WHAT IF TOO MANY PEOPLE PLAYED A GAME ALL AT ONCE?

This month, I have mostly been writing 30-player six-table TTRPG scenarios in advance of GenCon 2026.

(Last month, technically. I spent too much time writing the scenarios and now this is late.) 

Let’s talk about what’s fun, and what’s interesting, and what’s unfortunately dull about that:

TO DIE WOULD BE A GREAT (MEANING LARGE OR IMMENSE) ADVENTURE

I have the DIE RPG to thank for this. 

Kieron Gillen, author of same, came with us to GenCon 2024 and had an idea for a big game of DIE that needed thirty people to work correctly, and we did what we could to facilitate that. It was the sort of metatextual onanism that Kieron loves as much as overwrought puns and 90’s alt-pop: he, the noble and valiant indie comic book author Kieron Gillen, was magicked into a roleplaying game by his evil alter-ego, also confusingly called Kieron Gillen, but this one wore a leather jacket so you knew he was a bad guy right from the get-go. He played both.

The thirty players were divided up into six tables of five, each of whom played through the same scenario which involved rescuing their GM from an evil GM, I think? A microcosm of the broader plot, anyway, and - spoilers, I guess - each one of them unlocked one sixth of the magic word needed to defeat the malevolent Leather Gillen. 

The word in question was E-D-I-T-O-R, which is a nod to the fact that when we received the initial manuscript for DIE it was roughly twice as long as it was at the time of publication - and even then, the final book is massive. If Kieron had published it in that state you’d need a wrist brace to carry the fucking thing. The only thing capable of defeating his worst impulses is the cruel hand of an editor to take a machete to his masterpieces and make them readable in a single human lifetime. 

When the magic word was spoken aloud, I - technically one of the editors on the project, although more in a “cut this chapter” than “change this word” sort of way - kicked in a side door, humiliated Kieron in front of the crowd, and made him apologise for wasting their time with something as trite and self-centred as recruiting them to defeat his alter-ego. A brief round of light accusations against him followed, from the audience, and then he promised to never do it again. 

(I got to rip the piss out of a writer that I have great respect for; Kieron got to have a large man harangue him in front of a crowd while he begged for mercy, and honestly I think we both maybe enjoyed it a bit too much to examine it any further.)

IT’S NOT LIKE IT WAS BACK IN MY DAY (I ASSUME)

The DIE megagame - which is what we called it at the time, despite that not being an accurate name (megagames are technically low-barrier-to-entry oneshot LARPs with a tight scenario) - gave us a taste for big games. Seeing as we had all collectively decided to just sort of ignore the ongoing global pandemic now we had shots for it, we wanted to make something more of conventions.