What We Did At Pyrkon
Hello, Producer Chant here, because we all went away to Europe and Grant is still sleeping it off.
Editor: GRANT’S HERE. Grant’s here. Hello! I’m late to the party and I’m editing this piece now. Or rather: leaving it entirely intact and commenting on it because that seems like more fun.
Every June, in Poland’s queer capital Poznań, over 60,000 people descend on a convention centre and nerd the fuck out for a full 72 hours. You get all the usual stuff you’d expect from a convention: signings, panels, cosplay, games to play, a small (but beautifully curated) selection of things to buy. You also get an entire hall of recreated mini-worlds from your favourite fandoms and genres (come for the festival atmosphere, stay for the life-size squigs), parades, and full complement of concerts.
Because Pyrkon has a TTRPG track, they’ve let us send representatives for the last three years running. Every year, we send more people, and we have more ideas for things to talk about next time. Every year, the TTRPG track gets bigger and cooler, and we get to sit in on talks by people who make us go “oooooooh, that’s clever, we’ll have that!”. Yes, obviously I want to hear Chris Taylor, Felix Isaacs, and Darrington Press talk about how to build weird worlds. Every year we also do more damage to Poznań’s pierogi supply chain, but that’s the price of doing business, innit?
Ed: And every year I ask the organisers if I can bring more people, and every year they say yes. I’m not sure how far I can push it. They’ve not turned anyone down yet. It’s either that they’re very hungry for guests on the game track or we’re just that magnetic and brilliant; can’t make up my mind.
THE ESSENTIAL PYRKON
Pyrkon’s crowd is young. Like, much younger than a UK convention, or the US ones we’re familiar with (disclaimer: about 4 of them, between us). The average age is somewhere around 25. People are unashamedly enthusiastic. Half the convention centre is covered in brown paper that people spend all weekend drawing cartoons and sometimes elaborate and breathtaking murals on.
Ed: We don’t have a picture of the breathtaking murals. I did however draw several honking geese on the walls, as is both my right and duty, and also added several fake animes to the ANIME TIER LIST I found upstairs in the weeb room.
There is not a stray mote of irony or self-deprecation to be found outside the British Embassy (the table in the air-conditioned VIP room where we return to melt into goo between events). It’s almost impossible to spend more than an hour shopping: you should be having fun instead. Nobody is dragging around a shopping trolley full of board games they just bought. It’s awesome.
Ed: The VIP room is the only VIP room I’ve ever been allowed inside and it is my goal to never use any other bathroom at the convention than the one located inside its boundaries. They serve a canteen lunch with soup AND salad every day FOR FREE and they have apples the size of your head just sitting there. Now: I don’t like apples, no-one really does, but they’re so big that you can’t help but be impressed
It is non-stop. You arrive when the gates open and there are three competing concerts - orchestral video game music, alt rock, and K-Pop - all going at once. There is a parade, probably involving pineapples. There is a man in power armour made fully out of Monster cans. You can just camp out in The Spire, where they run all the RPGs, and not stop playing until it’s time to go home (which is Sunday). You can admire an incredibly detailed LEGO version of Kaer Morhen or Night City. People show up in force for panels that start at 10.30pm - and show up in smaller numbers, possibly wearing yesterday’s clothes, for panels at 8.30am. If you’re lucky a lovely artist like hiurione will live-sketch a group of diverse orcs during your lecture.
The guests are many and varied. Last year Elaine spent about an hour chatting to someone who turned out to be Mark Shepard (you know, Crowley from Supernatural. He was nice, apparently.). This year Kieron Gillen (DIE and stuff) was there, as was someone from Breaking Bad, which I (Chant) am not fussed about but knows other people like, and Maggie Stiefvater, an author I am fussed about but was too starstruck to talk to. Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall from Darrington Press were there! The entirety of Mythworks (Slugblaster, Wildsea) showed up! Adrian Tchaikovsky’s been, and Grady Hendrix is going next year. And obviously, there’s us.
The point is, whatever flavour of nerd you are, there’s probably 20+ hours of programming that is absolutely, perfectly, 100% your shit at Pyrkon. See? If you like RRD, there’s probably 15+ hours of programming for you just by Elaine Lithgow, who loves panels and workshops and cannot be stopped. Other conventions take note: she’s an incredibly high-value guest.
Ed: We tried to stop her. Nothing. Then Maz pulled out due to health reasons, and she took over Maz’s slots too. She’s too powerful
Pyrkon is also hot. Yes, the whole of Europe’s been in a heatwave, but Poznań really got a head start. Watching a crew of red-faced Brits dive, hissing, for any available sliver of shade is genuinely very funny.
This is my way of saying:
- You can understand why we fight tooth and nail to be allowed back every year
- If you speak even a smattering of Polish, you should go - even if you don’t, we get by on “dzień dobry”, “dziękuję”, “sorry, English”, and “UWAGA UWAGA”.
GOING DEEP
Last year, most of our talks were planned around designers and creatives - so Professional Friendly Person Matt suggested that it would be great if there was a designer track, where people actually wanted to see our interactive project budget spreadsheets. God forbid we change ourselves when we could just demand an entire convention reshape itself around us.
I’m pretty sure Matt wasn’t the only person to say this - at least, my ego’s not big enough to think we’re solely responsible for what happened next. Because Pyrkon don’t do things by halves, so this year they scheduled an entire extra convention: Designer Experience Exchange Program (DEEP), which happened the day before Pyrkon.
Between us, we did about six talks at DEEP. Grant and Chris spoke eloquently about rules and game design (system first or setting first? NEITHER OR BOTH. Experience first?). Alex talked about the life-cycle of a game (turns out if you want to keep selling books, it’s useful to ensure you have books to sell), and Naomi did a panel on whether roleplayers are changing, which somehow morphed into how we could all do with accepting social media exists, and maybe considering influencers.
The rest of us…
Chant:
“I volunteered myself for a panel on Safety & Comfort in TTRPGS. Sadly there was no drama: everyone was broadly in favour of not traumatising your players. We still managed some spirited debate about where and how to introduce safety tool in a book for the greatest impact. Since we didn’t have to explain what an X-Card was, we got into more thinky stuff like the permeable boundary between designer and GM responsibilities (broadly: we can tell you where we think the dangerous bits are and how to handle them, but the whole table has to actively participate. Informed consent.)”
Grant:
“DEEP was the first TTRPG conference I’ve ever been to. Probably the first one I’ve ever heard of, even? Which is strange, but it’s a tiny industry, and most of us are too busy writing games to worry about setting up events about them - still, it ought to have happened in the UK or the US about ten years ago, and the fact that it didn’t makes me feel lightly ashamed. (I guess Big Bad Con was kind of that? Anyway.) It was good: I got to talk shop with my peers in front of a crowd of smart, engaged people, then I got several free strawberry cocktails I drank whilst sitting on a deckchair, so 10/10 would DEEP again.”
Elaine:
“DEEP was v-cool cause the panels were able to speak about more nuanced or complex topics than a lot of convention panels. I was part of panels on both AI in Roleplaying Games - where I got to engage die hard AI hater mode and walked away with most of my teeth in place - and Designing Rulebooks - I got to talk about BOOKFEEL! And INFORMATION FLOW! And other SUPER NERDY BOOK SICKO SHIT! Not something you normally get to do in panels.”
Alex:
“DEEP felt like being in on the ground floor of a new, radical concept in RPGs, otherwise known as a pretty simple industry conference - perhaps it's the fact that most games designers I’ve met seem to emerge blinking from the writing nest flummoxed by the idea that others might want to hear about their views on the real world - but actually hearing a bunch of people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences sharing views on the state of the industry, the difference between practice and praxis, where we’ve come from and where we may go next. I left DEEP buzzing with ideas, and I hope it returns every year and becomes firmly established in the calendar.”
Actual Pyrkon
This year, we planned our Pyrkon talks much better. They were for players and GMs - though as several of us are perma-GMs, we lean much more towards helping GMs translate the great ideas from our games to their tables. Turns out it’s quite hard to switch between player and GM mindsets when you mostly run games. Shoutout to Marcin Kuczyński from Game Machinery who spent most of a DEEP panel patiently reminding Chant that GMs are players too. He’s right, but I don’t have to like it.
Grant and Chris signed books, talked about worldbuilding, had important, business-y meetings, and did numerous other things, but their genius does not translate well into a blog post (or they didn’t have time to give me any quotes; pick whichever explanation you like better).
Ed: I admire how impressive Chant makes us sound; I had one forty-five minute business meeting, most of which was gossip, and spent a lot of time face down in my hotel room bed. We signed a total of five books in the hour we sat at the signing table. We did talk about worldbuilding on stage for several hours, so I’ll take that.
Naomi had the worst panel slot (8.30am, Saturday morning) and did maybe the best - definitely the most prepared - panel: how to make people care about your AP. In short: have a plan, execute it, and keep doing that consistently. And be on other people’s APs.
Chant:
“I helped out at Grant Howitt’s Kitbash Extravaganza - where the tall one showed a room full of people how to build a game out of bits (pick a vibe, a resolution mechanic/method, some character roles, actions, and cool greeblies)! There were three lovely assistants, and it was a small room, so me and Alex spent half the time making a perfectly cromulent game about temple guardians building a highway to the afterlife.
“Grant, Elaine and I were left unsupervised to deliver a lecture on making combat exciting (we thought it was a panel, we were not prepared). We managed to make some salient points, which mostly boil down to make your combats short, purposeful, put them in either very big or very small spaces, and make sure NPCs react to stuff that happens (if players know they can provoke a reaction, they get real into it).
“My favourite events were our writer and artist portfolio review sessions. I truly hope we see the fashion battle x murder mystery RPG, and the smooth, slick, easy-prep scenarios for convention GMs (shoutout to ChaosRPG.pl, one of whose members brought this to us) come to fruition.”
Elaine:
“I ran two workshops, on city building and boss building. The venue was loud but the ideas were louder. Featuring: a city where magical cocaine that only affects animals is mined, and a boss fight against a literal sun which has the gall to spout the phrase, “We’re not so different, you and I.”
“I too was at the Kitbash workshop. [And did much more work than Chant and Alex - Chant] Many games were made. Much sweat was sweated.
“I also got to talk about working in licensed RPGs, where I shared the ups and downs of working on licences big and small. Including the tension of memes vs themes (aka: why there’s not a button in Warhammer 40k games where you shout “HERESY!” and get an instant kill on an enemy.)”
Alex:
“I was also in the Kitbash workshop and I have questions. Will Chant and I finish our kitbash game about himbo guardians of the dead forced to lead their disappointed ancestors across a blasted afterworld in search of the (incorrectly) promised land? Will I steal one of the other group’s ideas and make a game about 5 different drugs in a person’s system trying to pilot them through an L.A. networking party? Should Alex be invited to help run a workshop if he’s also going to participate in it twice at the same time? Answers on a postcard please.”
WRETCHPOSING
This year we brought Naomi, the Social Media Wretch, with us. Every time we let her out of our sight we found her threatening Spenser Starke or being beaten with sticks. I think she was happy? I think that’s what this pose means?
We cannot send Naomi to all the conventions, because they are expensive and we’re worried about her welfare once she returns from her natural habitat. So if you’re at a con where she isn’t, please channel Wretch: send us pics of your finest wretchposing, preferably with RRD books visible to indicate that this is a tribute and not a cry for help.
IN CONCLUSION
Pyrkon is good. Alex put it best:
“My role at RRD is not to do game design, be clever about game design or in fact pretend to have even passing knowledge of a game. Fortunately a lot of my job is about talking to people I don’t know well, learning and sharing, and making nice. An event like this is exactly my wheelhouse. I got to meet so many interesting people (peers, VIPS, volunteers Pyrkon staff, stall holders) and came away from the whole thing bubbly.”
Thank you JJ and the team for letting us do this three years running. Once the heatstroke wears off, we’ll be full of ideas and fizzing to make new, weird games - the people we meet in Poland give us life and a renewed determination to be as cool as they are.
Man, we’d love to have a con like this in the UK.
Normal service will be resumed when we all climb out of our ice baths.
- Chant et al