Tag Archives: Fallout

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.