Gen Con Memories

Friday, July 29, 2011

I attended my first gaming convention in 1995. Home for a summer between college semesters and with my regular high-school D&D game done and buried thanks to all of the players attending school in different states, I was aching to throw some dice, kill some monsters, and take their stuff. So I headed over to the Thunderbird Hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota and entered a whole new world of public gaming.

At Twin Con I played my first session of Living City, the original shared-world RPG campaign, and met a lot of local gamers who shared my gaming interests. I won a contest for a unique dagger designed by a local artisan, with LC stats to boot, and played a ripping game of Circus Imperium ("Whip the beast! Whip the beast!"). Most importantly, I picked up a sign-up form for Gen Con, and within a week of Twin Con I was registered for the biggest and best American gaming convention of them all.

I'd long wanted to attend this gaming Mecca (then held, naturally, at Milwaukee's MECCA Convention Center) thanks to previews and coverage in Dragon Magazine and Polyhedron, the official newszine of the RPGA Network that brought me the Living City campaign I'd so enjoyed at Twin Con. I knew that all the big gaming companies timed their major releases for the show, and that it attracted tens of thousands of "alpha gamers" from all over the world to play all sorts of games, shop in the cavernous exhibit hall, and learn from game professionals in panels and seminars. But until 1995, I'd never managed to have the right combination of time, money, and transportation to make my dream of hitting Gen Con a reality.

Flush with exciting stories of my fun time at Twin Con, I managed to convince a small gaggle of my local gamer buddies to accompany me on the road trip to Milwaukee. I recruited these guys from my old high-school-era gaming circles, and while none of them were as rabid as I was about gaming, they agreed to come with me and help split the cost of the hotel room.

That first Gen Con was a marvel. Until you've been to the show you can't really imagine how impressive it is to see 30,000+ gamers take over the downtown core of a major city. You have no idea what it's like to stand in an enormous dealer room filled with just about every gaming company you can think of, with booths staffed by some of the same names you usually see on book covers. It was an amazing experience, and one I swore almost instantly to repeat on an annual basis.

That's me on the right, manning the original Paizo "booth" with Dungeon editor Chris Thomasson.

For whatever reason, though, my buddies were not quite so enthusiastic, and so when the time came to sign up for Gen Con 1996, I couldn't convince any of my old gaming friends to come with me. Slowly but surely, by attending several local Living City events, I was developing a new cadre of gaming buddies, but only a year after I first got involved with LC, none of those relationships had gelled to the point where I felt comfortable sharing a hotel room with those guys. So I did the unthinkable, and decided to head out to Gen Con all by myself.

Even though it was my second Gen Con, 1996 feels like my first when I think back on it, because I felt like such a fish out of water that year. Without the companionship of pals to take in the convention with me, I ended up setting my own schedule and doing the things that I wanted to do, exclusively. And around then that meant haunting the various TSR seminars (especially when they had to do with my beloved World of Greyhawk campaign setting), playing a ton of RPGA events, and scouring the dealer hall for out-of-print AD&D modules I'd somehow missed the first time around. It was enormously fun, but I went into it quite nervous. It's hard to feel lonely among 30,000 fellow gamers, but with no hotel roommates and no friends to share the experience, I was worried that I wouldn't have any fun at all. I felt more like an isolated newbie than I ever had that first year.

I needn't have worried. I was far, far too busy to ever feel lonely. Within the first day I'd met up with the local RPGA'ers, and the convention's relentless programming had me seated at game tables around the clock. A funny thing happened at those game tables. I started recognizing gamers from the previous year, and they started recognizing me. The next year, 1997, I split a room in the vaunted (and, let's face it, probably haunted) Hotel Wisconsin with 11 other RPGA fanatics, some from my native Minneapolis and some from all over the country. I began to travel with these new friends, hitting game days and cons in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and even Florida. Far from being alone, as I'd feared the previous year, I was developing a huge network of hard-core gaming buddies all over the country.

Here I am about two years later. I can't recall what year this was, but I'm certain it was the last time I did Gen Con in a T-shirt...

At Gen Cons between 1996 and 1998, my questions at various TSR seminars (along with, I must admit, a ton of critical commentary on the old TSR area on America Online) brought me to the attention of a few D&D contributors, who soon hired me on as a freelance continuity consultant for Greyhawk and Planescape projects. That work brought me to the attention of Wizards of the Coast's Lisa Stevens, who hired me for real in 1999 to join the RPGA staff as editor of Polyhedron and the head honcho of the network's Living Greyhawk campaign, which was to coincide with the launch of third edition Dungeons & Dragons in 2000.

Gen Con 1999, my fifth consecutive appearance, was the first time I attended the show as a gaming professional. The following year I launched Living Greyhawk and helped manage the RPGA's presence at the show, which dominated a massive arena complete with stadium seating and poorly lit subterranean passages. A lot of the volunteer coordinators of the Living Greyhawk campaign turned out to be guys I'd played RPGA games with those first couple of years, solidifying friendships with gamers who had been strangers only a few short years before.

By 2002, I'd been transferred from the RPGA to the periodicals division of Wizards of the Coast, which was spun off to form Paizo Publishing. This gave me a whole new Gen Con experience—helping to run a dealer hall booth for what amounted to a tiny, start-up company. "Booth" is probably too bold a word, as the first Paizo booth was really just a small table with a few posters taped to the wall of the D&D castle mega-booth.

Here I am the last year in Milwaukee with Eric Noah of EN World fame.

Since 2002, I've been one of the few constants of Paizo's presence at Gen Con. Most of the original Paizonians have moved on to other career opportunities, but I'm still around, standing behind a decidedly larger booth, with a decidedly larger set of responsibilities as publisher than I had as the lowly magazine section editor of 2002.

And here I am, about to head out for my 17th consecutive Gen Con, and my mood couldn't be further from the trepidation of 1996, when I attended the convention alone. Because with nearly 20 years of the convention behind me, I now understand that a gamer can never be truly alone at Gen Con. Each annual convention is a chance to reacquaint myself with old friends and make a ton of new ones. Where once I worried that not a single person there knew who I was, these days I can barely walk from my hotel to the Paizo booth in less than an hour, because I end up running into so many old friends.

If you've never been to Gen Con, or if this is your very first year to attend and you're a bit nervous about what's in store, take if from me. You needn't worry. Gen Con has a way of making gamers feel right at home, and once you've attended one time, you'll have so much fun that your biggest concern coming out of the show will be how you're going to manage to attend next year.

And when you do come back, swing by the Paizo booth and say hi. I'll be there, eager to meet you.

Erik Mona
St. Petersburg, Russia