Let’s get one thing out of the way first: RiverCityCon, despite the name and host city, is not a successor to RiverCon. Whereas the latter con (and its shorter-lived successor, Conglomeration) was a general fantasy/SF con with a gaming track, RiverCityCon is a board game con that wedges TTRPGs into the cracks around its founders’ main focus. It’s a Louisville-based spinoff of the older Lexicon, which, as the name suggests, started in Lexington, Kentucky a few years ago.
Because it’s in our city of shared origin, the Louisville Gaming Mafia used last year’s inaugural RiverCityCon as a found-family reunion. We put it to the same use again this year, and as far as that goes, it satisfied our purposes adequately. Absent that, as a con fitting my own purposes, I’m somewhat ambivalent about it.
I’ve written 31 characters in 31 days before. In truth, I don’t think I’ve ever run a convention LARP that didn’t have a pre-gen death march as part of my prep. Those efforts were always single-system and single-setting, though. This was rough, and I know my quality was rather variable across all the entries. It was much more of a time suck than I thought it would be, too. When I’m writing LARP pre-gens, I estimate a minimum of one hour per character, and I suspect I exceeded that in this project.
Was it rewarding? Yeah, to a point. But that point was sometime in the 20s, when it turned into a slog and all the fun sort of evaporated. I had to force myself to grind out the last eight or ten. While every system I used is something I’ve played or run at least once, most of these required at least some degree of refamiliarization before I could start building.
Will I do it again? Enh… maybe? I have a limited amount of creative energy these days, and part of my rationale for taking on this project was the fact that I didn’t have any other creative projects in the hopper when I committed to this in late December. For future years, we’ll see what else I have going on.
Since I like indexes, here’s an index of every system and character for this iteration:
CharCon is a small tabletop gaming convention held in Charleston, West Virginia. I’d attended it once before, many years ago, but that was just a one-day trip out from Lexington with Tracker7. This was my first full-weekend trip. As the con’s web site points out, it’s within easy driving range of several Appalachian and Appalachia-adjacent cities:
The TL;DR is that I’m quite impressed with CharCon. With about 600 attendees, it’s on the smaller side, but it fits very well into its available space. The con staff did an amazing job of shoehorning a robust gaming offering into the place. I didn’t catch any of the other programming but they offered a showing of the Dungeons & Dragons movie on Friday night and a locally-produced documentary on West Virginia escape rooms on Saturday afternoon.
Special thanks are due the con staff for their handling of a fire alarm during Saturday morning’s gaming slot. The staffer on duty in the TTRPG area immediately announced, “we’re going to treat this as an actual fire, everybody out!” when gamers seemed reluctant to move. (In the attendees’ defense, those were the least alarming fire alarm annunciator noises I’d ever heard. Whoever chose the acoustic aesthetics of a polite electronic ping over a sound that might actually impel evacuation urgency needs to reconsider their career choices.) The alarm wound up dumping the building for about 20 minutes before Charleston Fire cleared it for re-entry. No big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Venue
CharCon was hosted at the Clay Center, a performance venue and science center in downtown Charleston. As noted above, the facility was a bit small, but the con was well-arranged within it. Gaming was in various spaces in and around the main auditorium, with board games on the second- and third-floor balconies. The RPG space was on the main stage (behind the drawn curtain), and it was one of the very few con TTRPG spaces I’ve ever seen that didn’t have significant noise issues. This was a brilliant choice and I applaud whoever made the decision to put the RPGs in there.
I didn’t partake of the on-site cafe, but I believe it maintained its normal operating hours during the weekend. Restrooms remained clean and stocked, a feat that most con hotels can’t seem to manage.
Parking was a bit on the tight side, but we didn’t have trouble getting a space in the venue’s lot across the street. Weirdly, it is a pay lot, but the kiosk doesn’t require you to display your ticket/receipt. At $3 for the day, it’s a great deal for downtown parking. The con is also walkable from multiple hotels, so it should be possible to park on Friday and not move your vehicle until you leave on Sunday. (We chose to drive because our hotel was about a half-mile away and temperatures were upwards of 90º all weekend.)
Gaming
The real reason I go to cons (most of the time).
I’ve been disappointed in the TTRPG offerings at most cons over the last decade or so. It’s seemed that gaming tracks are dominated by D&D and Pathfinder organized play, with occasional instances of obscure locally-published games filling in the cracks. At my two cons prior to this one, I don’t think I got in on a single RPG session because the pickings were so slim and uninspiring.
CharCon was a breath of fresh air. I actually saw more than one slot on the schedule with multiple games I wanted to play! I wound up opting for two and a half things I hadn’t played before – more on those in a moment. I did have a fourth game on my schedule but wound up ditching it due to a minor bout of con stomach crud and some other factors.
I didn’t have time to check out the miniatures or board game offerings, but judging from the schedule, both of those tracks also had robust support.
Game registration opened up about a month before the con, using the tabletop.events platform. I had neither technical nor user interface difficulties in using it.
Fallout
As mentioned in my last post, my Friday night game slot was the Fallout RPG. The system has some innovations I like (particularly the metacurrency being a group pool rather than an individual resource). I’m not sure I’ll pick up a copy the game, but that’s a consequence of personal disinterest in the property as an RPG setting, not any failing on the designers’ collective part.
We had a great GM for this, and it wasn’t until we were midway through the game that he admitted this was the first in-person RPG session he’d ever run! He’s the host of Rad Rolls, a Fallout actual play podcast, but that’s all been online. He kept the plot moving and the table engaged, and he had some great self-made gameplay aids on the table.
Symbaroum
Saturday morning found me at something of a found-family reunion table – myself, Elalyr, and Lilavati playing in Tracker7’s Symbaroum demo. I own the core Symbaroum book but haven’t cracked it since first reading it about five years ago, so I was only familiar with it in broad conceptual strokes. It’s not quite grimdark, but the setting and art paint the PCs as being very small players in a very large world with a lot of shadowed places.
As expected with a team of this quality, it was an excellent session. Symbaroum plays simply and smoothly, and there’s ample room for improvisation in the spaces between the mechanical structures. The aforementioned fire alarm cost us about 20 minutes of play, so our wrap-up had to be a bit hurried, but this session was again time well spent.
(The slot for this one was 1000-1400, so we planned ahead and brought lunch. That scheduling was also in effect on Sunday. Not spanning lunchtime might be a refinement the con staff could consider for next year.)
Savage Worlds: Street Wolves
My final game session found me, Elalyr, and Lilavati back at a table for Street Wolves, a Savage Worlds setting currently in Kickstarter fulfillment phase. It takes its aesthetic from the synthwave and cassette futurism movements, and its structure from innumerable ’80s action TV shows. PCs are burned spies, semi-reformed assassins, getaway drivers, Vietnam veterans turned mercenary, and private investigators, all occasionally stepping away from their usual occupations to serve as agents for Wolfpack, a quasi-governmental entity that exists to solve problems its conventional near-peers can’t touch. The default setting is, of course, Miami.
I’ve played Savage Worlds a few times before, most recently in a short-run backwoods horror game run by Lilavati, so I was somewhat familiar with the mechanics. The setting wasn’t hard to pick up, given my own pre-teen and teenage television habits (though I do wonder if it’ll appeal to many gamers under 40).
We should have known what we were in for when our GM showed up in a white linen suit over a lavender t-shirt. He did an excellent job presenting the rules and the genre and keeping the investigation and subsequent action moving. I’m not ashamed to admit that I ordered a copy of Street Wolves from Backerkit as soon as I got home on Sunday evening.
Vendors
The dealers’ room had a broad, if a bit shallow, selection – not a lot of variety in games on offer. This was one of the rare cons where I didn’t buy a single book because literally nothing caught my interest. I usually go to con dealers’ rooms looking for out-of-print nostalgia items and indie/small-press RPGs, and neither of those categories was represented. However, there were some very interesting crafted items. Multiple vendors were offering 3D-printed miniatures and gaming accessories.
I did look at the one local publisher offering his RPG, but when I asked what made it different, his answer was, “pretty standard fantasy setting.” Dude… if you want to actually interest prospective buyers, maybe be able to wax eloquent about what makes your product unique?
Lodging
The con had a room block at the Best Western across the street. Because of the siren song of reward points, we secured a room at another hotel slightly farther away. From friends’ reports, we can advise that (1) the Best Western is not well-suited to service animals, and (2) two of their three elevators were out of service.
Surrounding Area
As previously noted, the Clay Center is in downtown Charleston. While some urban decay is evident, the infrastructure seemed robust and there were minimal apparent safety concerns. Numerous restaurant offerings were within an easy walk, including a few blocks of Capitol Street that were sectioned off as a pedestrian mall on Friday and Saturday evenings. We tried Pies and Pints for dinner on Friday and were mostly satisfied with their default offering of 10″ individual pizzas. Dinner on Saturday saw us at Sitar of India, followed by Ellen’s Ice Cream; both were excellent. We were referred to Taylor Books but, sadly, didn’t have time to check it out on this trip.
The con had Sister Samurai, a hibachi food truck, and Big Marv’s Cafe, a local barbecue purveyor, on site on Friday and Saturday afternoons. Both of them were out of service by 1800, though, which seemed odd in light of the ongoing events. Dippin’ Dots had a booth open on Sunday.
Verdict
For what CharCon is, it is very, very good. Don’t go expecting a media con, nor a huge crowd, nor a massive vendor presence, nor an all-interests geek con like the old RiverCon or the current Archon (still my benchmarks for what I want out of a con). But for a local tabletop gaming con that enables miniatures gamers, boardgamers, and TTRPGers to play side by side in a comfortable space, it’s excellent. I strongly recommend keeping an eye out for future years’ schedules and game offerings.
As I restart Kaserne on the Borderlands, one tweak I’ve made to my GMing style is in how I provide information to my players that their characters should reasonably have. There’s little fun for anyone to find in me saying, “your character knows __.” It’s narration without player agency.
When I had in-person gaming groups, my usual solution (when I remembered to do it) was passing a note or pulling the player out of the room for a moment. Discord enables me to do the latter with multiple channels, without anyone having to leave their chair, and I do still use it for things that require a conversation. In the last couple of sessions, though, I’ve begun using Discord direct messages for shorter infodumps. This gives the player a written reference (something I’ve found is helpful when I’m imparting domain knowledge that’s more in the PC’s lane than the player’s) and lets them rephrase (or elide…) it in a manner appropriate to their character’s persona.
The cautionary note here is that I need to say, “stand by for PM,” before I start typing. Otherwise, the sudden GM silence is a bit awkward and can leave people wondering if we’re having a(nother) comms failure.
A couple of years ago, I backed the Kickstarter for Dan Verssen Games’ Spruance Leader (I’m linking to the Boardgame Geek page rather than DVG’s product page because the company… um… doesn’t have the greatest web site). We promptly adopted a pair of kittens, which are not really compatible with big boardgames that need to stay set up for days for protracted campaign play. Between that and mental health haze, the game’s been sitting around unopened for the year and a half since the Kickstarter delivered.
I’m currently living alone while the girl and the cats and I work through the phases of our cross-country move, and I had the foresight to bring my DVG solo games along with me. After watching a couple of actual-play videos, I broke out Spruance Leader this afternoon and set up a first campaign and mission.
Things were getting hot in the North Atlantic. My task force’s first assignment was to go after a Soviet ASW task force operating off the Norwegian coast between Ålesund and Bødo:
Last week’s post on go-to game systems got me thinking about the settings I love and why I love them.
My lifetime achievement award for an intricately-detailed, internally-consistent, hugely-expansive setting has rested with Blue Planet ever since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, a sci-fi frontier setting that supports a broad spectrum of campaign styles. Its fatal flaw, if there is one, is that it has no default campaign. Without a clear vision of “we’re playing to do these things,” it seems very easy for a campaign to drown in options. But hot damn, the options.
Shadowrun (at least through the end of the 3e run) is every bit as detailed as Blue Planet, and benefits from an immensely-greater number of supplements. The FASA authors and developers crafted a fantastic world that could range from noir to gonzo while remaining internally-consistent. Moreover, the setting writing is a joy to read. I’ll still go back to 1e sourcebooks just to watch the in-setting conversations reveal another slice of the world’s secrets.
For big ideas and sweeping four-color generalizations, I adore the original 7th Sea. My elevator pitch for it has always been “the coolest parts of early Renaissance Europe filtered through the lens of Disney’s The Three Musketeers.” Every nation its its own unique setting that supports a different style of play. Theah as a whole is somehow stitched together in a way that feels cohesive rather than the half-assed patchwork that could easily result from a less-skilled attempt at putting together a kitchen sink setting.
The setting in which I’d most want to be a player character is Trinity. It’s not quite utopian sci-fi – the setting has plenty of dark places and rough edges, and there are ample reminders that when we went out into the stars, the monsters we brought with us were just as bad as the ones we found. But the overall tone is hopeful. It’s a setting in which humanity is striving toward a common goal but not united, in which the world is better but has been through some really bad times within living memory, and in which PCs can fundamentally make a difference on scales from human to interstellar. (Plus, I was an intern at the Wolf while the initial development cycle was under way, so it’ll always have a place in my heart for its proximity even though I had zero involvement with it.)
The setting in which I’ve spent the most time immersed is a toss-up, but I’d have to say that Twilight: 2000 wins by a nose over the (Old) World of Darkness. I’ve spent at least an order of magnitude more time playing the WoD line. Most of my closest, longest-lasting friendships came out of those gaming groups. It’s the foundation of my body of freelance work. But T2k is the dark future of the ’80s that I found the most compelling when I was a young gamer, and I keep coming back to it over and over again. It offers me a broken world whose fires are still smoldering, where memory of the world-that-was is still alive, and in which there is a faint hope of stabilizing the downward slide and starting the generations-long recovery process. Taken to the extreme, it’s the gaming counterpart to the calling that is my second career, and the same urge to bring order from chaos is what draws me to both of them.
This morning (that being the morning I’m writing this, not the morning of its scheduled posting), I was scrolling through the Pathfinder 2e subreddit over breakfast and ran across a post asking why readers prefer PF2 over rules-light systems. Several someones made the point which I would have made if I were going to comment: that different game systems are different tools for achieving different storytelling experiences and outcomes.
The comment thread that prompted this post, however, was this one, in which the OP expressed surprise that someone could be capable of running more than one game system without getting rules crossed up.
I had a bit of an “oh, sweet summer child” reaction to that. It never had occurred to me that this might be a problem. I’ve been collectingaccumulating TTRPGs since my childhood in the early ’80s and studying and running them semi-regularly since the early ’90s. Each one still occupies a measurable amount of my brain. While I can’t claim to be able to run anything 100% off-book, the RPGs for which I could play or run tomorrow without much fumbling, unfamiliarity, or pre-session review are, off the top of my head:
7th Sea (original)
Dungeons & Dragons (5e, 3e as a stretch)
Feng Shui (either edition)
Legend of the Five Rings (original through 4th)
Shadowrun (2e and 3e)
Spycraft (original and 2.0, including Stargate SG-1 as an intermediate member of that line)
Trinity (original)
Twilight: 2000 (v2.2 and v4)
Vampire: The Masquerade (original through Revised and 20th Anniversary)
At one time or another, I’ve spent enough time at the table for each of these to develop a decent familiarity with the mechanics. I can make a spontaneous rules call at the table and be fairly confident that my off-the-cuff decision will be consistent with the game as written. Of equal importance, I also know each of the settings (or genre assumptions, in the case of setting-less games like Spycraft) well enough to improvise plot and the world’s responses to the PCs’ actions.
In a pinch, I also could do passably-good GM work with the rest of the original World of Darkness (strongest in Wraith: The Oblivion, weakest in Changeling: The Dreaming), Dark Conspiracy, Earthdawn, Star Wars (WEG or FFG), and a good cross-section of the Powered by the Apocalypse family.
I’ve been a gamer since 1983 or 1984, when an elementary school classmate introduced me to Car Wars. Tabletop roleplaying got on my radar a few years later when I picked up a copy of Autoduel Champions for the helicopter rules and found a bunch of other material on superheroes. My first actual RPG was probably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, followed closely by Mechwarrior and Twilight: 2000.
Prior to 2000, I had played in two sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, separated by about five years. The third edition Player’s Handbook was the first D&D book I ever owned.
Today, I have approximately 49 shelf-feet of RPG material between my library and my office. My combined D&D material across all editions is under 2.5 shelf-feet, making it roughly 5% of my total TTRPG collection.
A cursory survey of my library yielded a small number of RPGs that can give me some form of high fantasy gaming experience with no meaningful connection to D&D, Wizards of the Coast, or the Open Gaming License:
Ars Magica
Blade of the Iron Throne
The Burning Wheel
The Dark Eye
Dominion Rules
Dragon Age
Dungeon World
Earthdawn
Exalted
Forbidden Lands
GURPS
Iron Kingdoms
Legend of the Five Rings
Palladium Fantasy
The Riddle of Steel
Runequest
Symbaroum
Talislanta
Worlds Without Number
And that’s just what I have in print. Those vastly outweigh my D&D materials, even combined with the other games I own that rely on the OGL (13th Age, Blue Rose, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Fantasy Craft, Pathfinder, and The Wheel of Time).
Has the OGL been a huge boon to the subsidized hobby (I can’t call it “industry” with a straight face) that is tabletop roleplaying? Absolutely. But Wizards of the Coast’s complete implosion and irrelevance will not meaningfully affect my ability to play games, even in the genre space that D&D currently dominates.
Sadly, I don’t have a D&D Beyond subscription to cancel.
