Tag Archives: Savage Worlds

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.