Field Report: Vindiecon 2026

This years Vindiecon was just had last weekend - this year I was purely a punter - got in played a game, chatted with pals, shopped the vendors, bailed. A very early start to the day by eldest had made it long already by the time I got in the door and I turned into a pumpkin and rolled home just as the second slot was starting up.

First impressions

This year felt like a solid evolution on last year - perhaps not "better" since the first one last year had a wonderful boutique vibe but bigger without losing the charm. There was a big vendors hall in the centre and a half dozen game rooms. The location was decent for public transport and opened right onto a little mall cluster with a supermarket which was very handy for snacks.

It was busy without being overcrowded, the vendors seemed to be doing a brisk trade but one could thread your way through the hall without pushing. There were always free chairs in the 'cafe' area whenever I looked so not overly packed.

Activities

I got there a touch early, got parked in the cafe along with the rest of the punters and saw a fair few known folk drift in - mostly other RPGVienna regulars - then we got pointed to our tables for the morning slot. I played Potvory, which went well and I will right that up in more detail again. This was a game written by two of the folk helping run the con so we did not get them running it but it went well. Most of the folk sitting to the table had backed the kickstarter and come along to give it a live-fire try. Session went pretty well all told.

A pal ran a table of Spire - rerunning a session that had been part of a campaign a year or two back to great results. Another ran Out-gunned that was well received - all the feedback I heard from folk running and playing was positive. There were a ton of games available - 12 different games/systems in the morning, 10 in the afternoon - and a huge variety of stuff which was a great opportunity to try out that indie darling one may have heard about but had dithered on deciding to get or had trouble wrangling a table together for.

I took a poke around the vendors after - Gazer Press and Causa Creations got me to crack my walled for The Hidden Isle and Der Gazer Vol 1. I picked up some stickers from the artists too - successfully resisted the many other bits of RPG merch.

I was gratified to see some folk actually selling RPG books - we often get active games societies at conventions but nobody selling anything beyond a zine or two. The lamented loss of Planet Harry has left a gap not yet filled - neither of the two other shops that sell RPGs showed, one never does and the other typically only turns up at cons with boardgames. I recall Irish conventions of the 90s - or even the last Harry Con - where there would be general games stops with boxes of weird old books to browse through, but for some reason the thing I see these days are fancy dice, accessories, character art - so it was great to *also* see Gazer Press and Causa Creations, both locals, both bringing interesting stuff.

VindieCon 2027

I am looking forward to it already - if my sleep schedule has recovered sufficiently, I will be trying to run something next year, not sure what or what system yet, but something.

I like how Vindiecon is a focussed one - TTRPG forward and so concentrates most of my pals and contacts. There are lots of other big conventions across the year - Spielefest, Fantasy-Con, Fantasy-RPG-Con, ComicCon - many of whom will have some corner dedicated to TTRPGs or a stall with the energetic local games clubs - Paradice is almost certainly going to be wherever there are dice rolled in earnest - but the vibe at Vindiecon is the most reminiscent to me of the 90s-00s UK and Irish cons like the ones I used to run, and I like that 'here to game' vibe.

One other remarkable thing - it was free on the door which is fantastically generous. I think they could easily ask for a couple of euros in - the price of a take-out coffee at least - and most folk would not blink.

Shiny TTRPG links #297

A week of links spotted on the internet. For even more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

gamemastereno hosts Torquetober!

baktegon hosts Norman Mailer Mail-in Game Jam

Shigure hosts The Queer Medieval Jam

portals and pegasi gives us The Goblin Market (Dolmenwood)

Roles, Rules, and Rolls shares Midkemia's Matrix: Rationality Unbound

I Cast Light! posts SAVE THROWS: AN ALTERNATIVE METHOD & AS WORLD BUILDING DEVICES

Rise Up Comus writes Worldbuilding through Saving Throws

Valeria Loves asks Why Didn't Silent Titans Change the World?

New School Revolution writes The Keys to My Heart

Dead Tree, No Shelter gives us Squad Goals

Iron & Ink shares Things It Took Me A Long Time To Learn

I Cast Light! posts MAGIC NEEDS MINI-PROBLEMS NOT MINI-GAMES: A Defense of Vancian Magic

Pages Brittle with Sun and Salt writes 30 Old OSR Blog Posts You Should Read

ΝΕΩΝ ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ posts The Catalogue of Ships

Stampede! Encounter table cascade

At a lake today all was quiet, then suddenly two herons took off and everything else panicked and it went from idyllic to chaos in seconds - ducks, pigeons, herons, crows - no doubt squirrels dived for cover too but they were drowned out.

An encounter table should have a cascade effect - something like roll 2d4 more times and have them all happen at once - the dragon woke up, got the goblins running around, they let out the zombies, the bats are fleeing - general chaos throughout the dungeon.

This does not have to be the impossible challenge of hundreds of HD worth of foes - the rolling chaos provides ample cover for a party that decides to just bug out, or potentially make a thrust onwards to glory. No need to be stealthy in this hullabaloo and whatever you run into may well consider themselves to have bigger problems just now.

Typically an encounter pulls in another as reinforcements or generally as an escalation - here I suggest the alternative of running it up to high chaos and let the players decide to they take the chance to bug out or forge ahead.

Shiny TTRPG links #296

More shiny links from around the web. For even more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Bastardica shares A foundry for bastard web fonts.

Store Brand Danger shares Domain Play Starts When Players Start Caring

Kind of Old Games asks What if stronghold construction *is* the adventure?

Pages Brittle with Sun and Salt posts Lord Problems

Snakebite posts Systems You Don't Think You Need: the Designated Survivor

I Cast Light! posts THE SERPENT SONG HYMNAL: My Collection of Tables & Such for Running BX Dungeons & Dragons

Afraid of Encounters posts A TTRPG Playstyle Rant

Leonardo Andrade for Typebar Magazine writes ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying

BASTIONLAND posts Breaking the Wave

Dice Goblin writes Safe Transit, Dangerous Transit: Two Ways of Adding Juice to Interstellar Travel in TTRPGs

Spears & Spreadsheets gives us Looking Upon the Face of a Dead God: the aftermath of a 1D10/1D100 SAN test

The Garden Below posts So, i’m running a megagame

Pool Time with Swim Allen posts Do not Overthink the City

To Be Resolved writes Historical Reconstruction as Play

The Madman's Menagerie posts 1 CORINTHIANS 13:12 (Mask Relay 40)

Props driven investigations for Imperium Maledictum #City26

Two sessions in to the IM City26 game I have been having a go at conveying the atmosphere with physical printout for some of the things they find during their investigation - partly to reflect the grinding bureaucracy of the Warhammer 40k Imperium but also to convey some of the voices of the factions through vox-log transcripts.

Engagement seems ok, getting everyone to read a handout is a bit of a time sink but when there is a handful of them in play that people can rotate between them it seems to work. At player request I have set up a thread on our gaming society forum with all those uploaded, we will see if that gets much interaction.

Formats for a future yet to come

I combed through official sourcebooks to get a standard handout format - starting with the old Rogue Trader '87 and working up through Dark Heresy and Imperium Maledictum. There is happily a lot of content out there on 40k lore which puts lots of the icons and images easily to hand.

One of my favourite things I learned doing this was how the date format worked - the first digit is a check-sum type confidence interval depending on how close the connection is to Terra. Up to 5, it is a continuous chain, 6-8 are increasing levels of 'we can tie it back to a date we think we know when it happened' by margins of less than a year, less than ten years and more than ten years. Lastly we have 9 which is 'a xenos wrote this, do not trust it' which is entirely apt for the setting.

I worked some things up in Word with basic fonts, used the formats I pieced together - headers of subject, date, classification, who transcribed it, ancillary references at the bottom. For drafting Imperial documentation one does well to channel the stereotypical secret policeman - the content is one thing but precision about who, where, when is critical so whoever is responsible can be found and blamed afterwards.

To reflect the vast timescales for the setting I aged up some of the documents to reflect how noone had looked at the issue for ages - this involved printing it off then scrubbing the inside of the heating furnace with it, with particular attention to the edges which worked well.

Progress logs at table

Since vox-transcripts are so prevalent in the setting I am also trialing a new means of session logging - I throw down a voice recorder at the end of the session and get the players to record their report to their Patron. This is then transcribed and I clean it up and give it an appropriate header to become another handout. I would not be entirely regretful for this campaign to flare-out and another party to have to try and pick things up from these ... terse... activity logs.

So far it is working, the table has logs to work from at the start of each session, let us see how it evolves over the half dozen sessions we have left. That sentiment broadly stands for the props in general - good so far, not sure about the overall effort-reward ratio, will hold off

Overall #City26 progress tracker stats:
Progress: 44/52 wards completed
Completion vs target: 85% vs 73% target
Population covered: 87%

Shiny TTRPG links #295

Slightly late shiny links gathered from around the web. For more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Thriftomancer shares Hexcrawloween 2

The Nothic's Eye writes Inadvisable Decisions (GLΔG)

Bat in the Attic shares Why is the Ogre there?

Blog of Forlorn Encystment shares Developing the Sandbox: The Campaign Calendar

Games Workshop posts Necromunda RPG

Rise Up Comus shares Beholders are intellectual property, eh?

Crow’s Corner posts Surviving in a Male-Dominated Hobby

Trick's Tales writes DRGE (Dice Roller Game Engine)

The Onion gives us Olivia Rodrigo Releases Fantasy Tabletop Game ‘The High Winter Elves Of Girlville’

Among Cats and Books gives us Rub My Body in Goose Fat, Daddy, I Want to Fly

Zanzibar Games shares Toyetic Wizardry

Whose Measure God Could Not Take writes Downtime and “””Stronghold Management”””

Lonely Star shares I dislike "worldbuilding"

The Black Citadel posts KILL THE CUCKOLD SELF

BASTIONLAND gives us Workflow Eats Features for Breakfast

Kludge Kauldron writes Finishing Campaigns

Store Brand Danger shares Big Map Progression

The Dolent Chronicle posts On Halo

SlothBorg writes Five Room Dungeon Generator

Review + Actual Play: Emelda's Song

tl:dr; a three part adventure with an investigation, infiltration and tomb-dive; neatly presented and fun to run.

I got this as part of my Dolmenwood order - it turned up in the giant box - and on the basis of it getting hailed as a great one-shot adventure I decided to run it at one of my open table sessions.

The book is a 36-page A5 hardback - the Dolmenwood/OSE standard - with maps on the inside covers and double columns with art throughout. The format within is that well-thought-out Dolmenwood approach of 'location, box with key descriptive items, likely actions, stats for anything present' that makes it pretty easy to use. One could give it a go un-read I suspect but it might get tricky.

So what do you actually get in the book?