Next weekend is LongCon, a tabletop RPG convention where you play through a single mini campaign. It’s going to be full on! On Friday I will set-up the temporary curtains in our main room, to shade the players from the bright sunlight, we want them in good shape in service to their masters in far away mountains and towers.
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| A couple of orcs, ready for the weekend fun |
I have also bought a couple of USB chargeable camping lights, that I hope will open out the potential of using the veranda as a gaming area for one of the groups. Another purchase is a rubber safety strip to enable a power cable to go from one wall to the gaming tables area without creating a tripping hazard.
In addition to the practical organising, I’m also running The One Ring, with a series of adventures set in Eriador in the Third Age. I have some more prep to do, but it is shaping up well for the weekend. Every time I return to this game I find that I am hugely impressed with the way it conveys the mood and tone of Tolkien’s stories and setting. In a way, this really is the game that I should be playing, set in a place that has inhabited my mind for 53 years.
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| Characters and dice for the game |
There is, of course, too much material in the excellent ‘Tales from the Lone Lands’. I have already done some pruning, but will leave the exact shape of our story to the weekend itself, allowing the players to breathe and fully inhabit the game. Hopefully, and hope could be in short supply, I’ll be able to give a satisfying arc, with a good sense of a journey to a heroic end.
More generally, I hope that LongCon will continue to thrive. I love the all weekend game format the most, both as a player and GM. What will LongCon 2026 bring?!