I was having a conversation recently about AcadeCon and was asked: why are you organizing your own convention? There was clearly some subtext to this – I gathered, “this seems like a lot of work, so why are you doing it?”

Why? It’s a simple question; a good one to ask; and very obvious. But like many simple, good, and obvious questions – it requires a complex answer.

Why AcadeCon?     Here is my complex answer:

The birth of AcadeCon occurred in a car ride home from my first GenCon in 2013. Despite the fact that I’ve been a fantasy junkie (both in playing D&D as well as reading lots of fantasy fiction), a lover of sci-fi (I like both Star Wars & Star Trek), and a fan of comic books, cartoons and most of the now widely-popular nerd/geek culture – I had never gone to a convention of any type before. At least, I don’t think so. I have been to a low-budget Comic Con in Lexington, KY. But I feel that it was after GenCon 2013 and since that makes a better story, we’ll go with that.

In June of 2012, my friend Evan and I prepared for the launch our website/podcast: Dicemonkeys.com. A few weeks later, we changed the name to DnDAcademy.com. (if you’re interested you can listen to the why of that story in Dungeon Talk episode 4: A New Home). As part of this creation process, I started getting involved in social media. I set up accounts on Twitter, Reddit, Google+ and Facebook solely to promote the podcast but very quickly learned how poorly self-promotion is viewed on most of these sites. I also (eventually) learned that I enjoyed social media more when I was actually engaging and interacting with people. I’m happy to say over the last few years that I’ve built numerous friendships and partnerships via social media, including meeting my current co-host Caleb, and would advise anyone to view social media as more than just a way of saying ‘hey – look at this!’

I continued to get more heavily involved in social media around July and August of 2012 – GenCon season. I did not even really know about GenCon back then but my feed and timeline were flooded with excitement about people submitting games, registering for games, and dealing with the chaos of housing. This turned into a flow of constant updates from people experiencing GenCon during the event. It got me interested. Very interested. As 2012 turned into 2013 and the DnDAcademy podcast was starting to find an audience, I knew that I wanted us to go to GenCon. It sounded like fun and I thought attending would give us some amazing content for our show as well as help further integrate ourselves into the gaming community.

Then, things happened. Evan decided to step away from the website and podcast. He had some life events happening and our little hobby podcast was turning out to be more work than he had anticipated. I wanted it to grow, both in size and scope. We went from being a weekly, one hour talk show format to including actual play episodes, interviews, movie reviews and more. Evan was doing all the editing in those days and I was constantly searching for ways to make us sound better – buying new equipment, moving our recording locations and trying new equipment configurations. Each time we made some movement forward, we’d first have to take two steps backward and I’m pretty sure that I was driving him crazy. Regardless, when I went to GenCon 2013 I had some friends and fellow podcast mates with me, but Evan was not among them.

GenCon 2013 was a life-changing event for me. I’ve discussed my experience previously (Table Topics # 56) and don’t need to completely re-hash the experience here but two things were born that weekend: the ‘If you can read this, I failed my Stealth Check’ T-shirt and my desire to go to as many gaming conventions as possible. In that one weekend I transformed from someone who had never been to any convention before to someone who is now a life-long gaming convention attendee. But, perhaps more relevant to this story is that one of, if not my, absolute favorite experiences at that first GenCon was the open gaming event at our hotel. We had made an open call for any listeners of our show to come join us on Wednesday night for a pre-GenCon get together. And some did, including Randy (he of the Green Shirt). We ended up with a handful of our listeners joining us and stayed up almost all night playing board games and an epic evil-party D&D Game ran by Randy (he of the Green Shirt) and IT.  WAS. A.  BLAST. And right there, folks – that is the secret origin story of AcadeCon.

Here’s where things get complicated, mostly, as always, from my ignorance. I can recall very vividly a conversation I had with Travis as we were driving back from GenCon where I decided that not only would I go back to GenCon (in perpetuity) but that I could not wait a year to have that much fun again. It would be unfathomable for me to wait an entire year have another Con experience. Here’s where my ignorance comes in. See, I had no idea there were so many local and regional conventions (remember, I’d never been to any before) and so, rather than waiting till I got home and doing some research, we decided during that car ride home to do our own convention. We came up with the name (AcadeCon) during that conversation and declared then and there in the car that AcadeCon would be “a thing”. This was our rallying cry up until AcadeCon 2015: Into the Wilds when AcadeCon did, in fact, become “a thing”!

Since the original idea was to break up the year-long wait for GenCon with an AcadeCon, we scheduled the first AcadeCon in February of 2014 right around the halfway point between the last and next GenCon. That first AcadeCon was tiny, by design, being a 3-day weekend of gaming at my house, primarily with my already existing gaming group. Before it was even over I was already thinking that we could do this again and maybe go a little bigger (remember how I mentioned that I may have driven Evan away with these same thoughts concerning the podcast?). At one of my previous jobs we had these Leadership Dimensions we had to rate ourselves on for our reviews. One that I got really high marks on was, has a bias for action, which I always translated to “I get BLEEP done”.  So despite having no idea what I was doing or getting us into, I roped Caleb (who was now my full time co-host) into my madness and we decided to do AcadeCon over again. We also had our second rebranding around this time, leaving behind DnDAcademy for the more inclusive TheRpgAcademy. Thus the idea for AcadeCon: Year One – Déjà Vu, was born.

We started talking about the upcoming AcadeCon on our podcast and social media and had an open invite to our podcast listeners to come down to my house and play games with us for a weekend. We had some takers and while ultimately not everyone who had planned on coming was able to make the trip, we did have some of out of town guests join us. We also opened up the invite to friends of friends and even had local game designer and author C.B. Droege show up and run a tournament of his game Dragon Line.  All told I think we had somewhere around 25 people that second year. We even had a few door prizes – you know, like a real convention.

During that weekend we played a bunch of different board/card games and RPGs and had almost no sleep. IT WAS AMAZING! (if you are interested I did a write up about it which you can find here ) But it was clear that if we wanted to make AcadeCon an annual event (and I did!) and go even bigger (and I did!) that my basement would not work for much longer. It was Eric who I credit with saying (something to the effect of) “if you wanted to rent a space we could all throw in a few bucks and cover the costs”.

Cut to one year later when we were at the Hueston Woods Lodge for AcadeCon 2015: Into the Wilds. As with all things Michael, I took that original kernel of an idea and let it fester and then grow into something much larger than intended. Rather than just invite some friends and podcast listeners to play games and split the cost of the venue, I decided to launch a business (The Rpg Academy, LLC), rent out a venue and then raise money to pay for it all on Kickstarter. And it worked! We raised close to $7,000 dollars, brought together about 150 gamers, (many who were not previously familiar with our show), ran over 100 games, brought in game designers (including John Wick, Rob Schwalb and Rich Baker), other podcasters (including James and Kat from One Shot / Campaign, Jim from Talking Tabletop and DM Mitch and DM Chris from DM’s Block), the You Too Can Cthulhu Gaming group and all The Rpg Academy Faculty members and mixed it all together for our first public AcadeCon and it went better than we could have hoped. Several of our guests made a point of telling us that AcadeCon was the best con experience they ever had and assured us they would be back next year and bring their friends.

It’s now about five months later and Caleb and I are putting the final touches on the soon-to-launch Kickstarter campaign for AcadeCon 2016: Leveling Up! We have rented a much larger space at the Dayton Convention Center for this year’s event. We’ve invited even more special guests and are expecting to bring over 300 gamers together this year. We have multiple vendors who will be on site including local game store Bell, Book & Comic. We have made partnerships with local gaming companies including Medieval Interaction Gaming and Third Act Publishing as well as national gaming companies including AEG and Privateer Press in order to make AcadeCon 2016 bigger and better than before. Our goal is to raise around $15,000 which will cover all our costs and offer our gaming guests an experience that I hope will transform them into life-long AcadeCon attendees the same way I was transformed by my first GenCon.

So, we are now all caught up and back to where we have started but still have the question to answer.

Why?

Why does there need to be an AcadeCon? Why are we putting all the time and effort into creating our own event rather than just going to another event nearby?

I want to believe that if you’ve been listening to our show since the beginning – you already know why. But not everyone who reads this will have listened to every episode. Maybe you’re new and have not yet went back through our entire catalog. Maybe you don’t have the desire or fortitude to do that. No worries. I think I can sum it up; why AcadeCon?

Because we’re stupid!

But, ALSO because we enjoy it and apparently, we’re good at it. Neither Caleb nor I have had any prior experience with organizing anything like a convention and yet we are now on our fourth one. Each of the three prior has been more successful than the last. They were not perfect, of course, and we learned lessons from each of them and adapted. We’ve built partnerships through our podcast and our podcast network as well as simply making calls and asking for help where needed. Ultimately I think that we have been successful because when people get to know us they see that our goal with AcadeCon is an extension of our show; we are just trying to get more people to play more games and help them have more fun while they do it. And that’s why we do it. AcadeCon gives us the opportunity to touch our audience (phrasing!) in a way that is an extension of our podcast. We get to put our thoughts and beliefs into practice and be an example of what we want to see more of. The motto here at the Academy is: “If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right!” and with AcadeCon we are doing it right.

I hope you can buy into that and will want to help us succeed this year and beyond.

If so, please check out our Kickstarter when it goes live on 04/21/16 or until then you can go to the Event Page on Facebook here:

Thank you,

Michael & Caleb