Gary Con 2026

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.

My 2025 in writing

Last year, I kept track of how far I ran (miles), how much I wrote for fun/free (words), how much time I spent playing RPGs with friends (hours), and how many books I read.

Bluntly put, 2025 was not a great year for creative writing on my own time. Give or take, just shy of 4,600 words, spread across:

I had a lot of fun writing that “Ensorcelled Beckets” piece, shooting some photos of my friend John’s inspiring rings, and getting my lifelong friend Aaron Archer to contribute some art. The handful of copies I printed for Gary Con were well-received, and I made the PDF available at Itch.io. It’s probably not the last you’ll see of this content, either.

I also did help proofread “The Twin Heads of Avarice” for my friend Alex. While that was nearly a 17,000 word project that I’m proud to have contributed to, my work as needed didn’t feel like it reached the level where I was comfortable counting it as writing/editing time. (It’s available in print and digital formats)

I’ll also add this, though: I did a lot of paid writing in 2025 which came with no small amount of satisfaction for reasons I think I’ll at least briefly write about next week.

My 2025 in RPGs

Last year, I kept track of how far I ran (miles), how many books I read, how much I wrote for fun/free (words), and how many hours I spent playing tabletop roleplaying games with friends.

The Monday night online crew 2025 kicked off with the highly satisfactory conclusion to a Pulp Cthulhu adventure in alternate-history 1930s New York City. (My Monday night game group will mark six years in March. Not everyone has played in every adventure, but overall, we’ve represented seven states spanning New York to Alaska and south to Texas. I’m making a note to write more about this in the spring.)

The Monday night crew also gave Shadowdark a try this year, with a run through an adapted Ravenloft adventure. Shadowdark’s a lean system that a lot of folks dig for its flexibility, quick startup process, and an old-school feel with basic mechanics that d20 system players can get from the start. It’s blown up the past couple years in part because it’s so easy to create adventures and supplemental materials for it.

I wrote in last year’s RPG lookback that I missed playing Numenera in 2024 and I wanted to get back to it, so I ran the Monday gang through two short, linked adventures early in 2025. They returned to the Ninth World in September for a longer quest based on the “Edge of the Sun” source book, which is where we are currently. I’m also currently GM’ing my Wedesday night in-person RPG group through a great Numenera introductory adventure, “The Nightmare Switch.”

The Wedesday night in-person group is also long-standing. We’ve been playing twice a month for more than four years, and started the final chapter of our Pathfinder campaign in June. Then we hit pause to celebrate one of us becoming a first-time dad. With that guy on parental leave for a bit, we’ve been playing board games or “The Nightmare Switch.”

I played 15.5 hours of classic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons at Gary Con in March, and 12 of those represented a high point in my personal RPG narrative, because I spent a trio of four-hour sessions gaming under the Dungeon Mastering of Erol Otus. In addition to being a super genial guy at the table and away from it, Erol’s storytelling and style is very much in line with the type of art he’s known for: We played not as humanoids, but as a party of strange and diverse creatures; joining our incredibly detailed figurines on the table were an assortment of squishy little rubbery monsters like you get from gumball machines; and otherworld-evoking props salvaged from appliances. It was delightful and immersive and B-movie pulpy and I loved it.

Because he doesn’t like to run the same adventure repeatedly, Erol’s approach to his Gary Con sessions is to keep telling an ongoing story with a core group of characters, session-to-session and then year-to-year. So no matter who’s playing at the table, we’re all shaping this collective journey. Erol’s plans for the 2025 sessions were directly based on the character actions and outcomes from the 2024 player decisions and die rolls, and our stopping point last March is where this year’s adventurers will pick up the tale.

All in all, I played just over 98 hours of RPGs last year, which was down a significant chunk from the 130 I played in 2024. There are a couple reasons for this, one of which is just coming back to me: I used to run a D&D game at work, which then spawned a third regular gaming group outside of work hours. And then over time several of us in the group lost our jobs at the agency where we’d all met. So starting last February, that TTRPG group morphed into a regular tabletop gathering. It’s the same every-other-week schedule, but we do board or card games instead of roleplaying. A few of us are looking at trying to do a one-shot for an afternoon or evening because we miss rolling math rocks and telling stories, so hopefully that happens in 2026.

I also realize now that there are two TTRPG-related projects from 2025 I worked on but didn’t count towards my prepping or playing hours: 1) I playtested and helped proofread Reverse Ettin Games’ “The Twin Heads of Avarice;” and 2) I successfully Kickstarted “The Legacy of Mo’Roh,” which I now need to set up for sale.

Books I read in 2025

Last year, I kept track of how far I ran (miles), how much I wrote for fun/free (words), how much time I spent playing RPGs with friends (hours), and how many books I read.

In order from last January. Asterisked listings are books I had read before – multiple times in some cases.


1. Every Day I Pray for Love – Yayoi Kusama
2. Catching the Big Fish – David Lynch
3. Medieval Wrestling – Jessica Finley
4. Runes of Engagement – Tobias Buckell & Dave Klecha
5. Moby-Dick in Pictures – Matt Kish
6. Spelljammer: Astral Adventurer’s Guide – Christopher Perkins, Jeremy Crawford, Ari Levitch
7. Spelljammer: Boo’s Astral Menagerie – Christopher Perkins
8. Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis – Justice Ramin Arman, Sadie Lowry, Jeffrey Ludwig
9. Anathem* – Neal Stephenson
10. The Women Who Changed Art Forever – Feminist Art: The Graphic Novel – Valentina Grande & Eva Rosetti
11. Red Mars* – Kim Stanley Robinson
12. The Midderlands – Glynn Seal, Edwin Nagy, Mark Nolan
13. The Three-Body Problem – Cixin Liu
14. Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg
15. The Martian Contingency – Mary Robinette Kowal
16. When the Moon Hits Your Eye – John Scalzi
17. A Trail Guide to Aihrde – Stephen Chenault
18. Fantasticland – Mike Bockoven
19. Leviathan Wakes – James S.A. Corey
20. Dandelion Wine* – Ray Bradbury
21. The Mountain of Smoke – Jeffrey Alan Love
22. Sunrise on the Reaping – Suzanne Collins
23. The Human Division* – John Scalzi
24. The End of All Things* – John Scalzi
25. You Remind Me of Me – Dan Chaon
26. Nothing to See Here – Kevin Wilson
27. Open Throat – Henry Hoke
28. The Last Colony* – John Scalzi
29. Hail Mary – Andy Weir
30. The Shattering Peace – John Scalzi
31. Agent to the Stars* – John Scalzi
32. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
33. Lord of the Rings appendices – J.R.R. Tolkien
34. The Ride of Our Lives – Mike Leonard
35. Here is New York – E.B. White

Scalzi is obviously a comfort read: I tend to grab his older books to revisit while I eat breakfast or in places where I’ll have some down time but maybe don’t have the brainwidth for digesting new material.

I’d never actually read the Lord of the Rings appendices, despite having read The Hobbit and the trilogy several times. Interesting to realize how much material in there has made its way to big-screen interpretations. And also, here’s a confession: This whole time, I thought “Eorlingas” was the name of Theoden’s horse.

We read and we learn things.

My 2025 in Running

As I did in in 2024, last year I tracked my running (in miles), my personal writing (by word count), how many hours I spent playing RPGs with friends, and how many books I read.

In 2025, I covered about 370.7 miles, which is significantly more than the year before (264 miles), and got me to an average of more than a mile a day. That said, the year was significantly front-loaded, since Jenn & Kelsey & I all ran the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon at the end of April. Training for that packed almost 251 of my miles into the first four months of the year.

I still managed to run pretty regularly the rest of spring and summer – Jenn and I also did a four-mile race in downtown Cleveland which culminated in lap of the field at the Cleveland Guardians’ ballpark, and that was really cool.

My fastest mile of the year was a 7:30 on the treadmill in February. So was my fastest 5k of 24:34. My fastest 10k of the year was a 55:27 in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in early April. I did a lot of Planet Fitness treadmill time in the winter months, and again the vast majority of my outdoor running was in the CVNP or Cleveland Metroparks. I managed a few now-traditional outdoor miles in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in March during Gary Con, and my also-now-traditional 5k during downtime at the Pittsburgh Dragon Boat Festival. And I put in a few more New York miles in and around Central Park in August.

On longer runs, I spent time listening to the audiobooks “Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson and “Leviathan Wakes” by James S.A. Corey. But they’re for another post.

“The Legacy of Mo’Roh” – Live on Kickstarter!

I’ve written before about my friend Matt Kish’s art, and now I’m incredibly proud to say he granted permission to use some of his fantastic “A Radiant Bestiary” works in a short, system-neutral tabletop role-playing game adventure, “The Legacy of Mo’Roh.”

His art is fully the inspiration behind me writing this adventure, which I then took to another amazingly talented friend, art designer Carmen Dotterer, who packaged everything in a classic zine-sized format and made it look spectacular. I ordered a small print run, took it to Gary Con in March, and got some encouraging feedback, so now we’re Kickstarting a larger print order!

It’s my first Kickstarter (sidenote: I support the efforts of Kickstarter United), so I opted to keep things super simple with a modest goal and two reward levels: PDF only, or PDF & print, shipping included. Thanks to my friend the awesome Phil Reed for answering my questions along the way and being yet another creative inspiration for this.

We’ve hit our goal, so the good news is that the new print run is happening, and the Kickstarter is running until November 26th, so there’s plenty of time to pledge and get a digital or physical copy.

Rally Point Productions: Casting & Fundraising for “I’m Gonna Marry You, Tobey Maguire”

My daughter Kelsey and the rest of the Rally Point Productions team are fundraising for their next show, “I’m Gonna Marry You, Tobey Maguire.” Learn more their Indiegogo page. Here’s a quote:

About Rally Point:

If you are just meeting us for the first time: Hello! We are a new(ish) small theatre company based in NYC, founded by three alumni from the Stella Adler Professional Conservatory heading into our third production, second on a full production scale! Rally Point Productions seeks to bring together underrepresented and emerging artists to create projects that audiences can see themselves in, and we are continuing to work toward being a place where people feel that they are able to take risks, make change, and to learn something about themselves in a safe and secure setting. With a solid world premiere production of The Resurrectionist and our New Works Fest, under our belt we feel confident moving forward with our company, especially with such wonderful support from our community and beyond. 

And here’s a picture of Ben (left) and Finn, because the internet loves cats.

My First Published RPG Credits!

Almost three years ago, I got back from Gary Con and wrote this post about role-playing games and a personal realization about recognizing them as creatively productive. Today I’m packing for this year’s Gary Con trip and smiling at these photos from my friend Alex at Forge of Ice, because Alex’s “The Twin Heads of Avarice” adventure includes my first published RPG credits. (Playtesting and proofreading.)

Thanks to Alex for inviting me to be a part of making this happen, and to our Monday night group for five years of adventures in Azor and other worlds beyond. Here’s to the stories we’ve told, the ones we’re telling, and those yet unwritten.

UPDATE: Print copies are out there, and “The Twin Heads of Avarice” is also available as a digital download through itch.io.

“Moby-Dick in Pictures” by Matt Kish

Matt Kish once owned the coolest suit jacket ever and he’s such an amazing human that he let me borrow it for a prom date. Most of two decades later, he created 552 artworks – one per day for a year and a half! – each inspired by a single page in a particular edition of his favorite book, Moby-Dick. (The suit jacket? Nothing to do with Matt’s art or Herman Melville at all. Just something I think about occasionally. It was a really cool jacket.)

Anyway, I finally finished a long, deliberate read of Matt’s resulting book – Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page – and look, it’s been out for almost 15 years now, and it got a ton of great reviews from people way more qualified than me to discuss art and literature. I just wanted to make sure I put into the world what an incredible thing this is that Matt did, and why I love it.

It turns out that Matt and I had the same Illustrated Classic Editions version of Moby Dick (no hyphen, for some reason) as kids. I read mine a lot and still have it.

But where Matt read Melville’s unabridged whale book in high school, I didn’t get around to it until the last 5 years or so. And while I knew the overall story well enough, I wasn’t ready for what a strange, complicated, beautiful, experimental, and compelling journey it was.

But that’s not what this is about – this is about Matt‘s book, and what a strange, complicated, beautiful, experimental, and compelling journey it is.

I’ve been a fan of Matt’s art and his approach to it since we got back in touch many years after college, so I had seen a fair amount of his Moby-Dick pieces online and in person before I finally got a copy of Moby-Dick in Pictures. I was still floored by seeing the whole project as it was intended, and I knew I wanted to read it thoroughly and not flip through it like a coffee table art book.

It took me a long time because I wanted it to. Even when there were only a dozen or so words in the passage Matt selected for a given page, I did my best to take them in repeatedly and with consideration. Same with the art, which is just an entirely different beast when considered as a whole as well as its individual pieces. Themes and patterns and character traits and outliers and hints and secrets all started peeking back at me and unfolding in ways that only happened because I was turning pages and pulling threads.

Matt’s work is so vast and varied that it’s pretty much impossible for me to pick a single representative page from the book as a favorite. (A few even weave in echoes of the black-and-white illustrations from the kids’ version, and those really struck some chords.) That said, here’s one of the many that I love for both Matt’s art and Melville’s words:

By the end, I was caught up in Ishmael’s tale and Matt’s pictures, just like when I was a kid churning through the final pages of the adventure. And it was awesome. Just a completely thrilling and new way to experience this incredibly familiar story.

One of the things I try to live by is the idea that when someone creates a thing that brings you joy or cracks your heart, you should let them know it and then tell other people about it. Matt’s a prolific artist and he sells originals and prints and zines that I can’t get enough of, and I hope you’ll check them out.