2025 Convention Report: Alaska RPG Con

A couple of weeks ago I cashed in some air miles and hauled my ass.... self to Wasilla, AK to run five games at the inaugural Alaska RPG Con. An associate/buddy/friend of mine, the pretty cool RPG Artist JE Shields told me a couple of years ago his "dream" was to run a local game convention in his hometown of Wasilla, which is a 45' drive (or so) North of Anchorage. 

Of course I told him that if he gets this convention set-up, I will come up from Oklahoma to help do whatever he needs. Run games, work a desk, be a general con-bitch.....whatever.

Now before any of you go and try to think I'm some sort of "good guy", please know I'm coming from a totally selfish place. One of the fun lessons I learned "as an adult" is that doing cool shit is hard. All those hopes & dreams? Wicked hard (imagine a Boston accent here..)! You know what isn't so hard, and much more rewarding that in should be? Helping someone else achieve their cool shit goals. Getting to strengthen a friendship, possibly make more friends, and get in some gaming?!

Kind of a no-brainer for me. Because I travel so much for work as it is, hopping on a plane & flying 1/8th around the world for a gaming weekend isn't much of a stretch.

I got in on Thursday night and promptly screwed myself over by allowing the car rental place to upgrade my ride to a nice F150. Holy hell, that was a HUGE truck. Yeah, you know how driving a new car feels weird because you don't have a feel for the size of the new ride, or how it responds? So I missed the exit from the parking garage and pretty much got stuck on a way too-tight spiral ramp. The door at the bottom of the ramp wasn't properly in-line with the ramp and I had to do what felt like a 27 point turn to try and exit through the detailing room. I ended up scraping the rear quarter panel a bit, which I thought was far worse than it was, so mentally I was a bit messed up. Probably going to cost me the whole $500 deductible to fix....

I know I mentioned I travel a lot for work, and because of this I am an unabashed Marriott guy. I wasn't too thrilled that I was staying in a Best Western, but I was pleasantly surprised by the hotel. It felt more like a private hotel with some corporate signage. I had upgraded to a suite in case the convention needed more gaming space (Originally they thought they might need some more private space for "adult" RPGs). The room was nice, with a kitchenette and door separating the two rooms. It would have been easy to keep my personal space if there were gamers playing in the other room.

The hotel was decorated for Halloween, even the Polar Bear above the vending machines was in costume. The con was being held in the meeting rooms downstairs, with the main room holding the majority of the con and two smaller rooms with gaming tables as well. When I showed up one of JE Shield's kids (I honestly do not remember which one) was drawing up the convention logo on a welcome sign. Clearly artistic talent runs in the family. I don't think I could have even trace as well! The registration desk wasn't quite setup yet so I would have to come back in the morning, which was fine because I needed to go to bed since my body was still on Oklahoma time.

Stolen Pic from Will Kemp

I was running an adventure I wrote, and re-wrote I don't know how many times, each morning. This go-around I wrote for Old School Essentials (OSE). On Friday & Saturday night I ran some old HackMaster (4th Edition) adventures that I pretty much converted on the fly. Since I was running games in the 1st and 3rd gaming blocks of the day I had the 2nd 6-hour gaming block to get food and prep for my next game. I also had to make up the pre-gens because I had completely forgotten to print them before I left the house. Instead I was able to get some blank PC sheets printed at work and I had to create pre-gens for each game.

My very 1st game I ran using TAC0 and while the game went well, it just felt clumsy as all get-out. I switched to Ascending Armor Class (AAC) and it just flowed so much easier. I thought that the change from HackMaster to OSE might be too hard, especially since I was running 4 player groups instead of the 6 player groups I was planning for. Each game I had a potential TPK and my Saturday morning game only avoided it because the players wisely caught a mistake I made. The BBG had a slow weapon and had to attack last in each round. I had him attacking first since he had initiative and he was going to kill the last PC fighter, which would have resulted in a TPK. When I was reminded about that weapon being slow, well that one-his-last-hit-point-fighter got in a blow first and downed the BBG.

I tried a mix of old & new stuff (for me) in these games. I bought a bunch of minis this last summer when I was in Upstate New York, and didn't use a single one. Instead I kind of pulled an audible and bought a bunch of cardstock minis (review forthcoming) and used a bunch of tokens as well, most notably some plastic chips to represent dead bodies. I brought my smallest map mat and used it as a backdrop for plastic overlays. I discovered a long time ago it is relatively easy to pre-draw my "rooms" on vinyl and just slap them down as needed. This way I have my drawn rooms, and the players do not have to wait for me to try and draw an accurate room.

This con did a few things that just felt....right. They had tables set aside for open gaming and more tables set aside just for eating & socializing. Each table had wooden "table tents", more like weighted poles, showing the table's number and had a place holder for a little laminated card stating if there were open seats available. The games were all listed on the back wall, but they were loosely organized by day only, and if your game was full, the sheet for that game was pulled.

I liked how this convention was a local con, in almost every sense of the word. There were a handful of vendors and all of the Guests of Honor were Alaskans. I suspect I was the only non-local at the con, but not sure about that. I did hear at least one participant grumble that the convention was in Wasilla and not Anchorage,
and I did talk to James about that. While I'm sure Wasilla is largely for convenience, as 100% of the convention staff was from Wasilla, one of the things he said to me just drove a real point home: he said he wanted the con to "feel like Alaska". Now I've been to Anchorage a half-dozen times for work and the city kind of feels like Alaska-Light. Sure you have the view of the mountains, but with the density and way too many homeless, Anchorage feels more like a shopping mall with a nice backdrop.

Meanwhile, the view from a few feet outside the convention space:

Overall, I enjoyed the con and hope I can attend next year, which will be October 9th-11th, 2026. If you want a good destination small con, Alaska RPG Con might just be up your alley!