DemonCon III followup

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Let's qualify this a little - it's not a real big con, all right? Just an open play day, getting people to meet one another. We've tried to get vendors, do some publicity, etc, but for more about that, see below. Not surprisingly, it's a bit of a Forge magnet for the Chicago area and adjoining states. If I weren't a prof, and if this weren't using campus club/property, then it'd be an apartment-con. That's about the scale at this point, anyway.

This year's event started rough for me, including a lot of hassle about room reservation and the odd tendency for clubs, on this campus, to disappear administratively, so you have to go through the whole registration process all over again. And then, just to make things extra fun, a few pre-con calls about game scheduling resulted in shocked "oh, was it this weekend?" responses, from people who'd been pretty vocal about attending just a few weeks before. I actually had to chuck out the planned schedule for games and rely on on-site signups exclusively.

The good news is that a couple of the "whoops" folks and a bunch of new people did show up, from sources such as the Chicagoland Gamers mailing list and even one enterprising fellow who'd frequented the Sorcerer website. The usual Forge suspects were there, among them Julie (jrs), Mike Holmes, Tim C. Koppang, and Ralph Mazza (Valamir). I was happy to meet Keith (Bob Goat), in a sort of rehearsal for GenCon. Tim Kleinert was the "special guest," retroactively speaking, as the Celebrated Author of the Mountain Witch, a game which had garnered massive approval from the club. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to fashion a paper hat for him or something. Overall, we had about ... oh, 20 people show up in total.

And that, as is appropriate, resulted in plenty of sign-ups, keeping the small space we had full of actual play. I'll be posting about specific games in individual threads, but overall, the day included Elfs, InSpectres, The Mountain Witch, Munchkin (cards not RPG), Robots & Rapiers, Star-Lit Hell, and the first-draft version of an activity I'll be running at GenCon, called Sorcerer Boot Camp.

Here are some thoughts on campus cons or semi-cons.

1. The faculty advisor has a difficult choice: actually to adopt the whole event as a personal project, or to let the student members of the club set the pace for what happens and how much. I decided to be responsible for the space, to advertise the con as part of my regular on-line activities (i.e. nothing extra), and to run a couple of games. But anything else has to be student-generated, and - unsurprisingly - that turns out to be a pretty tough thing for them. One guy is ultra-reliable with flyers, but that's about it. Would I like to see vendors, t-shirts, pamphlets, and so on there? Sure. But no one's paying me for this ...

2. Organizing vendors and any other non-play oriented activities is a stone bitch. They need information nailed down, and even if this year was especially tricky (I didn't even have a final date until a month ago), it's always hard to try to spin "when they can make it" simultaneously with "when it's going to happen." For the first DemonCon, I tried real hard to set up some vendor participation with local stores, but since then, I haven't bothered. I'd still like to, especially with Graham Cracker, a very good store that also carries RPG stuff.

3. How to deal with money? This particular club has yet to tap into a university budget for funding activities. I disappointed the original founder of the club (now long gone) by telling him that the university club money was not going to become his personal source of game purchases, and since then, I've decreed that university funding has to be for events, not items. Again, I've let that be student-driven (the events, I mean), which again predictably, means it hasn't happened yet. It might happen, eventually, but not yet.

For DemonCon specifically, as it turns out, we don't have any expenses unless we wanted to do a big promoting push and take out ads of various sorts. Oh, I kind of like the idea of getting a big banner and perhaps cool ads ... but again, that'll be student-driven when it happens. And I really don't want to get into the situation of having any accounting going on regarding admission and so on, as the club is strictly non-profit. So it's free.

4. This university is urban, hip, and very fragmented across the city area. The "core" campus is more like a small 9.000 person college rather than the rather intimidatingly-sized 22,000 university it's part of. That's a good thing in a lot of ways (e.g. class quality, etc), but it's a much tougher row to hoe than, e.g. CodCon at the College of DuPage County, off in the boonies. There, the campus is the students' life, and activities like their LARPs and their boffer groups are a big draw for surrounding folks too. Here, role-playing and other adventure-gaming is sort of lost in the shuffle.

I'd be very interested to learn more about others' experiences with running campus conventions, especially in terms of helping them to grow over the years. It's also interesting to look at my very first thread about this topic, over two years ago, in CodCon and me.

Best,
Ron

[Keith Senkowski]

Ron,

Did you try talking to the guys at http://www.games-plus.com/">Games Plus in Mt. Prospect.  They are the only real game store in the Northwest Suburbs (or NW Boonies in my case) and I know they do stuff at their store.  I know they have a board people post games on an such.  They might be a good source for promotion for a small con/game day like DEMON Con.  I think it would be an inexpensive way to advertise it for next year.

just some thoughts
Keith