Hosted a mini-con
This past weekend, my brother and bunch of guys we met on a Facebook group hosted a mini OSR gaming convention.
We hired a tiny hall for cheap and at 1pm the nerds converged for 8 hours of gaming and talking and eating. By the end of the day, I was still a little surprised it had happened at all.
I had grown tired of trying to squeeze into the OSR schedule of the rest of the world. Living out in the middle of know where with two small children and fulltime work is not conducive to making 3am online games work. So, I set out in search of some locals!
I have a gaming group who I play with fairly regularly, and they're kind enough to let me throw various games at them. However, I was looking to find other GMs who are running OSR systems so that I can learn from them and also just nerd about the systems I enjoy. Which led me to the local Facebook ttrpg group. Which, to be honest, had been rather lack lustre. This time my approach was slightly different though. I had a bit of a plan.
Capture people in a Discord server.
To my surprise, there was quite a positive response to 'Hey, anyone like OSR games?' The post kicked off! The first post in a while to get much attention on that page for quite some time.
The initial group was about 8 folks who joined in. Everyone nerding out about their games and, as is tradition, failing to define what OSR is. My brother organised a meet up at a cafe, I didn't go as I live in a different town, but it was hoot. Everyone was pretty cool. No one was a dickhead. And at that little meet up they talked about hosting a small con. Something small, but something that offered a very different range of games what is seen at cons in Adelaide at the moment (six 5e tables, and one Call of Cthulhu usually).
It turns out, a bunch of 30- to 40-year-old GMs who work in corporate and management roles can organise things real quick. In three weeks, we were ready to roll. Hired hall, mapped out the day, made spread sheets, set up Warhorn, rallied players, and then ran a tiny little con.
We had three tables and two sessions and five different games.
Session 1
Table 1: Old School Essentials - Save Vs Sarnoth
Table 2: Mothership - Vibechete
Table 3: Bibliotecs (Cairn Hack) - Water in the Mortlock Wing
Session 2
Table 1: Old School Essentials - The Hyqueous Vaults
Table 2: Cy_Borg - Blacklight Express
Table 3: Planet Psychon
The hall was small and noisy, but it was clean and welcoming. We got take away food and folks bought their own snacks. I killed a Pyrohydra (which was a straight up weakling if I'm honest). I playtested a game I'd been working on figured out I don't really want to make it anymore. No issues, no weird interactions (well... nothing weirder than you'd expect).
The discord now has 40 dice people and growing (if you're in Australia or coming here feel free to join). We are planning next year's events. Three in total. One in February, one in May (as destination event), and another in September or October.
Good times ahead. Reach out to people. Make cool things happen.