Putting on a Con

The discussion takes on new life. James and I, who at that time were in kind of rough footing, had been toying around with the idea of putting together a gathering for our friends. It shifted the focus from the areas we disagree to something we could work on together, to this conversation, where James stopped in at RIW and found out we could have one of their rooms for free for the weekend and she would give our guests discounts for things they bought in the store.

His excitement carried over the phone and I was buzzing with possibilities. We agreed that we had a bunch of work to do. We needed to plan events, food, snacks, how we would communicate to the attendees, who we would invite, travel arrangements and those things overlapped with the number we thought would attend and if they had any restrictions, how much free time and on we went.

That night we talked to Steve, not only an potential attendee, but one of the core people in our group, who we thought might want to run something. Steve had three or four games he thought he could run, we talked him back to just two. We wanted him to spend most of his time just enjoying, but we knew we needed a little more content. James had an idea of a Savage Worlds games and a Warhammer demonstration. I thought I would run a D&D game, maybe a first edition throw back and a play test Orks n the Boardroom.

We started to flesh out the schedule, putting up a google document to share what was happening when, who we had confirmation, look at the logistics. James locked down Warhammer into two event, a painting demonstration and game. I settled on making my D&D adventure and Gary Gygax tribute, something he ran, something which had a little legacy to it. This would be three hours long on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, which caused James to scrap Savage Worlds and replace it with a Magic draft. We had card games and board games, roleplaying games and miniatures. We had, a room and a hotel locked down for us, now we just needed to communicate it.

I took a crack at writing up a flier, all the details, trying as best as I could to cover my amateur commercial art skills. James reviewed and edited it, adjusting some wording and cleaning it up. We sent it to our nine or so invitees letting them know to invite others they thought would enjoy this kind of thing.

Then came food, we could have pizza every night. So we talked about the places in the area would could get food from, discussed what would make good and bad gamer food and considered how often we thought we should get out of the game room. A couple meals out, one as a kind of celebration dinner at the end. We didn't need to worry about breakfast, because of the hotel, but we needed lunches and dinners we could go get for the rest of the meals. Then, we realized we would need snacks and pop available for people to enjoy. Variety, again, was the key. We didn't want fast food all the time, not sandwiches for every meal. We worked this list a few times to get it right. Salsa and chips, to go with the green Chili we had learned Kevin was brining, Swiss Cake Rolls for nostalgia reasons, Buddy's pizza and Buffalo Wold Wings. It looked to be a good list.

Prizes... Oh the discussions on prizes. I can't stress this enough, we wanted everyone to have one of the best experience of the year. So, when it came to prizes we wanted a way to get them into the hands of many people and make sure even those who didn't win anything would have a little something to go home with. So, we considered prizes for each event, then door prizes, then just welcome bags. We literally, until the last week had several ideas n the air on this. The one, or should I say two, we settled on were a raffle for a few bigger prizes, such as Warhammer figures and them a gift bag for everyone, which would have all the things they should need for the weekend and a little bit more. Dice and paintbrushes, magic cards and a miniature. We would give away the raffle tickets for good play or winning a game. No one, we thought, would walk away empty handed.

As the days closed, my nervousness and excitement grew. I only hoped it would be as good as we had planned it. Toward the end, I even made a detailed behind the scenes schedule that included times to hand out menus and who would need to pick up what and when. It was approaching the ridiculous, but I needed to know that I knew what needed to be done. I needed to ease that part of my mine that keeps saying, what about this and what about that.

Then, I was on my way to the airport to pick up our first guests, the planning ended and the magic began.