GaryCon 2024 Convention Report (part 1)

 

I got back yesterday afternoon from Gary Con.  Overall, it was a great time!

My notes and game prep stuff is in the car, and getting all that stuff would wake my sleeping wife who was good enough to hold the fort and watch the kids while I was away.  So, in the meantime, I'm just going to mention some takeaways in no particular order.

I ran 6 games and while that felt kind of overwhelming and "too much" at certain points, I'm glad I went for it and achieved that much gaming.  There's almost never a "perfect session," even in one's home game, but at a convention?  Forget about it!  However, I was extremely pleased with how the sessions turned out.  

I had between 4 and 6 players for every game, which I think is ideal.  BTW, part 2 of this post-GaryCon report is here.

I noticed that the only game where I took lots of notes was the last one, the Alpha Blue session.  There's only one common denominator there, and that's the peace and quiet of a private room without all the noisy distractions.  But why, oh why, did that room have to stink so bad?  As soon as I walked in, it was like someone had let out a wet cheese fart about an hour ago and that smell never fully left, even after we kept the door open for the first 30 minutes.

The silver lining (aside from the fact that we had the whole room to ourselves) was that one of the randomly rolled qualities of a PC was their disgusting smell, so I suppose... it added to the immersion, kind of?  But yeah, the room stunk and 4 hours of that was about as much as I could reasonably stand.

Other than that, the Alpha Blue session was fantastic and I got to play in-person with guys who were big fans of mine and really loved my stuff.  

In fact, one guy, David, who'd played in one of my Cha'alt games, too, said he wanted two autographs at Gary Con this year.  One from old-school D&D artist par excellence Erol Otus, and me.  So, that was a bit overwhelming and extremely flattering, making the whole trip worth it for me just for that.

But why would a higher level of background commotion keep me from taking notes?  I was thinking about that on the drive home, earlier this morning, and again right now.  Maybe a fear that if I wasn't focused on moving things along at a quick pace that the session would be swallowed by all the commotion around us?  Perhaps there was less inter-player chatter, banter, and casual one-liners (which I usually like to observe and write down) due to the need for everyone to speak-up clearly and intentionally in order to be heard?  Also, if I wanted to hear anybody, I had to watch their mouth (I estimate I had to ask folks to repeat themselves about 5 or 6 times per session) - which is another reason why wearing masks at a gaming con is just not ok.  

Anyway, these results mean that I don't have copious notes from the first 5 sessions, only the last.  However, I ran the same Cha'alt scenario (an original piece I wrote the week before the convention) 3 times, so the details of what happened, generally speaking, are firmly in my head... and I have my prepared game notes.

Apparently, when I'm running my rules-light d20 Lovecraftian investigative horror hack, I either need to pad-out the scenario to exceed 2 hours or simply schedule it for a 2-hour game.  Additionally, I should include stage directions in my GM notes that say HAVE THE PLAYERS ROLL FOR SANITY, YOU DUMBASS because I neglected to do that in both scenarios on Saturday!  That, and the shortness of those games irritated me since I always want to deliver (overdeliver, actually) on what's promised.  

With that night-time Cthulhu hack session, I should have morphed it into Cha'alt using something akin to that method between Cha'alt campaigns in our home game, but I didn't think of that until later.  We still hung-out and talked for about 30 minutes after, so wasn't the end of the world, but when it's listed as a 4-hour game, I feel like the shortest it should be is 3.

I can still remember my first (possibly second) ever Gary Con I attended.  My hotel room that I booked got bumped to a golf course villa or something a little bit off property, but a bus took me back and forth to the main hotel whenever I wanted.  That villa had its own well-appointed, private room with a big round table and plenty of comfortable chairs.  

I remember being fed-up with gaming in open areas alongside dozens or hundreds of people who weren't in my session but doing their own thing right next to me, and thought... why don't I just use that private space in my villa?  

That was the first time I ran The Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence.  The book wasn't out yet, but the Kickstarter had ended, and I had maybe 40 pages of word document type stuff printed-out and spiral bound for ease of use.  T'was a fun session made all the more awesome because of the quiet, peaceful, and luxurious location (FYI, this is what gaming at VENGER CON is like).  

The two negative take-aways from that playtest con game were that wandering around, sandbox-style, wasn't what a few players had expected.  They preferred a more directed adventure with something specific to do.  The other was a player whose character got killed when an enemy critted him and I rolled a 12 on a d12 critical-hit table that I had included in the purple islands setting.  

It happened at the tail-end of the session, so he didn't miss out on anything, but when it was all over, I thanked the players and hoped they had fun.  The player whose PC died said something like, it was fun until my character died; or it would have been fun, except my character died.  In that moment, and still today, I'm glad he got killed.

Nevertheless, to this day, I'm sensitive about PC deaths and not providing some kind of overarching plot, story, or narrative to guide players in a general direction - without it turning into a railroad, of course.

Admittedly, there was a single point in the Cha'alt session where the PCs get rounded-up and imprisoned, but everything else was up in the air and could have gone a dozen different ways.  Being a con game, I think the vast majority in the hobby would let it slide.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll sign-up to attend and GM the crap out of Gary Con next year... but perhaps I can arrange something with the convention, like a private room where I'm staying, so I can run my games without taking up precious space at the actual hotel.  The private room experience really does bring out the best in gaming, and since GMing tremendous fucking sessions is one of the things God put me on this Earth to do, I want to do it to the best of my ability.

What else?  Got to playtest a psion class for Advanced Crimson Dragon Slayer, which was fun (it's just based on the psionic rules, page 50 of the Cha'alt book), and a couple new races... an obsidian-man and tangerine-elf.  The obsidian-man, I now realize, needed more mechanical flavor to really come alive.  However, I'm quite pleased with how the tangerine-elf turned out, being able to make himself into orange juice in desperate situations + that race's high immunity.

Speaking of playtesting, I brought out the Cha'alt X-Cards for every session (except the Cthulhu hack ones) and the Gilded Die of Satanis for a few.  So, folks got to try it who'd never heard of anything like that before.  I think they found it somewhere on the spectrum between interesting and really cool.  

It was especially useful when we were flavoring random items quickly stolen from a treasure vault.  Since it was vast and full (imagine the cave of wonders in Aladdin), I let the players pick out what they found... with potential complications once they brought it out of the vault.

I remember the eyes of expectant players gazing into my GM soul, burning holes through my imagination as they patiently waited for me to improvise something awesome and contextually appropriate and badass... those eyes... the eyes!!!  Lol.  No, but seriously, there was some pressure to perform and not disappoint.  I think I did well under the circumstances.  The players occasionally helped with the creative lifting too, which is a feature of the design.

I remember thinking up a conch shell that when you held it up to your ear, you could hear the Great Old Ones devouring souls from beyond this universe.  So, like I said, the Cha'alt X-Cards came in handy and provided a lot of additional flavor to the session.

A player in a different Cha'alt session was spamming the cards at one point, trying to trick-out their stretched sand-speeder to include a pool, high-tech weaponry, hot chicks, extra tentacles, etc.  As I mentioned in the one video I made while at the convention, when a particular mechanic, system, or way of playing and interpreting the rules drifts organically into something the players can use to improve their overall experience, I try not to stop them but encourage how they've intuitively latched-on to it. 

Sometimes, the cards and gilded die were merely excuses to get the players conceptualizing a particular location, event, or NPC.  Occasionally, they were used as a "fail forward" device that had a built-in cost of either creative energy or shameful consequences for their PC.

After each session (again, not including the Cthulhu ones), there was a clear refrain... there's nothing quite like this.  It was completely different than any session they'd played at the con - or, in some cases, their entire lives.  They had assumptions and expectations, but this was just... weird... beyond weird.  There really is nothing comparable.  Cha'alt (using Advanced Crimson Dragon Slayer and the way I run it) is a unique roleplaying game experience.  

That's what comes with focusing on a particular niche, adhering to your own aesthetics and sensibilities, and honing the vibe with an easy going and flexible manner until you get exactly the kind of game you're looking for... then, on top of that, never stop trying to improve.

GaryCon is a solid, well run convention.  It's sheer size puts it in a large gaming con category where you should know ahead of time if the crowds, noise, and expense are within your wheelhouse.  For example, Friday night, I opted for the prime rib buffet, which was good, but $50 + $3.50 for a Mountain Dew... before tip, obviously.  That's not in everyone's budget.

Of course, I'd be remiss for not mentioning my own old-school, OSR, and traditional RPG convention happening this July in Madison, WI... VENGER CON III: Revenge of the OSR.  Weekend badges still available - max attendance capped at 100, so don't delay!

Oh yeah, and I sold a ton of books... which was nice. If you want either the first, second, or the entire Cha'alt hardcover trilogy, here's the ordering info + price list.

Thanks to the con organizers and volunteers, thanks to all my players and those who wanted to get into one of my games but couldn't for one reason or another.  Part 2 of my GaryCon XVI convention report will either be tomorrow or the day after.  Thanks for reading, and I hope you're enjoying it so far!

VS

p.s.  [this space left intentionally awesome]