Ropecon 2016, or, “I’m taking this year easy.”

We had a Ropecon again last weekend! Woo!

As my sole reader from last year will remember, the convention had to finally depart, after 18 beautiful years, the non-Euclidean fever dream that was the Dipoli Conference Centre. We found expansive new digs at the Helsinki Fair Centre, which, if nothing else, would have room for us to grow. There’s a new conference wing that suits convention style programming well, and big, huge exhibition halls where we placed the miniature gamers, card gamers, the dealers’ room, the boffer fighting, the archery range, and the wrestling show. Those all fit into a single hall. I’ve been in smaller aeroplane hangars. For the first time in my recollection, the dealers’ room was not cramped.

We all wondered if Ropecon can make the transition or if it would be disfigured by the barren expo halls. I think it survived just fine. Some things changed – the green parks of Otaniemi have been replaced by the office park that is Pasila – while others remained the same. While the card gamers finally have enough oxygen, the air quality in the tabletop gaming rooms was as musty as ever.

Our guests of honour this year were the excellent Ross Watson, whom I’d met before at Tracon 2013, and the rock star Claus Raasted, who was originally a Ropecon guest of honour ten years ago but since then pretty much changed the face of larp so we figured we could have him back.

I keep saying “we”. I haven’t had an official position at Ropecon for some years now, but old habits die hard. Like the habit of Ropecon veterans of asking me to do “just this one small thing”, which is how I wound up on two different awards juries this year. I assume it’s punishment for my admittedly smug advertising of how I’ve kept my duties light.

The first thing on my plate was a Pathfinder Society scenario on Friday, #7-22 Bid for Alabastrine. It was my kind of scenario, in that it required the PCs to be proactive in attaining their goals and was designed for solutions other than killing everyone. Actually, killing everyone would be a Bad Thing and probably not possible. I also liked how as a social scenario with as little combat as possible, it still left the barbarians and other heavy hitters something to do. The game went well, running only a hair under the four-hour time slot, with a crew of three beginner players and one more experienced one.

My Saturday morning program item was “Game Novel Then and Now”, a two-hour look into the history and meaning of role-playing game tie-in novels. It ties in with an article series I wrote for the Loki blog a couple of years back as well as my MA thesis. Game novels are a fascinating topic that basically nobody writes about, the Scribe Awards habitually overlook, and academia barely acknowledges. I’ve been delving deep into the weirdness of late, and brought back things of great interest, some of which I’ll post about soon.

Finally, on Sunday, I had a presentation with Miska Fredman about the English translation of Astraterra. The translation is more or less done and we should have the IndieGoGo campaign up and running in the near future.

Typically of me, with a full plate of programming, I didn’t actually get to see much. The things I did see were the postmortem of Solmukohta 2016 – went reasonably well, we learned a great many things, larpers can be difficult customers – and the first half of the vaunted Pokémon musical. The costuming was top-notch.

As for the rest of the con, some things went well, some did not. The poor availability of food has been discussed elsewhere to exhaustion already – of the something like 22 restaurants in the Fair Centre, a total of five were open during the con, and only the burger joint and the prohibitively expensive hotel restaurant (also the only place serving alcohol) were open beyond lunch hours. This was apparently due to the company running the show colossally misunderstanding the demographics of Ropecon, which I think is a bit rich at a venue that hosts conferences, conventions, expos and fairs of every type.

Anoher thing I thought could’ve been done better was the ticket queues before the con opened. We could’ve done with opening another one or two ticket counters to shorten the lines. This, though, was mostly a bit clumsy. For proper failure, look at Rio Olympics.

Overall, though, it was a good convention. The criticisms are things that stick out because they didn’t work, while the capable work often goes unnoticed because smooth running does not draw attention to itself. Despite the move, despite the loss of the green spaces and the non-Euclidean architecture, it still felt like Ropecon. Ropecon is more than just the walls at weird angles and though they housed us well, the soul of the event is in the people, and the people came. It was home.