“GenCon, the four one and three-quarters biggest days in gaming!” I think that’s what the line is, anyway. I used to laugh at it because when I was working GenCon, it was six days on site plus all the preceding prep time. But like last year, I got a free badge because one of my Legends of Greyhawk adventures was running, and I got a reasonably priced Airbnb for two nights, so my GenCon ran from Wednesday afternoon until Friday morning, which was just right.

Wednesday: I rolled in later than I hoped because I had to repack the exhaust on my daughter’s YZ85. It had been dripping sludge the previous weekend, so on Tuesday I opened it up which is never a good move when you need to leave town the next day. The packing material was soaked with oil and came apart, so there was no putting it back together right then. I got the parts I needed when the local shop opened at ten A.M. and got to work. Many swears later, the job was done and I was on the road to Indianapolis.

Rolling into town, I dropped off my backpack and scarfed my packed dinner of seitan, broccoli, and homemade pasta sauce before heading into town. I went to the Baldman Games DM meeting to get my badge, had a chat, and then met up with some more friends before heading over to the Diana Jones Awards. More hanging out was done before I went to sleep just long enough to be out the door for our seven A.M. coffee hangout.

I found a quiet spot in the convention center to finish reading the House Under the Moondial, a delightful adventure, and then made the mistake of trying to go through the vendor hall at ten thirty. It was jampacked, shoulder to shoulder. The pressure had let off when I returned later in the day, which made for a much more pleasant experience.

It was fun seeing some new Lego games on the floor accompanied by a giant brick-built Destiny’s Bounty, but the display that made the biggest impression on me was, somewhat predictably, Dwarven Forge’s. They’ve been building up to their upcoming Perilous Frontiers crowdfunding campaign for a while now. I somewhat intentionally haven’t been paying close attention. Sand and snow banks sound like something more affordably done with foam, but I also knew that the team would come up with something in the end that would knock me out, and they certainly did. The displays were gorgeous. The bank surfaces look great, but all the little touches like cactuses, cave entrances, and floating rock structures really put it over the top. My pictures don’t do them justice.

Eventually I made it through the crowd to meet up with Andrew Bishkinskyi of, well, everything design fame, who had tickets for us to the Dungeon Dare and D&D Keynote events in the D&D Tower. We headed over, and after waiting until thirty minutes before our event time, submitted to bag searches and passed through the metal detectors to board our airplane play an hour of D&D (credit to Mike Shea and my daughter for both independently coming up with that joke). We visited the merch booth which had seen little traffic due to the security measures in place. I think this stuff was smoothed out in the time for the carnival later that weekend? I’m not sure.

Dungeon Dare was a one-hour semi-competitive event where you try to survive a death trap dungeon and find a gem to win fabulous prizes like the upcoming Arcana Unleashed book. Or at least I think so, no one had survived yet when we got there. Our DM used Lego figures for minis, which took me back to our first 5e campaign. In the first room a water elemental instantly drowned a character. That raised an eyebrow for me because 5e characters can normally hold their breath for an unreasonably long time. Whatever, moving on. Characters started taking d100 damage for messing with things while trying to open a door, so I headed out the other way. We poked around some more and time started running out, so I opened a footlocker to look for a key. Seemed like a reasonable course of action, but I was insta-killed. Okie dokie.

I’m fine with deathtrap dungeons, but I believe they need to reward investigation and clever thinking. You also need to have a party that is focused on the goal and can move quickly. There were plenty of tells, but they all seemed to be, “you’re going to die if you try to do anything,” which just leads to a certain paralysis. And then there’s goddamn mage hand, which just goofs up everything as everyone is subtly encouraged to give up their turn and wait for the wizard to safely mage hand whatever can be mage handed.

Maybe I missed the clues, maybe our group wasn’t a finely tuned machine, but between that and the security weirdness (hard to visit the tower if you can’t), I left kind of bummed out. My next event was the Warhammer Kill Team Experience, a series of activities aimed at new players. After being greeted by a staffer in life-size Deathwatch armor, we had fifteen minutes to paint a mini.

Then we got a quick demo of Kill Team and got to peruse the shop on our way out. I have a few Kill Teams at this point and I really want to paint them and play. Overall, this was lighthearted fun in the grim darkness of the far future.

I tried to get the Star Wars Legion con-exclusive Boba Fett mini, but I was told you had to register at nine A.M., so no Boba for me. Crestfallen, I wandered off and ran into a couple more friends in the vendor hall. It’s amazing how at a convention with seventy thousand people attending, you can still just bump into people you know. That all cheered me up. The main reason I was there was to see my friends, and it really made the trip worth it. And then… it was time for the D&D Keynote address!

I went through security again and found a seat in the back. The theme of the night seemed to be collaborations. As has been reported elsewhere, they really tried to hype the crowd up. That’s a dangerous gamble, because when they asked things like, “You won’t believe what we have coming next!” I was tempted to shout back, “Peppa Pig!” (another Hasbro property, obviously ready for a 5e-compatible RPG), but I didn’t want to be The Guy Who Ruined the D&D Keynote 2026. Much digital ink has been spilled elsewhere so I don’t need to repeat any of that, but most of the announcements left me going, “huh.” It all fell under “wait and see” until I found out that Will Doyle and Stacey Allan wrote the upcoming Greyhawk adventure with Justice Arman. That got my attention, though I had to wait until the next morning to find it out because they didn’t include that important information in the announcement. By my reckoning, Will and Stacey are possibly the best designers in the 5e sphere, so I’m eagerly anticipating that one.

I actually left before they made the Star Wars announcement in order to meet some friends for dinner. I got caught at an intersection while a run went by. I listened to literally half of Agnostic Front “Live at CBGBs” while waiting for a break in the runners. It was worth the wait, both for the company and the food.

I had considered staying later on Friday, but by the morning I was ready to get coffee and head home to take my kids to the track. Forty three hours of GenCon was enough for me. Maybe I’ll do more next year and play more than an hour of games? I wonder if that would make it feel better. I had that midday crash on Thursday, and the familiar feeling of despair at there being so much stuff that I’ll never engage with. It’s a personal bummer that I’m not sure how to get around. Death comes for us all, and I want to do everything forever. I don’t know how to reckon with the intersection of games and mortality. At least I have my friends to visit, and that feels good.