Matt and I made the trek to Gamehole Con yesterday in Madison, WI and it was a fine time. Due to no planning on my part, we didn’t get into any scheduled games, like the bolt action tournament or any of the 5E or other OSR RPG games. However, for me this was just a ‘check out’ year to see what it was all about, so walked around and painted stuff and I busted out BLOOD RAGE and got a few games of that in.
It is not a huge con, maybe twice the size of say Plattcon or Hooplacon. Yet it is a huge OSR con–there were tons of Dungeon Crawl Classics, Swords and Wizardry and other OSR stuff going on. If you count 5E as in the OSR style, the entire con was mostly OSR RPG’s. Absolutely there were Pathfinder games there, but they were in the minority.
We spent about 3 hours at the free painting table where I found an old Talisman Rogue and just had to paint the fucker. They had BOTH of the Kevin Dallimore painting books there was well, so I was able to pour over those. Matt got stuck on painting some sort of samurai and though he spent awhile on it, it was still not finished. The lady that runs it had a ton of great tips so highly recommended.
Stuff I saw:
- Tom Wham. He was running Feudality and Dragon Lairds at the con.
- Lots of Bolt Action. The tournament brought at least 20 people playing. I should have brought my shit… (and painted it beforehand…)
- Rob Heinsoo. One of the designers of 13th Age. He was running a game that we didn’t get into– needless to say it was sold out months ago.
- One really fucking hot girl. No joke.
Otherwise it was extremely well run and organized. They really have their shit together and I will be definitely attending again. Likely I will run something next year as well.