Contingency 2017

This is a bit of belated post. (If you're going to blog, you really should try to keep up.)

A rather special event happened last week. Contingency.

For a decade or so, there used to be a superb convention in the first couple of months of the year in the South West called Conception. It spanned 5 days, was residential and was pretty much all RPGs. Hundreds of people went making it the largest dedicated RPG convention in the country.

Thousands and thousands go to UK Games Expo, of course, but that includes board games, card games - in fact every type of Tabletop game. So it's not a purely RPG convention. Conception was the big RPG con.

Last year it became clear that Conception had to be cancelled. The owners of the Holiday Camp hosting it came up with a new business plan which couldn't accommodate Conception.

We were all gutted about it.

But some people - spearheaded, it seems to me, by a single visionary - had the bright idea to set up replacement convention at about the same time - Contingency. At first sight this seemed a daunting task - to replace a huge, long running convention, built up over years with one thrown together in just a few months.

Initially I threw my hat into the ring to help organise the "classic" Roleplaying games. However, I had to pull out when it became clear that I simply couldn't trust the British Rail system to get me down and back reliably.

So I didn't go and can't give a first hand report on what happened. However, from what I've read, it all seemed to go rather well. Given the scale of the task they set themselves, the fact that it happened at all with no major glitches is nothing short of a triumph.

It just goes to show what one woman with a vision can achieve. Well done!