Last week I made the pilgrimage (bathing every veyne in swich licour) to GenCon 2012 in Indianapolis, which is no longer Lake Geneva. I had a terrific time. This was my first visit to the "original, longest running, best attended,[comma sic] gaming convention in the world." GenCon is bigger than Origins, and much bigger than Philcon, although I like those very much as well. I like the Cons. I do.
I was fortunate enough to stay with my old friend David and with his friends, all of whom know how to do this right. I made some mistakes. For instance, I spent money on generic tickets rather than specific event tickets, discovering only too late that the events (that is, game sessions) I wanted to enter were all sold out by day one. I also planned my return flight for not-long-after-dawn on Sunday morning, which put a damper on what might have been a big Saturday night of playing Werewolf or Mansions of Madness.
Some of the games I, we, or they played and enjoyed (or just stood and watched) include:
True Dungeon, which is a kind of D&D haunted house, meaning that you actually roll a character and walk through it. In the end, though, it's really neither true nor dungeon.
Lords of Waterdeep, in which political/criminal/heroic factions struggle to control territory in a seedy fantasy metropolis, kind of like Monopoly with assassinations.
(A) Game of Thrones, in which the various House factions of Westeros struggle to play Risk and kill each other, just like in the book.
Rex: Final Days of an Empire, which, though set in the full-developed Twilight Imperium universe, is widely recognized as a nearly exact clone of the old Avalon Hill Dune.
An X-Wing Miniatures Game involving expensive little models shooting lasers and photon torpedoes and making maneuvers in what was still (alas, the tabletop) two-dimensional space.
Mansions of Madness, a Cthulhu game that might best be understood as Clue with eldritch horror and sanity points.
Eldritch horror and sanity points are everywhere in gaming, which is a testament to both the power of H. P. Lovecraft's dark imagination and the fact that his work is now mostly out of copyright. Cthulhu is huge and terrible to imagine, but he is also free of licensing restrictions. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl ftaghn, indeed.
(I'm looking at my list, BTW, and noticing how much it is dominated by games from Fantasy Flight. Thanks, Fantasy Flight! They certainly rented a lot of space at the Con.)
There are costumes at these conventions. I didn't have one, but I was impressed with a lot of the ones I saw. Others less so. Do not expect too much from your first "Slave Leia."
There are costumes and there are costumes. Some of these people are clearly talented armorsmiths, seamstresses, and ear sharpeners. Others look are a little harder to figure out. ("Is this a D&D Orc or a Warhammer Orc?" "Is this a Steampunk wizard or Sherlock Holmes?" "Is this supposed to be Kevin Smith circa 1999?") It occurs to me that it would be interesting to hold Cosplayers to the same standards as Civil War reenactors, who lose points for wearing contact lenses or anachronistic bathing. But how would we know?
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