Chaosium Con 4: And with Strange Aeons Even Death May Die
Another trip to Ypsilanti, MI; another week of debauchery and horror gaming with some of the best to do it.
My first two years, I volunteered so that I could meet new people. Now I've met a ton of the regulars and show up a few days early so we can find ourselves congregated in the hotel bar, regaling each other with stories of prior gaming sessions or other Chaosium Con shenanigans from prior years.
The hotel bar provides a perfect nexus of a meeting point: you can see people enter the hotel from the front entrance, you can see them exiting the hotel side of things while heading out the entrance or to the convention center, or you can see people leaving the convention center to head back to the hotel. It's a perfect place to catch literally anyone at the con if you haven't seen them yet.
The first few days before gaming, vending, or panels begin is a good time to stock up on supplies from the HoD or Kroger's, and snag some grub from other local restaurants that will find themselves overflowing from con traffic once it starts. This is why I flew in Wednesday morning.
Wednesday, April 8th
My flights began at 7am and I first stepped foot in the hotel around 1pm. Got to sit and chat with Symphony Entertainment's owner (and real-life megaphone in human form) Bridgett Jeffries. I was lucky to return home with all my hearing this time around.
We pile into several cars as there are numerous errands to run and numerous people to be picked up from the airport yet, so we scramble out of the hotel around 4:30, make our rounds around town, and then return with heavy hands and overflowing bags. I make it a few extra hours, but the day of travel has left me wiped out and I pass out between 8 and 9pm.
Thursday, April 9th
Thursday's a fun day, and typically when the majority of people start to arrive. We post up in the hotel bar area, catching up with convention attendees as they arrive, all of them equally excited for the evening's Chaoisum mixer, the Symphony LARP after, and other various planned activities happening pre-con.
It's also the morning we try to have a Symphony breakfast at our favorite spot, Luca's Coney Island, where we not only had a group larger than our normal size, but we got the same server as previous visits (and who absolutely takes care of us every time).
Back to the hotel for hangs, off-books games, delirious conversation, and a ton of reconnecting with other gamers flooding the hotel hallways.
Wanting something more substantial for dinner, I opted to head across the street with Perry, Samantha, and Doc as we enjoyed a super quiet (but delicious) meal at Caspian Mediterranean Grill. After a quick bite, it was time to mingle with all the other con attendees at the Chaosium Con mixer, which was...fine. I continue to struggle with certain aspects of the hotel management's thinking when it comes to servicing different aspects of the convention, but having only two bartenders (who weren't even actually bartenders) trying to make specialty mixed drinks for several hundred people is never gonna go smoothly. I've stopped trying to get a drink during the mixers due to the egregious amount of time it takes.
After the mixer came the Symphony LARP called "The Mind That Wasn't Made," written by Clyde Williamson. I don't LARP myself, but I made sure to capture a ton of photos and video of the event. You can hear more about it on the Symphony Twitch channel during our Symphony Lounge airing on Saturday, April 26th at 1:30pm CST / 2:30 EST, where Bridgett and I will have our annual post-Chaosium Con chat about what worked, what didn't, what we loved, and what we'd love to see more of next time.
It was near midnight by the time the LARP wrapped up and I headed damn near directly to bed since I had a 9am game to be up and ready for the next day.
It was near midnight by the time the LARP wrapped up and I headed damn near directly to bed since I had a 9am game to be up and ready for the next day.
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| The Symphony Entertainment crew |
May have had a little more vodka than I'd intended the night before, but got up in plenty of time to munch on some breakfast leftovers before hiking over to the convention center to grab coffee from the coffee truck that's posted up outside the convention center the last two years, Bearclaw Coffee. An absolutely essential addition to the convention experience as the hotel's interpretation of coffee is...dubious.
Since I had a huge chunk of time between games, I sauntered through the dealer hall to see what all was being vended this year, stopped by my friend Tiffanie's table (Colourcat Designs) to see what all great stuff she'd brought and marveled at many of the skulls she painted specifically for the con. After, I snagged a light lunch in the hotel bar and then headed back to the convention center for my final game of the day.
Honeymoon in Sweden was a VIP game hosted by Chaosium's own Paul Fricker, who constantly creates fantastic Call of Cthulhu scenarios that are always a joy to play through. That I was joined by several other members of the Symphony family (Andy, Rina, and Heather) made the experience only that much better.
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| The Old Ways Podcast crew |
Saturday, April 11th
Another 9am game started my Saturday off perfectly with a full table of some of my favorite degenerates playing a game written AND run by our dear friend Keeper Doc over at Prospero House Publishing. We played through his 1970's scenario Deliver Us from Evil, which was inspired heavily by the movie Deliverance.
Doc knew he was in trouble, and we all knew it beforehand, but never was it more apparent than when he began the game saying "This is an X card; it's not for you, it's for me," knowing full well there might be a chance that his players would push his buttons before he pushed ours. A riotous game and absolutely a personal highlight for me.
With not much time between sessions, I went up to my room and refilled my travel cup for the next 4-hour game ahead of me. I found my way back to the tables, along with my friend Miranda, and we played through Dust to Dust, written and ran by Sean Branney of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, famous for making several of HP Lovecraft's stories into movies while also creating really fantastic (and affordable) props for many Call of Cthulhu games.
This was a dense game, and required a LOT of piecing together of highly textual clues that, honestly, had me more confused than knowing exactly what was going on. But, an enjoyable game nonetheless as I watched Miranda just absolutely dominate the table.
I wanted to grab dinner with people, but everyone either already had dinner plans or were about to head off to their evening games. Decided to chow down on some Jet's Pizza, a first for me over the last four years of attending the con.
There was, however, a great meetup with the Old Ways crew, and there was bourbon being passed around and other frivolities happening in the surrounding area. Later, I posted up in the bar area with a deck of cards and taught several of the Symphony members how to play "Killer," a card game we were taught by a family who owned a local coffee house we used to sit and chill at on Friday and Saturday nights way back in high school. While the bar area seemed REALLY quiet compared to years past, we played cards until about 2am, which surprised all of us.
Sunday, April 13th
We gathered in the hotel lobby ahead of Sunday breakfast. Jon Hook and Seth Skorkowski of the Modern Mythos program were there, interviewing con-goers, so Doc and I took up some of their time before leaving the hotel grounds.
Sunday breakfast with the crew before we all dipped out and headed our separate ways. We ended up at this lovely spot called the Bellflower. Great conversations and entirely too much laughter (at everyone's expense) before Nate drove myself, Rina, and Miranda to the airport.
Rina (aka, Ri-Ri the Destroyer) and I shared a flight into Chicago, where we parted ways. While they had another several hours to go, I landed around 8:15 in the evening and promptly started unpacking to do laundry.
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Final Thoughts
This event is one of the high points of my year as I get to sit and game with people I normally only get to chat with and see through laptop and computer screens the other 51 weeks of the year. But as of right now, I'm a 50/50 chance of coming back next year.
The last two years have had me in bad headspaces when I arrive; last year for more personal reasons, this year more for external reasons outside of my control (with a sprinkling of personal stuff). So, I'm not sure how much that colors my experiences.
Having said that, I tend to dislike the hotel as a whole. While it fits all our people pretty decently, it always feels very run down and like they're running a skeleton crew during the convention. The barest number of people available to ensure things run just well enough.
But there was no time when I was on the convention side of things where the public bathrooms weren't an absolute nightmare (one was still seemingly under construction and smelled absolutely foul while the other was just...foul). This isn't an unusual problem for that side of the hotel, which is aggravating. You know you've got several hundred people coming to populate that side of the building and the work just...isn't done?
There were maybe two people in the bar area who had a single inkling of what was going on, and one of those people is Matt, who's been an absolute rockstar at taking care of us the last few years. The hotel food itself is always pretty hit or miss; what they prep specifically for the convention is typically a miss (but I recognize quality is harder to achieve in that aspect).
I honestly don't understand the logic of much of the hotel's machinations or why they always seem overwhelmed instead of just...whelmed.
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Chaosium started in 1975, so this particular con was a 50th anniversary of that. And while there were free dice and anniversary pins given at check-in, it didn't feel like an anniversary party vibe throughout the con. There wasn't much that I saw to really hype that fact up at all, which was a bit strange. Not sure if it's just because I didn't see it or if it honestly just didn't exist, but nothing made this con stand out in contrast to the previous ones in this regard.
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For those of you who might be new to the blog and don't know me, I'm a horror TTRPG enthusiast, Production Daddy for Symphony Entertainment, and an abstract artist/dystopian and surrealist horror author based out of Kansas City. I've published several short story collections, my most recent being "Under a Black Rainbow," a collection of 18 surrealist horror stories guaranteed to unzip you right out of your skin.
Should you be a writer for the Miskatonic Repository and you get inspired by any of my stories and eventually turn them into a scenario, please let me know so I can check it out!
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