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.
This will be my twenty-second Gen Con, my third officially attending as Distant Era, and my fourth attending with fine art fantasy offerings.
Over the past week, I’ve been journaling my experience writing games for publication and public consumption, starting with contest entries in my teens. Gen Con featured in that story, so as I prepare for another year, I’m reflecting back on Gen Cons past and what I remember best from them. This week, I’m thinking of how I got into Gen Con and eventually into game writing, life paths which come from the same source in the late 1990s.
1999
I moved to Chicago from Ohio in late 1997. I worked at Ed Debevic’s Real American Diner in downtown Chicago and took classes at Chicago’s ImprovOlympic (later “iO) under Del Close and others. It took a year to make friends and find my people here, and one of the first was my fellow Ed’s server Michael T. Kuciak. Coincidentally, we both played beatniks—Mike went by Bebop, and my character’s name was Nick Beat. My schtick was to do bad food-related poetry on the counter. Not the most popular bit at Ed’s.
Before the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films made it safe to publicly admit you liked playing make-believe with storytelling and dice, you kept such things to yourself or faced ostracism and ridicule as a degenerate social reject. So finding people who shared such interests involved listening, trying to pick up on certain cues and references—Monty Python, Star Wars, sf and fantasy literature, the Renaissance festival, Magic cards, and so on. One day, I overheard my fellow servers Mike and Malcolm discussing a fantasy card game in the break room at Ed’s. This was the hint.
In late 1998 and early 1999, I ended up playing Dungeons & Dragons, Alternity, and other games with Mike and Malcolm and got to know them better.
Mike didn’t just play D&D. He’d published several articles for Dragon Magazine. He’d grown up going to Gen Con. These had been very faraway, impossible things to me until I met someone who’d done them. In 1999, Mike got together a group to attend Gen Con in Milwaukee. I was hungry for new experiences, and I joined.
While I didn’t bring my camera with me to Gen Con 1999, I do have photos from 1999 for context. And some anecdotes.
TOP: At (my first) Origins Game Fair 1999, I met David Prowse (Darth Vader, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi) Phil Brown (Uncle Owen, Star Wars) and Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi). When I approached the signing table, Jeremy Bulloch said, “Eat and get out! Eat and get out! …That reminds me of school.” I asked why, and he explained that his school master always shouted at them to GET OUT of class if they made any noise. Affable chap. It’s just the sort of thing that happens at Origins. On my way back through Dayton, I stopped to see the Springfield Civic Theatre production of 1776, in which my friend played Martha Jefferson. In Distant-Era-related news, twenty-three years later, she brought her daughters to to Chicago to be Distant Era’s first cosplay portraiture clients, playing characters inspired from My Hero Academia and Madoka Magica.
CENTER: The cast of Slam Dunk, the improvised poetry slam improv form at iO. Slam Dunk opened in mid-February 1999 from Del Close’s graduating 5B class. It (and its counterpart show, The Holy Fools) were the last of the shows directed in full by the late great Del Close, who passed on March 4, 1999 (incidentally the same day as Gary Gygax in 2008). In this show, I simply wore my beatnik work uniform from Ed Debevic’s.
BOTTOM: D&D 1999. Mike Kuciak is seated at the left. Mary Utz, on the right, was also in Slam Dunk, in the center photo. Once, at the iO bar, Mary casually introduced me to her friend Rachel, who I spoke to for a few minutes. Years later, I realized this was Rachel Dratch. Mary knew everyone.
What do I remember about Gen Con 1999?
– We stayed in affordable dorms at the university and took a shuttle to the convention.
– We went to The Safehouse in Milwaukee, the Cold-War-era spy bar with the secret entrance from the alley and the password.
– I attended a panel moderated by a TSR person. TSR people were gods in my eyes. In the Q&A session, people in the audience shared stories about their games. I raised my hand to participate and shared a favorite story about a spontaneous adventure I’d run that I was proud of. The moderator dismissed it as stupid. I felt embarrassed and humiliated in front of the room. It was a disheartening experience, but the rest of the convention was great.
– I played in a D&D organized play adventure at the convention.
– I met Rich Baker and Bill Slavicsek, who signed my Alternity books. A decade later, I’d know them better.
– After the collapse of TSR, Wizards of the Coast announced a brand new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I swear I playtested the game under a red-haired DM named “Monte.”
– Hanging out by the brick half walls outside the convention center, I spotted Gary Gygax smoking a cigarette, talking to a few younger gamers. I joined the group and hung out for a while. Gygax was laid back and chill. I asked a very young-person question about whether he ever envisioned something this big, and he said he hadn’t. Most important, he was kind—to me and to the young gamers gathered around him. Kind, laid back, and easygoing as he took a smoke break. Standing in that circle felt totally calm and peaceful, and it’s one of my two memories of interacting with the man. My memory is hazy as to whether this was Gen Con ’99, ’01, or both.
– In the late 1990s, I was shocked to see that girls attended Gen Con. (I was too scared to talk to them.) Writing this in 2024 seems weird. Fantasy films, Marvel, the resurgence of D&D, internet channels, and geek culture has changed things so significantly over the past quarter century that it’s difficult to effectively explain how different things were. I’ve written a lot about fear in this post, but I’m not overstating it. From my experience growing up, the fear was real. I’m happy that we can enjoy what we love without that fear these days.
Here’s a photo of the Alternity Player’s Handbook that Bill Slavicsek and Rich Baker signed at Gen Con 1999. Eight years later, Bill would interview me for a D&D design job at Wizards of the Coast that I didn’t get, but it indirectly led to all the freelance D&D design work I did for Wizards with D&D and other games from 2009 on. I was to work extensively with Rich on many projects both inside and outside of Wizards, including his company’s reboot of Alternity. Twenty years after the Gen Con signing, here are our names together on an Alternity book in 2019.
Gen Con 2001
I missed Gen Con 2000 because I was traveling the US and Canada with Montreal’s Repercussion Theatre, performing in Romeo and Juliet and A Comedy of Errors.
In 2001, I returned to Gen Con with Mike and friends.
– I remember sitting out on the patio at the Rock Bottom Brewery Milwaukee with Mike and our other friends, enjoying the food, the river below, and the glorious time that we were about to have.
– Mike discovered the brand new Zombies!!! game and Grave Robbers from Outer Space, both of which we played the hell out of late at night.
– This was the Gen Con where I participated in the Whose Line Is It Anyway? improv event, and LARPers tried to get me to join them. I asked one what was going on, but as was always the case with Vampire and LARP, no one was ever able to explain them to me.
– My sister had sent me a batch of delicious chocolate chip cookies, which I carried around with me in a tupperware container. I passed Gary Gygax smoking outside and offered him one. He politely declined. I don’t think he knew what he was missing.
– Mike and I registered for an endless role-playing game that clung so firmly to the rails that nothing our characters did mattered. At one point, I passed him a note card with an illustration of a train on the tracks, with the word “plot” written on the train. Mike passed the card back to me, having illustrated and labeled “impassible mountains” on all sides. It was around then that the giant robots attacked the party, who were supposed to flee from them to the next plot point. Instead, Mike and I decided to take them on. It was clear we weren’t supposed to do this, and the other players hung back to protect their characters as we rushed in. However, this battle woke the table up, the game turned exciting for a few minutes, and from their places of safety, the other players contributed to our effort. We nearly won the battle but were mercifully cut down—at which point Mike and I (also mercifully) got to excuse ourselves. I kept that illustration and still have it somewhere. It serves as an eternal reminder when writing games with choice.
– My friend Lowell got left behind at the convention center overnight, and he met a whole new group of friends, some of whom I’m friends with to this day. These were the pre-cell-phone days when “meet us here at this hour and look for us” was the best one could do.
– I left Gen Con to drive back to Chicago to watch the ImprovOlympic twenty-fifth anniversary show in Chicago. In 1999, I’d seen an amazing two-woman show at iO called Dratch and Fey. At the big twenty-fifth anniversary show in 2001 I saw them again, as well as a new-to-me performer named Amy Poehler who I thought was fantastic. All of them have done a couple things since. Among the other teams, I also saw The Family play, and Beer Shark Mice, and so many others. In true Del Close fashion, I could name drop for days, which I suppose is what comes of meeting people and doing things.
Gen Con 2002–2003, the Missing Years
Mike Kuciak left the Midwest in 2001 and moved to Los Angeles to make movies. I missed the final Milwaukee Gen Con in 2002, as I was performing at American Players Theatre at the other side of Wisconsin every night of the week except Mondays. The following year, after returning from (another) tour of Romeo and Juliet with Utah Shakespearean Festival, I spent the summer of 2003 performing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream followed by Twelfth Night with two different companies in Chicago. I met Elizabeth in that production of Twelfth Night. And thus I missed Gen Con’s 2003 debut in Indianapolis when the Lord of the Rings cast attended as special guests. As this painting on the side of a building in downtown Indianapolis might say….
Gen Cons Ownward
From 2004 I never missed a Gen Con except the 2020 Gen Con that didn’t happen.
Here are a number of posts about the Distant-Era-era Gen Cons the post pandemic years.
There are many stories to tell of the Gen Cons of intervening years, and perhaps I’ll share some if there’s interest.
As for Mike Kuciak, the man who opened my mind to Gen Con and took me to the first two, he did make it back to Gen Con last year, in 2023. His feature film Death Metal was part of the Gen Con Film Festival lineup. Here we are below, celebrating after the Gen Con Film Festival with Mike and Drew (“The Tataille“) Beyer, and Chloe Baldwin. Never a man to rest, Mike’s already got a brand new new horror film called From the Shadows, starring Keith David and Bruce Davidson hitting the screens as we speak!
That’s it for the rambling summary of my first Gen Cons. Thanks for taking the trip back in time with me!
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