I always thought conventions came in two sizes, small (a few thousand attendees) and massive (tens of thousands of people). Now I’ve been to an extra small one (a few hundred folk), and it was different. This was SpoCon.org.

I had great fun, but I had to be a bit more flexible.

The gaming schedule was more aspirational than predictive. Most of the games posted didn’t happen due to lack of players. Worse, this included two out of the three I was prepared to run! I’m used to folks being on waiting lists for my games; I was shocked.
But the one game I did run, The Ripper of Shriveport, a 13th Age adventure, was great. I had two adult women looking through my pre-gens when two girls, maybe 12ish, joined us. Together they investigated two murders, collected cats, dealt with fungus folk and demons, and avoided getting stuffed in the Wicker Man.
With fewer attendees, if something exciting like the costume contest or a popular panel was scheduled at the same time as your game, you didn’t get a lot of folks coming in.
So, here I was in a new city I had just moved to. I had hoped to make some friends in the gamer community here. Falling into a pit of despair over my other two games didn’t seem like the right thing to do. So I ended up finding games to play when I couldn’t run one. Guess what? I had fun!
I’m used to the RPGs being separated from the board games at other conventions. I tend miss the boardgame action since I’m always running RPGs. Both were in the one gaming room (the adventurer’s league had its own room), and I got to learn some great new board games. One I fell in love with is Century, Spice Road.
I was on the panel Game Mastering with Ease. We had such great questions; it could have gone for another hour. Oh well, leave them hungry for more!
The hard working volunteers at this smaller con were super helpful and nice. Volunteers work hard at all cons, but at a very small one each wore even more hats than typical. Speaking of hats, I tip mine to them.
I’ll be back next year.