Category Archives: Hobby Musings

Con Report: CharCon 2026

Back to Charleston, WV for another iteration of a surprisingly good pocket-sized gaming con. I first attended with Tracker7 when he and I were rooming together in Lexington, half a lifetime ago – no con report for that trip. More recently, I’ve attended – and reported on – the 2024 and 2025 instances. Even better, it’s one of the few reliable times I get to see Tracker7 these days, and it’s becoming something of a summer reunion con for the Louisville Gaming Mafia.

The TL;DR is that the CharCon organizers continue to pack a shocking amount of gaming into a space whose size and geometry both should be more limiting. I have a few issues with various aspects of the con, but these are noteworthy for their low magnitude.

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Post-Con Depression

A con is liminal space. It’s a pocket of unreality bounded by the host city’s build environment. It allows us to unmask, or at least to loosen the strings a bit. It’s a seasonal gathering place for the nomadic tribes of dice and media, complete with entertainers, merchants, and revels. For a weekend, we raise the varicolored tents and gather around the fire circles that burn well into the night. The neurodivergent are the majority here; the neurotypicals, for once, find themselves exiled to the sidelines of incomprehension if they aren’t willing to learn others’ rites and revel in the ways those others deem appropriate and normal.

For a weekend, we are safe to be.

The Appeal* of Solo Wargames

(* for me)

The Girl and I took the past week off work for our anniversary. We did some old married couple stuff and some maintenance, but a lot of the week was spent in our respective monotropic foci. For her, that was a lot of editing and gap-filling on her current fiction project. For me, it was entirely too much time spent playing, deconstructing, and sketching out house rules for Eagle Leader.

I’ve spent the past few posts braindumping on that game, and as I was wandering around the house today, I found myself considering just why it’s so compelling. It’s easy for me to lose myself in PC games, particularly turn-based tactical stuff (looking at you, X-Com and Doorkickers series), but what’s so fascinating about analog solo wargames? They’re not nearly as cost-effective or space-efficient – for what I’ve spent on Eagle Leader, I could make an immense dent in my Steam wishlist, and that wouldn’t require any shelf space.

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The d12 Decimal System

The Girl and I moved into our current house just under a year ago. Some of our initial choices in where to put things have never been fully satisfactory. Yesterday, we began implementing a plan we’ve been discussing over the past couple of weeks.

The RPG library – which occupies approximately 60 shelf-feet of space – was previously sorted alphabetically. As part of a larger furniture rearrangement, it is now arranged by genre. This is still not entirely what I’d like, but three-dimensional bookshelves only support usable organizational schemes in two dimensions and are wholly unsuited to a rapidly-searchable multi-attribute tagging system.

Still, it’s probably more rational than sorting 40 years of RPG accumulation autobiographically.

Table Tents

Just a quick note here to give credit where credit’s due and to remind myself of a cool table hack. At CharCon 2025, GM John brought dry-erase table tents for his players to use. Requested information was character name and archetype/class, player name, and any outstanding flaws or hindrances that John might need to take into account during play.

It’s a little thing, but it helped with immersion because I didn’t have to struggle for PC names, and it helped build a sense of community when John was able to consistently refer to every player by name.

Con Report: CharCon 2025

This was my second consecutive year of attendance at CharCon, a small tabletop gaming convention held in Charleston, WV. My 2024 report is here, and most of my observations about the venue, vendors, and surrounding area remain applicable for 2025.

As noted last year, the venue is shared with a science center. Some clever individual in the con staff made the decision to put the cosplay tables (and photo backdrops) right at the main entrance so all the kids (and their parents) coming to the science center could encounter the cosplayers as soon as they hit the doors. Bonus points to the Twi’lek X-Wing pilot and whoever brought the life-size remote-controlled R2-D2.

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Con Report: RiverCityCon 2025

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.

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CCC2025 Final Thoughts

Well. That was a thing.

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:

1 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness – Kabu, California Coyote Ninja Avenger
2 – Star Wars – Anastasia “Convor” Glaux, Reconnaissance Starfighter Pilot
3 – 7th Sea – Gervais Fournier, Reluctant Porte Sorcerer
4 – Spycraft – Isak Eriksen (code name Svallin), Watcher on the Baltic
5 – Vampire: The Masquerade – Curtis Baxter, Anarch Vigilante
6 – Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Nadia Vasylyk, Dangerous Antiquarian
7 – Mage: The Ascension – Gordon Armstrong, Cryptid Preservationist
8 – Wraith: The Oblivion – Margo Vaughn, Stormchaser at the End of the World
9 – Changeling: The Dreaming – Gökhan Karga/Silver Mhachkay, Goth Bard
10 – World of Darkness: The Hunters Hunted – Neville Grimes – Eighteen Wheels, Both Barrels, and Exodus 22:18
11 – Demon: The Fallen – Tom Hartman/Viatiel, Darkness on the Edge of Town
12 – Legend of the Five Rings – Iuchi Masuyo, Reluctant Yojimbo
13 – Shadowrun – Julien Yoshioka (“Harbinger”), Nocturnal Predator
14 – Stargate SG-1 – Staff Sergeant Jared Ingram, Interstellar Weatherman
15 – MechWarrior – Sao-shao Aleksey Sokolov, Electronic Warrior at Large
16 – Blue Planet – Cutter, Cetacean Salvage and Recovery Expert
17 – Dark Conspiracy – Mercedes “Sadie” Cantrell, Two-Fisted Psychic
18 – Cyberpunk 2020 – Vera Rodriquez, Account Adjuster
19 – Adventure! – Ainsley McTavish, Heiress of Secrets
20 – Aberrant – Bánoy (Manuel Kidlat Salazar), Stormwhisperer
21 – Trinity – Inspector Ekundayo “Kunda” Temitope, Forensic Engineer
22 – Conspiracy X – Special Agent Corey Marsh, Deniable Enforcement Asset
23 – Exalted – Jarlath Shonida, He to Whom Borders Are as the Morning Fog
25 – Eclipse Phase – Hackbird (Sequence C15.5359j), Dataspace Predator
25 – Palladium Fantasy – Valpuri Savolainen, Errant Lady-at-Arms
26 – Earthdawn – K’Jal Mirrorlake, Questing Nethermancer
27 – Feng Shui – Athena Cheng, Maverick Cop
28 – Twilight: 2000, first edition – Sergeant Murray Vinson, Cavalry Raider
29 – Twilight: 2000, second edition – Corporal Václav Procházka, Everyone’s Favorite Defect(or)
30 – Twilight: 2013 (aka Twilight: 2000, third edition) – Lieutenant Commander Owen McNeil, M.D., Horse Surgeon
31 – Twilight: 2000, fourth edition – Captain Katie “Acid” Christensen, Trapped in the Mud but Staring at the Stars

Con Report: CharCon 2024

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.

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