Tag Archives: Balticon

BALTICON – The Panels – Wrapping Up

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The workshop I ran was the last of my panels at Balticon.

The workshop was GMing for Beginners. It’s exactly what it sounds like. If you hadn’t run a game before, but wanted to. IF you had, but you stumbled or wanted tips to get to the next level sort of thing. In short, my wheelhouse. I’ve been doing this for years.

Turns out the hardest part of all that is going back to the start.

It was a very small group of folks that showed up in person. The panel description stated it was aimed at a younger demographic and that’s precisely the folks that showed up. They were fun and creative and our hour melted away and then some. We were still sitting there when the hotel staff came and asked us to give up the space for the next event.

There was a part of me that really wanted to do pictures and notes and all sorts of things related to what we did, but I think that would take something away from the folks that were there in person. I was absolutely delighted to share with them. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did (and they did seem to). I will probably ask to run that workshop again next year, though perhaps earlier in the weekend to give folks that want to try things out more of a chance to hit the game room.

In the end, the con was very successful for me. I’m glad I went. I’m glad to be getting back into the con circuit and working on being creative again. It’s been a rough couple of years for everyone. I’m looking forward to going again. I’m looking forward to meeting new people and seeing my old friends again.

Will I see you there?

BALTICON – The Panels

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The last actual panel I had was on Sunday morning. There was a workshop to run later in the day, but this was the last of the traditionally formatted panels. As it turned out, I was also scheduled to be the moderator. As a moderator, I didn’t prepare notes in the same way I would have for other panels. I went for questions. My job was to get the other panelists to talk about the topic and keep things moving.

Finding Your People:

Whether you are a writer, gamer, costumer, maker, filker, or LARPer, there is a thriving community for you. Panelists will discuss opportunities for attendees to connect with like-minded others outside of Balticon.

  • How did YOU find your people?
  • Best ways to track like minded folks down in general? (discord, failbook, message board at the game shop, others?)
  • Should we ponder the future of in person conventions?
  • What if you’re painfully bad at all the social stuff? Plans are hard, and going out fills me with anxiety.
  • Have you had any experiences that put you off to a group? Any tips on avoiding that kind of thing?

I based my questions on things I believed would be useful from my own experiences. I wanted the folks I was working with to be able to express their thoughts on connecting with others and providing a way for cons and game groups and costumers and all those crazy folks to still be able to get together and enjoy our hobbies like never before. Interestingly / sadly this was also the panel where I caught the fringes of how this all goes wrong. I’ve got a lot of thoughts on the subject, so I’m going to dedicate an entire post to that at a later date. Other than what amounted to a minor ‘blip’ for me, the panel seemed to go well enough. A lot of the answers tended to circle back around to finding connections via the web, but that’s the world we live in these days.

Do you have any great answers for the questions above?

BALTICON – The Panels

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Saturday’s list of panels wrapped up with one on recommendations for reading. I was ready, but also worried for this panel. While I have read a lot, my reading has suffered lately. The volume of words I have consumed has dropped off sharply. It’s been a struggle to read sometimes. The weight of things going on around me has made even the escapism of a good book work. Couple this with the folks on the panel were clearly experts in the field, while my qualifications amounted to being part of a fan group with a long reading list. As it turned out, a really skillful panel moderator made this one run! At the end there was only one request for finding “something else like this” we couldn’t come up with an answer for. At the end of the day, I think I held my own. The things I go back to the most tend to be older works and not the most recently released stuff, but I managed. Here’s the description and the panel notes I had going in.

What Should I Read Next?

While it’s easy for us to be bombarded with automated algorithm-derived suggestions, it’s important to get book recommendations from a dialogue with a real person. Our well-read panelists will listen to what you like and don’t like and suggest something you haven’t heard of… we hope.


—
Hope is right – this tends to be a very well read crowd.

I keep a list of books shelved in the dining room. They are books that I go back to over and over again when talking about books. Some examples are:

Magic for Sale (short story collection)
Light of Other Days (Stephen Baxter / Clarke)
Bimbos of the Death Sun (Sharon McCrumb)
Pandora’s Legions (Christopher Anvil)
Song in Stone (Walter Hunt)
Rollback (Robert J Sawyer)
Bureau 13 (Pollata)
Griffin & Sabine (Nick Bantock) series of mysterious letters
Immortal warrior Kane (pulp fantasy series) Karl Edward Wagner
House in the Cerulean Sea (T.J. Klune)
Written in Red (Anne Bishop)

Find a small press!

Talk with booksellers (Cupboard Maker Books in Enola PA is my favorite by far!)

Watch the Skies has a 20+ year reading list. You can always jump on and chat with us! Connect with us here!

BALTICON – The Panels

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Saturday rolled on with more gaming, and a topic I love even more than board games, role playing games.

You Can Start GMing Now: Tips for First-Time Gms

If you want to play RPGs and you don’t have a GM, you should consider stepping up. You don’t have to be an expert on fantasy lore or a master rules lawyer; anyone can be a GM. We’ll talk about common struggles like setting expectations, keeping everyone at the table engaged, finding and playing to your own unique strengths and style, and the hardest part of it all, battling the demons of three to five other people’s schedules.

My personal house Rule #1: It’s just a game.

We’re here to have fun, and if we’re not having fun, then why are we doing it?

Find inspiration (in art, in books, in movies, in conversation with others). I’ve talked about this in other places before – Attacks Of Opportunity being one example.

Prepare to the amount you feel comfortable with, over or under prepared is relative to how you play.

Roll with choices your players make – be flexible – because they WILL change it all. Constantly.

Adapt encounters that were ‘missed’ into something else later in the campaign (save your work).

Keep a list of names (like sounding names from a similar area – on hand just in case random NPC).

Keep notes – particularly of who all those random NPCs are, b/c they might stick and come back (melon guy from Avatar the Last Airbender anyone?)

Feel free to watch shows like critical role – but understand what they’ve got going on behind the scenes (and if you don’t have that, how can your game match that?).

Those were my notes, and many of the other panelists / game masters seemed to share some if not all of those sentiments. There was a lot to pack in during our hour, so I think we did well, but it’s always a challenge. Gaming is such a wide ranging topic it’s tough to squeeze all that in during an hour.

I’ve been running various D&D games for years so there are a lot of things I’ve internalized. Have you run a game? Do you have any thoughts for first timers?

BALTICON – The Panels

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After a couple of solid panels on Friday I was ready for the Saturday schedule and really wanted to dig in. There was a lot of great stuff lined up, starting with games.

Help Me Find a Game I Will Enjoy

Are you new to playing board games, card games, or party games? How can you tell if any particular game will be fun for you? Come to this panel to ask experienced gamers what you should try next based on your own likes and dislikes.

Finding a board game you like is partially about the game itself and partially about the people you’re playing with. Both parts matter.

Board games are by their very nature social. The single biggest challenge is finding a group, or a series of groups of people that you really, truly enjoy gaming with. The people are the key to it all.

As for the games themselves, part of that is learning the language of games. What IS a worker placement game vs. a party game vs. a resource management game? What kinds of those things do you enjoy?

How many people do you want the game to handle?

Do friends recommend the game?

Can you find a YouTube video on it (and do you trust that person’s opinion)?

Find a group – see what they play: https://www.gamesclubofmd.org/

https://www.boardgamefinder.net/

http://www.boardgamesfor.me/

https://boardgamegeek.com/

The best part of this panel for me was the crowd participation. That normally isn’t true for me, but having my dear friend and serious game fan John right up front was really special for this one. Myself and the other panelists enjoyed a good discussion about all the things I listed above in my notes and then some. It was a really great start to the day.

Side note – I highly recommend digging up a board game and finding some folks to play.

Do you have any favorites?

BALTICON – The Panels

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The second panel of the weekend for me was about maps. I was really into the idea of the panel, but I was unsure of how it would all work out. Here’s the description and what I had prepared.

Mapping the Landscape

Every science fiction and fantasy reader has their favorite book with a map in the forward or appendix. Besides helping audiences keep track of where things are taking place, what roles do maps play in fiction and gaming? How does a creator go about creating a clear memorable map, from both narrative and visual perspectives?

______

Ask yourself if a map is really needed? Being a very visual person, I LOVE maps and building layouts, but does your book / story actually need it?

Look at your map at 3”x4”. If you can’t read it then it is too small to print in a mass market. Consider adding extra maps that show blowups of things you actually want readers to know about.

Cheat. Take a known map and turn it upside down, then relabel everything.

Don’t be afraid of looking for inspiration in the old. There are a number of museums that have digitized their collections of historical maps and have them available for viewing online. This goes for plants and monsters too. The biodiversity heritage library has 150,000 images out there. University of Chicago Press have created a history of cartography collection with downloadable PDFs.

Think about what your map looks like relative to your story. What does a fantasy map look like exactly? What does an urban fantasy map look like by comparison? How will it look when it’s squished down to 3 inches wide by 4 inches tall in a paperback?

How much area are you mapping? 2D or 3d for your map?

The panel itself ranged all over the map (see what I did there LOL). The panelists had a wide variety of backgrounds and it was a really neat discussion. I grabbed a couple of notes of my own, and was surprised (though I probably shouldn’t have been) when discussions ranged into technology and things connected with my day job. Turns out that architecture is essentially building mapping – and that includes site context.

It was a very enjoyable discussion and the folks that attended seemed to be really happy with what we delivered.

BALTICON – The Panels

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I posted my schedule back before I headed to the con, so it would seem only fitting to post notes from each of those panels. I often prepare far more than gets used when it comes to panel information. Sometimes this is a question of not having enough time to shove it all in, sometimes it’s a question of sharing panel time and other times the panel just doesn’t go the way I thought it was going to.

I’m going to load these up one at a time so I can give each panel its own space – and even try to tie together with the virtual space!

My first panel of the Balticon weekend was Rating Books in the Algorithm Age and it was in fact my only virtual panel for the weekend.

Here’s the description and what I had prepared as notes~

Rating Books in the Algorithm Age

Do numeric rating systems such as “X out of 10” lead to a loss of nuance? Can the ubiquitous five-star rating system (as used by Amazon and Goodreads) lead to grade inflation? Is a well-written entertaining work deserving of top ratings, or does it also need to be groundbreaking? When a rating is going to be amalgamated without context, what are a reviewer’s ethical responsibilities?

Yes, any scoring system with limits like x out of 10 has a loss of significance. It’s designed and designated specifically to be ‘shorthand’. Can it help? Sure… to a point.

Grade inflation can (and does happen). Of course I’m going to give my book 5 stars. So’s my mom cause I asked her to (no, she won’t read it). It’s unethical to ‘stuff the ballot box’… or is it? Is campaigning for you book and getting your friends to pump it up and get attention?

Well written and entertaining is completely subjective. I have a particular prize winning work that I LOATHE and I know more than one person that thinks it’s amazing. It’s terrible, but the story of how the story got published caught me more than any rating. It was all about how the friends and family of said book got it out there to my attention.

When I do reviews for the things I read, I state up front if I got the work for free (pretty sure there are rules about this, but I genuinely don’t know them). I will say things in the very first line of the review like, “OF course it gets 5 stars… it’s mine after all”.

I have taken a long time to recognize and understand what I like about stories, and have started to apply that knowledge to how I talk about the books I really like. If you like something I like, and that continues to happen, then maybe you can trust my opinion about a book. I have one friend (Molly) who knows that if I love a book, she’ll hate it. Our tastes tend to be diametrically opposed. She knows this and takes all of my reviews with that thought in mind.

How you feel about the author can (should it?) effect how you review a book. I know a number of authors. I recommend the work of my friends.

Will I recommend a book, no matter how good, after I met the guy and he was a total dick to me? NO.

Will I recommend a book, no matter my political feelings about an author, if that guy was SUPER nice to me? That’s way more complicated.

Those were my notes. What do you think?


BALTICON – Convention Report

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Cool new logo!

This past Memorial Day weekend I was lucky enough to go back to being a panelist at a live, in person science fiction convention. I was and am very happy to be able to get back to that sort of thing. I’ve missed it. At this point, with so much time passing between the event and the actual writing of my post(s) I suspect there will be details that are hazy and that will make the summaries shorter than they may have once been.

The con took place May 27 – 30, 2022 at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace hotel. Right in the middle of Inner Harbor. The location was (and continues to be) something of a sore spot for many people. The hotel itself is expensive. Parking is generally expensive as well, but the con made arrangements for a deal with the parking company and that worked out really well. I was able to save a fair amount of money compared to past years by setting up my parking in advance. The area itself, the places around the con seem to be struggling. All but a very few businesses in the area are gone. The restaurant choices were thin and did not lend themselves to quick con based meals. All the other shops, including the shopping mall previously below the convention are are simply closed and gone. The absolute lack of options was one of the most challenging aspects of attending. The room, the amenities and the rest of the hotel related things were pretty standard.

Checking in this year was the smoothest it’s been in a long time. There was one minor blip, but in general worked and I was in and out of the registration area very quickly. The set up / arrangement of the convention spaces was very similar to years past, with the notable exception of splitting the dealer’s room into two different spaces. This worked for me, though it’s questionable what the vendors themselves thought of the arrangement.

One of the bigger changes as an ‘in person’ panelist was the addition / continuation of virtual panels. I’d brought my own laptop along and set it up in my hotel room. This turned out to be a good thing. There was mention of a space being available on site for folks to participate in the virtual panels, but from what I witnessed of that it was less than successful. Running all the tech for all the panels AND having a place for a panelist to just drop in and use ‘extra’ equipment didn’t seem to go well at all. I don’t think any mention of availability should have been made for the panelists and I think the panelists should have been far more prepared than the ones I witnessed were. Thankfully, my connection went off without a hitch and I got to participate in a virtual panel to go along with my in person sessions.

The pandemic made a lot of other things feel slightly different or out of sync with what I have become used to over the years. Attendees were there, and wearing masks as was the rule. They were generally friendly and happy to see others in person, but the numbers seemed down. I understand the hesitation of many, so this wasn’t entirely unexpected but I hope it’s not a sign of the death of in person cons (and that death has been rumored for many, many years of course). The other aspect of this con for me was a profound shift in who of my friend group were there. My family didn’t attend. People I always went to dinner with didn’t attend. People I’d sit and share a drink with or bump into between panels weren’t there. Even things I did get to do with friends seemed muted and worn. Yes, I went to dinner. Yes, there were games and chatting and all of it seemed… slightly surreal. I was adrift and on my own and that is certainly not my convention experience in the past.

It was a good con for me. I did a bunch of panels, ran a workshop and bought a handful of things from wonderful creators. I also managed to (mostly) avoid con drama. I say mostly, and that deserves an explanation, but also that deserves its own post. All in all, it was good to be back. I hope and look forward to doing it all again next year.

Balticon Schedule!

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It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a Balticon. Too long in fact. I miss doing the live convention thing. This year will still be weird, and masks are still required, but it will be good to try to get back to doing the things we all love.

This is my schedule, as long as nothing changes between here and there:

Start Time Duration Room Name Session ID Title


Fri 4:00 PM 1 Hr Virtual Panel Room 1 379 Rating Books in the Algorithm Age


Fri 5:30 PM 1 Hr Guilford 887 Mapping the Landscape


Sat 10:00 AM 1 Hr James 411 Help Me Find a Game I Will Enjoy


Sat 11:30 AM 1 Hr James 416 You Can Start GMing Now: Tips for First-Time Gms


Sat 4:00 PM 1 Hr Club Lounge 381 What Should I Read Next?


Sun 11:30 AM 1 Hr James 965 Finding Your People


Sun 4:00 PM 1 Hr Private Dining Room 943 GMing for Beginners: The Workshop

Gone Virtual

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I would have to consider it the negligent misuse of understatement to say that our current global pandemic has changed many things. Everyone has been asked to significantly change our way of living. How we work, how we connect with each other and certainly how we gather… and that is to say that we DO NOT GATHER. We don’t know a lot about the virus that is raging across the world and killing people by the thousands. We do know that if we keep our distance from each other, things slow down.

Everything has slowed down. Meetings take longer to arrange. Work hits unexpected delays. Time off takes on a whole new dimension – if you’re lucky enough to still have a job and still be working.

Part of the slowing down, part of the social distance needed involves not getting together. Conventions that many of my friends and collegues depend on are simply not happening this year. They are not able to gather so many people in a single place. The risk is too great.

Going to conventions – particularly science fiction / fandom cons – are a major part of my life. I have been going to or working as part of the staff of cons for somewhere around the past 27 years. I genuinely don’t remember a year when I haven’t been off to Richmond or Boston or Pittsburgh or Baltimore for a convention. Sometimes a big con, sometimes a small con – always going to see friends and talk about my favorite things. This is part of my life. It is part of my family’s life. My daughter doesn’t know anything else. In her mind this is simply what people of like minds do – they get together to enjoy their favorite things.

I’m not going to any conventions this year. None.

That is at least the plan as it stands right now. Most cons have “shut it down” and declared they will return in 2021. Some are making the effort to push ahead with the program parts they had lined up and are creating methods for holding virtual cons. I am amazed at how quickly some of these fan run, volunteer organizations have turned around the parts they need in order to make something like this work. I applaud them. It’s fantastic to see that they’re doing what they need to in order to survive. I wonder how many of them will. I just don’t see myself doing a virtual con. It feels too much like work at this point.

I understand the value of meeting virtually. I am, on average, attending between 5 and 10 virtual meetings every week now. I have adjusted my computer settings, arranged my working spaces differently along with changing and upgrading some of my hardware… and it’s still not the same. Gathering with friends in the same physical location matters. A hug, a handshake or even a simple hand on the shoulder are very important. Yes, there are down sides to meeting in person. There is expense. It’s time consuming. Scheduling is a challenge. Meeting with your friends is great, dealing with everyone else… not as much. Even with all the challenges (and occasionally the terrible smells) I hope to see the very best of them return for live and in person events. They are what recharge my batteries. It’s how I level up my creativity.

For the first time in decades I will be home on Memorial Day weekend. My family will be having a small gathering to celebrate my sister’s birthday. That’s it. That’s the entire schedule. There are no festivals going on, there are no events other than on the computer. We’ll see how it all goes. It is an odd feeling to know I won’t be part of something so dear to me. Hopefully it will come back around. Until then I’ll have to navigate my way around “the new normal”.

The virtual con is going on!