One of my favorite things to do as a fan of the tabletop roleplaying game hobby is to attend gaming conventions. I love meeting people, I love trying out new games – essentially I love everything about it. One convention that I have heard many people rave about is GaryCon, a tabletop roleplaying gaming convention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin that is named after one of the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax (Lake Geneva is where Gary lived at the time where he created the game). The convention was first started by his son, Luke Gygax (also a TTRPG designer), after Gary passed away in 2008. Luke wanted to honor his father and his legacy in the tabletop roleplaying game hobby and thus the following year, GaryCon was born.

The organizers of the convention were kind enough to grant me a press badge to attend the convention and provide coverage over the event. Here were the major announcements that occurred at the convention as well as my thoughts and experiences at the convention.

Major D&D Announcements At GaryCon

With this being my first time attending GaryCon, I am unaware if this convention usually make big announcements like what we got this year or if this is a new experience (my guess is the latter based on what was announced). Regardless, Luke Gygax and Wizards of the Coast dropped some major announcements at the gaming convention. If you’re interested in watching the full videos of the announcements they made, you can find all of them in the playlist below.

To summarize the announcements:

• Gygax will be creating a book for Wizards of the Coast called Melf’s Guide To Greyhawk. This will be the first time since Wizards of the Coast owned Dungeons & Dragons that the Gygax family name will be on a D&D book published by them. Gygax is excited for this opportunity, and mentioned that he plans to make it deadly and will include alternative rules/mechanics to support that goal. This book will undoubtedly be very nostalgic for people, and the proposed cover art for the book was done by Jeff Easley, one of the first artists for D&D when it was under Tactical Studies Rules (TSR).
• Wizards Of The Coast acknowledged that they have not been consistent in releasing updates on their plans for the game to the community. Moving forward, they’ve committed to share their roadmap to the D&D community every year at GenCon. Starting this year, they will share more information and details about the Season of Champions as well as other announcements (hinting that more information about the OGL and content in Creative Commons will be announced at the gaming convention as well).
• Modules will be making a comeback to D&D. Ayoub mentioned how much he loved the boxed sets of Modules when he was a kid and wants to have Modules return as part of their regular product line for D&D. It is unclear what that will all entail or what that will look like. We may hear more about this as GenCon as well and I suspect it may be part of the new D&D Encounters that they are rolling out as part of their community initiative to support local game stores.

Why GaryCon Is One Of The Best TTRPG Conventions

As I mentioned earlier, this was my first time attending GaryCon. While I was there, someone asked me what was my favorite convention I’ve been to. I shared with them GaryCon has tied with GenCon as my favorite. That person asked which convention I thought was better and I said that they’re both great in their own right. While GenCon is great as a large, major event with huge crowds, vendors, and games, GaryCon is quite the opposite, which is why it makes it great.

GaryCon was held at the Grand Geneva Resort and had a little over 4,000 people in attendance (compared to the usual 75-80,000 attendees at GenCon). Having a small, intimate atmosphere had a different kind of energy and buzz floating around that felt familiar yet different at the same time. Everyone that I met was very friendly. The resort was easy and manageable to navigate (I figured out where 90% of events were located by the end of the first day), and everything that you needed (gaming, food, drinks, vendors, etc.) was all in one central location.

Although GaryCon first started as a D&D convention, it has grown into a TTRPG convention (and this year they had Magic: The Gathering events). I got to play D&D 5.5 in the organized play Legends Of Greyhawk, I tried playing Shadowdark for the first time, I had the pleasure of playing Daggerheart at a table that was ran by Jeremy Crawford (former D&D designer and current Games Director at Darrington Press), and the starter set to The One Ring, a TTRPG by Free League that’s based in the Lord Of The Rings universe. My favorite aspect of this convention is how many offerings of the different editions of Dungeons & Dragons there were at the convention. If you are like me and have “play every edition of D&D once”, you can easily check off each edition by attending GaryCon (unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to do that this year).

I’ve been to a number of conventions since I joined this hobby a few years ago. But GaryCon stands out as one of the top TTRPG conventions that every hobbyist should try to attend at least once.