Swedish gaming conventions vs American (and other nationalities)

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raniE

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I help run a gaming convention in Sweden (GothCon, the biggest and longest running gaming convention in Sweden). I’ve gone to this con every year since 2004. I’ve also been to several other cons in Sweden. And though there are differences, most of them have a lot of similar features. Nut whenever I hear of American or British gaming conventions, it seems like almost nothing there works the way I would expect it to from visiting and running a con in Sweden.

Now, I assume that a lot of you will be Americans (technically I’m also an American, but here I mean someone who actually lives in the US) or Brits. I also assume a lot of you will have gone to cons. So I figured it could be interesting if I post a bit about how Swedish gaming conventions, and especially GothCon, work, and you can tell me about cons in other countries. If you have experience with conventions in other countries than Sweden, the USA or the UK, feel free to post about them as well of course.

I’ll post about GothCon in my next post.
 
So, about GothCon.


First, size. GothCon is Sweden’s largets gaming convention, which translates to having a bit over 2000 attendees. I haven’t gotten the final numbers for this year yet, but they’ll probably end up at around 2200 or similar. This is clearly a far cry from Gen Con’s 60 000 attendees, but fairly similar to smaller US gaming cons from what I can find.


Next, venues. This seems to be one of the biggest differences to me. Swedish gaming conventions are nearly exclusively held in schools or universities. GothCon rents three schools and a student union building that are all in close proximity to each other, plus another school that is a bit further away (about ten minutes walk). Smaller conventions often only rent one school. But I’ve never seen or heard of a Swedish gaming convention that is held in a hotel or a convention center, which I understand is very common in the US.


A side effect of not being held in a hotel or similar (or maybe it’s the other way around) is that people’s sleeping arrangements will be very different. GothCon at least has a deal with a nearby hotel, so you can get a discount if you book a room there over the weekend. I’m not sure how many other cons here do that though, nor how many people actually stay at hotels. Instead, a lot of people sleep in the schools. They bring air mattresses or sleeping pads and sleeping bags and then just crash on the floor. Remember that fourth school that was a ten minute walk away from the rest of GothCon? That school is only rented to be sleeping quarters. There are no events of any kind held there. A lot of people live close enough that they can just go home at night of course, while others stay with friends or family.


Then we have what goes on at the cons. I recently saw a guest list for some fairly small con in the US. It was immense. GothCon sometimes has a guest of honor (we had Cam and Jessica Banks a few years ago for instance) and often there’ll be some panels. The panels I’ve been to are often fairly sparsely attended though, and don’t seem to be a big draw. We get a lot of people from the Swedish rpg industry attending, but they’ll usually be there selling their stuff and/or running games. Often they just go as guests and play games.


Speaking about selling, there will usually be a bunch of stores and game companies and just private individuals there to sell stuff. Often used stuff is a huge draw.


The games of course are the main draws. The board games, card games and miniature games work pretty similarly. There’ll be some tournaments and some rooms for drop-in play. The ratio of tournaments to drop-in games varies (board games have fewer tournaments than miniature games at GothCon). A lot of the board game rooms are just places where you can borrow a game and sit down and play with your friends, while the miniature game rooms and card game rooms are usually more structured than that.


Then there are the rpgs, my favorite. This is what I’m responsible for at GothCon. We’ve got a couple of drop-in game rooms (The indie room and the old-school corner), but most of the games you have to sign up for ahead of time. Organizers get in touch with convention staff in the fall, sending in some info on what they want to run, when they want to run it and some contact details. They also get some promotional material for the website to us. Then when the website goes live we put their promotional material up. Then people can sign up for these games during registration. A lot of groups sign up as soon as registration opens, which was in … either January or February this year, I can’t remember. How you sign up varies from con to con though. For GothCon the entire convention is organized into seven five hour slots (10-15, 16-21, 22-03, both Friday and Saturday, then 10-15 only on Sunday) and each rpg session is expected to last those five hours. At GothCon, you also sign up as a group. Now, if you don’t have anyone to sign up with, you can make a group with just yourself in it, sign up for games and show up hoping to find another group to join, but the default is that a group has about four or five people in it and shows up ready to play. You can also sign up as a GM, which is usually necessary, as there are almost always more groups signing up than the number of GMs the organizers can provide themselves. Then at the beginning of the time slot, you show up with your group to the game’s assigned room (we try to keep all of these gathering rooms on the same floor to make it easy for ourselves). There, your group hopefully gets a GM. Then one group stays in that room, while all the others are assigned a different classroom to play in (or if necessary because we ran out of rooms a secluded stretch of corridor). Then you game for about four to five hours, then on to the next thing.


There’s a lot of other stuff that I won’t mention right now, but that is I believe the core of the Swedish gaming convention experience. Some cons do things a little differently, like doing individual sign-up for rpgs for instance, but it’s all pretty similar. Oh, I will mention one thing. GothCon, and I believe all Swedish cons but I’m not 100% about that, is completely drug and alcohol free. That means no drinking on the premises or you get booted, and no showing up intoxicated or you get booted.


If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to ask. I’ve been doing this for a while now so should be able to answer at least some questions. Now, what about conventions in other countries? Differences, similarities? Just generally interesting facts? I’d love to hear about them.
 
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Thanks for telling us about GothCon, it was really cool to read about.
I'd like to ask about a few specific games and companies.
Were there any promotional stuff or teasers about Kopparhavets Hjältar? It's the game I'm looking forward to the most. Were the Fria Ligan / Järnringen guys there? Did they hint at anything new?

By the way I'd love to visit next year, my Swedish skills will probably be more up to the standards by then, so let's hope.

Cheers! :smile:
 
Free League guys are always there, and a blast to talk to (I've known one of the Järnringen guys since around 2004, when they were the ones publishing Mutant, so it's always nice to catch up). Since they've got so much stuff now, we moved them out of the small vendors hall (which is just a small school auditorium) and into a room of their own. Otherwise they'd take up too much room in the hall.
I didn't really see any stuff about Kopparhavets Hjältar, but I could have missed it. Not sure it's in a form ready to be presented to the public as such. I can tell you that if you want to be at events where some rpg thing is released in Sweden, GothCon is your best bet. Free League used to time their releases to happen around Easter so they could premiere them there.

You should visit even if your Swedish is a bit rusty. Our actual materials, like the website, don't have great content in English, but once you get there almost everyone speaks English. I've played games entirely in English because of non-Swedish people being in the group, and it generally works fine. Hope you decide to swing by the convention!
 
British cons run the gamut from one day events held in school or village halls (or similar like ConTroll) to multi day events (Games Expo) held in the huge National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. One day events are usually run by a local group and consist of two or three gaming sessions with catering by wives/girlfriends etc. One and two day events are often held in hotels (the only space where you can get convention centre space sufficient to hold several hundred people and trade space). Catering is usually via the hotel or running across the road to a local shop (Dragonmeet in London and things like Concrete Cow in Milton Keynes are like this).

Finally there's UK Games Expo which is held in huge aircraft hanger sized halls at the NEC near Birmingham Airport. It runs Thursday to Sunday and accommodation is usually via local hotels plus those in Birmingham City Center as well as AirBNB places. Catering is either via the hotels or lower priced vendors brought in specially, there is no provision for popping out to the shops for food, although pizza delivery is popular. Games slots are three per day of 4 hours each and the trade halls are massive. It also hosts a huge amount of board and card games in various locations.

I've attended European cons (Chimeriades and The Kraken plus Hydriades at the end of this month) which tend to be residential and often held in either some sort of youth hostel or other government sponsored facility and have a more chaotic schedule for gaming - basically throw up a sheet listing your game and get people to sign up.
 
British cons run the gamut from one day events held in school or village halls (or similar like ConTroll) to multi day events (Games Expo) held in the huge National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. One day events are usually run by a local group and consist of two or three gaming sessions with catering by wives/girlfriends etc. One and two day events are often held in hotels (the only space where you can get convention centre space sufficient to hold several hundred people and trade space). Catering is usually via the hotel or running across the road to a local shop (Dragonmeet in London and things like Concrete Cow in Milton Keynes are like this).

Finally there's UK Games Expo which is held in huge aircraft hanger sized halls at the NEC near Birmingham Airport. It runs Thursday to Sunday and accommodation is usually via local hotels plus those in Birmingham City Center as well as AirBNB places. Catering is either via the hotels or lower priced vendors brought in specially, there is no provision for popping out to the shops for food, although pizza delivery is popular. Games slots are three per day of 4 hours each and the trade halls are massive. It also hosts a huge amount of board and card games in various locations.

I've attended European cons (Chimeriades and The Kraken plus Hydriades at the end of this month) which tend to be residential and often held in either some sort of youth hostel or other government sponsored facility and have a more chaotic schedule for gaming - basically throw up a sheet listing your game and get people to sign up.
Cool. Where are Chimeriades, The Kraken and Hydriades held? And what do you mean by a residential con?

Interesting info about the food. I realize I didn't touch on that issue. GothCon is held in the middle of Gothenburg so there's all kinds of restaurants around for people who want to leave the convention to eat. However, a large part of the staff work in the school kitchen, making meatballs, veggie balls, mashed potatoes, curry and hot dogs through the day, plus a large breakfast buffet in the morning and then a pre-ordered dinner in the evening. This is usually cheaper than going somewhere else to eat, but a lot of people feel like stretching their legs for a bit and eat at least one meal away from the convention every day. Other conventions have tried getting food trucks in in the past, with varying success as I understand it.
 
Chimeriades was held in southern France in a castle not far from Avignon but is now ceased as of last year. The Kraken is held in a restored hunting lodge in Germany just west of Berlin each June and October. Hydriades is at the end of this month (29 May - 2 June) in Switzerland. By residential I mean staying on site either in the hotel or some other form of facility (youth hostel or similar) as opposed to going each day from wherever you live. For example Contingency is held at a UK holiday camp (caravan park and small lodges) on the Norfolk coast each January (out of season so relatively cheap).
 
Chimeriades was held in southern France in a castle not far from Avignon but is now ceased as of last year. The Kraken is held in a restored hunting lodge in Germany just west of Berlin each June and October. Hydriades is at the end of this month (29 May - 2 June) in Switzerland. By residential I mean staying on site either in the hotel or some other form of facility (youth hostel or similar) as opposed to going each day from wherever you live. For example Contingency is held at a UK holiday camp (caravan park and small lodges) on the Norfolk coast each January (out of season so relatively cheap).

Ah, I see. Most Swedish conventions can be classed as residential in that case, probably because of the size of the country.

My German is pretty poor and my French is enough to say that I don't speak French. Are those cons English language friendly in your experience?
 
Saw that Cam Banks liked my post. Neat! Since you've been to GothCon and I'm pretty sure American conventions as well (and maybe some in New Zealand now, or maybe no time for that yet), maybe you could talk about differences between them that you noticed?

edit: Only if you want to of course.
 
GothCon was amazing! Truly lovely people. I wish we could return one year, though New Zealand is a lot farther away than the USA.

It felt like a lot of the local or regional cons around the USA to be honest. You had a lot of publishers there for RPGs too, albeit Swedish and other European ones. Seemed like you had room to grow.

Cheers,
Cam
 
My German is pretty poor and my French is enough to say that I don't speak French. Are those cons English language friendly in your experience?

Well my French isn't great and my German less so but enough people at Chimeriades spoke English it wasn't a problem. Same for The Kraken, English is the common language and is mostly used by all. I'm not sure about Hydriades as it's the first time it's run but I'm hoping for some English being spoken as well as my terrible French. Many of the European cons have English/American speaking Guests of Honour so expect to hear a lot of English regardless. Bear in mind that the European cons I go to tend to often concentrate on Chaosium's games lines. The English ones in go to are more varied game system-wise although I'm no fan of either Pathfinder or D&D and avoid those cons here in the UK.
 
GothCon was amazing! Truly lovely people. I wish we could return one year, though New Zealand is a lot farther away than the USA.

It felt like a lot of the local or regional cons around the USA to be honest. You had a lot of publishers there for RPGs too, albeit Swedish and other European ones. Seemed like you had room to grow.

Cheers,
Cam

Thanks a lot! It was a lot of fun having you over. And yeah, it is a long way to go from New Zealand to here (although I've got a work colleague who lives in Sweden but whose family lives in NZ, and he does the trip fairly regularly. But it is mucho expensive of course).

We are sort of running out of room at the moment to be honest. We're finding it difficult to get any new places to rent. The next logical step up is the local convention center, but it is way too expensive and doesn't really have enough small game rooms for our tastes.

Thank you for the gaming session at the con by the way (I'm the guy that got his face mauled when another character freaked out)!
 
Well my French isn't great and my German less so but enough people at Chimeriades spoke English it wasn't a problem. Same for The Kraken, English is the common language and is mostly used by all. I'm not sure about Hydriades as it's the first time it's run but I'm hoping for some English being spoken as well as my terrible French. Many of the European cons have English/American speaking Guests of Honour so expect to hear a lot of English regardless. Bear in mind that the European cons I go to tend to often concentrate on Chaosium's games lines. The English ones in go to are more varied game system-wise although I'm no fan of either Pathfinder or D&D and avoid those cons here in the UK.

I like Chaosium games. BRP games are a part of Sweden's roleplaying heritage. The first Swedish rpg ever published was a translation of Magic World from Chaosium's Worlds of Wonder, and many Swedish games have used a variant of the BRP system (Mutant was always BRP until Year Zero came out for instance). So that isn't going to be a problem. Might be nice actually, a lot of my friends aren't as keen on Chaosiums stuff as I am.
 
You might still be able to get in to either the mini Kraken held in June or the full fat Kraken held in October. At least the full fat version sells out fast so you might need to got to http://www.the-kraken.de/ very quickly and see if you can book a space.
 
I help run a gaming convention in Sweden (GothCon, the biggest and longest running gaming convention in Sweden). I’ve gone to this con every year since 2004. I’ve also been to several other cons in Sweden. And though there are differences, most of them have a lot of similar features. Nut whenever I hear of American or British gaming conventions, it seems like almost nothing there works the way I would expect it to from visiting and running a con in Sweden.

Now, I assume that a lot of you will be Americans (technically I’m also an American, but here I mean someone who actually lives in the US) or Brits. I also assume a lot of you will have gone to cons. So I figured it could be interesting if I post a bit about how Swedish gaming conventions, and especially GothCon, work, and you can tell me about cons in other countries. If you have experience with conventions in other countries than Sweden, the USA or the UK, feel free to post about them as well of course.

I’ll post about GothCon in my next post.
Neither American nor Brit, here:smile:. But hey...(probably) unwanted information ahead!

So, about GothCon.

First, size. GothCon is Sweden’s largets gaming convention, which translates to having a bit over 2000 attendees. I haven’t gotten the final numbers for this year yet, but they’ll probably end up at around 2200 or similar. This is clearly a far cry from Gen Con’s 60 000 attendees, but fairly similar to smaller US gaming cons from what I can find.
And here we're probably about 20 years from reaching your numbers, for now we've got roughly two zeros less:wink:. And yes, that means we usually gather at gaming stores.
For now, we're sticking to mini-cons, usually held within one day (and possibly late into the night). Some make it a whole week-end, but that's not typical. Then again, those are RPG-only events. For some reason, some RPG players don't mix much with the boardgame and cardgames crowd.

Oh, I will mention one thing. GothCon, and I believe all Swedish cons but I’m not 100% about that, is completely drug and alcohol free. That means no drinking on the premises or you get booted, and no showing up intoxicated or you get booted.
That, however, I just can't imagine happening in my lifetime:grin:!
 
Neither American nor Brit, here:smile:. But hey...(probably) unwanted information ahead!


And here we're probably about 20 years from reaching your numbers, for now we've got roughly two zeros less:wink:. And yes, that means we usually gather at gaming stores.
For now, we're sticking to mini-cons, usually held within one day (and possibly late into the night). Some make it a whole week-end, but that's not typical. Then again, those are RPG-only events. For some reason, some RPG players don't mix much with the boardgame and cardgames crowd.


That, however, I just can't imagine happening in my lifetime:grin:!
Not unwanted at all. I don't really know where "here" is in your case though. Europe? South America? Asia?

GothCon started in 1977 in a single room in the basement of Chalmers university of technology. It takes a while for these things to get going.

We get a mix of people who only come for the one thing they want to do (like the people who spend almost every waking hour playing rpgs at the con) and the ones that mix it up a lot. I usually do a lot of different things as a visitor. Rpgs are fun, but I like to get in some boardgaming and shopping and maybe test some miniature games too.

And yeah, to me drinking at a con just seems so weird. It just isn't something I would consider doing. It is interesting seeing the differences in culture.
 
Not unwanted at all. I don't really know where "here" is in your case though. Europe? South America? Asia?
EU, Bulgaria. If you pass by Sofia and wish to play, PM me here and I'll give you a phone number:smile:!

GothCon started in 1977 in a single room in the basement of Chalmers university of technology. It takes a while for these things to get going.
...more like 4 decades, then. We started the whole "regular mini-cons" thing back at 2015 or 2016...and yes, I was part of the group that started it.

We get a mix of people who only come for the one thing they want to do (like the people who spend almost every waking hour playing rpgs at the con) and the ones that mix it up a lot. I usually do a lot of different things as a visitor. Rpgs are fun, but I like to get in some boardgaming and shopping and maybe test some miniature games too.
And we want more people like you:wink:!
But we all get what we get...

And yeah, to me drinking at a con just seems so weird. It just isn't something I would consider doing. It is interesting seeing the differences in culture.
The rule is as follows:
If you can handle your booze (and are of legal age, though we don't get that many youngsters), you're free to drink whatever you pay for - vodka with beer, or rakia with rum and wine, or whatever. If you get drunk and it shows, you're going to be booted (and if you were obnoxious, you might get blacklisted from local game stores at the owners' discretion).
Simple to adjudicate and allows for no exceptions. And we've never had to boot anyone, to my knowledge:grin:!
Maybe we'd need to introduce some rules for it if we had more people, but I don't know if we could enforce them, or even whether there'd be any support for such.
My guess is no, we're kinda used to it and the rule would probably be seen in the same way that some OD&D grognards see D&D3.5 - as full of rules a competent GM doesn't actually need and actually make the game more prone to abuse.
In fact, most gaming tables I've seen would allow you to play drunk if you're not a "problem drunkard" - some people actually start playing better after having a few glasses, IME. I've never been one of these - alcohol either makes me sleepy and uncommunicative, or a mean drunk, so I don't use more than the "medicinal dose", and that if I feel I'm getting sick**, as many people do. But not everyone is the same, and I've played with a guy who was getting inspiration when he was halfway through a bottle:tongue:!
OTOH, I've been told by a couple other players, one of which I met on said events, that some of the most memorable sessions they've run were those they don't remember...because they were about to pass out while running them:shade:. Nobody was bothered by it, they all enjoyed the surge of creative events and characters!
Cultural differences are amusing, indeed!

*I believe the latter is the more murderous combination, but I'm not into trying such combinations out.
**Weirdly enough, then it has no negative effects on me. Quite the contrary, I feel better and am easier to talk with than my getting-sick-any-moment self. So technically, I have played after consuming small doses of rum, rakia, and other hard liquor...it's just that it never happened when I was affected by it.
 
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