Tag Archives: conventions

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.

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 90ยบ 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.

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.

Through the Gate

Last month, someone elsenet started a thread about people’s most memorable experiences involving gaming with strangers. Here’s my contribution.

At GenCon… ’03, I think… I was on the AEG team. I was primarily there to run demo sessions of Stargate SG-1, which was so new that the AEG warehouse had to unload the books from the truck and overnight them to our hotel to get them to the booth for sales. It was late on Sunday and I’d already run five sessions plus a Spycraft LARP (the less said about that, the better). I was at the booth for the last couple of hours when a group of five or six guys wandered in hoping there was a chance of an off-schedule Stargate demo game. I was utterly exhausted and going through Ricola like it was powdered sugar at a Miami Vice LARP, but they were so earnest and so hopeful. Yeah, sure, I can do one more, just pour a Mountain Dew into me and I’ll be good to go…

… and that was the best table I’d run all weekend. Genre-savvy, well-coordinated, and willing to lean into the plot hard. Better, and this was a high bar, than the group that included three players whose real-world doctorates or career specialties matched the ones on my pre-gen PCs. That Sunday afternoon group turned out to be a college gaming group who’d split to all corners of the country after graduation. They’d mostly fallen out of TTRPGs due to jobs, families, other commitments… but for nearly twenty years, they’d been coming to GenCon to get in one weekend a year of gaming together. Felt good to facilitate that for a few hours.

Hell Comes to Cave City

Another ConCave, another unfortunate encounter.

In this instance, several of us had decided we were hungry and the hotel diner was overpriced. But that vaunted mecca of civilization, Cave City, was nearby! And our hero protagonist victim had a car! Thus it was that four people squeezed into my ’99 Mitsubishi Eclipse, truly the gothiest of goth rides, to seek sustenance.

Two of the witnesses shall remain nameless. The third passenger, he whose reputation burns in infamy even today, shall be called WB, he who sometimes was called “Wookiee” for his stature and lack of a volume control. WB was about 6’6″, not a small man in width, made mostly of metal from the knees down, and aggressive in asserting his identity as Louisville’s largest and most notorious Jewish goth punk gamer bookmonger.

So it was that the four of us sauntered into a combination Long John Silver’s/A&W (i.e., the Fish&W) restaurant. I was attired fairly nondescriptly, as was my habit. My companions… had only brought Vampire LARP costumes to the con.

Needless to say, we attracted some attention on this fine Saturday morning. Our kind was rarely seen in Cave City. There were murmurs of outrage and consternation.

I, being attuned to the ways of incipient redneck unrest, was uneasy. My unnamed companions, alas, were more sheltered. And WB… WB was aware of the attention and was feeling provocative.

As we dined, WB’s volume increased. Every French fry brought forth another bloody tale of in-game vampiric horrors, presented out of context for the Barren County public’s edification. I began gauging the distance to the exits.

Finally, our trays were empty. Could we escape without incident? Alas, WB had one more arrow in his quiver. As we discarded our waste and headed for the exit, his voice boomed out: “Hey, Clayton, you know the best thing about this leather jacket?”

I cringed. “No, WB, what would that be?”

And as the door swung shut behind us, the last thing the good folk of Cave City heard was WB’s proud declamation: “A little rain water washes the goat blood right off it!”

Decomposition Book

No shit, there I was…

This was in spring ’98 or ’99, I think. I was running a LARP at ConCave, a small local convention in deep rural southwest Kentucky.

I was minding my own business at my registration and logistics desk when a pack of prospective players staggered into the room in what was either a Fleshcrafted gamer-centipede mass or a consensual close-order formation of mutual support for upright locomotion. It was just past three in the afternoon and I could smell the liquor and questionable decisions from across the room.

“Heeeeey,” one slurred, fumbling in his pin-festooned leather vest for what I hoped was not a weapon. “I heard yer runnin’ a Vamfire game.”

Trepidatiously, I responded in the affirmative.

“Awesome.” He located the object of his search and withdrew, to my rmingled relief and slowly-rising dread, a small wad of paper. As he unfolded it like some non-Euclidean eldritch origami horror, I recognized it as a character sheet. It appeared to have been used as a placemat for last night’s pizza and this morning’s coffee, and under the layers of organic debris, the owner’s pen had left no dot behind. “I wanna bring in my home chara… chiro… character. I call ‘im ‘Roadkill.’ He’s a Samedi wererabbit Abomination.”

The Cocaine King of Barren County

Back in the ’90s, the western end of Kentucky had a surprisingly lively World of Darkness LARP scene. No one ever could explain why Bowling Green (40,000 people and four last names) was a major strategic focus for the Camarilla and Sabbat, but hey… nerds gonna nerd. But interactions with non-players were always interesting because this was not generally, shall we say, a progressive or well-read region. No, friends, this was – and is – a place where Justified is a documentary.

At the time, there was a regional sci-fi/fantasy/horror convention, ConCave, so named because it always ran in an old, raggedy hotel adjacent to Mammoth Cave National Park. It was a small con, a peaceful con, a con at which the old SF/F fandom could relax, reminisce, and spouse-swap. At least… it was peaceful until Vampire: The Masquerade LARPs became a thing and the region’s LARP community was looking for a con, any con, at which to gather.

All names have been obfuscated to protect the damned.

My comrade FB was playing a Setite drug lord. FB was decked out in his finest business attire. FB also went all-in on props. Including a briefcase. A briefcase full of sealed bags of powdered sugar.

About 0200 on Saturday morning, the first night of play was winding down. Due to a con hookup – not his, more’s the pity – FB found himself locked out of the hotel room he’d arranged to share with another player. Disgusted and sleepy, he staggered down to the hotel’s pool room, dropped his briefcase on a ping-pong table, threw all of his other props into it, and crashed under the table.

Unfortunately, he left the briefcase open.

Because of con shenanigans in previous years, this hotel had hired a local sheriff’s deputy as night security. Around 0300, Deputy Toothless was making the rounds when what to his wondering eyes did appear but the largest drug bust in the history of Barren County. Doing his due diligence as an officer of the law, Roscoe P. Coleslaw roused FB and dragged him and the “evidence” down to the night manager’s office to await an on-duty deputy. And perhaps the DEA. With a news crew or three. And a promotion. Maybe even a future run for the sheriff’s election!

So there FB was, somehow not handcuffed, in the manager’s office. The night manager was horrified. Deputy Toothless was giddy and accusatory. The sheriff, when he arrived, was skeptical – and not amused at being called at home at 0300. FB was tired and cranky and his back hurt from trying to get comfortable on the floor.

I am informed that the conversation with the law amounted to this:

FB: Look, Sheriff, you can run a test kit on it if you want, but if I had this much cocaine, would I be staying in this f’ing fleabag?

S: You’re free to go, son. Deputy… we need to have us a talk.