Last week, I drove to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin for my seventh trip to Gary Con. I’ve made the journey every year since 2018 except for 2020 and 2021, when there was no in-person convention. It’s always a fantastic time: I love seeing friends I only get together with annually; I love trying new roleplaying games and revisiting old favorites; I love getting inspired by the storytelling and the books and the art and the costumes and the energy of the whole place. I love sitting in the lobby bar area and just hanging out while people come and go.
Also, I can’t stress enough what a fantastic job the convention organizers and volunteers and resort staff all do to make Gary Con special and awesome. I’ve just never found another con that feels as much like a kind of homecoming as this one does.
This year, I signed up to run a game for the first time in awhile, GM’ing “The Legacy of Mo’Roh” as a Numenera one-shot. I had a full table of six great players, and I thought it went really well – they all seemed to enjoy themselves, and the game ran nicely in the allotted four-hour slot. Even more than a week later, I’m so grateful that all of them signed up to play: It means a lot when someone is willing to roll the dice – ha! – on a GM they don’t know, and more than anything, I wanted them all to have fun.
Anyway, I did that during the afternoon of the convention’s first day, which meant I also got the associated nervousness about it out of the way.
I played two sessions of Daggerheart, since a friend got me the starter set as a gift and I wanted to experience it at the table and see it in action.
And now I can’t wait to run it. I was lucky to get two differently structured adventures, two fantastic GMs, and two tables of people who fully leaned into role-playing the characters and having fun together. I’ll probably write more specifically about the game another time, but again – these were just incredible sessions that flew past.
My last game of the convention on Saturday night was “Brethren’s Plunder.” Here’s the description from the schedule: A premier multi-table event! Seven crews will plot the siege and sacking of a landlubber city, then execute their vision in the very first Pirate Borg Epic. Expect lots of strategy and then chaotic combat on sea and land. PIRATE BORG is a rules-light, grimdark, scurvy-ridden d20 RPG. Characters provided.
Okay, so first, for you know, atmosphere – we played in a freaking waterpark. This was very cool. Every table had its own player captain, crew, and ship, and each crew had its own specific goals – but the overarching event was all unfolding simultaneously, so the successes and failures at each table affected events all over the map. They’d ring bells and make announcements if the fortress cannons were still firing on everyone, for instance, or raise a cheer if a crew took out some of the defenses. Or say, hypothetically, that you thought you’d cleverly summon some skeletons to fight for you, but you rolled super poorly and they wound up under the control of the fanatical and evil ghost pirate, and now the lead GM has to go tell another crew that three more skeletons just showed up and attacked. That would be hilarious and super embarrassing. (Don’t ask me how I know.)
They also incorporated our surroundings into the game with a neat gimmick: A large inflatable twenty-sided die drifted around the lazy river all evening. If you spotted it and managed to grab it, you got a free roll with a result you could save and use at any time.
Overall, the 42 of us playing fell a little short in our climactic battle against the Ship of the Dead, but man, was it a fun way to spend the last night of the con.
Aside from gaming, I added a few autographs to my TSR veterans collection, including artists Clyde Caldwell and Brom, designer Douglas Niles, and author Troy Denning. I also chatted with Rose Estes again and bought her new book. (I first met her in a chance hallway meeting during last year’s convention – her Endless Quest books were favorites of mine as a kid, and she’s incredibly gracious and kind, and I was glad to be able to thank her in person.)
Oh! Also, my friend Alex generously set out some print copies of “The Legacy of Mo’Roh” at his table, and sold several – so thanks to anyone who picked one up!
And also also, inspired yet again by my friend John Popson’s incredible Gary Con rings, I expanded the first ‘zine I did last year into a new version with added lore & trinkets.
Oh, and here’s a goofy picture of me in front of the house where Dungeons & Dragons was invented.
John Booth Writes 