Under a Black Rainbow

I will neither pretend to be eloquent or short of words. Those who know me know that I could spin a yarn about getting a gallon of milk into a 30 minute epic which may or may not involve a brawl in the dairy aisle with some blue-hair who took the last gallon of 2%. So, here are my reflections on my first gaming convention, Chaosium Con 2023.     As someone fairly new to Call of Cthulhu, I didn’t know what to expect at Chaosium Con. I knew that friends I’ve known through various Discord channels would be there, but I didn’t know how meeting them in person would go. I knew that there would be the higher ups and content creators from Chaosium, but I assumed they’d be flanked by a table and some sort of security detail or something a la Comic Con. I expected there to be an overwhelming number of games, but thought there’d be overlapping tables, creating a disaster scene of games overlapping with Cthulhu stomping his way through Runequest’s Glorantha, pirates of 7 th Sea swashbuck...

Back when I was 11 or 12, my friend group consisted of hyper nerds into video games and roleplaying games (we were good at the former and almost certainly doing the latter completely incorrectly). And I would spend the next several years playing DnD (or HeroQuest) or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness off and on with various friend groups.  I played once or twice in college again, but left the hobby alone for the most part until 2016 or 2017 when I got back into a campaign with some old friends from my DJing days. Then mom got sick and I had to put that on the backburner again. Then the pandemic hit and I found myself gravitating toward the collective storytelling found in horror roleplaying games like Kult and Call of Cthulhu as opposed to the fantasy worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. What fantasy lacked is what horror seemed to contain completely: a sense of actual danger and, at least for me, infinitely more interesting storytelling and narrative opportunities....