Nothing’s off the table for PrairieCon’s comeback

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This article was published 20/05/2022 (1386 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Despite its humble beginnings, PrairieCon has remained a constant presence in the Westman community for more than four decades, providing tabletop gaming enthusiasts with a reliable space to bond over their mutual love of the hobby.

And after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the convention is scheduled to make a big return to Brandon next weekend, even if the unpredictable nature of the province’s public health guidelines gave local organizers a much shorter timetable to work with.

“Essentially, we had three months [to plan], which is ridiculous,” PrairieCon board president Alex Braun told the Sun earlier this month. “I still think maybe we were insane. But it’s going to happen. We’re super excited.”

While the 41st iteration of the local convention will feature many of the same attractions attendees have come to expect — including a games auction and a Dungeons and Dragons tournament — organizers are looking to shake things up with a change of venue.

Rather than heading back to their usual spot at Assiniboine Community College, Braun and her team of volunteers are moving all the action over to the Keystone Centre for the first time, with the hope that a more centralized location will provide easier access to hotels, restaurants and other amenities.

“It’s also going to allow us to have more space between the tables. So it won’t be as crowded, it won’t be as noisy,” Braun said. “You’ll be able to enjoy and immerse yourself in the gaming atmosphere a little bit more.”

Even though she is expecting reduced attendance this year — with the impacts of COVID still being felt across the province — Braun is also anticipating that this year’s PrairieCon might be the most “joyous” event they’ve held in a long time, since it will serve as a long-awaited reunion for certain players.

“Sometimes there are people that you only ever see at PrairieCon, because they come in from Winnipeg or other places like that,” she said. “And so it’s really a great opportunity just to catch up with old friends.”

To PrairieCon co-founder Chris Baker, this strong sense of community is the primary reason why the convention has managed to endure for so long; that spark has been present since day one.

Baker told the Sun that he and a friend originally got the inspiration for PrairieCon after they travelled to Wisconsin in 1979 to attend Gen Con, which remains the longest-running tabletop gaming convention in North America.

While the scope of this operation was unlike anything Baker had seen at that point, he knew a couple of Brandon facilities could accommodate a similar kind of event, albeit on a much smaller scale to start.

So the following year, the very first PrairieCon took place at Brandon University, with the event consisting of a dozen or so attendees and a handful of volunteers by Baker’s recollection.

Even though these numbers pale in comparison to the thousands of people who signed up for Gen Con around that same time, attendee James Rodgers remembers that the new Wheat City event was still plenty of fun in its first couple years and laid down a strong foundation for not just the future of PrairieCon but the Westman gaming community in general.

“As soon as we started playing, it was just like being with your friends. It wasn’t any different,” Rodgers said.

“We met a lot of new people, too, who were interested in the game. Before that, we felt a little isolated, because we had a little group of four to five friends and that was it. We didn’t realize there were other people in town who were doing the same thing.”

In those early years, PrairieCon would strictly serve as a venue to play Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy tabletop role-playing game that was first released in 1974 and has been gradually growing in popularity since.

However, large swaths of the broader public still didn’t understand this blossoming subculture in the early 1980s, which made attracting local businesses to sponsor an event like PrairieCon a challenge at the beginning.

Thankfully, Baker and his fellow organizers caught a break when Donald Phillips, the owner of Candlewood Books, agreed to hop on board.

“He was one of the early sponsors, and his financial support was really important to us,” Baker said. “Because we had the ideas, we had the time, we had the energy. We just didn’t have the money.”

Other members of the community weren’t as accepting of PrairieCon, though.

In fact, some residents fully bought into the 1980s moral panic that surrounded the newfound popularity of Dungeons and Dragons, viewing it as a corrupting influence that encouraged youth to take up witchcraft, demon worship and other occult practices.

Baker even remembers a time when he was called into the Brandon Sun office after a concerned citizen told the staff they needed to write an exposé on the emergence of a “satanic cult” in the city.

However, that story never made it to print after Baker calmly explained the principles of the game to reporter Gordon Kent.

“It’s basically people who collaborate on storytelling using dice to bring in a random factor and a context, like spaceships or ‘Lord of the Rings,’ stuff like that. That’s all it is,” Baker said.

“So I felt that I would best represent the [Dungeons and Dragons] community by sticking to the fundamentals, talking about the rules and how organized and disciplined it is.”

Despite these roadblocks, PrairieCon continued to evolve throughout the remaining 1980s and into the 1990s, both in terms of its attendance and format.

Not only did the event occasionally take place multiple times a year, but organizers also began accepting tabletop games outside of Dungeons and Dragons, thereby opening up its appeal to a whole new group of gamers.

“We actually made the schedule up so that people had at least one free slot … because we wanted other people to try playing these games,” Rodgers said, having taken over lead organizing duties from PrairieCon IV onward.

“You really wanted them to experience it first and say ‘yeah, I really like this. I want to play this.’ So we were introducing a lot of new games, and I think that was a pretty significant change for us.”

This new wave of PrairieCon attendees included people like Braun, who had grown up playing tabletop games but discovered a whole new layer of fun and camaraderie by taking part in these public events.

“I definitely remember the first time that I was one of the winners of the Dungeons and Dragons tournament,” she said. “That was absolutely a highlight, because that was also back when I think there [were] maybe three girls who went to PrairieCon. It was a very small group of us, so … that was pretty cool.”

But to Rodgers, the biggest leap forward in PrairieCon’s evolution is its governance structure, which was completely revamped after he stepped down from his organizing duties in the late 1990s.

Before that time, Rodgers admitted he and his friends were simply ill-equipped to put together these kinds of events, whether that was because of their relative inexperience or the technological limitations of the day.

“One year, somebody told us they were going to come and set up a computer program for registration … and the day they got there, they couldn’t get the program to run,” he recalled. “So we quickly cobbled together an old paper-and-pencil system for doing it and it was a disaster all weekend long.”

Thanks to advancements in computer technology, alongside the adoption of a more rigid organization hierarchy among PrairieCon volunteers, Rodgers said he firmly believes the convention has been in much better hands throughout the last two decades.

“I have a great deal of gratitude for them keeping PrairieCon going and making it better,” he said.

PrairieCon’s evolution as a premier tabletop gaming event was on full display during its last official gathering in 2019.

Compared to the dozen or so locals who came together to play Dungeons and Dragons at that inaugural event, PrairieCon XL saw around 200 to 300 attendees, some of whom hailed from as far as Saskatchewan, Ontario and even parts of the United States.

The gymnasium at ACC was littered with various tabletop games besides Dungeons and Dragons, including Magic the Gathering, Warhammer 40,000 and Settlers of Catan.

Braun mentioned that attracting sponsorships is also much less of an ordeal compared to the 1980s, with organizers having built up a sturdy Rolodex of vendors and businesses during her tenure, including graphic designers and artisans from outside the city.

While the increased diversity of attendees, partners and programming is due to the hard work of her fellow organizers, Braun said the event has evolved in tandem with a growing cultural acceptance and understanding of the hobby.

Today’s society is far removed from the “satanic panic” of the 1980s, with TV shows like “Stranger Things” and other related pop-culture properties highlighting the fun of tabletop gaming to a broad group of people.

“We have a fair number of farmers who will come in for the weekend … so we have run the whole gamut,” Braun said.

“A lot of us work at the university or at the college, we’ve got some pretty high-profile lawyers who come out. It’s a crazy-diverse group of people and I think that’s one of the strengths of the community.”

Even with all the progress event organizers have made over the last 40 years, Baker said he believes PrairieCon still has room to grow.

Moving forward, he hopes local volunteers can find a way to work with more game publishers directly, since the convention previously hosted an officially sanctioned Settlers of Catan tournament back in 2016.

“So by having that reputation and having that integrity, you can approach people like the publishers of Catan or Magic the Gathering and use the con to host regional or national events [and] earn more revenue to support the local tournament,” he said.

But for right now, Braun is primarily focused on the immediate future, with PrairieCon XLI being only a week away.

While this year’s festivities will feature its fair share of changes and a brand-new venue to explore, Braun is dead-set on cultivating the same warm, congenial atmosphere with which most PrairieCon attendees are familiar.

At the very least, Braun hopes this year’s PrairieCon will serve as an antidote to the last two and a half years of social isolation and remind people of the unique, in-person bonding experience that takes place between a few people, a table and a fistful of multi-sided dice.

“In a world where we’re moving far too much online … it’s one of the best ways that you can actually still have social contact in a live setting,” Braun said.

“I feel like it’s a really great opportunity to maintain some of those social skills that we’re losing by playing all of our games online and just watching TikTok for hours in the evening.”

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