TardisCaptain's Blog of Holding

The last SaltCON for 2026 is now in the books and boy was it a good one. And I’m not just saying that because I know the fine people who run it. I’m saying it because I had fun. I got a few hugs. I was able to catch up with a few friends and make some new ones. So yea, this convention did exactly what I needed it to do.

As you may remember from my SaltCON 2026 Summer After Action Report, attendance had been down for that event due to our bad economy. Well I can tell you that the three-day passes and Saturday passes for the September event did sell out. This may have been a combination of things. The organizers had done some advertising that may have helped. Summer is a very busy time in Utah and also the last con of the year is the smallest. In the past, single-day passes for all three days would have been sold out. So I’m hoping that things are on the rebound, but I know there’s a way to go. I was able to have two of my three games “fire” this time around so I was very grateful for that.

Speaking of the games that I ran, the one that didn’t fire was Basic Fantasy on Friday. But I still had an enjoyable time. One of the things that I like about SaltCON is that they use the Table Top Events convention management website that allows for attendees to purchase their tickets and reserve their seats at different games. You can even download the .ica files and import them into your favorite calendar system which provides me with a 10 minute reminder when I have a game coming up. Because of this I knew that I had one player who had registered for the Basic Fantasy game and I was hoping that more would sign up at the con. Unfortunately it was only this one gentleman. So we had a discussion about the advantages and history of Basic Fantasy. That’s when I discovered that he had driven all the way up from Las Vegas to play this game. He had even purchased a hardbound copy of the book. I mentioned that perhaps the title of the adventure, “Guildmaster Quest Part II” may have led to some confusion. The adventure was a continuation for a Basic Fantasy one-shot that I had run at an earlier SaltCON. But if anyone looked at the schedule of events, they didn’t see a Part I. So it’s possible that participants may think that they may be missing something by not playing the first part. I should have also communicated that playing in the earlier adventure was not required and a “previously on…” recap would have been provided. I even had a Part III and Part IV planned. So I’ll put those on the back burner for now and come up with a brand new adventure for SaltCON-Spring 2027. The gentleman from Las Vegas wondered if my adventure had been published through the very strong Basic Fantasy community and had downloaded all of the free adventures that were available. I do need to get off my duff and get my notes polished up for submission. One last enjoyable note about my conversation with this Las Vegas fan, he had been playing since the 70’s. He loved old-school systems and even played D&D with his wife up at Wizards of the Coast headquarters in Seattle before the company had been purchased by Hasbro. We ended up exchanging contact information to keep in touch and he promised to drive back up for a future Basic Fantasy game. This gave me encouragement to continue this line of games.

The Saturday game that I signed up to run was Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition which I had already run my regular players through as part of a test run. While no one reserved spots prior to the con, I had three in-person-sign ups on Friday and two more added on Saturday. So there was more than enough to run the session that I had planned. I can now publicly state that this adventure was my own STA adaptation of the FASA Star Trek Roleplaying Game module, The Vanished. I had changed the title for the convention and my personal campaign to avoid any spoilers. According to the notes in the FASA book, this adventure was actually used as a RPG convention tournament module at the 1983 “Love of Trek” Star Trek Convention in Omaha, Nebraska. The module even included play reports from that convention. It was very interesting to see how the two groups I ran this through the adventure differed from those fans in the early 80s. The party was able to discover the big secret and recover the missing crew within the four hours allotted for the time (we ended right on the dot). The pre-generated characters came from the Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition Starter Set. I liked how they were presented in the printable format plus some fans had made name tents with a character name on the front and the stats on the back. One player enjoyed this game so much that he sought me out after the adventure to thank me for running this. Yes, I will be polishing up my adaptation notes and presenting them on this blog later.

My Sunday game had all six slots filled online before the convention started. The Geek Wife was also able to join me for this game of Mutant Crawl Classics. Once again, I changed the title of the game to avoid spoilers, but I used The Museum at the End of Time as presented in the DCC Free RPG Day 2016 publication. This is a zero-level funnel and I had dropped a stack of pre-generated characters on the table for players to use. These were teenagers going on their trials to become adults by trying to find technology of the ancients that would benefit the Tribe of the Cog. This was my first time GMing one of the Crawl Classic games and it didn’t go too bad. I wish than I could have done a test run for it prior to the con, but sometimes you’ve just got to jump into the deep end and swim. I really like the Crawl Classics system. I didn’t kill as many zero-level characters that I probably could have, but these players were also very well organized. The party only got about 1/3rd of the way through the museum before they had an opportunity to exit with their newfound technology and they left. I’m not certain if this was because it was one of the last games at the con or if the players thought they had found enough ancient tech to satisfy the tribe leaders. But the players told me they had fun when we wrapped up so I’m a happy GM.

I was able to get to all of my scheduled games that I had signed up for. I really liked Shadowrun Anarchy and how simple the rules were. The GM runs SA 5e for his regular campaign and said it was a little bit more crunchy. But if I was to run a game, I think I’d stick with SA as too much crunch isn’t really my style right now. We had to go rescue a local community doctor who was being hunted by a corporate high-response strike team. Turns out the doc had treated a shadowrunner who had accidentally downloaded an experimental AI from a script-kiddie who somehow got into a corporate mainframe. It was a simple adventure that introduced the world to the players and was very well done. When I was giving con updates on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server, one of the writers for Shadowrun Anarchy responded. I wasn’t aware that this person had worked on this book. I had to run over and grab my dead-tree version to check the credits when he had piped up. So that gave me a thrill.

The SCP playtest was based off of the shared-writing universe called The SCP Foundation. Think X-Files meets Cthulhu meets Warehouse 13 meets Supernatural that’s been running since 2007. My youngest Geekling is a big fan of this universe and has even cosplayed for it at Halloween and conventions. So when I texted my youngest Geekling, they got really excited. When I got home I had to give them a complete run down of the adventure. We were an investigation team that traveled to Denver to check up on a weird warehouse that was gathering a mass audience by some displays in the windows. Long story short, I got to blow up the warehouse before we could contain the “Evil Industrial Cooking Oven” hidden inside. It sounds strange, but it was a lot of fun. I was able to give some feedback on the system used for the game directly to the designer.

On Saturday morning I got to play Dungeon Crawl Classics game titled Emirikol Was Framed. For those of you who don’t know the character, Emirikol was the chaotic wizard whose image was in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. We got to fight flying monkeys, use mighty deeds and weird spells (each spell in DCC has a chart that you roll against when the spell is cast with varied results) and defeat not one, but two evil wizards plaguing the city. We were playing fourth-level characters and I only wished that the character would have had more equipment on them. Holding only a melee weapon while the flying targets buzzed above you took some creative thinking. But the players at the table had fun.

I was the only player that showed up for the steampunk/western/horror game Through the Breach on Saturday. It was played with a deck of playing cards and had an interesting system. The GM’s brother played at the table as well so that we could have a session. The two brothers reminded me of another pair of geeky brothers that I know. When I was discussing the game with another convention attendee, he told me that Through the Breach had a huge following in Montana for some reason and also had a big miniatures collection line. I don’t know if this is a game that I’d buy at full price, but I did enjoy the opportunity to learn about a new system.

A system that used a deck or two of 52 playing cards also popped up in the Sunday game I played called Starship Infernum. The second player who registered didn’t show up, so I ended up taking three characters and letting the GM walk me through the system. I was also able to ask many questions as I went through the book. This game could easily be used as a convention one-shot or a pick-me-up game if all of your regular players can’t show up for a game night.

As you can see from the photo above, I came home with some interesting loot from the convention. The t-shirt was gorgeous and I had to give a compliment to one of the con-runners. This year’s theme was pirates, but the shirts for Spring and Summer were really busy. I remember wearing the spring shirt and having someone look at it confused as to what it was because of how busy it was in the graphic. The end-of-summer shirt had a very simple logo and quickly made sense. I can’t wait for the right time to wear it. The free game was something called Battlebones and was the only free game that I hadn’t already picked up from previous SaltCONs. A board game that I did buy in the swap meet was Robo Rally. I remember playing this game about 15 years ago with some friends in the local Star Trek club and it was very enjoyable. But every time we had found a copy, even used, it was outside of our price range. Well this one was at a very decent price so I snapped it up as my first purchase of the con. Also in the game swap was the Cy_Borg core rulebook. This is Mork Borg for cyberpunk. And since I had been wanting to try some of the Borg games (Mork for Fantasy or Pirate Borg) I picked this up. For my Thank You gift I found a sci-fi RPG rulebook for Untamed Worlds from Osprey Games. In this universe Humanity has reached the stars, but the bulk of them stay in the core worlds while they send out genetically modified animals to search the uncharted sections of the galaxy. I’ll use both of these books in the 2027 Character Creation Challenge.

Wow, this after-action report turned out to be a long one. But that’s probably because I had a ton of fun at SaltCON End-of-Summer. If you are looking for a good gaming convention, please check out SaltCON. There are a ton of board games, card games, roleplaying games and more. The next two conventions at the Davis Conference Center in Layton, Utah are March 11-14 and June 11-13.

And before I forget, many thanks to the convention organizers and volunteers for putting this together. You guys are the best.

Do you have any questions about the convention weekend? This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.