Gary Con 2026!
I talk about how excited I am for Gary Con and discuss games I'm going to run.
2/3/20264 min read
Gary Con 2026!
I am excited for Gary Con. Gary Con, a massive gaming convention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, is celebrating its 18th year. Gary Gygax in the city where it all started.
My first experience at Gary Con was getting in at the last minute for a fantastic game of Boot Hill run by the legendary Keith Polster, who unfortunately passed away from cancer a few months later.
Here's a quick look at the elaborate terrain for the Boot Hill game. It really put you in the action!
Despite my years of gaming, that was my first experience at a gaming convention, though I nearly made it to the North Texas RPG Con years earlier (darn summer jobs!). But from that first visit, I was hooked. To say nothing of the other conventions I’ve attended since, Gary Con will always have a special place in my heart. It’s a great place to catch up with friends, run awesome games, and rub shoulders with the movers and shakers in the gaming industry, and I highly recommend checking it out if you’re near Wisconsin!
I’ll cover this in a future article, but I actually run an annual convention in collaboration with the library I work at and the Lake Geneva Library! These days, I’m planning my year around conventions, and that’s just the way I like it.
Adventures for 2026
Since I am the sole owner of Ozymandias Games, technically speaking, the company will have a presence at Gary Con this year! All of my games will be in the same area as Rough Magic Games, a Chicago-based professional Dungeon Master company, whose owner I met running at Gary Con back in 2024. They’re a great company, and I’m sure they’ll be running some excellent games this year!
Here’s where I’ll be at Gary Con. Feel free to drop by and say hi!
Journey Into Darkness
The year is 1884, and the history is not our own. You are a member of the Twilight Legion, a secret society dedicated to ending supernatural evil in the Weird West. Your team has been tasked with finding and destroying a ghost train that has been haunting the town of Calavera, New Mexico. Character sheets will be provided, and no prior experience is required!
I would call Journey Into Darkness my signature adventure (for more information, click here) as I’ve run it at every convention since debuting it at the first Bards & Bookwyrms, and it has a combination of investigation and dungeon crawling. The players (known as the posse in Deadlands parlance) are sent by the Twilight Legion to initially find a missing agent, a Choktaw medicine woman, who went missing after investigating rumors of a ghost train in Calavera. Their investigation leads them onto the ghost train itself, haunted by the spirits of the train robbers who caused the train’s destruction. They must fight their way through the strange and extradimensional train, and the cars are generated randomly via a deck of cards.
I’ve received some good feedback about this adventure, and hope to expand the number of rooms in the train soon.
White-Line Nightmare
The year is 2097, but the future is not our own. Supernatural ghost rock bombs have destroyed much of human civilization, the survivors wander the wastelands, and dangers both human and monstrous prey upon them. Your characters are mercenaries working for Junkyard, called upon to deliver a most curious cargo through the Southwestern United States. Character sheets provided.
White-Line Nightmare is a post-apocalyptic adventure set in the world of Deadlands: Hell on Earth. The adventure takes its name from the opening narration of Mad Max: The Road Warrior. I’ve taken heavy inspiration from the Mad Max film series when designing this adventure and running that setting in general. When I lived in Texas, I had a multi-year campaign set in that world, and that was probably the most player deaths that occurred with any campaign I’ve run so far. Over the course of the campaign, one of my players had to generate a new sheet three or four times, which was about average. That’s how it goes in the wasteland!
Although this adventure uses the current edition of Savage Worlds, I draw inspiration and develop character concepts from the previous edition of the setting. I think with this one, I wanted to get as many fun plot elements from that setting as possible into one adventure, so it has a civilization in the middle of a blasted wasteland, weird mutated creatures, psychotic road gangs, and a massive car battle for the fate of humankind. Fun stuff, right?
WITNESS ME! (Come on, you knew it was coming)
Basically, Wisconsin Has Great Conventions!
I feel lucky to be close to where it all began. I’ve made some fantastic friends attending conventions in Wisconsin, and I’m glad to be here! Now let’s see how many conventions I can squeeze into a single year…
As a side note, I’ve played in some excellent live games recently: my friend is running Pathfinder 1st edition’s adventure Rise of the Runelords, and I’m running 5th edition D&D’s Phandelver and Beyond: The Shattered Obelisk for another friend group. Gaming is a big part of my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
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