{"id":2030,"date":"2026-07-25T03:29:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T08:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/?p=2030"},"modified":"2026-07-24T05:56:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T10:56:10","slug":"con-report-charcon-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/?p=2030","title":{"rendered":"Con Report: CharCon 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a> and 2025<\/a> instances. Even better, it’s one of the few reliable times I get to see Tracker7, and it’s becoming something of a summer reunion con for the Louisville Gaming Mafia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Venue<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Once again, CharCon partners with the Clay Center, downtown Charleston’s performance space and kids’ science center. Venue staff continues to be unobtrusive – curious, even, about the goings-on of the pack of semi-feral nerds who are inhabiting their space for the weekend. See comments from previous years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parking was a bit tight on Friday afternoon, as the science center was drawing a high volume of kids and parents. No big deal – we found another surface lot a block away and tucked in there. No issues finding parking Saturday or Sunday mornings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The building’s HVAC was set to GLACIAL<\/strong><\/code> all weekend. Note to self: bring a sweatshirt or light jacket next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gaming<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In my recent visits, I’ve used CharCon as my opportunity to try games I haven’t played before. This year was no exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alpha Strike<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charleston, or one of the nearby cities, has a large and active Battletech community. This year, the core group ran learn-to-play sessions of Alpha Strike, as well as narrative missions of both Alpha Strike and Classic set around the Second Star League’s invasion of Huntress. I’ve owned Alpha Strike for a while but have never played it, so I signed up for this to give it a test drive. With four of us at the table, the organizer gave us the option of playing 2v2 or splitting into a pair of 1v1s. We opted for the latter’s simplicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each player received a pregenerated lance with one vehicle attached. I had a Charger, Rifleman, Shadow Hawk, and Hunchback with attached Warrior VTOL. (I’m uncertain of the era, but these were not introtech designs, so the Charger and Rifleman were more useful than their Succession Wars-era reputations might suggest.) With the exception of the Rifleman, everything capped out at medium range, so I clearly needed to get in close to do my work. I was up against a force with considerably better long-range firepower: Battlemaster, Warhammer, Guillotine, and Wraith with an attached hover SRM tank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not do as well as I would’ve liked, but in my defense, my opponent’s crit rolls were brutal. I lost the Rifleman and Hunchback to ammo explosions, the Charger and Warrior to cumulative damage, and the Shadow Hawk to being the sole remaing focus for three opponents’ fire. In return, I killed the Guillotine with a headshot from the Warrior’s dying salvo and the Warhammer with, IIRC, engine destruction by the Shadow Hawk. The Battlemaster and Wraith were stripped of armor and on internal damage thanks to two successive charge attacks from the Charger. Thanks to its +4 target movement modifier, I never got a hit on that damned hovercraft. My opponent was a gentleman of the highest caliber who acknowledged my corrections and reciprocally corrected me on some rules misses, and was respectfully sporting in delivering my curbstomp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My photo sucks, but the organizers did a good job with terrain and painted minis, too. I didn’t need the visual appeal to sell me on the game, but it definitely didn’t hurt.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The guy who was actually teaching the session was great, but the vibe was somewhat marred by two of his grognard teammates who constantly interrupted both his instruction and the players’ play. I finally lost my cool in the middle of a rambling diatribe on lore and told the guy, “look, man, this is my first time with Alpha Strike, but I’ve been playing Battletech since Technical Readout: 3025<\/em> was the only TRO in stores.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, a good learning and playing experience, despite the signal-to-noise ratio. I’ve been interested in Alpha Strike for a long time, and this confirmed my suspicion that it’s roughly a tabletop implementation of Mech Commander. I’ll probably wind up buying the current core box and at least one of the Aces solo-play sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Old Gods of Appalachia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite my misgivings about a Monte Cook product (and I’ll hasten to say it’s nothing personal about the guy – it’s just that my brain isn’t not set up to grok his game designs), I backed the OGoA TTRPG Kickstarter campaign and promptly stuck the book on my To Be Read shelf, where it’s been gathering dust since the KS delivered. Unsurprisingly for a con held in Appalachia, there were a number of sessions on the schedule, so several of the Louisville Gaming Mafia crew signed up for one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this wasn’t a bad experience, it convinced me that this is, in fact, another Monte Cook product that I just don’t get. It’s by no means unplayable, but the Cypher System engine fails to interest me. The adventure, Best Leave Them Ghosts Alone<\/a>, felt like a standard D&D fetch-quest. I’m fairly certain it was a published module, possibly even intended to be a con demo, so I’ll assign minimal blame to our GM for that, but it did not capture the atmosphere of the original podcast. We managed to wring sufficient entertainment out of it, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The GM brought her custom-built virtual tabletop, which was a cool tech demo but significantly increased her logistics footprint. Honestly, we woulda been fine with laminated paper maps – or none at all. Having battlemaps implied an expectation of combat, which seemed to be one of those things that leaned harder into D&D tropes at the expense of adherence to the source material.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saturday’s 9am session broke my general rule of only playing things I hadn’t played before. In my defense, I think my last actual play experience with TMNT was in middle school. I’ve been in a few sessions of other Palladium stuff since then, so the system’s concepts and principles were not foreign to me. It’s just as janky as I remembered it being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m thankful I remembered to ask the GM whether this was intended to be a Saturday morning cartoon TMNT session or an original Eastman and Laird TMNT session (IYKYK). He replied in the former, so off to the races we were. Pre-gens were all cartoon characters – the original four turtles, Casey, Metalhead, Leatherhead, and Alopex. I grabbed Metalhead mainly for the hilarity of the random malfunction table, which (sadly, or otherwise) didn’t come into play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This session was an original creation of the GM. We started with a sparring match to get everyone accustomed to the combat system, then dove (heh) into thwarting Bebop and Rocksteady as they attempted to conduct a heist at the city aquarium. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(In the process of disarming them, we accidentally allowed a gun and a syringe full of mutagen to fall into the possession of one of the aquarium’s octopodes. In our table’s headcanon, this became the origin story of a new villain: Glocktopus<\/strong>. I’m unwholesomely proud of that one.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other highlights included a guest appearance by Krang, whose ambitions to take a mutant shark to the moon were thwarted when I hacked the Technodrome’s navigation system, doing a search-and-replace to substitute NOME<\/code><\/strong> for MOON<\/code><\/strong>. Heh. We then segued to a fight with said mutant shark atop a moving subway train. As the shark was just doing shark things, we opted to rescue him in the hopes of teaching him how to be a productive vigilante like ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m really not doing justice to just how hilariously unhinged this session was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shadow of the Demon Lord<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another game I own but hadn’t yet run or played. After playing, I’ll say that it’s perfectly serviceable, and I do like the setting rather a lot, but for my current gaming needs, it’s an answer in search of a question. It’ll keep its shelf space, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We only had three players for this one, but that wasn’t a problem. What was <\/em>a problem was that this was a playtest session for a module whose designer expected it to take nine to twelve hours to complete. Seems to me that if you want to playtest a module that long, you should playtest the whole thing, not just the first four hours of it – and you should hand it off to other GMs so you aren’t just playtesting it from the player perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

XCrawl Classics<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never bought the original XCrawl because of d20\/OGL saturation, but the conceit of dungeon-crawling in a modern context being a spectator sport always entertained me. It appears that Goodman Games has resurrected XCrawl and mated it to their Dungeon Crawl Classics engine, and it just works. This was one of three games run by GromMolotok, who’s one of the best GMs at CharCon, and he delivered admirably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our team of crawlers, Grievous Bodily Harm, unexpectedly found ourselves thrust into the limelight when a series of improbable accidents eliminated both a number of top contenders and <\/em>a number of top Dungeon Judges for the Toronto New Year’s Crawl event. We picked up a new sponsor, Descent Gear, and found ourselves playing through the major-league debut of DJ Crunchtime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our party was a messenger, a dungeon hottie (yes, that is a published class), a halfling rogue (The Girl snapped that right up, playing to type), and my half-orc (who Behind the Name and I immediately dubbed Aeneas Quintus Orcus). We were rather light on healing and damage, so we had to rely on merry fuckery to carry the day. I think our solution to the final stage, in which we had to rescue Baby New Year from an office filled with undead bureaucrats, admirably showcased our sponsor’s offerings, as we used our conspicuously-logoed ropes and grappling hooks to bypass most of the horde and airdrop directly onto the objective’s cage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the denoument, having learned that the entire setup was orchestrated by the deity Bacchus, we immediately renamed our crawler team to the Grapes of Wrath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cocaine Owlbear<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll start this one by quoting the game blurb in the con schedule:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019re a woodland creature who has recently gained sentience when you ingested magical cocaine from the satchel of an unlucky traveler in your forest. Can you take a chance that when the cocaine wears off you\u2019ll revert to being a mere woodland animal?<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
No.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
No, you cannot.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
You have to get more of that enchanted cocaine!<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately, you\u2019re a coked-out enchanted woodland creature prone to rage.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A Savage Worlds game for up to six wild animals. Character sheets provided.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
And then I’ll note that despite the description saying six players, the con organizers glitched the signups and offered ten slots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then I’ll show you the character sheet (with randomly-selected party role, disadvantage, and magic item) that I received:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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And if that isn’t enough, here’s the module<\/a>.  Apparently, everything past the initial setup runs on random tables, so it has replay value.  Expect to see this material again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We wound up with eight players, who were randomly assigned (in no particular order) raccoon, unicorn, possum, skunk, ferret, badger, and owlbear in addition to my owls.  I know I already used the phrase “hilariously unhinged” once in this con writeup, but it bears repeating and reinforcing here.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was another GromMolotok session.  Dude seems to specialize in testing the limits of Savage Worlds’ engine, and he outdid himself this time.  He also managed a ridiculously large table better than I do with the same number of players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Vendors<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I made a note to myself to flag this as an issue, because it’s been an ongoing frustration for the last three iterations of the con.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vendor space is not bad, per se.  A little cramped, but manageable.  About half of it is given over to artisan stuff rather than gaming stuff, but the prevalence of 3D-printed desk trinkets (which I am starting to think are the modern equivalent of airbrushed t-shirts from the county fair) is down a little bit from previous years.  There were three custom dice vendors (I supported the one who’s based less than 20 miles from me) and the skull terrarium creator was back this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What CharCon’s vendors fail to do – and, in my tiny mind, this is a rather large missed opportunity – is bring the games that are being run at the con.  The TTRPG offerings are scant enough as it is, but I have yet to see a single copy of anything I played.  CharCon’s GMs do a great job of offering more than just D&D and Pathfinder, and I assume this generates some interest among players like me who try new stuff and leave the table wanting to buy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Lodging<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
After the bumblefuck that was the Charleston Embassy Suites last year, The Girl and I were done with them.  We opted to try the Courtyard by Marriott, which was objectively usable but very disappointing when compared to our usual Hilton Garden Inn.  Ridiculously tiny refrigerator, sketchy third-party parking payment web site, poorly-communicated breakfast scheduling with a pathetic selection – meh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Food<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Clay Center’s on-site cafe was operating, but it has a reputation for mediocrity.  Sister Samurai wasn’t present, but Big Marv’s BBQ and the Dippin’ Dots stand were back.  I really wanted to try the new shawarma place on Capitol Street, but they don’t appear to be operating as anything but a carryout kitchen yet.  Sitar of India<\/a> remains excellent, and Pies and Pints<\/a> is reliably serviceable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I saw more DoorDash\/Uber Eats deliveries coming in this year, and neither the con staff nor the venue staff seemed to have an issue with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Surrounding Area<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Downtown Charleston continues to struggle with economic decline, but it’s not falling apart – just hurting.  Despite my general hypervigilance and mistrust of humans, I never felt unsafe walking around the area.  I noted several large buildings under renovation.  Taylor Books is still operating, but, sadly, I overscheduled myself on gaming to the point that I never had a chance to get in there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Verdict<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I got to play six game sessions, five of which had some subset of my favorite humans at the table.  I don’t think I’ve been able to do that at a con since the days Living Spycraft was running at Archon<\/a>.  This was a healthy weekend (even if I did come back with upper respiratory con crud).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CharCon remains a high-efficiency, high-density, high-quality gaming con.  I have zero concern recommending it to anyone who’s looking for a mid-summer Appalachian gaming getaway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[21,152,26,51,102,79,153,76,154,81,155],"class_list":["post-2030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hobby-musings","tag-alleged-humor","tag-alpha-strike","tag-btech","tag-conventions","tag-dungeon-crawl-classics","tag-lgm","tag-old-gods-of-appalachia","tag-savage-worlds","tag-shadow-of-the-demon-lord","tag-tmnt","tag-xcrawl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2030"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2037,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030\/revisions\/2037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}