Alexandria the Con Scenario Archive

A fascinating thing crossed my radar - reached out directly in fact - the website www.alexandria.dk is gathering convention-history and are adding all the convention scenarios they can get their hands on to the Alexandria library.

Growing from a group of Nordic gamers it is spreading out to the world. They seem to be organising around a facebook group at the moment, with almost 1000 people with some kind of convention-connection.

Stats-wise we have 2581 scenarios available for download out of 14901 known scenarios run at 2317 conventions. Thats roughly 1-in-6, pretty good for all this time passed. The content is strongly weighted to Swedish and Danish but with a good block of English games available, about 20% of the total.

It is also really interesting to see the sheer diversity of systems in stark contrast to the modern D&D 5e systemic dominance. This does chime with my memories of Irish conventions where you had all sorts of weird and wacky systems running as con games - within the list of systems we have a top ten that starts with "System-less" and runs down through #2 Call of Cthulhu, #3 AD&D, #4 Fri Form, #5 D&D 5e, #6 WHFRP, #7 Pathfinder, #8 GURPS, #9 Vampire: The Masquerade, #10 Basic Roleplaying - noting that this covers 30 years of gaming that is still a great range of stuff.

We are also seeing a bunch of skew in what the Alexandria team have gotten to so far - the list of conventions has 873 from Denmark, 672 from Sweden then 212 from the US and 151 from Ireland. While Ireland does have a lot of conventions relative to its size, there is no way we are 3/4 of activity levels in the US. I look forward to seeing how these activity levels change as the team expands its reach.

The site itself has a ton of stuff there already - including stuff I was familiar with myself would be the turn of the millenium Irish convention scene - Leprecon and Gaelcon mostly, a bit of Warpcon too. There was a ton of stuff being written for those con's and now we can have a look again! Tons of content for your one shots and campaigning needs.

I have not yet figured out the best way to find out what is in here; my first thought is to look up some authors who went on to great things in the TTRPG space like Gar Hanrahan - they have 32 scenarios uploaded. One tricky bit is the lack of clarity in lots of convention programs - games were 'D&D', 'WHFRP', etc. and would of course have been understood to be the edition of the day - or maybe not! I do recall writing these programs and getting the blurb right so people had a notion did they want that flavour of game was more critical than getting the system exact.

All in all - a really interesting slice through gaming culture coming from a very different angle than we normally get. While recognising that our friends in the Nordics are up to all sorts of stuff - I have Forbidden Lands and Symbaroum on my shelves here behind me - it is really cool to see even a nascent effort like this. I know there is tons of effort put into writing con scenarios, great that they should be stored in a near accessible way like this.

Edit to add: my own contribution to the effort; two old Gaelcon flyers I had stuffed in my Dragon Magazine collection.