Every year, GenCon descends onto the city of Indianapolis and, like a beacon, attracts gaming enthusiasts worldwide to nerd out about any type of tabletop game. Touting as the largest gaming convention in North America, GenCon has yet again broke its attendance record, with over 72,000 attendees present this year. Its continued success in delivering a high quality gaming experience continues to draws in the crowds (and it probably helped that Critical Role was in Indianapolis over the weekend for their live show as well).

Being a resident of Indianapolis and a tabletop roleplaying game enthusiast, GenCon is like a second Christmas for me. There’s so much excitement leading up to this 4 day event where I get to share my love and joy for gaming with people who share that same level of energy as I do. And this year’s excitement was even more magnetic than my previous years of attending GenCon.

Here were some of my biggest highlights at the convention.

Interviews And Press Events

I am fortunate enough to receive a Press Badge from GenCon to attend various press events and interview some wonderful people in the industry. For me it’s still a bit of a dream to be able to go to these conventions as press and have these opportunities to speak to people who are shaping the hobby that we know and love. I really, truly count myself lucky to be able to do these things.

Here was my line up this year:

• Attend the Dungeons & Dragons Press Event the evening before GenCon and interviewed Makenzie De Armas & Greg Bilsland about the new Forgotten Realms books that will be releasing later this year.
• Interviewed the designer of Rollacrit’s Heroes of Barcadia, Maddy O’Neil, about the success and future of the popular liquid health dungeon crawl game.
• Spoke with CEO of Free League Publishing, Tomas Harenstam, about their newest games coming out this year (I’m personally excited about Twilight Sword) and the ENNIE Awards they won, including Fan Favorite Publisher.
• Sat down and talked to the creative team from Baldman Games about the new D&D Organized Plays, Legends Of Greyhawk and Domain of Greyhawk.
• Interviewed Jason Keeley, Senior Designer & design lead of Paizo’s newest rulebook, Pathfinder Battlecry!
• Talked to Mike Tinney and Jason Carl from D&D In A Castle about their newest program, Dungeon Master University.
• Spoke with George Chao, the CEO & Founder of Game Theory Tables, and checked out their newest gaming table, The Table Of Adventure.

I was also able to attend the Daggerheart Showcase & Live Demo (I participated as an attendee) where they dropped a lot of updates and announcements about the new TTRPG from Darrington Press. Additionally, I was invited to a Meet & Greet with Darrington Press and got to connect with their team and other creators.

Check out my interviews at GenCon in the playlist below.

Playing In Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, The Borderlands, & Daggerheart

Every year, even though I attend the convention as Press, I try to make sure that I play TTRPGs at GenCon. It’s one of the few times where I can try different games that I normally wouldn’t play, as well as new ones that either released at GenCon or will release shortly after. (Side note – every year I try to get into a game of The One Ring and Dragonbane, and every year, it immediately gets completely booked. One of these days…)

My kid and I got to try out the new Greyhawk adventure, The Conspiracy of the Crown, from Baldman Games. We didn’t get to finish the entire session (it ran into the late evening and my kid wasn’t able to stay up that long), but it was truly a unique experience. This is what Baldman Games call an EPIC and if you haven’t played in one of these before, it’s a multi-table experience where what you do at your table could impact other people’s games at their tables in a fun and unique way (everyone plays the same adventure). My kid absolutely loved it because they never had an experience like this. At one point, they told me “This is great – I thought we were going to play D&D!”

We were also lucky enough to get an offer for Justice Arman, the Managing Game Designer from the D&D Team, to run a private game for my kid and I and another member of the press in a private room, where we played the new starter set, Heroes of the Borderland, which will come out in September. We got to put together our character from the options that come in the box set, and we played an adventure from it as well. Although this starter set is vastly different than what D&D released when 5th Edition (2014) came out, I thought this is a great product that’s coming out. I often hear that D&D can be intimidating to try to get into when you don’t know someone who knows how to play (which I can relate, but I also had Baldur’s Gate 3, thankfully), so this starter set is really designed to be an accessible and beginner-friendly experience. Using board game-like materials such as character cards, tokens to represent certain feature uses, etc., Heroes of the Borderland is great to get someone the foundations of D&D as a player and Dungeon Master. Overall, we all enjoyed playing it, getting into the mechanics and roleplaying of the game, and Justice did a wonderful job being a Dungeon Master for us with his storytelling. (They particularly loved how much my kid liked to lean into the chaos and wasn’t afraid to go up against monsters that were clearly meant to destroy us!)

On Friday of the convention, I got to participate in a Preview of the new subclasses from the new Forgotten Realms books that will be released by D&D later this year, Heroes of Faerun. I played the Paladin’s Oath of the Noble Genies, and although I am not particularly fond of Paladins, this sublcass was actually a lot of fun to play. We all played at level 3 so we can try our subclass features and I had a lot of cool ideas from how I could use the features from that level of Oath of the Noble Genies while we were in combat. I’ve been a sucker for the Forgotten Realms (and Karlach on the cover of the book is icing on the cake), and playing in this adventure from Baldman Games sealed the deal for me.

After trying to get into one of these games for the last two years at GenCon and failed, I was finally able to get into a session of Daggerheart! Although I ran Learn To Play sessions online and for my local game store when the new high fantasy TTRPG from Critical Role and Darrington Press dropped back in May, I wanted to experience the game as a player (and hopefully run it for Darrington Press at a future convention). This was a brand new adventure so it’s likely that they won’t publish it for a while, but it’s a follow up to their first adventure, The Sablewood Messengers. I was hoping to play the Guardian, but someone at the table had mentioned they never played before and they had their eye on that class, so I gave it to them because I wanted them to enjoy playing their first time. (Next year, GenCon!)

Meeting Online Mutuals In Person!

In the past few years since I’ve been involved in the TTRPG community, I’ve connected with so many wonderful people through social media. I’ve formed a lot of friendships and connections through our love for roleplaying games, D&D, Baldur’s Gate 3, etc., and I was absolutely ecstatic to have met them in person at GenCon. Growing up, I never would have thought that I would be making friends online through gaming, but this has been such a wonderful experience creating relationships with people and finally connecting with them in person thanks to GenCon.

A bit off topic – I’ve also had people recognize me from social media that I did not know either, and it’s a bit surreal to have those moments. I love talking to people about what we love and the TTRPG community, so I had a lot of fun talking to them about that – I just never thought that I would be someone that people would recognize from places like TikTok, YouTube, etc.

Honorable Mention: Critical Role Live Show

This year, Critical Role hosted a live show up in Fishers (30 minutes north of where GenCon was being held) and I had the opportunity to attend. This wasn’t an official GenCon event, but many people were coming in to see the live show, so many of them thought, “Might as well attend GenCon and see what it’s like.”

If you know my origin story with D&D and TTRPGs, you know that it all started when I stumbled across a show called Legend of Vox Machina on Amazon Prime. That was December of 2022. Then it snowballed from there. So naturally it was a dream of mine to attend one of their live shows, and this was right in my backyard.

I went by myself as I didn’t really know anyone close that was also a Critter that was going. So I sat smack middle in a front row of a section, wedged between people I didn’t know, all there to see a group of nerdy ass voice actors do what they’ve been doing for the last 10 years.

It was a surreal and strange experience for me. To be honest, I felt out of place because I haven’t caught up on any of the lore of the world of Exandria (only what I’ve watched in the animated series), so the people around me knew who a lot of these characters and stories were that I was left a little lost. But a lot of them also didn’t know their new system, Daggerheart, which is what they were playing that night, so I helped fill in the details for some of them regarding the mechanics. (As much as I love Critical Role, the highlight for me was having Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford there, playing adversaries during their show. I loved them at D&D and so it’s nice to see them back together again.)

Overall, I was glad I can mark this off my bucket list. But the next item on my bucket list is to attend another one with my kid (when they’re old enough) since Matt Mercer is the person that inspired them to be a Game Master and they also love Critical Role through the stories of theirs that I’ve told them.