Three weeks ago, we went back in time to the earliest Gen Cons I attended in Milwaukee—1999 and 2001—and two weeks ago, 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. Last week, I covered the years between 2008 and 2015 when I started attending Gen Con as a game designer working on Dungeons & Dragons and other games. This week, I’m concluding the Gen Con recollections with a brief synopsis of the last eight years I’ve worked at the convention, as well as some highlights from this year!
This particular entry will be a bit scant on pictures because I’m writing it from Gen Con!
Gen Con 2016–2018: Academy Games
Princes of the Apocalypse was the last big D&D book I worked on (with Sasquatch Game Studio), and it released before Gen Con in 2015, marking the end of a magnificent era where I went to Gen Con to engage with the wonderful folks I worked with, and I got to witness my work receive industry nominations and rewards.
In 2015, a Kickstarter for Mare Nostrum: Empires, released by Academy Games, changed the course of my Gen Cons. Mare Nostrum: Empires is a game where each player takes on the role of an ancient empire—Carthage, Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylonia. It has trade and building and war and five different ways to win, and it packs just about everything you want in a big game down to 90 minutes, with accessible rules. While waiting for the game to arrive, I read Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World and developed a new fascination for history.
In the years I was working in the game industry, Gen Con’s numbers began to swell. The tabletop game boom that began in the ‘00s took off. With the costs of the convention rising higher and higher, the lines growing longer, the vendors seldom having enough stock to satisfy demand, I had to rethink how to Gen Con.
In 2016, Academy Games put out a call looking for volunteers to teach their games in exchange for a badge (and games). From 2016 to 2018, I taught their historical games and had a great time doing it. Academy Games gave me something to DO at the convention and engage with games I loved while allowing time to catch up with people.
The other thing that happened in 2016 was I had the idea for what would become Distant Era, and I dedicated more time to photographing costumed portraiture.
Gen Con 2019–2023: The Distant Era Workshops
In 2019, the month after founding Distant Era, I accompanied Greg Inda with my own workshops for photographers to Gen Con. I did one on taking portraits and one on toy photography. These workshops were technically part of the Glitter Guild programming.
The pandemic closed the following Gen Con, but in 2021 I returned. In 2022, we offered modeling workshops for cosplayers as Distant Era, as well as an extended toy photography class. I repeated the portraiture workshop in 2023. Here are some links to those workshops:
2022
2023
2024 Highlights
Some of the wonderful participants from past Distant Era workshops reached out to book mini sessions at Gen Con 2024. I spent most of the convention photographing those sessions, which were fun and lively. On Thursday night, we helped our friends at the Glitter Guild burlesque show.
While I photographed the portraiture sessions, Elizabeth got in line for me and acquired one of the hot games at Gen Con this year. Titled Rock Hard: 1977, it’s a thematic tabletop game about building a career in the music industry in the 1970s. The game was designed by Jackie Fox, bass player for The Runaways (“Cherry Bomb”), who kindly signed her promotional character card for me.
We caught up with artist Claudio Pozas and game designer Rodney Thompson, both of whom I worked with on Heroes of the Feywild in 2010. We hung out with our friends Keith Baker and Dave Chalker in passing. Dave had just won a Dice Tower Award for his game Thunder Road: Vendetta, and I paused to get a quick selfie with him as I hustled back to the hotel in search of a coaxial cable to connect to the convention’s sound system for the Glitter Guild show. We hung out with Christopher Badell of Greater Than Games on Wednesday, and Elizabeth attended many more of their events and hung out with the Sentinels of the Multiverse community.
Speaking of comics, I picked up a game called Comic Hunters, which features beautiful Marvel Comics cover art.
On Wednesday, the day before the convention officially opened, we caught Deadpool and Wolverine at the local theater, which we’d been trying to schedule time for back at home.
This Gen Con presented more unexpected challenges than any previous Gen Con, but fortunately we overcame them all, and everything worked out in the end. Now I’ll be shackling myself to my desk to edit photos for the rest of the month, which will appear here in the coming weeks! Thanks to all who’ve joined along on our Gen Con odyssey!
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