Preparing for Summer StabCon 2025

The return of the Blog.

My last post on this blog was in March 2020. Right before a worldwide pandemic hit. Where everyone else switched to online gaming, I found that I couldn’t play like that so I had a forced hiatus from the Table-Top Role-Playing Game hobby which, somehow, grew into a 5 year break. Apart from dropping into the last couple of UK Games Expos for a day or so, just to play (not Referee).
But I’ve recently retired and returning to the hobby seems to be a good way to fill a bit of time. So I’ve been looking at restarting my convention visiting hobby. I’ll just try to keep the addiction more under control. (I notice from my last post - March 2020 - I’d been to FIVE consecutive conventions in 5 weeks. That was too much.)
I went to UKGE for three days at the beginning of June - again just to play - so I didn’t think it was worth blogging about that. The next available convention was StabCon - a con I used to be intimately familiar with. So I decided to make that my “big return” to the UK convention scene and the first convention I wrote about upon returning to this blog.
It’s a 3 day convention, so I’ve decided to split the report into four posts. One about planning for the event and one for each day. (Don’t worry they’ll each probably still be overlong and too detailed.)

My history with StabCon

If you used to read my blog or go back through the posts or read the diaries which preceded it:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/177449/conventional-thinking
you’ll know that StabCon had been on my regular convention list for many many years. It’s been going for decades in one form or another.
By the time I started going, it had fetched up at the (bargain basement) Britannia hotel in Stockport. It took place twice per year - one in the summer and one in the winter.Its organisation was so slick as to be almost invisible. It was basically a board games convention. I don’t know how that side of it worked. There didn’t seem to be any organisation. People seemed to just turn up with these BIG boxes and games just seemed to happen at tables in a large room.
For TTRPGs, there was slightly more organisation. You turned up, stuck up a sign up sheet on a slightly too small noticeboard and booked a conference room to play in. Conference rooms had space for 1-3 games. You could choose whatever times you wanted on your sign-up sheets but most prospective Referees seemed to stick to the usual convention timings - Morning, Afternoon and Evening.
That was it. Your first StabCon was extremely intimidating as it looks like absolute chaos. But you got into games, settled in, get to know people, they get to know you and a personalised StabCon gelled around you. As you went over and over again, it came to feel like a home from home.
My bespoke experience was this:
Friday evening: (arriving after work) I had a regular group I played with. This was Savage Worlds - but I didn’t care. It started off as Fantasy scenarios but over the years grew into something else:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/330218/the-secret-files-of-section-d-taster-edition
Pre-WWII agents vs. Nazi paranormal and aliens. Indiana Jones plus. Full disclosure, I’m listed as a playtester on this and my character is one of the pregens.
Saturday morning/afternoon: I’d usually offer to referee a couple of games and almost always get a full table of players.
Saturday evening: Unusually for me, I got into the habit of offering to run a horror scenario of some kind. People came to expect this and some people seemed to look forward to it. I always got a full table.

Sunday morning: I once ran a Star Wars game - using my own rules, of course. The players loved it and asked for a follow-up. So we all agreed to meet up Sunday morning at the next StabCon. And again. It turned into a Star Wars campaign. No signup sheet needed, everyone just turned up to carry on the game.
It ran for a total of three sessions until I ran out of scenario ideas. I found Star Wars to be a very limiting playground. But everyone agreed to my suggestion to switch to Superheroes. The Superheroes had just made a daring escape from captivity in the Villains’ lair when Covid hit.
Sunday Afternoon: I’d either go home early - tired but happy - or look for a game to sign up to. A couple of times I was lucky enough to get into a game of “Trumpton”. Lovingly based on the old TV series the sessions had a twist in that they were crossed with the worst excesses of American Action movies. It was not unusual for the Gingerbread Man to do a drive-by shooting on the Camberwick Green bakery!
So, for me, StabCon did become a home from home. I booked into the hotel Summer and New Year and turned up with my weekends pretty much mapped out - it was great.

Summer StabCon 2025

Having decided to return to StabCon, I did some research about the current convention. Some things had changed.
First of all, the venue was different. It was now no longer at the Britannia Hotel. (I believe a change in business model meant them housing more Asylum seekers and not having the flexibility to house a 300 people weekend event twice a year.)
It’s now at the Masonic Guild Hall in Stockport. This means it’s no longer a residential convention. However, finding accommodation is super-simple. The hall is halfway between a Premier Inn and Holiday Inn and is just a 10 minute walk from each. I found an even cheaper hotel 15 minutes walk away - which I’d used previously when visiting the Convergence convention in Stockport. Sorted!
Secondly, the bookings contact had changed. But I was easily able to get my hands on a booking form via Facebook and fill it in. I noticed a few people posting that they’d filled in forms and not had a reply but I honestly wasn’t worried. It was only £17.50 for the weekend and I trusted the StabCon organisation implicitly, even with a new name. Sure enough, confirmations came through a week or so before the event.
Another change, of course, is that now I’ve retired I could get to the con when it opened at 2pm instead of rushing up after work which left the option for an additional slot/game open to me.That left me with the issue of what to do. I couldn’t rely upon my old weekend framework, could I?

Games

I took to Facebook. I don’t like Facebook but it’s the only way some cons or clubs communicate about their event so it’s a necessity for that.
First of all, the Friday evening group welcomed me back with open arms!
That left 6 slots to fill.
Any other convention, I would have tried dusting off one of my scenarios from the old days that I’ve run several times - to make my return to Refereeing easier. The problem is, I’ve run just about everything I’ve got at StabCon. So any offerings would have to be new. I hadn’t designed anything to run at a convention in over 5 years.
Initially, I decided to offer two games.
- A SciFi game using my Code of the Spacelanes rules (even after 5 years I reckoned I could run those in my sleep). You wake up amnesiac on a ruined ship.
- The recent (I thought) Discworld Starter Kit. Though not one of my games, the rules are so non-existent I reckoned I could run them and I thought the setting would be popular.
Then I learned that someone had offered that Discworld scenario at Winter StabCon and some people had already played it. And that Referee was offering a follow-up Discworld game of his own design, so I pulled the starter set. (The Discworld Referee kindly sent me a scenario he’d designed but it didn’t gel with my style. Anyway I’d already pulled the game by then.)
Barely anyone seems to be using the Facebook page for pre-convention organisation apart from me. I felt like I was coming across a bit needy, but I needed to feel ready for the con.
I offered a Steampunk game. Most Referees offer pregenerated characters at conventions. I prefer to do character generation at the table. This was initially because I was using game conventions to promote my game systems. Later because character gen in my games is super fast and I loved seeing what characters players come up with. Recently I’d had this idea that at the start of a campaign a Referee should run a “prologue” one-off scenario using the rules and game world before “Session Zero”. I thought I’d try that. One of my quick one-hour Steampunk scenarios with pre-gens, then character generation and a longer scenario.
Finally I decided to offer a Fantasy scenario. I got this idea of a Dragon crash-landing into a village the characters are hiding out in - pursued by a flying ship.
I say “offered” but there’s no pre-arrangement at StabCon. I made signup sheets and posted images of them on Facebook. (Not to sign up to. I was just desperate to drum up some interest.)
So, Friday night was sorted and I had three games prepared to offer in other slots. That left three slots unaccounted for. I decided I’d play in those but printed second copies of each sign-up sheets and enough character sheets so I could run each game twice if I needed to.
Then I waited for Friday to come……