GenCon 2025
Aug. 2nd, 2025 11:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heron61I went to GenCon this year, for the first time since the pandemic. The day before I left, I checked in for my flight (on American Airlines) from DC to Indianapolis (I visited my mom first, since that means I can arrive in time to see the convention w/o needing a red-eye flight), and an hour after I did so, I got an email from American saying they’d changed my flight so that it left Friday evening and had me spending the night in Chicago’s O’Hare airport, before arriving the next day at 10 am. Obviously, I canceled that flight and eventually found one that worked almost as well from Southwest.
The convention itself was visibly different in a wealth of subtle ways – definitely more women, possibly 50/50 on Friday and no worse than 3:2 on Saturday. Also, at least on Friday, there were a surprising number of people in wheelchairs and other mobility devices, but somewhat fewer on Saturday. Less happily, they outnumbered people of color on Friday by at least 20:1, and there wasn’t a higher percentage of people of color on Saturday.
In addition, they served notably more alcohol at the (generally quite delicious, and very large) food cart pod. However, the biggest change was an extension of what I noted in 2018 & 2019 – fewer RPGs and RPG companies. RPGs are thriving, but increasing numbers of people purchase then via kickstarted or buy them as PDFs, neither of which are helped much by a company having a presence at GenCon. Also, most of the RPG companies there focused more on board and card games. In addition, as a clear sign of living in the fascist US, there were far fewer non-US citizens there and several non-US companies (that I was eager to talk to) simply weren’t there, and that was a very sensible choice for them.
Finally, I either picked up no RPG work there or will pick up some UTTERLY AMAZING work. I talked to the quite new company putting out an RPG of Brandon Sanderson’s awesome Cosmere series (Mistborn, Stormlight, and others). I love his books, and the company is quite flush with money since the did a $15 million dollar kickstarter (a factor of more than 7 greater than any other RPG kickstarted I know of), and have recently released the PDFs and had samples of the print books at GenCon). I also wrote extensively for the Mistborn RPG Crafty Games put out and also for the Alloy of Law supplement for that game).
In any case, especially with my having worked on the Mistborn RPG, there were potentially interested having me write for them, which given their books look gorgeous and the rules and writing both look solid, I’m very eager for, and then I asked their per word rate – which I almost couldn’t believe – it’s twice the highest word rate I’ve ever been paid for RPG writing. So, I’m both eager and hopeful, but am also now looking at maybe doing DragonCon or Origins instead, especially since very few people I know were there.
The convention itself was visibly different in a wealth of subtle ways – definitely more women, possibly 50/50 on Friday and no worse than 3:2 on Saturday. Also, at least on Friday, there were a surprising number of people in wheelchairs and other mobility devices, but somewhat fewer on Saturday. Less happily, they outnumbered people of color on Friday by at least 20:1, and there wasn’t a higher percentage of people of color on Saturday.
In addition, they served notably more alcohol at the (generally quite delicious, and very large) food cart pod. However, the biggest change was an extension of what I noted in 2018 & 2019 – fewer RPGs and RPG companies. RPGs are thriving, but increasing numbers of people purchase then via kickstarted or buy them as PDFs, neither of which are helped much by a company having a presence at GenCon. Also, most of the RPG companies there focused more on board and card games. In addition, as a clear sign of living in the fascist US, there were far fewer non-US citizens there and several non-US companies (that I was eager to talk to) simply weren’t there, and that was a very sensible choice for them.
Finally, I either picked up no RPG work there or will pick up some UTTERLY AMAZING work. I talked to the quite new company putting out an RPG of Brandon Sanderson’s awesome Cosmere series (Mistborn, Stormlight, and others). I love his books, and the company is quite flush with money since the did a $15 million dollar kickstarter (a factor of more than 7 greater than any other RPG kickstarted I know of), and have recently released the PDFs and had samples of the print books at GenCon). I also wrote extensively for the Mistborn RPG Crafty Games put out and also for the Alloy of Law supplement for that game).
In any case, especially with my having worked on the Mistborn RPG, there were potentially interested having me write for them, which given their books look gorgeous and the rules and writing both look solid, I’m very eager for, and then I asked their per word rate – which I almost couldn’t believe – it’s twice the highest word rate I’ve ever been paid for RPG writing. So, I’m both eager and hopeful, but am also now looking at maybe doing DragonCon or Origins instead, especially since very few people I know were there.
