Tag Archives: conventions

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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Can you hear me now?

The one Dragon*Con I attended was 1997. I didn’t intend to LARP there, but some of the Louisville Gaming Mafia was tight with the Liquid Dreams storyteller crew, so I sorta got recruited. “We need more werewolf players,” someone said, and jammed a character packet into my hands before running off to attend to a mass combat or some shit.

I opened the packet and looked at the sheet. Huh. Rank 5 Silent Strider Theurge? I can work with this.

Because werewolf players were so very few and far between, I wound up tying in with Little Sister and her attendant vampires, who collectively formed a long-standing and ridiculously-overpowered Sabbat pack known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The fact that they numbered more than four was irrelevant, as they kept adding apocalypses (my favorite was Grievous Bodily Harm). The fact that I, as a werewolf, should not have been anywhere near these walking atrocities was less than relevant – as a player, I had a choice between hanging out with friends and seeing plot, or being lonely and seeing no plot. Seemed like the appropriate decision at the time.

Because Little Sister was known as a player and her character was equally known as Someone With Whom Not To Be Fucked, no one questioned her or me when she brought me along to a summit of the Sabbat leadership. No one even checked to ensure I was a vampire. I made a couple of mental notes about security lapses.

Then the meet started. It swiftly became clear that the elder vampires had their collective cravats in a knot about an ancient mummy who had arisen and was causing no shortage of pre-apocalyptic problems for them. Huh. Mummy? Something in my character packet, which had been provided without explanation, suddenly became much more relevant.

In the back of the room, I raised a hand. “I know his True Name.”

I am not usually the loud type of player. No one heard me.

Little Sister looked at me sideways. “You what?”

I cleared my throat. “I know his True Name.”

No one paid attention.

Okay, fuckit. I raised my arms above my hand, wrists crooked, in the Mind’s Eye Theatre hand signal for transforming into a war-form. In game, this meant I was shapeshifting into the werewolf Crinos form.

Suddenly, in a room full of elder vampires, this nine-foot-tall avatar of Anubis in full mystic muscular mass murder mode stood up and managed to growl out, “I SAID… I KNOW HIS TRUE NAME.”

What Goes Around, Surprise Round

Not my story, but I’m batch-writing and scheduling a bunch of war story posts, and this one bubbled to the surface of memory.

Back in the early editions of Mind’s Eye Theate, the LARP engine for the World of Darkness, character stats ran on adjectives. The stronger your PC was in physical/social/mental categories, the more adjectives you had. The intent was that when you declared an action, you had to use a relevant adjective in a sentence. It was supposed to be more immersive. Most players ignored it.

Some, however, found ways to use it to their advantage.

Another amusing rule of those editions involved surprise. If someone declared a challenge, you had three real-world seconds to respond. If you failed to meet that time, you were considered surprised and could not resist the incoming hostility. I suspect the design intent was to keep play flowing quickly without a lot of the page-flipping and sheet-consulting and other usual sorts of dithering that happen when someone is yanked out of their Interview with the Vampire fantasy by some Near Dark action.

This story features NLP, and this is kind of representative of his LARP play style. At one particular RiverCon LARP at the old Executive West, NLP was in character, seated at a table, in negotiations. Negotiations were not going well, and it looked like the other party was about to call in her attack ghouls. NLP decided to get in a little preemptive revenge. Without raising his voice or changing his tone in the slightest, he palmed the item card for his character’s sawed-off shotgun, slid it under the table, and said, “I deftly shoot you in the gut.”

Cue wide-eyed crogglement. “You… I… what? Wait…”

NLP glances at the narrator who’s observing this and raises a hand, folding out fingers. “One… two… three, BOOM.”

“That’s surprise. Take two damage.”

“But I…”

“I quickly shoot her again.”

Three Stakes Carved from a Stradivarius

No shit, not only there I was, but I set this up.

When I run LARPs, I always write pre-gens so I can set up plot hooks and conflicts. Most players ignore the packet and just run around playing supervillains with fangs, so when someone latches onto a story thread and runs with it, I appreciate them all the more.

This one is from ConCave 2000, back when that western Kentucky con was still hosted at the old Park Mammoth Hotel in all its creepy-ass glory. To set the stage, I need to give you the character histories from two particular PC packets…

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You’d Think It Would Be Obvious

This is yet another one from a convention LARP in western Kentucky in the late ’90s or early 2000s.

I was playing in this one, not running. The game staff did not share my view of having a coherent plot, so they were allowing players to bring in their own characters rather than providing pre-gens. I chose to run an Assamite (Child of Haqim to you new kids) vizier. I honestly can’t remember if this was before or after I was tapped to do the revised Clanbook: Assamite, but I’d roughed out a lot of the work I wanted to do on the castes a couple of years before that contract, on a late-night drive with Little Sister, so this was definitely a time at which the viziers were front-of-mind for me.

Old man rambling. May yell at cloud next. Anyway…

This LARP’s plot was the predictable and painful “Camarilla and Sabbat vampires put aside their differences in a neutral city run by a ridiculously powerful neutral Methuselah to deal with an existential threat to all vampirekind and/or consensual reality and/or the world.” I’d attached my character to the Camarilla delegation because I figured they’d be less annoying, if also less competent, than the Sabbat. They were glad to have me, because this was still a time when the player base assumed “Assamite == murder machine,” and I certainly wasn’t going to correct them by stating that I was here to study their dumb-ass antics. But I wasn’t completely defenseless.

So we’re wandering down the hall of this hotel when we come face-to-face with the Sabbat bishop and her retinue. Thankfully, by this time, the LARP scene had evolved enough that it was accepted practice to use index cards as item representations, rather than hauling around prop Kalashnikovs and Molotovs and battleaxes and whatnot in public. The bishop is holding a sheaf of index cards in her hand, but doesn’t say anything about them. Okay, whatever, that outfit doesn’t have space for her assets, let alone her inventory.

Dialogue ensues, and things are not too incredibly tense when the bishop’s player suddenly remembers that one of her item cards should be evident to any observer. But how she expresses this… is by brandishing the card toward our faces and announcing, “oh, by the way, this is a five-foot broadsword.”

Okay, then. My hand comes out of my pocket, where I’ve been holding one of my own item cards, and points a 3×5 straight between her eyebrows. “Cool. This is a .357 Magnum.”

Pool Party

Louisville. RiverCon ’94 at the ol’ Executive West hotel. I didn’t personally witness this, but it’s a fixture of Louisville Gaming Mafia folklore.

This con is infamous for several reasons, not the least of which is that it’s the con (and con LARP) at which most of the LGM met for the first time. Like many LARPs of its day night, the Vampire LARP issued badges separately from the con’s membership badges. Regardless of the status of your con badge, if you were wearing your LARP badge, you were considered to be in character and in play.

You will see this material again.

Also, like many LARPs of its day night, this con featured significant power creep and inattention to consequences. One of the PCs was one Father Drake, a vampire hunter with True Faith. For audiences who may be unfamiliar with Vampire: The Masquerade, the capitalization indicates that the wielder is capable of faith-based supernatural effects.

We shall cut, for a moment, to the players running our game’s Sabbat pack – effectively, semi-feral nomadic vampires who reject human morality and any pretense of clinging to their own humanity (ref: The Lost Boys, Near Dark). The players decided that since the hotel had a perfectly usable pool and the game had slowed down, they may as well take a dip. Alcohol may have been involved.

For the sake of expedience, many LARPers – including several of our Sabbat players – had attached their LARP badges to their con badges’ lanyards or holders. Thus, it so transpired that the Sabbat pack was having a (perhaps unintentional, but again, alcohol may have been involved) pool party in character.

There our vampires were, minding their own business, when Father Drake’s player came sauntering down the Executive West’s main hallway. He glanced through the windows overlooking the pool desk and saw… opportunity. Quickly, he affixed his own LARP badge and collared a Storyteller.

Around and in the pool, the Sabbat players were having a grand old time. Several were in the pool as Father Drake approached, unnoticed, trailed by a Storyteller whose smirk could best be interpreted as yo, Caine, check this shit out – you are about to see some shenanigans, fangboy.

One of the players climbed onto the diving board.

Father Drake looked left. Looked right. Saw no one observing him.

The player strutted out to the end of the board.

Father Drake knelt poolside.

One bounce.

Father Drake placed his hand in the water.

A second bounce.

Father Drake began chanting in Latin.

A third bounce.

Father Drake completed his invocation, stood, and smiled.

The player launched on a gentle arc and happened to glance toward the side of the pool. Recognized the clerical collar. Had just enough time for regret, and perhaps the beginnings of a Wile E. Coyote-esque air-clawing motion, vainly attempting to halt his ballistic plunge.

And that’s when the screaming started.

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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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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Mad Libs

I just got back from CharCon, an excellent little pocket gaming convention in Charleston, WV. I’ll probably post a more thorough con review later, but the post that’s been stuck in my head for the last couple of days is a con GMing tactic that I encountered on Friday night.

Friday night’s Fallout session, like all good convention games, used pre-generated player characters. What made these different was the GM’s insertion of a Mad Libs-style fill-in-your-own-characterization block in the lower left corner of the sheet:

It’s ridiculously simple, but it made a noticeable difference around the table in terms of player investment in the PCs they’d just received.

Apocalypse World and its Powered by the Apocalypse derivatives all have something similar in their playbooks, of course, but it’s a pre-defined list of choices – and I’d never made the connection between that concept and the need to provide some sort of player input on con one-shot pre-gens. I’ll definitely be stealing this for future demo games I run.