Over the weekend (Friday, February 14th through Sunday the 16th), I attended DunDraCon 48 in Santa Clara, California. This was only my third DunDraCon and like the previous two, I had a really nice time!
While there are things I wish they would do a bit differently, particularly in regard to event registration (it really is time for them to sign up with Tabletop.Events), overall, it is a worthwhile event.
My good friend Michael Kelly and I set off for the con at 7am Thursday morning as it is a five-and-a-half to six hour drive when you factor in breakfast, a stop or two for gas, and unforeseen traffic and weather issues. We dealt with rain for much of the drive and this was quite challenging with a lot of blinding mist kicked up from cars on the way into Santa Clara on the 101N.
At Noon the following day, I ran De-MING-netized, an adventure I wrote for the Savage World of Flash Gordon that originally appeared in the Moons of Mongo supplement. I had a full table of enthusiastic players and the session went very well indeed. I gifted a couple players copies of Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (older printings) and did my usual promotion of KublaCon and our Savage Saturday Night event.
I had pre-registered for a game Friday night, but was not one of the lucky few selected to participate and so I spent the evening prepping my Saturday game and filling out lot slips for the Sunday auction as I had brought a couple large bins of board and card games to sell.
Saturday morning at 10am, I ran the Forsaken Vault of the Crimson Oracle for Dungeon Crawl Classics. This adventure was written by Brendan LaSalle and served as the 2023 Gen Con tournament module. You can find it within the pages of the Goodman Games Yearbook #11. The notes contained within are pretty clear that it can come in well under four hours (and a previous playtest wrapped up after three), but in this case, the players were done about two-and-a-half hours in!
As games at DunDraCon are free of charge, I don't think anyone was particularly upset about the short-ish runtime and we all had a lot of fun! Pity about that short-lived, bag-draggin' goat, though!
Saturday night, my Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures continued as I managed to get into a game run by "booth babe" Jon Wilson of Goodman Games, the publishers of DCC.
The main issue with this session came down to two young (teenage) "kids" who seemed more interested in doing their own thing than actually contributing to the party's success. We would be walking down a corridor, moving from room to room, and one of these young players would ask if they could cast some completely inconsequential spell and then spend a couple minutes going through the entire process. It was annoying and I wasn't entirely happy with it, but it was still fun playing a halfling (aka "a good luck charm") in a published Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure.
.jpg "Photo by Jerry McCoy")
Finally, my Sunday was mostly devoted to the game auction. If you have never attended one of these, you really should consider it sometime as it is not only a great way to get your hands on some choice items, often for bargain prices, it is also entertaining and informative. This year's auction was one of the best I've ever been a part of with no noticeable technical issues, a reasonable selection of quality items that ensured the event only ran for a few hours, and an always full room of eager bidders.
And with that, my DunDraCon was complete and we were on the road before sunrise on Monday, returning to the L.A. area before Noon.
