How to resolve AdBlock issue? GLENS FALLS — Last weekend, on Saturday, Sept. 7 and Sunday, Sept. 8, Adirondacon 3 took place at the Charles R. Wood Theater in Glens Falls.
The convention is focused around tabletop gaming, which is essentially any game that can be played on a table, normally using a board, dice or deck of cards in some combination. According to event organizer Veronica Hamilton, they had somewhere on the order of 400 games available.
The majority of games were kept in a side room with a view of the outside sidewalk and road. The room had various tables set up for open gaming, so that anyone who wanted to play was free to walk in and start at any time.
The various tables each had different names, based on where they were located in the convention and the intended use. Some tables had generic names like RPG-04, for role playing games number four, while more specialized areas like The Lovecraftian Lounge and the Magical Games Corner had more referential names.
The Magical Games Corner’s tables were named “Great Hall,” “Gryffindor,” “Slytherin” and other obviously Harry Potter-based names. Hamilton said that they did not name the area after the franchise so that they would not get Warner Brothers on their back.
Meanwhile, the tables in the Lounge were named “Miskatonic University” and “Arkham,” both references to Howard Phillips, or H. P., Lovecraft’s works.
Lovecraft was an early twentieth century science fiction and horror writer who created the Cthulhu Mythos that started the horror subgenre known as Lovecraftian horror, or cosmic horror, which has become popular in modern gaming.
In Lovecraft’s works, Arkham fills a similar role to Metropolis, where Superman lives, in DC Comics. While Metropolis is a stand-in for New York City, Arkham is a stand-in for the real world Providence, Rhode Island, where Lovecraft was born, raised and lived for most of his life. Miskatonic University refers to a fictional school in Arkham with a wide collection of occult books, including a copy of the Necronomicon.
Bruce Danner from Potsdam, who was running the card game “Arkham Horror” at the Arkham table, said that tabletop gaming has entered something of a renaissance, where too many good games are being made for people to reasonably buy, even if they are interested.
“I have pursued cons to learn who’s playing the games, who’s interested to play games that I know about but haven’t played,” he said. “Cons are a great opportunity to dip into those games that you are aware of but you couldn’t possibly have enough time to learn the rules for.”
The Designer Dungeon was further in. Another event organizer, John LeMaire, Hamilton’s brother, said that they took the idea from SnowCon in Maine, one of the conventions they went to with their game, S.U.E.T.
Instead of the tables being named, the various game makers at the convention put up signage indicating what game they were promoting, such as “Ursurper,” “Mission to Planet HEXX!” and “Omen Peak.”
According to “Omen Peak’s” creator, Ben Croft, it was the first game he ever made, with the push being that he was participating in a survival game creation competition.
“They said, ‘alright, it’s gotta be survival-themed, it’s gotta fit in a box this size and it has to costlessthan$30,’” Croft said.“I bargained with my wife to design ‘just this one game, it’ll all be done in four months,’ and that was the main reason she let me get away with it was because it had a deadline.”
Since then, Croft has designed two other games in addition to “Omen Peak,” “Coauthorization” and “Hobbe Manor.”
As for the original idea for “Omen Peak,” Croft said he knew he wanted to make a Native American theme and that the general idea was that the characters were on a journey to the top of a mountain.
“What I didn’t know and what I thought was an interesting twist was that survival games often entail player elimination, so I wanted to design something that would avoid that,” Croft said. “There’s nothing worse than dying in a game and then having to sit and watch your friends play the rest of it while you’re left out.”
The back of the convention was a stage where the larger events took place, such as the improvisational role playing game “Whose RPG is it, Anyway?” and a convention- wide Harry Potter trivia.
Hamilton said that they already have Adirondacon 4 penciled in for next year at the same location and around the same time, and that the biggest difference between now and then
was that they were likely to have around 11 months to plan the convention, instead of the two or three they had for this year.
For more information, visit www.adirondacon.com.
