Hey all, Sam here.
Hello, hello, and as promised, I am here to give you the wrap-up of all things Gen Con. This year the tabletop gaming convention took place August 1-4 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, and I knew it was going to be a good time. I had a whole bunch of panels planned, and I took a lot of great notes. I’m hoping to roll that creative inspiration over into actually doing more creative work on my own projects presently and as the year progresses.
I didn’t take any photos of the convention floor itself, because it is huge. Seriously, Gen Con takes up the entirety of the Indianapolis Convention Center, plus overflows into like a half-dozen connected hotels, AND takes over the entirety of Lucas Oil Stadium (home to NFL team Indianapolis Colts). It’s massive. And Gen Con was completely sold out this year, meaning that attendance was over 71,000 people. Based on estimates that are in turn based on previous years of the convention, it is estimated that Gen Con brings in about $77 million to Indianapolis…and I think that’s mostly because of hotels, parking, food, and shopping at local establishments, plus whatever taxes are collected from all the purchases inside the convention. Basically, it’s a huge, profitable, geeky event.
Next year’s Gen Con will be July 31-Aug 3, also in Indianapolis, Indiana. We’re definitely going, so maybe we’ll see you there.
All right, let’s get started. This post has a whole bunch of photos.
Panels: I went to so many panels this year, and a few of them were great and I got a whole bunch of notes from them, and some were good and I still got some notes, but there weren’t as many nuggets of wisdom that I added to my Kindle Scribe. The Query Q&A panel was pretty informative and definitely gave me good tips and tricks if I do decide to try and go a more traditional publishing route (at least with some of my projects).
Aside from that, panels on topics like Breaking the Rules! (basically writing rules and should you break them), Beat Writer’s Block, Fall in Love With Your Writing. Yep, yours!, POV Pandemonium: How Many POVs Does Your Story Need?, Sharpen Your Story, Strategies to Avoid Infodumps, Emotional Self-Care for Writers, and Hacking Your Habitat (So You Can Write) were really useful to me. Perhaps I’ll do a separate post with some of my favorite advice/tips/info that I gleaned from all of my panels this year.
And then David went to a panel about starting your own Actual Play stream, and we attended a panel on Carving Your Own Niche in TTRPG Content together. We’ve been thinking about moving the blog content over to a YouTube channel and TikTok for a while now, and we just haven’t fully taken that leap yet.
Food: We usually always eat some great food while we’re at Gen Con. Yes, this year that included visits to places like White Castle and Waffle House, because we sadly don’t have any of those near us (it’s a 3 hour drive to the nearest Waffle House). But we also went to our usual stops at Giordano’s for some yummy pizza (although we skipped the Chicago style deep dish this time around), and Yard House (for a meal of half off appetizers, yum!).
Normally we go to an Irish Pub for some Shepard’s Pie and Bread Pudding, but this year it was closed for a private event on the day we tried to go, so we found a ramen place called Wei Ramen nearby and decided to try it out. There was also a coffee shop on the second floor, and a bubble tea/mochi donut counter just inside…and we went for bubble tea and donuts three times while we were in Indy.
We also finally got around to trying out the food truck offerings for Gen Con. We had a lobster roll and tacos at Naughty Lobstah (which was delicious) and waffles from Side Chick Waffles (also delicious), so we’re probably going to try and do a little more of the food trucks next year (depending on our panel schedules, obviously).
Haul: There’s a s0lo RPG about being a crow and going on little adventures! I’m so excited about that. I absolutely love crow themed thing, so that was a quick impulse purchase for me. I also needed some more tea from Dryad Tea because I had finished off a couple of my favorite flavors. And of course we picked up some books for various RPGs like Pathfinder Second Edition, Vaesen, and the out-of-print Mistborn Adventure Game (because Dragonsteel just launched the Cosmere RPG on Kickstarter: 1st wave is Stormlight Archive in 2025, and Wave 2 will be Mistborn in 2026). Oh, and David picked up a couple Stormlight Archive playmats because they were too dope to pass up.
And then there’s the books/writing related things…
I took four books I owned with me to get them signed by their authors, and that’s always a joy for me. I also picked up the last three Story Engine expansions that I needed to complete my set, so now I only need a few more Booster Packs to have everything. I love using The Story Engine and The Deck of Worlds for writing prompts and creativity boosting, and I can’t wait to have The Lore Master’s Deck, which should be coming fairly soon, to my collection.
David picked up a couple books he spotted in Author Avenue, and then I picked up a couple freebie books from the Writer’s Symposium, including an ARC that sounds utterly fascinating, so I’m really looking forward to reading that.
Oh, and yes…I did buy dice at Gen Con as well, but I’m not sharing those here yet, because they belong to the characters in my current WIP (Roll for Romance, which I’ve talked about before on the blog. It’s part contemporary romance following two people falling in love while playing D&D, and part epic fantasy following the in-game D&D adventure), so naturally I needed dice for all of the in-game characters. I also made all of the characters as figures on HeroForge, and David printed them out and painted them for me….so when I’m ready to start sharing more information about the book (aka, once I’ve started editing and am working towards publication), I’m going to do character reveals, using character art, the miniatures, and their dice, so you can get the vibes of each character.
Whew, another epic Gen Con in the books…and now it’s time to start financially planning for next year. Of course, next year we also might be able to get a couple more friends to come along, so splitting costs (for things like gas, parking, and hotel) means more money for food, books, and games.
We’ll just see what happens. Anyway, that is all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
Free State of Geek 