Category: Gaming Conventions

We’re back and we’re bursting with song, but more on that later. We’re also talking about conventions, and definitely not singing about them. That would be silly. Specifically, we’re talking about the UK roleplaying conventions we attend, with a focus on encouraging those of you who don’t already attend them to do so. Conventions are great social occasions, a good way to try new games and not filled with anywhere near as many weird people as you may fear.

Harmless convention-goers pictured for reference

We have limited ourselves to conventions that at least one of us has attended and that are still running, but this didn’t narrow things down much. This is a long episode. Apparently we spend a lot of our time sitting in hotels or holiday camps with dice in our hands.

Or, more usually, a White Russian.

The conventions we cover, along with links to the relevant websites, are:

• Conception
• Concrete Cow
• Conpulsion
• The National Student Roleplaying and Wargaming Championships (Student Nationals)
• Con-Quest
• UK Games Expo
• Continuum
• Furnace
• Wyntercon
• Indiecon
• Dragonmeet
• London Indie RPG Meetup

As we mention in the episode, Phil Masters publishes a calendar of upcoming RPG conventions, and this will fill in a lot of gaps in our rather incomplete list. We also mention that Neil Smith has published a how-to guide for running your own small Concrete Cow-style convention, so here it is.

And here’s one we prepared earlier.

Before you start listening, it’s only fair that we give you warning: we sing in this episode. You may well have seen or heard us mention our Patreon page for people who would like to help with our hosting costs. One of the rewards we (well, Paul) offered was that we would sing our thanks in the style of a barbershop quartet to anyone donating $5 per episode. The full horror of what this meant only sank in when two insanely generous people sponsored us at this level, and we realised that only one of us could even remotely carry a tune. After an hour of recording and much editing and mixing, we have come up with a version that minimises SAN loss. It’s at the end of the episode, so brace yourself when you hear it coming. Please don’t let this put you off donating!

“How bad can this be? Oh. Oh dear.”

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We’re back, and we’re talking about Gen Con. Again. This is our third episode about the world’s largest roleplaying convention, and Scott has still not managed to make it there. No, instead he gets to sit here and write blurbs to go with discussions of how much fun other people are having. Not that he’s bitter. Oh no. Not at all.

You should have seen the first draft of this post.

Matt has already posted an article about his trip to Gen Con 2014. Paul and Scott were too lazy to read it, so Matt had to tell them all about it in person. Happily they remembered to put a microphone in front of Matt first, so we don’t have to find some way of attaching Matt himself to this post.

Last time we tried uploading Matt, the local junction box suffered.

You may notice a bit of a drop in sound quality this episode. This is because we were unable to use our state-of-the-art recording facility (Paul’s shed) for reasons that will be explained next episode. That episode should have been this episode, and this episode should have been, um, probably this episode as well. All will be clear in a couple of weeks.

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