Mark your calendars! Gen Con 2024 will take place from Thursday, August 1st through Sunday, August 4th in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Writer’s Symposium, now in its 28th year, is a celebration of speculative fiction for new and experienced writers and will be on the 2nd floor of the Indianapolis Downtown Marriott. “The Gen Con Writers’ […]

Today Paizo Publisher Erik Mona opened PaizoCon 2022 with an energetic, one-hour Keynote Address on the state of the Pathfinder and Starfinder roleplaying games. Highlighting the convention are the Starfinder Drift Crisis Meta-Event and upcoming Pathfinder Dark Archive hardcover rulebook. PaizoCon 2022 runs today through May 29 at the DoubleTree Hotel, and through May 30 on @OfficialPaizo on Twitch and on Discord.

The Best Games are Played in the Dead of Winter

Midwinter Gaming Convention is a 4 day convention held each January in Milwaukee, WI. Started in January of 2000, this event was founded on a Classic World of Darkness Live Action Role Playing game (LARP), and over the years grew to become a full gaming convention offering everything from Tabletop RPG’s, CCG’s, Miniatures, LARPs and of course, Board Games.

At this point in we have decided to create and curate our own Board Game Library. In this way we can be fully assured that the services offered our Board Game guests are everything we expect to offer as a convention. We can maintain consistency and continue to grow toward a future of improving and expanding our Board Game track.

Geek.Kon is Madison Wisconsin’s very own anime convention, sci-fi convention, and gaming convention all rolled into one! As the name implies, Geek.Kon is a place to celebrate all that is geeky from strong foundations in anime, science fiction, video gaming, tabletop gaming, and costuming to up and coming fandoms like steampunk and gothic lolita. From Lord of the Rings to Doctor Who, Mario to Solid Snake, Geek.Kon covers it all.

Several of the Flames Rising crew will be at the convention and on panels throughout the weekend.

Both Matt and myself will be at Geek*Kon in Madison, WI this weekend as guests of the show. Geek.Kon is Madison Wisconsin’s very own anime convention, sci-fi convention, and gaming convention all rolled into one!

We have a booth in the Dealer’s Room and will have lots of books for sale including Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror, Redwing’s Gambit, and Tales of the Seven Dogs Society.

We will also have a selection of John Kovalic’s Dork Tower Collected Editions.

PAX Prime 2012 has wrapped up and I had a great time at the show. That unfortunately meant I had to miss out on other great times like Dragon*Con in Atlanta and WorldCon in Chicago. I could go off about the scheduling demons that need to be exorcised to make that not happen again. I’ve heard all kinds of cool stories from those other shows that I missed out on…but anyway, PAX was pretty awesome so let’s talk about that…

Bring your best “battitude” to the Wisconsin Bat Festival! Bring the whole family Saturday May 12 from 9 am-5pm to the Warner Park Community Recreation Center in Madison. (On Mother’s Day weekend don’t forget bats are great mothers too!)

– Meet special guest, Brian Lies, author of the children’s books Bats at the Beach, Bats at the Library, and Bats at the Ballgame!

– Meeting a Malayan Flying Fox at the 2011 Bat Festival

– Meet live bats from around the world and visit with Wisconsin’s backyard bats. Come face to face with fruit bats from Africa and Asia, a Vampire Bat, and encounter the largest bat in the world, the gigantic Malayan Flying Fox which has nearly a 6-foot wingspan!

ReedPOP, creators and organizers of the New York Comic Con (NYCC), the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2), as well as other major events in the popular culture world, and Nerdist Industries, a multi-platform creator of genre and pop culture content, have today announced a continuation and formalization of a relationship that successfully began at NYCC in 2011 with the launch of the exclusive WHITE SPACE B2B conference. This new alliance provides for a wide range of strategic and cross-promotional activities that include Nerdist interviews with ReedPOP guests and a prominent role for Chris Hardwick, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Nerdist Industries, at ReedPOP shows. Hardwick, host of AMC’s Talking Dead as well as Nerdist specials for BBC America, founded Nerdist in 2008 and has nurtured its growth into a multimedia name now spanning blogs, a podcast, television, web-video, live-events and print. Chris will be a leading personality at NYCC, C2E2 and other ReedPOP events.

Star of SyFy’s Destination Truth is First Entertainment Guest Announced for Annual Midwest Pop Culture Convention

Organizers of the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) have today announced that Josh Gates will appear at the annual pop culture convention where he will be the focus of a high profile panel and will also do a signing. Known as the “face of SyFy”, Gates is well-recognized as the host of the hit travel-adventure series, Destination Truth, a huge sensation which has garnered considerable attention and publicity, including an interview for Gates on The Today Show.

GenCon: Indy 2011 has come and gone…already? The first DriveThruRPG partnership with White Wolf Publishing and select games from Malhavoc Press, Open Design, Nocturnal, Eden Studios and Abstract Nova was a lot of hard work but very rewarding.

The booth was located at the back of a very large and very huge hall, but that didn’t stop new and old fans of these games from driving on back to DriveThruRPG. The quality of the new books is really awesome; people were literally saying… “That’s POD?” when pointing to the Exalted Comic and Ptolus.

Many top writers and creators will be joining Marvel Comics at New York Comic Con (NYCC) as the renowned comic books and media entertainment company reveals preliminary plans for the 2011 edition of the annual pop culture extravaganza which will take place at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City, October 13 – 16, 2011. Marvel will not only have a 3000 square foot booth on the show floor where attendees will have an opportunity to mingle with creators and staff, but the company will also be conducting numerous high profile panels throughout the weekend which will feature their top talent. Joe Quesada, Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Entertainment, and Axel Alonso, Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, will be Guests of Honor at the show and will be joined by many other notable Marvel creators including Guests of Honor Jason Aaron, Matt Fraction, Kieron Gillen, and Stuart Immonen.

“The enthusiastic participation of premiere companies like Marvel is critical to our success,” notes Lance Fensterman, Group Vice President for ReedPOP and Show Manager for NYCC. “We are always eager to host Marvel at New York Comic Con and to provide their talent with a range of opportunity. Our show not only brings thousands of fans together with their favorite writers, artists and creators but we are a preeminent venue for launching and displaying new content and product. Marvel’s participation is a huge validation of our efforts and we are grateful to them for their energy and commitment. We look forward to making the 2011 edition of New York Comic Con one of the best ever!”

This weekend, I’ll be attending OddCon in Madison, Wisconsin as a panelist and moderator. Guests include J.V. Jones, Robin Laws and Sarah Monette. You may recall we conducted an interview with Robin Laws here at FlamesRising.com just recently. Well, Robin is the gaming industry guest of honor at OddCon, which takes place from Friday, April 8th through Sunday, April 10th in Madison, Wisconsin.

In this post I talk about other guests, my panels and offer more information.

One of the things I did at C2E2 was sit down and play a demo of Magic: the Gathering. I had the chance to talk to a very knowledge and experienced judge. We have some decks here at home and even though I’ve played a few rounds, with a game like Magic: the Gathering I feel there’s always something new to learn.

For my demo, I chose the Chandra Nalaar or red deck from the Planeswalker set. Immediately, the game designer in me wondered how gameplay might vary between the different colors. The red deck was totally appropriate to my personality and had lots of fiery cards and mountains in it.

It may come as no surprise that I’ve been thinking about horror lately. It occurred to me recently that there has, at no point in modern US history, been such a vast array of horror material – across all media – available for consumption. Not only do we have a regular horror television series currently airing (Walking Dead) plus many more series no longer in production available in DVD collections, but also a ton of fiction, both in novel and in comic/graphic novel formats. It’s a great time to be a horror fan!

I was glued to AMC’s series The Walking Dead ever since I stumbled across a preview trailer online last summer. My wife complained about the amount of space it took up on our already full DVR, so I conceded and deleted the recordings. The DVD of the first season is available now; I’m waiting for the time to be right to buy a copy. As the highest-rated series to date on AMC, and one of the top five shows from 2010 in terms of ratings on basic cable, the Walking Dead has broken new ground as a continuing horror series.

Thought you might want to see a collection of the photos I took at C2E2. There’s more C2E2 goodness coming when I talk about Skullkickers, what’s new with Tim Seeley, my Magic the Gathering demo and a smattering of new comic titles. Hope you enjoy these!

The 2010 New York Comic Con and New York Anime Festival (NYCC/NYAF) took place at the Javits Center over three days. I had a blast at my first NYCC/NYAF! There was a lot to do and a lot of other fans and professionals to meet. I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to, but there was more than enough to keep everyone (myself included) entertained.

One of the biggest treats at a convention like NYCC/NYAF is getting to talk to the people behind the scenes about what’s going on, what’s coming up, and what fans can look forward to. Here’s a few brief highlights and interviews:

ACD Games Day is an annual tradeshow put on by hobby games distributor ACD Distribution LLC that connects retailers with the top publishers. This year’s show was bigger than last year and offered exhibitors and attendees to explore a brand new location in Downtown Madison.

Industry veteran Boyan Radakovich, who is ACD’s new Marketing Manager, had this to say about his first ACD Games Day.

“I wanted to make sure that ACD Games Day had the feeling of a marquee tradeshow. We moved to the beautiful Monona Terrace Convention Center and Hilton Madison for our event programming. We also increased the number of seminars to sixteen total, including key manufacturer seminars like the Wizards of the Coast track, the Mayfair Demo-2-Demo program, and many others.”

Having attended a show the previous year, I could definitely tell the difference between this year’s and last year’s show. This venue was bigger and well laid out. There were demo tables set up with games throughout the hall and there was a lot of attention to detail — included projected exhibitor and sponsor logos above the exhibition hall.

Whether you’re in this industry of alternative media, or whether you cover this industry of alternative media, there are certain milestones, certain times of the year, places, etc that just stick out and you have to plan on the fact that you’ll be there, you’re going to be there, you’ll have to be there or something close to that line of thought. Because, if you aren’t there or don’t go, then you’re going to miss out on some really great opportunities. Of course I’m talking about conventions. Yes, that (now) time honored tradition of packing up your favorite tee shirts and comfortable shoes, and getting yourself to an expo/convention center huffing your way through town, and breaking your way through the ebb and flow of fan boys, both costumed and under clothed. Some of them unwashed, many smelling like some third world open air market. But the world of comics/alternative media/books and everything else is changing.

They call it “The Best Four Days in Gaming,” but for me Gencon turned out to be one single day of hyper-kinetic goodness dotted by plenty of booth babes to punctuate my day. Going to Gencon in order to enjoy the event is quite different than being a man on a mission, well, missions. There were some fantastic new products this year, such as new releases in the Cthluhutech and Eclipse Phase lines. I picked up Smallville (and the Leverage Quickstart Job adventure) to see what twists they would bring to the Cortex system. I mean how could Clark Kent sport a D12 Strength when Jayne from Serenity does the same thing (Cam Banks’ answer to that question proves pretty interesting). White Wolf took a bold move by, well, not bringing a single book to read this year (though the booth, which looked like a Vampiric salon, was hopping with excited patrons looking to hear about upcoming products and get their drink on). Companies like Out of the Box had a fleet of new party and educational games while Wits and Wagers had both an expansion and family edition available (would have liked to see Say Anything release an expansion too, but oh well).

The Hero Initiative and Wizard World Comic Con will partner in 2010 to maximize the reach to fans for this important comic industry charity organization, Gareb Shamus, CEO of New York-based Wizard Entertainment and producer of Wizard World Comic Con tour, announces today.

“It’s important to support The Hero Initiative since they support so many of the folks in our industry. Without this industry support many artists wouldn’t be able to keep producing the wonderful work we love,” said Shamus.

The Hero Initiative will have a booth at Toronto Comic Con and Chicago Comic Con in 2010 to raise awareness among fans of the importance of their continued industry support.