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GameholeCon has a particular significance in my convention-going life. It wasn’t the first con I ever went to, that was GenCon/Origins in 1989, but it was the first con I went to after that long break. It’s local enough that we can drive, but it also feels local and familiar. When we first went in 2018, I think almost the entire WotC D&D team was there, and I’m fairly certain all the Adventurers League admins were as well. I volunteered to run an absurd 30 hours of AL games, including the Open, the Epic, the Border Kingdoms special (once) and intro (twice), and one of the season eight AL adventures once or twice, and I was slated to DM the Red War Epic but my table didn’t have enough players. It was exhausting and exhilarating. I met loads of folks, made an important writing connection, and brought home a stack of books as DM swag. It was a con that was small enough that you could play whatever game you liked and probably meet whoever you wanted to, but it ran more smoothly than most shows. We’ve been back nearly every year since, and perhaps I’ll get around to recounting some of those stories another time.

Jumping Ahead… I started the week by driving to Cleveland Tuesday evening. A friend of mine from Japan plays in a band called Rocky & the Sweden and they were playing a handful of shows on the east coast. Ohio usually isn’t much to drive through, but the sun was setting through a break in the clouds and it made for some spectacular sights.

The show was good. I’m not sure what the last hardcore show I went to was, probably Forward in Detroit a few years ago? My ears aren’t generally up for loud music anymore, and most shows involve more waiting around than I like these days. It’s also different when you don’t know anyone in the crowd. I was surprised when I went to see Judge a few years ago and I only knew a handful of people there. Oh well, people move on to other places and things, myself included. I did know a few people at the Cleveland show, and I got to stay with a good friend I hadn’t seen in years. I got to see my friend from Japan as well, and his band was great, as expected. I had never gotten to see them in Japan because they went on an extended hiatus shortly after I started visiting there, so it was nice to finally have the opportunity.

Despite it being a Tuesday night, the show didn’t wrap up until after midnight, and I was on the road back to Ann Arbor before seven the next morning. I spent the day finishing packing (mostly food and gaming supplies) and we left for Madison around four thirty. This was actually the earliest we had ever left for GameholeCon, we typically drive a couple hours and stay with friends in Kalamazoo before completing the drive the next morning. We still didn’t arrive early enough to catch the opening reception, only reaching our hotel at eleven o’clock Michigan time, at which point we crashed out.

Thursday! Madison is quite nice. It reminds me of Ann Arbor, though bigger, spread across and around a couple lakes, and with the state capitol on site. The convention itself is held at the Alliance Energy Center and has more convenient parking than any other comparable show I’ve been to. You can just drive in and find a spot. It was a little more crowded this year then previous ones, as attendance keeps increasing, and between that and the challenges getting into certain games, I’m wondering if this cozy little con has grown into an awkward adolescent phase. Ah well, things change, and I can’t fault more folks for coming to what’s still one of the best run conventions out there.

We had the morning free so we went to Monty’s Blue Plate Diner for brunch. The Green Owl Cafe was also under consideration, but they didn’t open until eleven Madison time, and that was unreasonable on this particular morning. It was great, as usual. We had picked up our badges beforehand (I think there was one person ahead of us? A far cry from GenCon’s line that wends and wraps through the halls) and headed back after brunch to check out the vendor hall. I ran into an astonishing number of people I knew first thing, but that’s one of the joys of this particular convention.

I started my gaming day by running a slot of the one-hour fiftieth anniversary AD&D game they had put together, complete with vintage resin Dwarven Forge. I followed that up with a slot of the tier four Adventurers League module I had written for this year’s Border Kingdoms series. We scarfed the dinner we packed and played some Munchkin before ending the night with another AD&D slot.

The AD&D game was a good time. I love that sort of tactile play, where the room elements are laid out and the players are free to poke at them. The only hiccups I ran into were when the players wanted to attack the trap (with good reason, the columns had animated as tentacles) and the module didn’t provide guidance on that, and my second group got stuck on the puzzle (provided by True Dungeon, it was very cool and quite clever) and their interest threatened to fade. Ah, and the illusion. Illusions always trouble me when I’m DMing, I don’t know how to clue the players in without giving the illusion away entirely, so I prefer to avoid using them at all. Back to the columns, I stumble when I have to come up with the AC and HP for objects. I guess I should just think of comparable armor, that would get me halfway there. Either way, the games devolved into delightful chaos as characters were flung through portals and had to flee from overwhelming odds. I used the B/X combat procedure because no one has time for the AD&D system in a one hour slot, and especially not unfamiliar players or a DM who hasn’t used it in thirty five years (and even then, I would have just used B/X!).

I have been quite fortunate for the last few years to have gotten to write adventures for GameholeCon’s AL campaign, located in the Border Kingdoms region of the Forgotten Realms. This year’s series was a tighter affair, a few tier two adventures, a few tier three adventures, and my tier four conclusion to the story. The adventure opens with a rehearsal combat, travels through a magically warped wilderness (probably in the company of some fun nihilistic cultists, but the players aren’t forced to join up with them), and climaxes with a big fight against a big monster and its disembodied spirit (for most of the fight, anyway. Woe to the group that lets them join up and combine their powers!). Some players still had 2014 characters, some had updated to the 2024 rules, and it mostly ran smoothly, though the 2024 ones may have had a slight edge over the ones using the older rules. And of course, it deserves to be mentioned, that my tarrasque was Toppled twice by someone using a maul and weapon mastery. Sigh. Regardless, I think everyone enjoyed themselves.

Friday! It’s Friday already? Where is the time going? My partner had an early AL game so I had a little time to bum around before meeting up with some folks about an upcoming writing project. We met back up to go to Ben Rigg’s panel, “The Battle for the Soul of D&D.” My main takeaway was that the seemingly senseless layoffs from WotC’s corporate culture encouraged an atmosphere of backbiting among the staff, and that 5e was the breakthrough success that it was despite this. Ben didn’t hold back, and I don’t think I could have quoted some of those things with all the parties present in the building (or otherwise). But they were on record, so it is what it is, I suppose. The positive takeaway was that most of the things WotC gets criticized for come from the corporate side, like the OGL crisis (inspired by the video game Solasta? Pretty remarkable, that), so the game can exist in a happier compartment in your mind if you like.

After that, I hustled down the street to the Sheraton Hotel (“in Canada!”) for Stefan from Dwarven Forge’s AD&D game. I’ve gotten to play in it the last two years as well and it’s a rollicking good time. Stefan brings lots of terrain, obviously, and is an exceptionally fun DM. I had an incredible string of bad rolls, racking up seven or eight 1s by the end of four hours. The last one was a save versus a lightning bolt, and it would have killed me either way. It put a fitting cap on the game for me.

We got dinner at the food trucks as a little treat and then I ran two slots of the 5e fiftieth celebration game. The written presentation of this adventure was quite different from the AD&D one. There was an extensive backstory, four NPCs in the introductory scene, and progress gated by ability checks. The backstory was easily condensed to get things moving. One NPC reads a speech and acts as the quest giver, another provides the puzzle (another great True Dungeon element), and two just fill out the scenery, so the last pair got cut. And then the ability checks, it was an interesting (if predictable) contrast with the AD&D game. In that one, I had a player say at one point, “Can I roll Investigation or something?” To which I replied, “No, you can tell me what you mess with and how.” Contrast that with the 5e adventure where they find a trapdoor not by looking under the carpet, but by succeeding on an Investigation check which is then narratively explained as looking under the carpet. What happens if no one succeeds? There’s no description of the house, no tactile elements to mess with, so you could stuck. But at the same time, I’m not sure I can begrudge it. Maybe people actually play the game this way, I don’t know. I couldn’t, not over the long run. In fact, I could have comfortably run the AD&D adventure with 5e rules on the fly, and that would have been more my style. Still, I can stand shepherding players along for an hour. The end of the adventure was fun, with the players gaining an unexpected ally partway through the fight (though I had to improvise that. What happens if you move the hatching egg out of the fire? It doesn’t say). Other than a grumpy teen who didn’t seem to want to be there and another who wanted to argue with me about whether or not the pre-gen was a moon druid, I think my players had a good time, and I did too.

I then had a chance to catch up with some friends after my formal games were done. Nearly a dozen of us congregated near the end of the long hall, with half the group playing Ghostfire Gaming’s Abomination board game (looks impressive with minis and tokens and all that, but too much for me at nine at night after a full day), and a friend introduced the rest of us to River Valley Glassworks, a quick game about animals collecting colored stones from a river. I really liked it. It had a quality in common with games like Sushi Go! or Lords of Waterdeep, where it’s easy to pick up the rules, but the strategy feels deeper and is rewarding to pursue. Even if we didn’t get to all play one game together, one of the real joys of conventions is just being in the same space. It was a really nice end to the day.

Saturday! Phew, the end draws near. I had an early start with Mike Shea’s Shadowdark game. He ran Hoard of the Sea Wolf King, a level 0 gauntlet from Cursed Scroll #3. Our hapless idiots ventured into the seaside caves, investigating quite a few rooms before stingbats killed three of us in one round. The survivors chose to stay and fight, dying in the next round. Oops. Our next bunch of dummies set out along the same path, hoping to loot the bodies of our previous characters, and quickly died the same way. Don’t stingbats get full? Our third group decided to try a different passage, and despite quite a few more deaths, we made it to the end. The final encounter devolved into player versus player chaos, with my Halfling disappearing at the start of the fight to wait it out and bonk the last survivor over the head with a crowbar to claim the Axe of Nine Eyes. Victory!

Mike employed some neat tricks to keep the game moving and easily understandable. He drew the map on a dry erase grid as we explored, but it wasn’t intended to be a battle map so it wasn’t to scale. It worked perfectly fine with Shadowdark’s loose combat system. I noticed he was also counting up the damage we did to monsters on the same map surface, so from where I was sitting, I could see the running total but I never knew how many hit points a monster had left. He also had a handy system from tracking whose turn it was, given the importance of that with Shadowdark’s always-on around-the-table initiative system.

More than the little things, what I took away was just how a session can sing when you have 1) a good system like Shadowdark 2) run by a great GM 3) using a good scenario and 4) leaning into the strengths of the system. I was consistently engaged in a way I rarely am as a player. Things moved quickly, you could easily tell when your turn was coming up, there was lots of stuff to poke at, and it was just a great time all around. The game threatened to lose a little steam after our second TPK, but everyone rallied and carried forth. I’m going to be thinking about the synergy between those various elements for a while.

After that, I checked the vendor hall one more time, but a couple items I had my eye on were gone. Oh well, that can happen when you wait. I headed upstairs for the last panel in the History of D&D series, this one being, appropriately enough, about the development of fifth edition. I couldn’t fit the others into my schedule and I really hope they were recorded to be uploaded because this was quite good. Peter Lee, Mike Mearls, and Rodney Thompson talked about the environment at the company at the time and the various approaches they took to designing and play testing 5e. Of course, it was famously smashingly successful, a testament to the perfect synergy of what they did and unexpected developments in the wider culture like streaming.

The other downside to GameholeCon growing (the first being the filling parking lot) is that it’s getting a little harder to get into highly desirable games. While they do an exemplary job keeping seats reserved for the regular crowd so that the VIG badge-holders can’t take all of them, and it isn’t an all-out bloodbath like GenCon, it did feel a little different this time around. My partner and I registered at the same time and I got the top games on our wishlist but she didn’t get into any of them. I held out hope that a seat would open up at one of them, but it wasn’t to be, so I regrettably withdrew from my Saturday afternoon game. This convention is a fun trip that we do together, so I didn’t want to spend the weekend playing games apart. We sorted our schedules and got into an escape room session and a round of Codenames.

The escape room was great. One of the conference rooms had been decorated as the Cabin of the Cackling Man, complete with lock boxes, props, and a fully functional 8-bit video game. The game was styled after the original Legend of Zelda and you had to play it to get clues to solve the puzzles in the room which in turn gave you clues to help you progress in the game. Really, really neat. We solved it in the final few minutes.

Codenames was alright. It’s one of those games that depends highly on the ability of players to improvise clues the others can understand, and that dynamic can go poorly with the wrong group. We had a good time with it though. Then we headed downtown for pizza and improv! The group was quite capable, high energy and fun. Other folks were hanging out at the hotel bars until late into the evening hours (or morning), but we were still running on Michigan time and had to crash.

Sunday! We checked out of the hotel and headed back to the convention center one last time. I caught the live recording of Mastering Dungeons, said goodbye to various folks, and picked up a couple things at the dealer hall. Deep discounts come to those who wait (if the items are still in stock). We set out on the long drive home. I think it took us around six hours. Part of that was my fault, I had seen a Facebook Marketplace ad for a stack of AD&D hardbacks in rural southwest Michigan and the seller wouldn’t ship. Our route took us close enough, so I made the necessary arrangements and got them for a very fair price. After regrettably selling my Cthulhu/Melnibone Deities & Demigods in college, a copy is mine once again! These books are pure esoteric mystery and joy to me. I love them despite their flaws, and sometimes because of them!

It was a great weekend, but it was also very nice to be home, where the Shadow of the Weird Wizard books were waiting for me.

Brine of the Wrathful Mariners: Something I’ve wanted to do for a while has been to write short adventures for this blog, and GameholeCon was a perfect opportunity to set a deadline and do it. And I did! I took the easy option and used a Dyson Logos map and then built a trifold pamphlet layout around it. It’s a system-neutral scenario that runs easily in OSE, 5e, or Shadowdark, and it’s stuffed full of traps, treasure, chaos goblins, drowned cultists, and one murder monster. I’d love to hear what you think of it. I printed fifty copies and gave them away at the con, but you can download it here. Enjoy.