I’m off to WisCon 37 in a couple days, so updates will again will rare until I get back early next week. I’m really looking forward to the con, and I’ll be on two panels that might be relevant here:

Creating a Religion 201

Last year’s “Creating a Religion” panel dealt with topics such as the number of gods, creating mythologies and avoiding common foibles. Let’s talk about some deeper topics in created religions: dealing with the theodicy problem, developing believable schisms, detailing millenial beliefs, charting pilgrimages, describing religions without orthodox beliefs and whatever other interesting paths we may follow.

Lots of good worldbuilding advice will be given there, I’m sure.

Feminism in Gaming, 2013

2012 was a watershed year for discussion of misogyny in gaming, in many ways: Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter to examine misogyny in gaming, the backlash against it, and the counter-backlash; discussion of art direction in D&D Next; attacks on Felicia Day; the launch of the Gaming as Women blog; and other developments. What has happened so far in 2013? Is the amount of backlash more an indication that misogyny is getting worse, or that we’re finally getting around to the painful but necessary conversations? How much progress have we made, and what still needs to be done?

Deep, important discussion… and that’s just the panels I’m going to be on! If this year’s WisCon is like previous years’, the conversations will be deep, thought-provoking, hilarious, moving and meaningful. If you’re around, look for me and maybe talk to me about Blade & Crown! Which, by the way, should be available for purchase at the DreamHaven tables in the Dealers’ Room.

As usual, WisCon was entertaining, mind-expanding and generally wonderful. I have yet to fully recover. I will start posting reports soon.

First part of WisCon 37 that was relevant here: a great panel called “Why Is Pleasure So Problematic?” I didn’t catch the whole thing, but what I saw of the panel dealt in a very thorough, interesting way with the problem underlying things like feeling guilty about reading RPGs and obnoxious-expository worldbuilding: our guilt about experiencing pleasure.

It’s interesting how much of nerd self-loathing can be boiled down to simple pleasure-based guilt. If we’re not being Productive, our consciences tell us, we’re bad people. This panel did a good job of looking at that guilt and trying to moderate it with calls for “Squeevolution!” It was one of the few panels I’ve seen that didn’t try to argue that fun is good because it lets us work harder elsewhere, or because it makes us more attentive, or whatever other argument that is ultimately rooted in Productivity.

Yet even in this panel, an audience member related a story about a mouse who seemed to be ‘wasting time’ but then, come the winter, was able to entertain all the other mice with stories they’d dreamed up. So, you see, even creativity can turn out to be Productive!

I find the argument from Productivity pernicious, deeply rooted and extremely hard to do away with. Productivity is so deeply ingrained in our society that we have a hard time even framing a conversation that doesn’t proceed from the conceit that Productivity is the highest good. Guilt from lack of productivity is so deeply rooted that even when we acknowledge that we get pleasure from pure creativity, we can’t allow ourselves to let that be as it is; instead, we have to cover up that fun with appeals to Productivity. The panel addressed this, and the calls for “Squeevolution!” impressed me a lot. The panel didn’t go much beyond that point, but I think that’s okay, because even accepting that Productivity isn’t the highest good is a pretty titanic task.

Another insight I got from this panel was how social pleasures are generally less guilt-ridden than solitary pleasures, because they tend to be approved of by society more. Think of the difference in stereotypes between the “group make-believe session” and the “basement-dwelling troglodyte”. Both are looked down upon, yes; but the former is “at least social”. And I think it’s ultimately tracing back to the Productivity argument. Not sure about this, but it feels that way.

As with a lot of insights, this is obvious in hindsight, but I hadn’t thought of it before. I hope that even when I praise RPGs, I avoid appeals to sociability as the reason RPGs are good.

Interesting interfaces

A good chunk of it was really just relating interesting stories of things that have happened to us through RPGs. That was fun, but not really on topic.

The part that most interested me was towards the middle, where the panelists discussed how a PC’s emotions can sometimes spill over into the player’s life. This, one of the panelists termed “bleed”. “Bleed” can of course become pathological at the far end, but at the near end, it can be an interesting way to gain better self-understanding, as when we contrast a character’s emotional responses to a situation with how we‘d react in the same situation. One panelist brought up how these kinds of emotional responses can get foregrounded in jeepform, which reminded me how much I’d like to try that style of game someday.

There was also good discussion around how RPGs allow us to explore and experiment with identities, such as one panelist who learned to be more confident walking at night through a LARP.

The panel left me wondering where the discussion should go next. I feel like there’s a lot of unexplored territory in the near end of “bleed”, such as how roleplay “bleed” differs from the kinds we experience when reading or watching non-interactive narratives, and the psychology behind these sorts of liminal states. I feel like there are dozens of other interesting questions here, but it’s hard to pin them down; I just find the whole topic fascinating. What about you? What about “bleed” intrigues you?

At last year’s WisCon, there was a fairly interesting panel called Creating a Religion. It was nominally about how to create religions for conworlds. Mostly, though, it just kept coming back to polytheism vs. monotheism as the main axis of variation in religions. In fact, it’s so frequent in RPGs that I almost consider it a joke; we gamers seem to often ask only the question “What gods should I have in my pantheon?” The number of deities in a religion is an important question; but too many conreligions differ only in this way, and otherwise resemble the bland pastiche of religious stereotypes present in so many RPGs. And many religions have no gods at all, or some fundamentally different way of looking at “gods” in the first place. So while last year’s panel was interesting, it didn’t have nearly the depth that it could’ve. For that reason, I suggested and ended up this year’s panel, with a hope that it would go much deeper than last year’s had.

This year’s panel went okay, though it could’ve been a lot better. We kept coming back to Christian theology and Western biases: how many gods, what is the basis of orthodoxy, how do people argue through orthodoxy, etc. Sometimes interesting, but a) too often done in conreligions and b) too Western in its biases.

So, what areas would I like to explore more? What areas of variation do I think conreligions need more of? What can we worldbuilders do better in our treatment of fictional religions?

• The problem of theodicy. This issue has its origin in Western theology, as the question of how God can be just when there is still suffering and evil in the world. But in its broader form — the question of why suffering exists, and what we should do about it — it is an issue for most religions. There are a lot of answers to this problem, from “suffering isn’t real” to “it’s all your fault” to “the powers that be are fundamentally capricious” to others. And I don’t see enough variation on this question in conreligions.
• Different ways of approaching the powers of the universe. Too often, prayer is assumed to be the primary way in which people try to come closer to their perfect state of being. But in reality, there are a lot of other ways of approaching the perfect state of being: pilgrimage, sacrifice, meditation, dance, etc.
• Truer representations of polytheism. The type of polytheism represented in RPGs, especially, seems to too often be of the same sort: everyone believes in just one god, the one whose domain is most important to them (and only one domain is ever important to them), while allowing for the existence of other deities. Well, I suppose that style of polytheism exists in the world, but it’s just one type of polytheism. More often, people believe in all the gods/powers/principles, and try to supplicate/worship/approach whichever one is most important to their current situation, while supplicating/worshipping/approaching other powers at other times. Chinese traditional religion often works like this, for example. And in some seemingly polytheistic traditions, people grudgingly accept the existence of other deities but actually consider their deity to be the really primary one in the universe; Indian religions are often of this type, with Vaishnavites grudgingly accepting but mostly deemphasizing the importance of Shiva, and vice versa. And one more form of variation I rarely see in conreligions’ polytheism: having primary deities who everyone believes in, and lesser, more specific powers that everyone also believes in. Thus, we get things like Chinese religions where every town has its own deity (the Chénghuáng) and every household has its own deity (the Zàoshén), and there are powers you worship when you’re taking a big test, trying to conceive or beginning a business venture, and other levels of the universe have their own powers and deities, all of whom are (sometimes) considered to be part of a grand universal bureaucracy.
• Magic mixed with religion. In many traditions, “magic” is what other people do and “religion” is what we do. In too many conreligions, these two things are fundamentally different, which kind of buys into the Western theological stance. Instead, it’d be nice to see more conreligions where “we” do rituals and get specific results from doing so, but when “they” do the same thing it’s “magic”.
• More diversity within religions. Too often, conreligions are depicted as monolithic: everyone who believes in Grog the Unbidden reads the same book, practices the same rituals and has the same code of belief. Well, it’s hard to find two Christians who agree exactly on their beliefs, practices and traditions, much less two “Hindus” or two “Buddhists”. I’d like to see more conreligions have realistic variation in practice and belief, on a variety of different counts, sometimes leading to schisms, sometimes not.
• Importance of lineage. A lot of Westerners think of Chán/Zen Buddhism as being about meditation and confusing ourselves with logical impossibilities. Well, that’s part of it, but did you know that lineage of tradition is at least as important for a lot of Chán practicioners? That is, who you received the Dharma from is really important, and maintaining that tradition is really important. This emphasis on lineage is important in a lot of other traditions, too, and I’d like to see it more in conreligions.

And those are just some of the areas that come to mind right off. I hope that next year’s panel, if there is one, goes a bit more into these areas of variation, and into how to actually create a conreligion that isn’t just the usual fantasy polytheist boilerplate with a few bits flipped.

This panel went quite well. In pre-discussion, we created a handout with tons of resources and information, and we also printed up a bunch of copies of the Feminist Gamer Bingo sheet. Yes, a panel with not just one but two handouts!

The discussion ranged far and wide, including important developments in the past year or so, recommendations for games that get it right, video games, tabletop games, the social contract and more. Here were some of the specific points that stuck with me:

• How if we buy problematic stuff, we’re complicit; but if we don’t, we’re not considered a market. That’s putting it very starkly — there’s clearly a lot of middle ground there — but this “buy bad stuff or don’t exist” situation is a problem for a lot of gamers, especially where the dominant companies are still doing such a poor job of being inclusive.
• We want acceptable $60 games, not just indie games (said about so-called AAA video games, but this kinda applies to tabletop RPGs, too!). There are a lot of small-scale games out there that are very inclusive, but it’d be nice if inclusivity wasn’t restricted so much.
• Ways of finding and forming good gaming groups. We didn’t talk about this a great deal, but it’s a topic I care a lot about, so the discussion got me going. I still plan to discuss how to find gaming groups and how to craft a good social contract here — eventually.
• How misogyny can influence kids really young, but how young kids also seem to be getting less misogynist. Signs of danger, signs of hope.

All that, plus I managed to sell three copies of Blade & Crown! A great panel.

WisCon isn’t a gaming-heavy con; it’s primarily about programming and conversations. Still, I managed to get in a bit of gaming, all of it on Sunday:

• Dominion. We played one nice session of this. As usual, this was a combination of cards I’ve never played with; I haven’t played it enough to start seeing the same cards come up much. I think there were one or two player-interactive cards, which made it nice. I’m not a fan of high-powered attacks in Dominion, but some interaction is good; otherwise, it feels too much like synchronized solitaire. The mystery victory point count is definitely a big feature; it keeps everyone guessing as to what’s going on, makes people feel like they’re still in the game even when they objectively might not be, and adds that little extra bit of interactivity.
• Charades. Does that count? Well, it was fun anyway, shouting out guesses. A friend of mine got an amazingly fast time on one of the clues; he did nothing more than hold up his fingers to indicate “three words” and the audience got it! Turns out a kid in the front row had been waiting for the right combination of three words all night. Still, everyone in the audience was stunned when it happened.
• Zar. Popular among a certain segment of Twin Cities gamers, and spread to WisCon. Zar is, as we so often call it, Uno for Jerks. Fast-paced, entirely and viciously PvP, totally meaningless… but it manages to be fun and addictive. I’m still not entirely sure why, but I think it’s probably because a) the hands are so fast that it’s hard to feel like you’re really behind, and b) it is addictive, so you keep playing in spite of better judgment. Still, a terrible game to meet new people over.

No RPGs in there, you may note. A lot of people at WisCon play RPGs, but scheduling is always a hassle at cons where the focus isn’t primarily on gaming. But maybe some year.

WisCon was again great. WisCon’s level of discussion is uniformly very high and much more clueful than at a lot of other cons. I don’t do much gaming there, but it entertains through mind-expansion. And this year’s WisCon had a great deal of gaming-related programming; I think it’s second only to Convergence, for me, in opportunities to talk about gaming.

One particular topic I want to highlight: This year’s WisCon had a lot of panels and discussions where thoughts of nerd self-loathing was kind of roiling under the surface. Dealing with imposter syndrome; people feeling they need to apologize for not being published prose authors ‘yet’; a worldbuilding panel that seemed almost entirely focused on making sure the world was ‘productive’ and not ‘wasteful’; feeling like we need to apologize for wholeheartedly and un-ironically enjoying things; arguing for the value of hobbies in terms of their ‘productivity’ value; being ashamed to admit that one is a gamer; etc. This overarching topic keeps coming up, and I hope that WisCon manages to address it more head-on in years to come. I will certainly continue to talk about it here. Forward the Squeevolution!

At last WisCon, there were several great panels about worldbuilding. One, in particular, brought up the concept of using different standard blocks, like “elves who are immortal and hate dwarves”, “the monotheistic religion is on a crusade to destroy the other monotheistic religion”, or “space travel is through jump gates”. There are a lot of setting elements that we all recognize pretty quickly; they’re the elements where you can say “You know Babylon 5? Jump gates are like that” or “they’re pretty much the standard Tolkien elves” or “it’s kinda like medieval Christianity”.

Someone on the panel, I’m not sure who, termed this “Ikea worldbuilding”. I really like that turn of phrase. Like shopping at Ikea, there are a bunch of pretty standard furnishings that are available to everyone. Like Ikea furniture, it’s so common that you’re likely to see it in many different settings. “Oh, yeah, I recognize those elves, they’re the same ones as in the Forgotten Realms”, you might say.

And like Ikea furniture, this kind of worldbuilding can have a bad reputation. If your entire world is assembled out of Ikea world-blocks, more snobbish worldbuilders might look at it and say “Wow, how unoriginal”. And indeed, some of it will be unoriginal — but originality is not the be-all, end-all of worldbuilding.

In fact, like Ikea furniture, an important part of worldbuilding is allowing your audience (who, in an RPG, are most often your players) to come to grips with the setting quickly. If it takes active pondering before they can operate your fancy new chair, it’s arguable that the chair is a failure from a design standpoint. If everything is beautifully designed, totally original and yet thoroughly impossible to come to grips with, it’s not very useful as a world for gaming in. (Though it’s fine to appreciate it as a world in itself — more on that in a later post.)

A lot of people look down on Ikea furniture, but it’s successful for a reason. It’s cheap, it’s easy to assemble and it’s (mostly) achieved popularity because it works. It’s quickly understood and it’s pretty likely to work with the other elements you already have. When you’re building a world for RPGs, those are all useful elements to have. You don’t always have time to come up with completely new architectural styles, for example; it can be a lot easier to say “See these Moroccan houses? They look like that”. Ikea worldbuilding has its drawbacks, but it has some real advantages, too.

Convergence is still the con where I talk about gaming the most. Why not at other conventions, like Con of the North (where there’s tons of gaming) or WisCon (where discussions are such a major focus, and so deep and meaningful)? For one thing, Convergence has a huge contingent of gamers, so there are enough people around to support discussions about gaming. For another, the focus is largely on panels about gaming, rather than gaming itself. (Convergence probably has fewer than two dozen RPG sessions in a typical weekend, compared to probably a hundred or more at Con of the North. And unlike CotN, it’s not really possible to sign up for games ahead of time, and there’s a lot going on, so it seems frequent that scheduled games don’t happen for lack of players.) And for whatever reason, it just has critical mass to support discussions about gaming. Which is fine by me, because they’re usually quite interesting.

I hope that, in the future, Convergence will start to split different kinds of gaming into different panels. It may result in smaller audiences, but having to address all console games, tabletop RPGs, boardgames and everything else in a single panel gets very frustrating after a while.

Folks said hi to me a few times in the halls and wanted to talk about panels I’d been on. That’s kind of a nice feeling.

In spite of its hugeness, Convergence actually felt no bigger than last year, or perhaps even smaller. And that’s with breaking out into an additional hotel. Thursday afternoon, the majority of the con actually was less crowded — because so many people were stuck in the registration line. But the rest of the time, it also seemed like traffic was manageable, or at least as manageable as it had been in 2012. Maybe traffic patterns were better? Or maybe spreading into the additional hotel helped? Or maybe the shock of being so crowded has started to wear off?

I remember when I went to one of the huge Minicons — 26 or 27, I want to say — I remember feeling annoyed that gaming was stuck across the street in the additional hotel. But I think that may be preferable to having it on the 22nd floor, with the waits for the elevator as bad as they are.

Convergence continues to be a major highlight of the year for me. It’s going through some growing pains, but it seems like the concomm is working to continually improve the con. I know I’ll be back next year.

The afternoon game for Saturday was one I was running, using Blade & Crown. It was in some ways very conventional, but in many others one of the most experimental games I’ve run.

The scenario was this: various religious dignitaries from around Morensia have come to the monastery of Chatia the Just to discuss what they should do about the upcoming succession crisis. Someone decides to silence opposition through murder, and the PCs attempt to solve and stop the murders.

It’s a fairly standard plot, as RPG sessions go. However, the monastery belongs to the order of the Sisters of Faenwitha, all of whom are women who were assigned male at birth — that is, transgender women of one sort or another. And all the PCs, likewise, are Sisters of Faenwitha.

Most of the players were cis men, so it required a bit of skillful roleplaying on their part. But I addressed this, plainly and openly, at the beginning of the session, and gave everyone a polite out if they wanted it. None did; seems like the folks who’d signed up were all pretty clueful, or at least determined to try their best.

Things progressed pretty well, with good roleplaying all around. One player did a good job of portraying a bishop; another did a great job with a pacifistic ex-warrior; and the player with a Sashtian character was a great ham. (Sashtia’s relationship to Morensia is kind of like that of France or Portugal to England.) I tried to design all the characters to contribute something important, and it seems like they did in the end. As usual, I am not certain how well the players enjoyed themselves. But John, who was playing the head cellarer, has written it up at The Everwayan and has very kind praise for the game there.

Also as usual, it started to get crowded by the timeslot — I seem unable to run a B&C convention game in anything other than five hours. We had spurts of maximum expository mode towards the end. But finally, I gave the players a chance to exercise their characters’ Traits in stopping the violence, and solving the problems facing the Sisters. They did it in a variety of different ways, with a variety of outcomes. Somehow very appropriate.

There is a possibility I will run this scenario again at WisCon this year, depending on time commitments. If I do, I believe it will be the first RPG on the schedule for quite a few years. It certainly seems on-topic for WisCon.

If you missed my Mountain Monastery Mystery at Con of the North, you’ll get another chance to play it this coming Memorial Day weekend (May 23-26) at WisCon!

WisCon is a wonderful convention with amazingly deep conversations, but it hasn’t had much gaming of late — a pick-up game of Dominion or Zar here or there, but nothing scheduled, and gaming has not been a major focus of the con. The head of gaming is making a concerted effort to have more scheduled games, and I’m happy to be one of the folks running a game at this year’s con. The Monastery Mystery, with its various gender issues, seems a good match for WisCon. If you’re going to be at the con, I’d love to see you in my game!

Just about time to head off to WisCon. I’m looking forward to a weekend of passionate, buoyant geekery. Getting to run Blade & Crown tomorrow night will be an added bonus! I hope to see you there. Expect more early next week.

As I mentioned before, a lot of the panels I went to at WisCon this year didn’t have much to do with gaming. This one, however, did:

Social Isolation and WisCon

For many of us, WisCon can be a magical bastion of cluefulness in an expanse of oppression. Yet even at the best WisCon, we can have internalized phobias, impostor syndrome and geek self-loathing. And when we’re not here, we may not have access to the social support we need. How do we support ourselves when the world doesn’t do it for us?

I’d suggested part of the panel topic, but it had been merged with another topic. I was actually kind of worried that the discussion would therefore go rather octopus-shaped.

But in the end, it was quite a brilliant discussion. It was the closest WisCon has gotten in recent years to dealing with the issue of geek hierarchies. As you may have seen from my posts on the topic, nerd self-loathing is a topic I care a lot about, and one I try to address frequently.

Like a lot of cons, WisCon seems to assume that everyone aspires to be, or should aspire to be, a published author of prose fiction. Published authors seemingly get prioritized for staffing panels; guests of honor are almost always published authors of prose fiction; panelists’ bios tout their recent publications loudly, or apologize if there aren’t any; many panels are explicitly centered on how to perfect your prose fiction writing craft; panel discussions assume that everyone is trying to perfect their prose fiction writing abilities, whether that’s actually germane to the topic or not; people who haven’t published anything are made to feel like they’re somehow less qualified to be on panels or contribute; people feel like they have to apologize for not being PAPFs.

This panel was interesting in that it actually discussed these tendencies. One panelist talked about a particular con at which all the discussion very explicitly assumes everyone aspires to be a PAPF, and how this made them feel like crap. There was some discussion of this: the con she was talking of seemingly likes to reinforce geek hierarchy, and hierarchies in general. Not a good con to attend, if you’re interested in tearing down those hierarchies. (I’m not going to mention the con’s name, but I will note that I immediately knew which con she was talking about, and have experienced much the same feelings in relation to that con.)

Also, the panel moderator specifically asked if the audience has ever been made to feel “I don’t belong here because I’m not a writer”. A significant portion of the audience raised their hands. And another panelist asked if people felt non-legitimate because they’re not a published author; again, a large number of hands. And the panel briefly discussed impostor syndrome, which is a major related factor.

Another panelist reminded everyone that authors need readers. This fundamental fact gets forgotten pretty often. Seems like there’s a bit of a parallel with how the rich get to pretend they don’t actually need people to work for them. And it’s another example of how “productivity” is glorified at the expense of “consumption”.

There was also discussion of other kinds of social isolation and hierarchy within fandom: isolation because of not already having tons of friends (which can be a horrible vicious circle); feeling isolated because of body weight; isolation due to physical disabilities; feeling isolated due to being poor; isolation due to not being a techie. We certainly do find a lot of ways to make our fellow fans feel terrible!

Another very interesting avenue of discussion is how easily the desire to find community can lead to exclusion. When we feel like we’ve been excluded, we want to form a group with other people who’ve been excluded. But if we form a tight, cozy community, we’re then forming yet more exclusion. One of the panelists mentioned Bernice Reagon Johnson, who has said some really powerful things about how groups form. Reagon Johnson wasn’t talking about groups in fandom — she was talking primarily about women of color forming coalitions and music festivals, I believe, and I don’t think nerd self-loathing is anywhere near as bad a problem as racism or sexism — but her logic still applies. When we draw the circle closer, we’re necessarily keeping some people out of it. That doesn’t mean we should leave the doors wide open — that can lead to Geek Social Fallacy #1 (“Ostracizers are evil”), or even the missing stair fallacy, where we allow some really horrible people to continue doing horrible things in fandom for fear of being too exclusionary. But there’s clearly a happy medium here, where we’re neither allowing in bad people nor excluding those we should really be rejoicing with.

There was a lot of discussion about self-care and how to minimize feelings of hierarchy, isolation, impostor syndrome and other related maladies. Some things offered:

• Volunteering to start a group of people with similar interests;
• Continuing to bolster your own sense of self-worth in the face of negative messages;
• Making sure to have friends you can rely on for support;
• A healthy attitude of “screw ‘em” where necessary;
• Directly asking people if you can tag along with them at a con;
• The aforementioned reminder that authors need readers;
• Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable sometimes;
• Volunteering at cons in consuite, parties, etc. to help you feel helpful, and to make contact with other folks.

There was a fair amount of discussion specifically about dinner outings at cons, because these are one of the times that social isolation can be most acute. There was a good mix of general theory and direct practicality.

Overall, “Social Isolation” was one of my favorite panels of the con. It hit a lot of issues that I’ve been thinking about lately, and it did it in a very meaningful way. It encouraged me to be more out, positive and joyful about my fandoms, and to continue delighting in other people’s fandoms.

This WisCon, I did a fair amount of actual gaming. Foremost among these, of course, was my Mountain Monastery Murder Mystery. As I’ve mentioned before, this is set in a monastery/abbey of Sister Earth, in my main campaign world, Calteir. The PCs are all Sisters of Faenwitha, headed to a major meeting where the Order will decide its stance on the upcoming succession crisis. The stakes are very high, and tensions are running just as high.

This is the first year of scheduled tabletop gaming at WisCon. There were three games, one each Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. MMMM was Saturday night. There was a little confusion about when and how to get into the games. Some schedules had shown that they were to start at 8:30pm, while others showed 8:00pm. Also, it was a little unclear how players were supposed to register; my email address was given on the con website so people could tell me in advance (good), but it was also listed in the pocket program for people to tell me after the con had begun — when I no longer had access to my email (bad). And there was a sign-up sheet outside the room that I didn’t even know about until I got there.

I mentally prepared myself for not enough people showing up and the game being canceled. Perhaps too much, as it turns out, because by 8:10 or so, four players had shown up. Cool! So in spite of some organizational hiccups, the game ended up happening.

I tried to make sure everyone had a chance or two to shine, and the players all did a good job of immersing themselves in the setting and the situation. They came up with some inventive takes on things. In the end, they averted disaster.

The players apparently all had a good time. One said she thought it was “awesome”. Cool again!

For a first year’s attempt at running tabletop gaming, I think it was fine. Hopefully some of the wrinkles will be ironed out for next year. In any case, I’m very happy to see RPGs on the schedule at WisCon.

In addition to MMMM, I played a few other games at WisCon. One was Telestrations, which is quite obviously someone’s attempt at monetizing Moneyduck (also known as EPYC). I still prefer Moneyduck, because it a) gives more space for writing and drawing, b) allows you to keep the game sheets for later, and c) doesn’t require anything more than paper and pencils. But Telestrations was fun, and a good icebreaker. I happened to play with one of the con chairs, whom I’d never interacted much socially before, for example.

There was also some Zar. I won, or lost. Dunno, really. Zar has become such a nice background social lubricant with folks I game with that I rarely note whether I’ve won or lost.

That same group also played another game I created, and I think there may have been more gaming that I’m forgetting.

One game I didn’t end up playing was Kobolds Ate My Baby. I’ve wanted to play this for a while, and it was being run by one of the players in MMMM, but at last, I decided to go to the Guest of Honor speeches instead. (This included Nora K. Jemisin’s extremely important call to arms — go read it if you haven’t.) WisCon is always about having to make hard choices between different amazing things.

More gaming could’ve been nice. I sorely missed my friend Lisa, for example, who usually wants to play Dominion and other board-and-card-games. (As it turns out, that same weekend, she was also playing that other game I created, about 150 miles away. But she couldn’t be at WisCon.) But the gaming at WisCon 38 was still pretty great.

Other general things WisCon 38 has me thinking about:

As always, WisCon this year had a lot of powerful, important discussions. The discussion about social isolation was, for me, the one most directly related to gaming. But an ongoing, overall discussion, about who gets to be in our fandoms — and who gets to decide that — is an extremely important one. As I mentioned in the last post, Nora K. Jemisin’s Guest of Honor speech on this topic was really powerful. There has also been a lot of discussion about how we handle it when creeps find their way into our fandom. And general discussion about “inclusion”, and who gets to “include” whom, also feels related.

Fandom is going through some big changes these days. Women, people of color, TBLG people, disabled people and many other groups are standing up in greater numbers to say “Hey, we’re here, we’ve been here, no one gets to exclude us”. Unfortunately, a lot of people who view fandom as being their private turf are reacting negatively to this.

It’s a fraught time to be a woman gamer and writer of RPGs. (And to be other things that I don’t feel comfortable going into here.) Hopefully, fandom in the future will be a less hateful place. I know I’m going to keep working towards that, and WisCon has (as always) inspired and energized me to continue working.

In general, WisCon this year was great. Good to see friends I don’t otherwise get to see, good to be in an atmosphere where we all hold ourselves to a high standard. Good gaming, good panels, good food. Great things to think about, and greater things to work towards.

After some discussion on Steve Brust’s blog, I’m wondering if it’s possible to list all the cons in this area. There really are a lot of them, and it’s very easy to lose track. I’ve seen various attempts to concatenate all the cons in this area, but they seem to come and go, and to quite often miss some important cons. Kevin’s listing is one of the best, but it’s hard to keep up to date.

For those reasons, I’ve decided to compile a list that doesn’t list specific dates, but rather general tendencies, so that hopefully this list won’t become incorrect too quickly. In other words, I’m aiming for a perpetual calendar, not a single year’s specific listing.

Criteria:

• A physical, face-to-face con, not online.
• Within a 5-6 hour drive of the Twin Cities.
• Concerned with SF&F and (what I consider) closely related hobbies.
• Open to the public.
• Persistent. Has been run consistently, within the above limits, for a few years, and usually occurs every year. (Thus I’m not — yet — listing things like Berserkon, BritCon, Furry Migration, GameHoleCon, Gaming Hoopla, Gaylaxicon, or MantiCon.)

I’m trying not to make judgments about what’s fannish and what’s not, at least within broad bounds. And I’m not trying to limit it to fan-run, non-profit cons, because it’s actually kind of hard to define those criteria precisely. This is not a list of recommendations, just an expansive list of cons.

So, within those limits, cons I know of are:

That’s already 25 cons, averaging more than two per month. And considerably more during the summer months. And not even getting into more far-flung cons, like the ones in Chicago. I knew there were a lot of cons in this area, but listing them out, I’m amazed.

Also, I am quite certain I’ve missed some. I know, for example, that I’m missing some university gaming/anime/comic/fandom clubs’ local cons, which still meet the criteria I’ve laid out. Which cons am I forgetting?

If possible, I’d like to keep this listing up to date, so feel free to give me updates, either via email or in the comments.

And with my Minicon 50 posts finally written up, I’m heading off to WisCon! I’m not scheduled for a lot that’s gaming-related, and it looks like I might even have a schedule conflict or two, but here’s my relevant schedule as it stands right now:

Join the Mod Squad: Enhance Your Moderation Skills

Ever go to a panel and spend your time thinking, “With a good moderator, this would be a much better panel?” We will review several ways to be that good moderator, offer tips and tricks, and generally work on improving WisCon’s already high standards for panel moderation. We strongly encourage you to attend this panel if you are moderating at WisCon, especially if it’s your first time. It’s also a great experience if you ever have been, or think you ever will be, a panel moderator anywhere. Fri, 4:00–5:15 pm

Hopefully a good discussion of how to get started in being a mod. There’s an Advanced Moderating panel later on, but I’m sure we’ll have some original insights in this anyway.

Let’s Build a World!

Together we will start with first principles—cats as nobility, floating continents, steampunk far-future romance, whatever the audience wants—and create a world to fit. Marvel as a functioning society coalesces before our eyes! Watch as you become expert on a world that didn’t exist minutes before! Dazzle as connections present themselves in astounding ways! Audience participation will drive this. Sat, 9:00–10:15 pm

As it worked out, someone is running Microscope at the same time as this. Hrm grumble grr. Hopefully we can figure out a way to have both games, because I’d really like to go to both! For further updates, it may be necessary to check the at-con newsletter, as I won’t have access to this blog after the con starts.

The Dooms that Came to Chaegrae

The Tomb of Gemenos has loomed over the middle of Chaegrae for generations. All who have dared to enter, or even to approach too closely, have had horrible fates. But now, you and your motley friends have come to plumb the depths of the tomb. You are unafraid of the Tomb’s strange fates, because you already know how you will die. The Tomb is but the next step in your destiny. A tabletop roleplaying game, using the Blade & Crown system (which I wrote). Themes of fate, destiny and the wrongs of history. No more than five players. No rules knowledge or materials required, though you may want to bring your lucky D10s! Sun, 7:00–11:00 pm

A reprise of the scenario I ran at Con of the North 2015. A nice epic delve into a fantasy history, appropriate to WisCon.

There are lots and lots of other great panels that I want to see, including “Feminism in Thedas”, “Are Casual Gamers Considered ‘Real’ Gamers?”, “Why I Need Diverse Games” and many others. Some of which aren’t scheduled against something I’m already on. I’ll have to miss the Guest of Honor speeches to run “Dooms”. That’s how it goes at WisCon, though — too much cool stuff going on at the same time, all the time.

Hopefully see you there! And see you on the other side in any case.

WisCon 39 is now over, sadly. It was mostly pretty great. Lots of wonderful, deep and important conversations; superb panels; some surprisingly good gaming; and general fannish enjoyment a-plenty. I feel both ebullient and exhausted. More later!