a bit of real evil mixed up in the game.

My propaganda attempts to describe D&D as improv and math, make believe with rules that could be a wholesome family activity like her Sunday parcheesi and Monopoly nights she’d talked about meet with mixed results.

“I suppose it’s good for lonely people that can’t meet anyone to have some kind of social outlet.”
“Yeah it can help kids develop social skills!”
“Oh no, never for kids!”

After a bit of conversation I attempt to search for fantasy common ground.

“Well, do you like Lord of the Rings?”
“No, it has occult magic.”
“Ah gotcha, how about C.S Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia?”
“Well that’s borderline, I see what he was trying to do and it’s a fun story for kids, we read it in 5th grade and I really liked it- I just don’t see why he needed to make stuff up instead of just using the word of God.”

We pull up to the doors of the lodge and exchange pleasant goodbyes. I am very grateful to not have been a nerdy kid in the 80’s. Walking into the Grand Geneva Lodge and knowing I’m surrounded by 2,500 people that saw personnel value in throwing dice, escapism to fantastic worlds, and writing adventures for a job- is affirming and comforting.

I really had a blast at GaryCon.

This is only the second gaming convention I’ve ever been to and I plan on coming back next year.

After the passing of Gary Gygax in 2008, his family started the convention as a celebration of life for relatives and friends to gather together and play some games and. The event has since grown beyond to a couple thousand attendees and is on it’s 14th year, but still has an intimate and friendly feel compared to the Times Square over stimulus of my fun but tiring visit to GenCon, an event itself originally based in Lake Geneva during the TSR days before migrating to its current home in Indianapolis.

The games include the groggiest of grognards playing AD&D and sometimes Chainmail or Braunstein and also plenty of D&D 5E tables . The ages of convention goers varied a lot and there was plenty of families and younger folks along with older people. Between the 5E and 1E there’s a blend of indie and Old School Renaissance RPG’s and a number of personnel passion project or niche systems that I hadn’t discovered before the convention. Plenty of board games as well. There’s even an event called RPEX that’s a live action dungeon crawl with props similar to a more affordable True Dungeon. I’m interested in checking that out next year.  There’s also seminars on game design and RPG history that I didn’t make this year that sounded interesting.

My first event was an Old School Essentials Game using the Palace of Unquiet Repose adventure.

I’d heard of a couple folks in my party including Ray Otus who made the Gygax 75 campaign sandbox building guide and Vasili Kaliman who wrote the Night Land and Xanadu modules for OSE (who said he’d enjoyed my work with Desert Moon of Karth!)
We delved into the ancient ruins of a shattered city that captured the ominous feeling with minimal combat but a creeping sense of dread and wonder as we negotiated with a mercenary company next to an underground lake of liquid mercury. Our GM Brandon did a swell job and I definitely am interested in picking up the module for my own use and dissection. 

Afterwards I went to the dealer hall where I caught up with the World of Game Design folks who were stocking Karth at their booth where they’d had at Gen Con before and chatted with a number of friendly and passionate dealers about their products.

At one booth I snagged a $16 slightly stained Advanced Dungeon Master’s Guide that had the name ‘Dirty Dale’ and a bunch of hectic scribbles on the inside cover with some marginalia inside in a blue pen. I think the book has more charm this way with evidence of actually being used and loved.

It’s neat seeing the huge range of different interests and products on the dealer floor. They even had the cover artist Larry Elmore hanging out at a table in the corner with no line.
I checked out the Beadle and Grimm booth and looked out at their very fancy editions of D&D 5e modules with physical props.  I didn’t run into the company’s co-owner Matthew Lillard at the con. As a fan of his work playing Shaggy from Scooby Doo and in Scream, I hope to say hi next time.

I got back to the banquet room where I was hosting my first game of the con, Mothership 1E set on my own Desert Moon of Karth. The crew were members of a struggling news station that was going through cuts and to keep their jobs they needed to shoot a sufficiently clickbaity holodoc in the “cursed” Seahorse Mine on the edge of the galaxy to stay hip! I found this framing device really helped give the players a direction and reason to push forward and the two games I ran for it had a nice feeling that felt like Ghost Hunters on History Channel, combined with TMZ, and Aliens. Trying to film a sensationalistic ghost program to keep your jobs is a useful reason to get into risky horror movie situations..

  I had a crew of 4 including Vasili again and Ahimsa Kerp of Knight Owl Publishing (known for Scourge of the Scorn Lords, Meatlandia, and with a Kickstarter for OSE Aquatic Adventures right now! I had a blast running the game and several of the players had never been in any Mothership games before. In both this and the other two games of Mothership 1E I ran I found that new players were able to pick it up and grok the game within less then 10 minutes and have their characters created and then completely master the system within 30. While I think I’m a decent Warden I think the system is to thank for this easy pick up as opposed to solely my abilities.

As my time running my own module has been primarily in the form of one shots, I’ve spent a lot of time in the boomtown of Larstown where karaoke bar fights break out, burger franchises are started,  cults get joined, and in one memorable instance the governor assassinated and put into a hagfish patty grinder.

It’s great to see that there’s plenty to do but as a GM I like to get out into the wilderness of the sandbox moon too and pushed more aggressively forward to get to the mine to better fit the one shot format. This time I summarized the arrival to the moon and descent down the ancient space elevator and gave them a contact in the form of a contracted cowboy guide Sandsquid Slim to lead the party to the Seahorse Mine. They had no wandering encounters on their camel ride over the dunes and rested for the night at the huge crumbling bust of the Shattered Visage where I had rolled up a tropical shirt clad tourist that had been taken out on a game safari by Sandsquid Slim’s competing brother guide. After some back and fourth and the tourist complaining about being promised a private campsite they bedded down for the night uneventfully. In the morning the crew headed to the mouth of the mine where they got the cameras rolling and went into the collapsed mine shaft.

  The hapless tourist ran off ahead past the gas mask filled locker room and jumped out from hiding to scare the crew and causing everyone some stress. The discovery of a heap of boneless miner bodies stressed the party further and their sweaty tourist companion vomited in shock. After checking out a number of side rooms and noting the vents had been pried open the news crew saw a beeping biosignature towards the end of the mine main tunnel where the track ended. The biosignature but the trusty security officer crept upwards towards the chamber with the large ore crusher. Wisely noting he specifically looked up on the ceiling after leading the crew to the end of the tracks he had time to take some shotgun rounds when he saw this pale form clinging upside down to the ceiling.

Things devolved rapidly from there and a series of organic harpoon shots missed though the marine was badly injured. The rest of the crew took a few shots but fled where the bioscanner revealed another one that screeched and mimicked “Hey Jenkins there’s something blocking the vents- you should check it out.” as it charged. The scientist absolutely demolished this one with a tranquilizer dart and some vibechete chops as I continued to roll poorly for these beasts.This cleared the way for the party to flee through the vents, choosing the right direction to pop out into sunlight covered in detritus and goo. On death’s door and now out of ammo the marine faced down death as the original pale creature that had also sustained heavy damage from a flamethrower, shotgun blasts, and a vibecheted off limb while hemorrhaging blue goo. Bloody and with 3 hit points left the marine took their ammo-less shotgun and swung it like a baseball bat, rolling a critical success and doing enough damage to splatter the head of the thing and showered with cardamom scented blue fluid. The crew waiting outside had their weapons trained on the vent and were relieved when the blue covered creature that crawled out was their friend. Shaken and scarred but all alive, they definitely had gotten the shots they needed for their holodoc. Credits roll and we see the words “Space Vampires from Space!” pasted over the screen along with the producing names of each of the now promoted news crew.

After the game wrapped we had all gotten along well and decided to grab dinner or drinks at the Steakhouse across the hallway from the game. We talked about favorite niche RPG’s, thoughts on if WOTC can legally trademark a stat block (I lean towards no), niche scene drama, what RPG projects people were working on and a whole range of other tings. It was a really cool experience to have the type of conversations I’d only had impersonally online with some great people around tasty food.

Drunk on nerd camaraderie and the festive spirit of a carousing table I purchased a $48 lamb dinner- a mad, debaucherous, and ill advised purchase for my current budget and station in life. Luckily the dealers hall sold out of the Dark of Hot Springs Island book I’d been planning on picking up the next day so I’ll call it a wash.

I caught a ride back with my roommate and crashed back at the hotel with both alarms set to get us up for the fair to middling continental breakfast and ride the several minutes over to the Grand Geneva the next morning..

The second day I kicked things off with a game I was running using my current favorite published dungeon- The Caverns of Thracia by Jennell Jaquays. The gimmick was all the players were playing Level 10 magic users (I used these flavorful pregen spell lists from Alex Schroeder’s Hex Describe)  that have gotten sick of sending in parties to grab treasure that just kept dying and decided to roll up their robe sleeves and adventure themselves. Befitting haughty overconfident wizards they only got to pick two pieces of mundane adventuring equipment each (not including 3 torches and a dagger each). The dungeon is supposed to be for levels 1-5 but includes heaps of isolated much greater dangers that pushed the crew of hard wizards hard at points, though they did absolutely demolish most threats. Giving players a crazy arsenal of spells to wreak havoc with will never lead to a boring game.

In the first game the party decided to after roping down and figuring that if everyone kept dying that they were sent in, the front door was likely not the way to go.
The necromancer talked with dead on the skull found in the gelatinous cube he’d dissolved with a finger of death and found that the skull belonged to Grognar the Blade, an adventurer. They use this interrogation to get a map of the upper level of the temple complex where the death cult lived. Taking note of the room with the idol and the bowl full of treasure offerings they snuck past the giant sized gnome living on the bridge on the 2nd level and decided to follow the marble hallway clean where they paid the resident sphinxes toll and a bit more to ask for mystic knowledge to tell them where the nearest huge treasure was located. Turns out it was behind the huge red curtain at the back of the room and down a shaft a few hundred feet. After falling into a sneaky portable hole reverse gravity trick in the wall and popping out the party descended down on ropes.

The weakness of the original Caverns of Thracia map is that its intricate vertical connections aren’t called out in a user friendly manner so I don’t think I’ve ever run it “accurately” without fudging a room connecting to a room it wasn’t originally meant to. I’ll just call it my spin on my version of the dungeon and plopped the crypt of the lich lizard king at the bottom of the vertical shaft instead of the other treasure room that actually is. I also threw in a dogman barracks halfway down the shaft that they absolutely demolished 20 of with a Cloudkill after they sent reinforcements to attempt to ambush the dastardly wizards. The party didn’t decide to mess with the gold encrusted sarcophagus that obviously contained some kind of powerful sorcerer king and just looted the room of the rest of the horde before calling it while they were ahead and decamping with the loot and a teleport out of there.

Right afterwards I played a session called The Wheel of Blame with Tim Kask. Kask was the first full time employee hired by TSR and did the editing on all the OD&D supplements, helped create AD&D with Gygax and is responsible for why magic missile always hits.

He runs a light version of OD&D The is that he improvises a linear series of encounters based on two prompts written on index cards by each player and reveals who wrote the prompts for each encounter. The party explores each encounter and fights or interacts with the contents, poking an prodigy random bits until a magical coin (represented by an actual coin marked with Tim Kask’s face) is acquired by a player. Then the party teleports to the next encounter and the wacky contents inside. My words were ‘zeppelin’ and ‘devil pig.’

The novelty of having the person running your game casually say things like“I invented the bulette in D&D to eat all the dwarf ponies because there were too many of them running around.” is definitely a strange feeling.

This surreal quality of GaryCon kept on cropping up. The historical and personnel run together in the same waters. The future of the hobby, its present, and past intermingle and blend.

The best vantage point I had on this was sitting in between events preparing for games in the GM Lounge. I spent an hour or two each day in the GM Lounge preparing for my games, devouring the free snacks and beverages, and making conversation. There was a real Casablanca feeling to that room in the variety of people passing through and their different outlooks they had on role playing games. I talked to people who had only played 5e before, folks who were creating unique systems of their own design, 2nd Edition die-hards, and people running and enthusiastic about everything in between.

I had a great chat with the historian Ben Riggs who’s about to publish a fascinating sounding book called Slaying the Dragon on the rise and fall of TSR. The same event that he’s researching and writing about are personnel past for a good number of people at Gary Con that walk the halls of GaryCon, not all who agree on the same facts or interpretations of the history of D&D.

While prepping for one of my games a couple of guys sat down across my table and were having a very detailed conversation on the history of war games. I didn’t want to interrupt but I googled the name badge and saw, huh, that was David Wesley, who invented Braunstein, the role playing wargame that inspired Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, that in turn led to Dungeons and Dragons. Moments of casual bumping into RPG figures I’d heard of kept cropping up. Like Col. Louis Zocchi checking out my GameScience dice to see if they were genuine (They were).

I think what’s cool about the hobby is that most people who are historically significant to its development aren’t famous in the general widespread celebrity sense. For the most part they’re not on the cover of magazines or hassled by paparazzi, it’s just folks attending the convention like you are. There isn’t this sense of separation at this small scale event and I think it lends itself to the comfortable community atmosphere. Everyone is on a level playing field and most niche RPG famous folks seemed friendly and welcoming and excited to be there. It’s neat!

I also overheard funny takes like-

“D&D 5E just doesn’t have the same feeling to it, it’s not really D&D anymore. Young people these days are too self centered to play and work together, it has to be all about them and their half elf dragon cat person instead of engaging with challenges and playing a game that focuses on exploring a world.”

And-

“Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”

Okay, the second quote is from Socrates 2,490 years before GaryCon, but curmudgeons are eternal.

I also had an interesting conversation with a big World of Darkness fan and story arch centric GM that really made it clear how people can value entirely different things from RPG’s. We disagreed on our most core assumptions about what makes a good game. As the conversation went on and we talked past each other a little bit I realized that universalizing good game advice is really impossible as I think we both were sort of proselytizing for our style of game when we pitched the type of games we liked. While I still believe there’s heaps of value in the playstyle that many players of different systems and backgrounds would enjoy, old school inspired games and their philosophy don’t need everyone’s cup of tea, just like I really would prefer to not play in a game with predetermined outcomes.

Now this is pretty obvious stuff That there’s no bad wrong way to have fun with RPG’s is clear and I’ve said I believe that in the past. But I think our shared mutual initial surprise at the diametrically opposed philosophies really speaks to the benefit of not being siloed into the same circles and influences but to have situations where you casually bump into diametrically opposed ideas to shake the cobwebs off of assumptions. I think online groups around RPGs are really useful and inspirational, allowing folks to share ideas and group up around common interests and refine these to more and more tailored tastes.

However as with so many other areas of a life lived more and more through online conversations the separation of people by interest and preference into increasingly specific groups has a good deal of downside.

The diversity of backgrounds of the folks I ran into and the conversations I had really speaks to the serendipity of meatspace. I felt very fortunate to make it to a real world convention. For the last couple years I think the majority of my general social and hobby community interaction has been online and I’ve been fortunate to get more in person socialization than many during this pandemic. I’ve formed a lot of my RPG through reading blogs and hanging out in Discords and Reddit and it’s been the source of so much inspiration and collaboration with people.

But I know that I know what I like from a game design perspective. I’m likely to spend more time exploring those areas and adjacent ideas, not digging elsewhere to bump into entirely new ones or things I don’t like. I think this hyper specialization of hobby interests might make us less accepting of things that fall outside of these niches when we do bump into them.

We are not meant to exist as purely digital persons or in virtual “communities”. Having actual humans in front of you to discuss ideas about things you both care about is engaging and far more creatively satisfying than messages to or from a Discord handles or Reddit commenter that I’ve never actually met. In person gathering of nerds arounds a loosely shared hobby is amazing for cross pollination and networking, it feeds those human social needs and I dug that

That evening I played my second game of Desert Moon of Karth where I had a cheery android camera person, greasy mechanic and roadie, washed out ex marine security detail, and sketchy professor of mysticism that they brought to interview like the Aliens! Guy on History Channel as “subject matter expert”

Unlike the first crew, when they got to the Shattered Visage they decided to investigate what was behind the blackened sheet metal blocking off the head cavity from the neck of the giant statue. Using the teamster’s handy spanner to unscrew the bolts they found a charred corpse, a recording of the events leading to the fateful end before burning, and a brass locket containing a picture of a red haired young woman and the governor of Larstown looking happy together. 

  The teamster decided to keep the locket. Oh boy.

As he awoke he saw a transparent red headed face with empty eyes the color of a bottomless pit. It grabbed him and his life energy drained fourth. After taking a wound from all of that, he rolled that there was a limb loss and his arm touched shriveled and necrotized at the unearthly touch. The team swung physical weapons fruitlessly through the appertion though the android did notice the stun baton seemed to disturb it’s form and crackle more effectively. Thinking quickly the marine tossed the locket as far out as possible into the desert and the floating figure followed. With a painful shockwave scream that harmed the party and knocked many of them over it disappeared. Their cowboy guide Sandsquid Slim was Sandsquid shook for the rest of the game and mumbled under his breath incessantly as he led them to the mouth of the mine the next day.

Approaching the mine they had the bioscanner going nonstop. I used a soundboard of an Aliens style motion tracker to great effect, making it ping without describing it first and waiting for them to pick up on the sound and hurriedly asking to check what it was reading. This time they explored the mine more leisurely and broke into the computer room and used the password they’d found on a sticky note to access the controls, flicker on all the mine lights, and use the cameras. Hacking together an extension cable from the android’s severed hand after the ghostly incident. They had a feed of all the cameras running into their blurry screened studio camcorder for 50 feet.

Intrigued by the glowing blue light behind the ore crusher, they opened it up and saw a series of anemone like blue glowing growths on the wall with the tunnel turning to the right. At this point they saw a biosignature and heard a human sounding voice say “Hello? Is someone there?” after they responded, hearing “Oh god help me!” 

The android asked if it was possible to figure out if this was a genuine human voice or some kind of recording or fake through closely listening. I had her roll but it was very poor. Sounds exactly like a human to me! Slowly entering the chamber the crew caught footage of huge blue tendrils bunched up like shrubs reaching to the ceiling. The voice came again from behind the furthest. “I’m stuck and it’s coming!!” The marine rounded the corner to see the bleached creature again. Fear Saves all around. 

In the pitched battle that followed the disarmed teamster was paralyzed by the harpoons and nearly killed after they were ripped out. The android picked him up on her back and booked it while the marine opened fire with his smart gun, missing initially. The panicked professor caught another beep on the motiontion sensor… back the way they came! Waiting in the ore crusher chamber the blip moved into the vicinity of the computer room. Then the lights cut out. The combat suit clad marine backed up and opened up with the heavy machine gun again and blasted the first with some good rolls and took some dire hits but blew it to kingdom come. At this point the crew sprinted past the computer room towards the exit and the android flicked her one rusty grenade running past the broken window inside as they heard rapid scrabbling in their direction. 

Boom! The creature in there was annihilated and I rolled for additional cave in or debris falling but none did, bursting out into sunlight they had their clips- minus a few limbs. It was another really great group of players for this group and a blast to Warden.

On the third day I played DCC with Micheal Curtis (Director of Product Development at Goodman Games and author of Stonehell, and a huge number of great DCC modules like Frozen in Time, and the Chained Coffin) in a playtest of a module called Spire of Salt. The room we had been put in was a bit small and noisy so folks struggled to hear well, but it was still a fun romp.
I think the addition of a solid theme really makes for a stronger adventure. The Salt Lich, brine fountains, and crystalized skulls filled with maggots are much more evocative than a Kroger brand generic fantasy version.

After taking a breather and swinging through the convention hall to talk with folks until that evening I played a game called “In Search of the Brazen Head of Zenopus” by Zach Howard of the Zenopus Archive. I don’t think there is anyone more passionate about that Holmes Basic D&D Set and the Zenopus dungeon that comes with it. The enthusiasm and zest for the material Zach had for the game really brought it to life. We were playing characters from the designer J. Eric Holmes adventure novels which were revisiting the famous dungeon now changed as the game was set 40 years after the original Holmes Basic Set dungeon with the town having grown over the complex and paved over its secrets.

I think this is the game I played in that best captured the charming weirdness and sense of retro mystery and exploration of the wonderous that characterizes the creative adventure possibilities of the original games along with a great crew of team players with solid raport as well. While I had to take off before the epic conclusion of the game, I played a wizard named Murray that cast fireball to scare off a purple worm oozing down a hallway, broke into the bricked over basement of a very surprised sages house from the city above that had covered the dungeon, and drank a potion of control undead to wrest control of some fishman cultists giant snake mummy as we prepared to do battle with a huge animated idol and the attendant cultists.

Late evening I set up last minute late night game of Mothership with some folks and ran the Screaming of the Alexa from Dead Planet for loads of fun. I really dig how science fiction allows modern player handouts to be part of the diegetic experience, at one point just having the players take a picture of the ship’s blueprints from my screen with their phone for a personal map and referring to it as their personnel data pad. I just had two players, a teamster and an uncanny android who were both scavengers that had been set adrift. I think horror games actually work best in smaller groups and the two player party really led to a fun dynamic duo tension. Laser cutters breached hulls, androids were bisected, and unearthly psychic screams echoed through the rapidly depressurizing hull.  The players had also never played Mothership before and picked it up within minutes, at 11 pm with tired convention brains.

While I’m obviously biased as I’ve primarily published third party Mothership material so far but I think there’s a huge opportunity for it to take off as a more popular convention game with organized play or just lots of tables running it in the same way Dungeon Crawl Classics has a strong convention presence and energetic appeal to in person players. With the success of the recent 1E Kickstarter, Mothership is clearly growing but it seems like its fanbase and discussion is primarily online compared to having a physical footprint in gaming spaces and events. I’d say 75% of people I talked to about the game at Gary Con had heard of it from the chatter in a heap of RPG spaces online but only a much smaller fraction had actually played the game or read it.  From a financial standpoint, that’s not that big a deal because conventions represent a relatively small demographic of folks and cash. But as one booth owner told me, going to conventions isn’t so much just about event sales, but about meeting other people in the industry and having them know and recognize you and building recognition and legitimacy with big fans and introducing new people to your work by being present. Networking basically.
Tangential point being I want to run lots of Mothership at conventions and see other people run it as well to get more people playing because I find it to be a really fun and accessible game.

The next and last morning I drove over with the anti-D&D Uber driver and ran my final game of the Wizards Take Thracia. It was even more wild than the first round and I don’t have space to cover all of the crazy shenanigans the party got up to but one highlight was when the party ran into the sphinx and one member cut it off two words into monologuing to establish an empathetic bond where they shared all thoughts and feelings. The outraged sphinx knew it couldn’t target the mage without harming itself so threatened to slay his friends and pounced on one before the wizard used another spell to swap bodies with the sphinx and kill his invisible old body someone else had dumped a bag of flour they brought with them now occupied by the sphinx. Lots of wild stuff in this vein though the final fight with the magically armored immortal sorcerer king killed off two of mages with a finger of death and a disintegrate and had a third charmed before finally succumbing to a time stopped critical hit with a cultist dagger, being webbed, those webs lit on magical fire and hit with six swords on six newly sprouted limbs from another wizard also coated in the same magical fire. A great note to end my convention on.

Afterwards I made the ride back to Chicago to fly out, lost my debit card right before flying out of the country, found it at the last minute, and ate some deep dish pizza to celebrate the recovery.

While significant figures in any field’s past are mythologized by traditionalists and knocked from these idealized plinths by iconoclasts, GaryCon seems like a living event that bridges the past and future to exist very much in the present moment. It is more than just the legacy of a famous namesake. There’s a buzzing passion and energy about the event and all the varied people it attracts and the ideas they bring and I can’t wait to head back to Wisconsin.

Anyways, my Uber Driver got 5 stars.