Post CONjuration 2017 Report

Post CONjuration 2017 Report

Another fantastic convention in the books and a great time was had by all. Great panels, cool performers and amazing cosplay were on display through out the convention. Time was well spent with friends old and new. The staff of the convention was amazing as they are every year. Special thanks to Convention Founder Chris & Angela and Darrin the Professor for putting up with our shenanigans.

This will have been our fourth year as attendees and our third year as panelists and game hosts. We upped our number of games from last year and put on six games this year. We ran a gamut of D&D 5^th Ed, AD&D 2^nd Ed, and Swords & Wizardry games.

Every year I get the pre-con jitters, and fret something awful.  

Would I suck as a DM? Would our games suck?Would there be conflicts with other panels?  Would we have enough players? Did we forget anything?   

Then the convention started and there was literally no time to think.

The turnout was amazing as all most all of our games were full and some cases overfull.  The average game size was about 10 people per game. We had players who returned year after year to play in our games and we always see new faces coming to the table.

I ran the Sword & Wizardry games and it was a blast. All of my games were full with my first game having 14 players and my second having 10. I had the largest number of first time players who had never played ANY type of roleplaying game before. S&W is really great for this, especially when I streamlined it for Con-Play. 

I did not use any pre-written adventures like I did last year. I wrote all of the adventures I ran myself this year using inspiration drawn from Spencer, Tall Tales of the Wee Folk, Harry Potter and Labyrinth. I even made mock-ups of D&D Modules for the programming guide for the Convention.

My favorite one ended up being my Groundhog Day adventure where the players were struck in a time loop and kept dying until they could prevent the assassination of the Queen of Summer.

The highlight of the games was when two of the youngest players at my table (both 13 yrs. old girls) came to me after the game. They had never played before and had such a great time they wanted to keep playing.  They asked me how they could get their hands on the stuff I used for my game. I was floored to be honest. These are the moments you live for as a Dungeon Master.

Needless to say Swords & Wizardry has an embarrassment of riches for people who want to learn to play and much of it is free. I hooked them up with the S&W Intro Rules, S&W Core (Free Version), and several of the S&W Quick Play Adventures.

One other player reached out to me since the CON and as if I could get her a copy of the adventures that I ran so she could run them for her gaming group. That was another first for me.

We are already started the planning for next year and hope to host even more games and branch out to other game systems and genres.