Eight months ago, Lord Zinni pitched the idea of gathering a party and adventuring forth to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The dungeon to delve: Gary Con XVII, an “Old School Renaissance” tabletop roleplaying convention dedicated to Gary Gygax and run by his family. Lord Zinni and I, along with a few other Lords, had been meeting biweekly to play Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games. He had been spending a lot of his free time building modules for a handful of different game systems, so to him, it seemed like a natural fit. Even though I had been GMing once a month, I wasn’t sure if I could keep up my enthusiasm for tabletop roleplaying for four days straight. But in the end I decided, like Bilbo Baggins, to step out my front door and see where the journey might lead. Well, actually, all I did was buy a ticket. Then I waited eight months.
Thursday
Lords Zinni, Semmens, Mith and I arrived at the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa in the afternoon to get our badges and attend a few evening events. The resort was a welcome change from the sterile convention centers where Magic events are so often held. With over 3,000 attendees, Gary Con had completely taken over, with every conference room in use on the first, second, and basement floors of the hotel, and events spilled over into hallways that were wide enough. Three other buildings on the resort grounds were also overrun with nerds, and regular trolleys would shuttle you to any one of them, as well as the distant guest parking lot.
For grub, the hotel had three sit-down restaurants, ranging from casual to fine dining. There were a few temporary bars and hot food stations at strategic points, so attendees weren’t forced to backtrack all the way to the lobby. With traveling food carts pushed around by hotel staff, you didn’t even have to step away from a game session, many of which were four hours or longer.
After we checked in and received our badges, three of the four of us attended a seminar, “Worldbuilding with Intent,” hosted by Alphinius Goo, of GooeyCube, and Ed Greenwood, the father of the Forgotten Realms. For being such a pillar of D&D lore, it seemed fitting that Ed himself looked like a wizard, with flowing white hair and a long white beard. The conversation between the two meandered and was peppered with anecdotes and asides, and at just an hour, it was a very basic outline of how one might begin to create a world that could effectively suspend a player’s disbelief.
My first gaming session was from 6-10 pm, and I had signed up with Lord Zinni. The game used the “Weird Heroes of Public Access” system, which is a rules-light and creativity-heavy game. You and other players take on roles of public access TV personalities who solve mysteries and Keep Weird the small town of Fairhaven, which is part Twin Peaks and part Silent Hill. Unlike most of the games I played at Gary Con, where you played a pre-generated character, the first part of the session was spent building our weirdos. Mine was Jimothy Williams, the host of a “local talk” show, Conspiracy Corner. At one point, to persuade a mid-level villain to stand aside, I tried to convince her of a conspiracy theory that the meatballs everyone was eating were filled with addictive, psychotropic drugs, which turned out to be true! The villain collapsed in a puddle of tears, allowing us to avoid a combat encounter with her.
Friday
Compared to the other Lords, my schedule was relatively light. I slept in as they headed out to catch their 8:00 am sessions. Friday was still my heaviest day, with eight hours of gaming, starting at noon and ending at 10:00 pm. I had a slow morning, first stopping at Egg Harbor downtown, then an antique mall, where I failed my perception check to find anything worth buying.
My four-hour noon session used “The One Ring” system, a Lord of the Rings setting that takes place between the events of the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring. Its mechanics offered just enough differences from 5e D&D to feel both familiar and novel. I played a merry halfling treasure hunter by the name of Ledger Rumblebelly. Together with my three human, elf, and dwarf companions, we set out on an elven ship to find a secret island, rescue a lost daughter, and ultimately remove the curse that kept all the island’s inhabitants trapped there. At the climax of the adventure, we fought a Sauron-like boss at the peak of a mountain. Our elf companion, who was wielding the magic sword that both summoned the boss and could defeat him, was knocked out. Since I was the only other party member proficient with a sword, I picked up the unwieldy weapon, took a heroic swing… and completely biffed it. Luckily, our human warrior finished off the spirit and we won the day.
We had dinner at the hotel’s Italian restaurant, which had renamed all of the dishes on the menu to be fantasy-themed. Tatiana, our waiter, couldn’t seem to get into the spirit of it all, and gestured with restrained exasperation toward the menu, saying, “Welcome to… whatever this is.” We split the swamp flora and I enjoyed the crispy skin on my pan-seared mermaid tail. After I chivalrously corrected a mistake on our bill that would have had us pay half of what we owed, we were rewarded with a dragon egg dessert for free.
Our next session was a 6-10 pm Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tournament called “Legends of Roleplaying.” I hadn’t known what to expect, besides that the teams would be nine players, but Lord Mith had convinced Lord Zinni and me that it would be fun to sign up together so we’d be on the same team.
Several times prior to Gary Con, Lord Zinni had expressed concern about needing to study up on the ancient AD&D system in order to participate in the tournament. I hadn’t worried about it. I knew the very basics, like THAC0, from having played the first two Baldur’s Gates, and I figured in a pick-up-group format, the tournament probably wasn’t taken that seriously.
Once we sat down at the table, though, I began to feel the gravity of the situation. We were nine players out of 140, one of sixteen teams competing for the glory of victory in the largest Old School D&D tournament in the world. A team won the tournament by scoring the most points. You could score points by defeating enemies, avoiding traps, looting magical items, and reaching certain milestones. Points could be taken away for failures and deaths.
Our Game Master was a seasoned veteran who had played with Gary, and he explained exactly how he was going to adjudicate. I looked around the table. There were four generations of gamers in our group of nine, from Boomer to Gen Z, and all eyes were locked on the GM as he spoke.
When the GM finished his spiel, a scruffy-bearded, long-haired Millennial in a patched-out vest, who could have passed for a Lord, pulled out a two-minute sandglass to make sure decisions wouldn’t take too long.
The GM passed around the pre-generated character sheets. The vested dude snapped up the first fighter that was offered. Zinni and I lunged at the next two fighter sheets because mechanically they were the simplest: Step into danger and hit things. I tried to quickly but methodically scan my sheet for the important details: Level 7, human fighter, 3/2 attacks per round, +2 Longsword, Short Bow with eight +1 Arrows, Armor Class of 1, a Ring of Water Walking, a Potion of Extra-Healing.
We were briefed on the quest: the Duke had been betrayed by a group of five adventurers turned assassins. They had possession of the Soul Gem, which had trapped the soul of the Duke within it. Our mission was to travel to the dungeons beneath the fortress of Inverness, exact justice on the assassins, recover the Soul Gem, and find the other two Eldritch Jewels.
And then it began. The GM laid out the first map, an 8.5x11 photocopied black-and-white sheet that showed a birds-eye view of the ruined fortress: four half-crumbled towers with the central tower in complete ruins. Deteriorating walls connected the four. We stood outside the gate. What would we do?
Our first decision was whether to go under the portcullis, which was raised only three feet. We looked around at each other skeptically. This seemed like a trap. We found a section of a crumbling wall that was only four feet tall, and the fighters helped lift everyone over it.
Although there was only a very basic image to set the scene, my adrenaline made the environment come alive in my mind’s eye. The nine of us were clambering over a dilapidated stone wall at dusk, jumping down into the fortress grounds, ready for combat and searching for traps. We descended down the stairs of the nearest tower into its dungeon.
We found the first assassin down there, dead, turned an unearthly white after the Soul Gem had absorbed his soul. The evil adventurers had turned on themselves, apparently. We unceremoniously cut off his head and stuffed it in the thief’s bag of holding for evidence he had been slain. We stepped through the secret door and started through the maze.
My heart was racing. Lord Zinni whispered to me that he hated feeling out of his element. I was high on the thrill of it. I knew how to dungeon-delve, but like a newborn I had to learn how to connect my intention with the mechanics of the new body I was inhabiting. It didn’t take long, and the GM was very helpful at explaining what you had to roll, and what to add, for any game action you wanted to take. He also had great deadpan humor, which helped ease the tension a little.
There was plenty of tension, though. Hallways led to rooms, and every room had a puzzle or challenge to overcome, and any one of them could be deadly. Do you risk removing the Decanter of Endless Wine from the pedestal? It might bring the faerie statues to life. Which astrological glyphs do you step on to get through a room? There’s a small pyramid with magical items piled high. Which to grab first, and how?
Sometimes we’d quickly unite on a common decision, sometimes we’d hem and haw, sometimes we’d argue. Often, it fell to one of the fighters who felt strongly enough about their solution to simply try it, because we were the most likely to survive if something went wrong.
At one point, we opened a door and a magical torrent of water in the next room dropped into a bottomless pit. I remembered my Ring of Water Walking. I tied a rope around my waist and tried to leap onto the river. Something went wrong. I fell into the pit and drowned. They pulled me back to safety. Lord Zinni held a sword under my nose and saw my breath condense on it; I had been magically charmed and was merely asleep. They shook me awake. The whole thing was an illusion. We closed our eyes and walked through the room.
Everyone did their part. The thief disabled traps and unlocked doors. The cleric and druid healed us and kept anyone from dying to poison. The wizards shot fireballs and magic missiles. The ranger tussled with an ambushing jungle cat.
On and on it went. We’d find a slain assassin, get a piece of a key from underneath each tower, then quickly race to the surface and enter the next tower. We collected all four pieces and opened the door to the maze of the Ghost Tower, where each new “door” was a hidden magical portal. From desert to jungle to tundra, up and down and upside down, we relentlessly pushed forward.
We were in what appeared to be the final room, circular with eight floating gems evenly spaced. Each round, a random gem would shoot a petrifying cone. With just a minute left, it seemed like this was where we would find our end. All the gems were protected by force fields. We couldn’t find a pattern or solution to it. Then, in desperation, we simply started attacking the force fields. They went down, but the first, second, and third only held illusions of the gem, not the real one. Then, finally, we snatched the real one. We hit the button on the magic bangle given to us and we were all teleported to safety.
There was a real sense of accomplishment at the table. No one had been slain, and we thought we had managed to complete the dungeon. We congratulated each other on a successful run and wondered how well we did. The GM was impressed, but couldn’t promise anything about our ranking.
Saturday
Lord Zinni and I didn’t have a session before noon, so we slept in and got breakfast at Joni’s, a diner downtown.
My first game was an introduction to the “Call of Cthulhu” system, whose setting is most commonly associated with the 1920s. This particular game was more light-hearted and set in the disco era. We four players found ourselves in a nightclub, stepping over corpses and trying to keep our sanity in our search for a philandering husband. It was short and sweet, a fun appetizer.
With more time on my hands than I had planned, I beelined it to the Tower of Gygax, a two-hour AD&D adventure that varied depending on the GM. I had noticed the table would take walk-ups if a scheduled player didn’t show up. I got lucky–there was an open spot and the adventure had just started. Other players at the table had already selected their characters and told me they needed a cleric. I said I was happy to oblige, if someone could help me with my spells. In short order I realized I was one of the only players at the table who had any experience playing D&D, so I sat down and started reading through my spell cards.
The scenario was a two-hour battle on a grid map. We had to cross a river (with an ambushing monstrous octopus in it, of course), fight through a wave of defenders, and stop a ritual before a bone dragon was summoned; the dragon would mean certain death for us all. When a player died, the ritual turned their corpse into a ghoul, and they had the unstoppable urge to kill all other players. Things were grim at the end, with more monsters on board than we could handle. About half of us had been zombified. But we finally managed to destroy or dispel all four energy crystals that powered the ritual. For my efforts, I got a couple freebies and a stamp on my character sheet certifying that I had survived. We all thanked each other for the game. I left the table with a feeling that was very common that weekend: a sense of camaraderie with complete strangers for having overcome imaginary challenges that seemed real enough in the moment.
I stopped by the charity auction in the lobby bar and paid a fee for a card. It was packed, with standing room only. After an hour, I wanted to sit down, so I wandered off and eventually met up with Lord Zinni. First we did another lap around the vendor hall, which I ended up doing every day of the event. Then we took the trolley to the chalet, where a few Magic events were going on. We briefly looked around, but decided to just go back to the hotel and get dinner with Lords Semmens and Mith at the ChopHouse, the finest dining at the resort.
While we were in line to get a table, we received an email from Gary Con organizers: Our team had won the Legends of Roleplaying tournament! Our GM had very graciously called our team’s play a “masterclass in efficiency.” It felt incredibly gratifying to be a part of Gary Con history. We each won a free silver badge for next year’s Gary Con, and our badges would state that we were the reigning tournament champions. There were many drinks and much celebration at dinner.
My next session was 7-11 pm with Lord Zinni. We were at a five-player table using the “Electric Bastionland” system. It was a custom setting: dystopian Chicago, circa 2195. We were recently laid-off employees of a megacorporation. I was an Investment Centurion, a slimy people-leader with a tendency for backstabbing. Our mission was to plan and execute a heist of our previous employer’s mystic artifacts during a gala.
At the crescendo of the game, all of our plans were coming together: we had each infiltrated different aspects of the gala, the drinking water had been spiked with LSD, and the air conditioning had been turned off. Unfortunately, the gala wasn’t just for the unveiling of the artifacts, but a bringing together of them to cause some sort of cosmic, catastrophic event. Chaos ensued, and my character took his opportunity to seize power. He was thwarted by the other characters, and escaped into the night, defeated. The rest of the party won the day and had a happy ending.
Our GM was, by far, the best narrator and voice actor I had encountered that weekend, and it was not a surprise when they revealed they were a GM-for-hire in Chicago.
We took a photo with the other members of our winning AD&D team, congratulated each other, said our goodbyes, and the four of us headed back to our cabin. We spent the next couple hours drinking the remaining beers in our fridge, debriefing the weekend, and regaling each other with stories of our impulsive teenage years.
Sunday
Despite a draining weekend and having stayed up too late the night before, we woke up early to pack and get to our morning sessions. Lord Mith took a rideshare to get to his 8 am game, while the rest of us hit up Grandma Vickie’s, a downtown greasy spoon filled with townies. The head waitress (owner?) remarked how we all looked exhausted.
“Just one more game,” I joked.
I made a last-minute audible to join a 9-11 am “Age of Vikings” game, which was modified from the “Call of Cthulhu” system to be more combat-heavy. It was the only game of the weekend where the system hadn’t actually been released and the hosts were using the sessions to playtest.
The session was supposed to be a five-person group, but a couple people must have partied too hard, as they didn’t show up. I arrived a few minutes late, and since the other two players had chosen straightforward melee classes, I went with the spellcaster. The game was easy to play and the setting was cool enough.
The magic system was probably the most interesting part. You had a set of runes that could combine to create different spells. Some spells you had by default, but you could also mix-and-match runes to create a custom spell (the GM had the final say on what exactly it did). When I wasn’t needed to drive the game forward, I was fiddling with combining the runes and finally figured one out (kinship + fire + defense), but never found the right opportunity to use it.
I made my way to the vendor hall to see if I had any winning raffle tickets, but all my luck had been spent on winning the tournament. The other Lords finished up their games and we headed out to drop Lord Mith at O’Hare.
As we drove out of town, it occurred to me that Lake Geneva reminded me of growing up in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. Lord Semmens said it reminded him of his childhood home in rural Michigan. Much of the US is covered in these quiet, small towns with gently sloping hills and long, empty, winding roads, where you can confidently expect nothing to ever happen.
What better place, then, for those with wandering minds to imagine magical lands, artifacts, creatures, and characters? If you’re a daydreamer, small town boredom almost forces you to pretend you exist in a more exciting place and time. To escape the ennui, you fly on the wings of a dragon to a land where your every decision matters, and where there’s evil to overcome, treasure to be discovered, power to be gained, and romance to be had, all with the roll of the dice.
A make-believe universe is, by its nature, a fragile one, because at any moment it might be shattered by the warhammer of reality. To strengthen the conjuring ritual, you can join together with a coven of like-minded wizards, and now your pocket dimension is sustained by the collective imagination of your playgroup. At Gary Con, the mass incantation was woven so tightly, it often felt as if we had truly found a way, even for just a weekend, to transcend time and space in order to live in that fantastical realm.
Which made returning to reality all the harder.
