Sword's Edge

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Another Wonderful Weekend at Breakout Con.

I was lucky enough to attend Breakout Con in Toronto last weekend (10-12 March 2017) with a rather large Ottawa contingent that included Todd Crapper (Killshot, Screenplay, High Plains Samurai), Joshua Kitz (Simple Superheroes), Mark Richardson (Headspace), and Jason Pitre (Spark, Posthuman Pathways, Sig, and now Circles of Power). Eric Paquette, a key organizer in the Ottawa gaming community and all around good dude, was part of the BRG-SEP tag team of awesome, and I got to hang out a lot with him during the con.

Not only was this a chance to run some “Lawless Heaven” using the updated Sword’s Edge rules, but it was also a chance to meet a bunch of awesome game luminaries. The RPG industry isn’t huge, but there are still a large number of people whom I don’t really know who attended. I’m not one to go up and introduce myself to people, but the social part of the convention worked out because there’s a lot less than six degrees of separation between most designers, so hanging out with people I knew generally led to hanging out with people I didn’t know.

And, to risk repetition, it was awesome. There was a lot of game talk, theory chat, and just normal conversation. There was both deep philosophical conversations but also a lot of laughs. It was great.

I’ll leave discussion of the games and how they ran for the SEP website. For here, let me just say that Breakout Con is probably my favourite convention. That’s not a dig against Cangames here in Ottawa, which is a great place to run games, but just doesn’t have a venue that allows for the comfortable socializing that Breakout Con had. Gen Con is amazing and all, but it’s far away and way too big so that even with three degrees of separation, the sheer number of people means that someone who is generally quiet around people one doesn’t know well – which, ironically for anyone who knows me well, is me – will likely get lost in the crowd.

Having a bunch of people I knew and then fewer people I did not know meant I was more comfortable to speak up and join conversations. Usually, if I don’t know people, I’m the quiet guy who smiles and nods but generally doesn’t contribute. If I know a lot of people, I generally feel comfortable speaking up. Given how loud I am, it’s kind of funny, but I have enough self-awareness to have identified this particular quirk.

So, for me, Breakout Con is my premier destination. I know the organizers now – all of whom are fantastic, friendly, and organizing superstars – there is generally a good number of people in attendance whom I would call friend and through whom I can meet new people, and there’s a good number of people interested in actually playing the kinds of games I make. There is still D&D and Pathfinder happening, but there’s also a metric $h!t-ton of indie games that run the gamut from pretty traditional to very experimental.

Again, that’s awesome.

All that to say I had a fantastic time, I was really thrilled to hang out with old friends and make new ones, and I got to see people get really jazzed when they got the chance to punch gangsters in the face in the back alleys of Ulsan.

A weekend well spent.

You can find Breakout Con here.

Mark Richardson publishes through Green Hat Designs.

Jason Pitre publishes through Genesis of Legend Publishing.

Todd Crapper publishes through Broken Ruler Games.

Joshua Kitz publishes through Composed Dream Games.

And I’m at Sword’s Edge Publishing.