Distant Era returns for individual mini character portrait sessions at Gen Con 2024 (check for the link at the bottom of this post). As the big convention approaches and we prepare for the event, I’ve been looking back on Gen Cons past.
Two weeks ago, we went back in time to the earliest Gen Cons I attended in Milwaukee—1999 and 2001—and last week, I wrote about the first years I attended Gen Con in Indianapolis between 2004 and 2007, where I began to get more involved with the convention as a blogger for Wizards of the Coast.
This week’s chapter touches on the years between 2008 and 2015 when I started attending Gen Con as a game designer working on Dungeons & Dragons and other games.
Gen Con 2008
I had a lot on my mind at Gen Con 2008. The previous year, I’d interviewed for a design job at Wizards of the Coast, but by 2008 I was feeling the weight of all my failures and had all but given up on attempting to write for D&D. It was a busy year, but somehow Elizabeth found a way to attend Gen Con, in spite of being in rehearsals for Taming of the Shrew and us prepping for our wedding later that month.
My favorite pictures from 2008 are these three. Elizabeth was reading the Eberron books at the time and wanted to attend talks with the authors, Keith Baker and James Wyatt. I briefly met James and asked a question about D&D writing. He invited me to the freelancer seminar, and I gave him my card.
My other favorite picture from that year is the one below, which shows me waiting in line for the Battlestar Galactica: Pegasus expansion when Patrick Rothfuss walked by. We’d met Pat a few months earlier when we attended our first science-fiction convention (Odd Con) at a small hotel in Madison, Wisconsin. Name of the Wind had only been out one year, so he was a new author on the scene then.
Gen Con 2009–2015: A Turn of Fortune
These years are less about Gen Con and more about my experience of it, which changed from an enthusiast’s vacation to a professional conference in this time.
Turns of fortune can happen strangely and unexpectedly. Mine stared in late 2008 when Andy Collins at Wizards wrote to tell me Wizards of the Coast was looking for more designers; he suggested I apply, since I’d done well in the interview process the previous year. Since then, I’d stopped paying attention to jobs at Wizards. Having more or less given up at that point, none of the following would have happened had not Andy reached out, and had I not taken another designer test and submitted my application at his invitation.
In 2009, James Wyatt responded to that application with an offer of freelance work on Monster Manual III under the direction of Mike Mearls. What happened next was a perfect alchemy of the like-minded people with like-minded visions meeting at the right time. Once I had a chance, I was ready. James and Mike gave me that chance. I poured my heart and soul into that opportunity, and it led to the next, and the next, and the next, for years on end.
Thus, my interaction with Gen Con changed in 2009 after I started regularly freelancing for Wizards of the Coast writing and designing for Dungeons & Dragons. By Gen Con 2009, I was working on my third big D&D book that year, and the focus of my Gen Con shifted again. Whereas from 1999 to 2004 I’d come to Gen Con to participate in games, and from 2005 to 2007 I’d started to report on the convention, the years from 2009 to 2015 were the years I attended as a game industry professional. My priorities were focused on spending time with the people I worked with and worked for, on celebrating D&D, on making plans to make it better.
This was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, and in truth, my Gen Con dream. I’d always wanted to feel like I was part of what was going on and not apart from it. If I needed any more validation, it came from the ENNIE Awards bestowed upon several of the books we worked on in this period.
Photos during this time become a bit strange, as I’m alternating between an old digital point-and-shoot, an iPod Touch/early iPhone, and (rarely) my then-new Canon 40D SLR. I present here some notable years from this period where I do have more images. The years I don’t share here (2009, 2011, 2013) were assuredly more of the same.
Gen Con 2010 Gallery
Gen Con 2012
All I can say for sure about Gen Con 2012 is that I performed in a D&D improv show with Greg Bilsland, Tara Theoharis, James Wyatt, Mike Robles, and Tom Lommel. It was wild and awesome, and the audience had a blast. Prior to the show, I had been so anxious. I took time to stretch and breathe the way I used to prepare for shows back when that had been my career and way of life. If anything, I was surprised how all those former years of classes, teams, and shows “booted up,” and suddenly I was doing it and it made sense and I knew how it went. I realized then that there’s a part of me that only comes alive when I’m performing. I always think it’s gone away, but it turns up in the strangest places when given the opportunity.
Gen Con 2014 Gallery
A lot happened in 2014. I’d worked on Dungeons & Dragons 5e, and this was the big year of its release. it was the year of the big D&D block party.
As a person who can’t draw (as evidenced by my Feathergale Spire sketch below), I’ve always been in awe of fantasy artists, and one of my wildest dreams was to see art for material I’d written or designed. This first happened in 2001 with Chuck Lukacs’s illustrations for my first article in Dragon Magazine, and from 2009 on, I enjoyed an embarrassment of riches, from Howard Lyon’s original perfect illustration of the banderhobb on Monster Manual III to Ralph Horsley’s art for “The Siege of Gardmore Abbey,” in which a doomed knight faces off against a red dragon. It’s a dramatic scene from a dramatic adventure, and Ralph’s work took my breath away. The adventure began as a tournament game for PAX East and would have been forgotten if not for Teos Abadia, pictured below, who championed this piece, and it was later given full publication in Dungeon Magazine with gorgeous artwork. Ralph so very generously gave me a print of that work at Gen Con 2014.
End of an Era
In 2000, Cas Anvar (later of The Expanse) hired me as an actor for a tour of A Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet. When I moved to Montreal and started that incredible journey, I remember thinking, “This will one day end.”
I thought the same at the beginning of that blissful time working in Spring Green at American Players Theater in 2002, participating in the best Shakespeare work I had ever seen or done.
And when I got that first opportunity to freelance for Wizards of the Coast from James, working with Mike, I reminded myself of it then, in 2009, at the very beginning: It all ends eventually. So we must make the best of time while we have it. And I feel like I did that in those years between Gen Con 2008 and 2015. I never expected those opportunities to last as long as they did, never expected to work on core books of an edition of D&D, never expected it to win any awards. After all that, what more could I possibly want?
With the release of D&D 5e, the model for releasing D&D game books changed for a time. Wizards no longer needed a stable of freelancers pumping out a hardcover rulebook and content for two magazines every month, and in my opinion that change and the advent of DM’s Guild—where anyone can publish D&D adventures—was healthy for the game. I continued to do game writing and design work with other studios for a time, and I still do, when projects align. In fact, just last year at Gen Con 2023… But that story can wait.
As with the bounty of other great experiences I’ve been lucky to have, I look back fondly on that era of Gen Con between 2008 and 2015 and all the people I worked with then, and for me it feels like a kind of Camelot. Most of those people have moved on to other companies and other pursuits, as this is the nature of things, but a few remain, and I’m always happy to see them at Gen Con and at Origins.
I am eternally grateful to James Wyatt and Mike Mearls for giving me that chance in 2009. They fundamentally changed my life, and they shepherded me into that life with patience, compassion, and very good notes that helped me to learn and grow. I will always be grateful for this.
As for Gen Con during the next eight years, my experience of the convention would transition into something new and different, but that too is another story for another day.
Distant Era at Gen Con 2024
Distant Era will be at Gen Con 2024, photographing individual subjects in twenty-minute mini sessions as a convention special.
If you’re going to be at Gen Con and you’d like to be photographed in your favorite cosplay (or if you just want a headshot), please let me know here. It may be a bit late, as my dance card is nearly full, but I’ll include the link, just in case!
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