So Long Con was about a month ago, but today we're going to focus on what a great convention it was. First off, we were in the local news! I say we because I was featured prominently in one picture. Hint: Look for Molan.

Thursday

I arrived early ago got lunch with a whole lot of people. It was a "start of the con" lunch but also a "happy birthday to Matt Gullett" lunch. There's a decent Tex-Mex place right across from the hotel so it's an easy spot to grab food. Back to the convention to set up the booth. Lots of boxes to unpack! Long Con is a great con and probably has the most "DCC per capita" of any convention that I know of.

I ran some Xcrawl that night. Just a quick funnel adventure that I'm working on. Each room needs a little improvement, but it's starting to really shine. The working title is "Xcrawl the Mall!" but that may change before the end. It's centered around the grand reopening of a mall and getting ready for the holiday shopping season. Plus, I tucked in lots of references to Saturnalia, as that would probably replace Christmas in the world of Xcrawl. We had a great group of players, plus one chain-smoking trucker who wandered his way into the game halfway through.

Friday

I let the morning start slow and hung around the booth, chatting with Mr. Matt Robertson. Folks trickled into the con and we said hi to just about everyone of them. Our booth is right by the entrance so everyone has to see the Goodman Games booth before they join the fray! I ran The Technomancer of Candy Mountain in the afternoon. I really love that adventure, but I think it kinda gets overlooked by some folks. Post-apocalyptic settings just aren't as popular as fantasy settings, or that seems to be the way it goes. Nonetheless, we had a brilliant time. The PCs traveled to the mountains and quickly discovered the oppressive social system that the candy-people were forced to live under. But by the end of the adventure, Wuza Wylder had been defeated and a donut-person became the new ruler of Candy Mountain!

I grabbed a bite of food and wandered around for a bit. Didn't take long before two different people were trying to get me to join in a game! I ended up playing a Dungeon Dwelling Creatures game called Naked and Afraid (at previous cons, its been titled "Oops, All Orcs"). Our young orcs quested for special mushrooms as part of our tribe's "coming of age" ritual. But we were captured by humans for vile experiments! In DDC, orcs gain a +1 bonus to attacks, damage, and skill checks for each other orc in the party. Meaning that an all orc party has a special synergy not often seen. So we were getting a bonus +6 total to just about every roll, but still only had 1 HD each! It was a really wild time and we had a ton of fun playing dumb teenage orcs. If you want to check that out, take a peak at Dungeon Dwelling Creatures.

Saturday

Another chill morning at the booth. During this quiet time, I reviewed the level 10 DCC adventure that I would run later that night. Around noon, Brendan LaSalle came over to sign a bunch of Xcrawl books for folks! We had some of the limited edition covers at the start of the convention, but they ran out pretty quickly!

Next, I played a game of Dare Luck Club in the afternoon: Wrath of the Wedding Witch. I once again played a "bad kid", as is my tendency to do in games where you play as kids. It was an adventure that probably deserves about 2 game sessions of play time, but we abbreviated a couple things and had a satisfactory conclusion to our story. I always have a blast playing DLC.

But the evening game was one to remember: level 10 DCC! Julian Bernick has written an amazing adventure. He originally wrote this back in 2016 and ran it at Gen Con. Since then, the adventure has been just sitting on his hard drive. Julian mentioned it to me at NTRPGCon and we're teaming up to publish this bad boy! The table had some real DCC experts at the table so we were off to the races. Unfortunately, the dice were not on their side. Not a single level 5 spell was successfully cast! But that didn't stop them from stopping the green comet of chaos from irradiating the planet with chaos. Unfortuantely, saved all civilization by causing the comet to explode... while they were on it... So I guess I managed to TPK a group of level 10 DCC PCs and that's worth some bragging rights!

We have further playtesting to do on this one, but plan to crowdfund in 2025! We have the excellent Ben Marra on board for the cover art so it's gonna be one gorgeous adventure module! Working title is currently The 10th Comet of Chaos but I'll let you know if the title changes.

Sunday

Sunday morning was for Weird Heroes of Public Access! As usual, we had some excellent characters like the "grandmotherly lesbian who reads spicy romance for the blind" and the alcoholic 80s finance-bro who lives out of his car. They had 3 days to finish a movie that needed to air on Saturday night (the station had accepted a grant and had contracts to keep!) The auteur creator had promised that his 22-minute film special, titled "The Lost Heir", would be a genre that he called "gallo-Americana". Well, the auteur creator was in jail and looking quite ill. After manipulating the dumb deputy and his mommy issues, they got the creator bailed out of jail.

Unfortunately, they found that he seems to be quite literally melting into a puddle of clay. The film was a very artistic claymation featurette, and the clay seemed to be a re-packaged waste byproduct from the X-Tec factory. Also, the auteur creator was a recent recipient of an liver transplant, and that operation had also been bankrolled by X-Tec as part of a "medical experiment" program. The Heroes had to run all over town, finding a few minutes of film here and there. So lots of fun NPCs to bargain with and befriend. No combat in this sessions, just lots of laughs! In the end, they completed the film, which aired and will be remembered as a "what could have been". The creator's film career would never take off, as he melted away. Just a puddle of clay draining down into the sewers...

Recap

I got to hand out with a whole bunch of friends, play and run a ton of games, and eat some good food! If you're within driving distance to Longview, Texas then this is an easy con to say "yes" to. It's kinda out of the way, but it's an inexpensive convention to take part in and I've always had an awesome time. I drove home already looking forward to the next year’s Long Con.

What Else Is Going On?

The Conquest of Chaos

A levels 0-5 campaign path for Dungeon Crawl Classics! Six adventures inspired by the classic GDQ series take the PCs from humble beginning to fighting the primal forces of chaos and saving their world from certain doom!

Horror of the Whispering Woods

A bestiary and hexcrawl toolkit from Breaker Press Games!