Skip to main content

Announcing Scrum Con 2021



Although we can see a day sometime later this year when the pandemic might finally loosen its clutches on all of us gamers longing to meet around the table, for most of us that time looks like a few month in the offing.

When 2021 began and the Second Saturday Scrum Club didn't have our usual Scrum Con to look forward to in February, we decided we just couldn't let the year go by without holding some sort of gaming event, even if we had to make it a virtual one. Held on the last weekend of February, Scrum Con 2020 managed to sneak in just before the pandemic hit, and we came out of that event with all sorts of enthusiasm for continuing to grow Scrum Con in our new location at the Silver Spring Civic Center. We're going to continue to work toward that goal in 2022, but we just can't stand the thought of skipping a year and not hosting something under the Scrum Con banner in 2021. For those of you who have been simply too far away to travel to Washington, DC to attend our past Scrum Cons, here's your chance to join us from your quarantined couch anywhere around the globe!

This weekend we launched a great new Scrum Con website (thanks to fellow Scrummer John Sears), and opened up registration to a whole slate of great looking games. If you're interested in playing in them, I'd head over soon to Scrum-Con.com because the games are already starting to fill.

As in the past we're honored to include some special guests to the convention. Returning this year is Ed Stark (creative director of D&D 3/3.5), who will be running a session of Dungeons and Dragons. We've also managed to convince Dirk the Dice of the Grognard Files fame to ignore the time zone differences between the U.S. East Coast and the United Kingdom and run a game of Gamma World at our con.

Ed Stark, creative director on D&D 3/3.5 edition.
Dirk the Dice, host of the Grognard Files podcast.

In addition to the games we already have on the schedule, we’ll also be featuring a series of gaming-related workshops and seminars (sign up for the Scrum Con newsletter to be kept apprised of developments on that front).

To give everybody a shot at getting in on the fun, we are currently asking attendees to limit themselves to two games when they register. If we find ourselves with unfilled game seats in the final few days before the convention, we will send an announcement via the newsletter and open the games up to already registered attendees who are interested in playing in even more games.

You’ll also want to periodically check in on our vendors page, as we recruit more and more of them to offer special attendee-only discount codes that can be used over the weekend.

Finally, we are looking into adding some laidback social activities for registered attendees, perhaps on Friday night before the games kick off or Sunday evening, as we all unwind. Again, more details to follow.

And as we always do, we've designed a t-shirt for this year's convention! Dig that 8-bit wraith rider logo, an homage to gaming online this year! Order yours at our site store and have it shipped directly to your home!

Designed by convention co-organizer John Sears!


Please spread the word to your friends and on social media to help us keep this convention going until we get to the other side of the pandemic. And don't fret, we’re already exploring how to make an in-person Scrum Con in early 2022 bigger and better than any of our past gatherings.

----------------------------------------------










Labels:

Comments

  1. caveadsum1471May 4, 2021 at 5:15 AM

    Sounds like you'll have lots of fun! Good luck with it all.
    Best Iain

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Well-thumbed posts

Take the High Road: Making Cheap and Easy Dirt Roads

I have wanted some good roads to add to my games for a while now. My first attempt was a couple of years ago when my standards were a bit lower and I wasn't sure how much I was interested in investing in this new hobby. I bought some PDFs of cobblestone roads that I sized, printed, and glued to felt. The result was okay, but the way my laser printer  produced the roads ended up being quite reflective to the point of almost being glossy looking. The combination of glue, paper, and felt also meant the roads had a wavy consistency and almost always curled at the edges. I used them once or twice but was never happy with them. My sub-par first attempt at making roads for my games using felt strips, glue, and printed designs. You can see how shiny and how wavy and curled at the edges they turned out. I never felt good about putting them on the table for our games and eventually stopped altogether. I've been meaning to take another crack at making some roads now that I have...
17 comments
Read more

Playing with Yourself: 'Rangers of Shadow Deep' vs. 'Sellswords & Spellslingers'

As the year crawls to an end, I'm looking through this blog and noticing a couple of posts I started and never finished. This is one of them. Back in July 2019, I placed the photos on the page, jotted down a few bullet-point placeholder notes, and then never actually went back and wrote anything to post.   The post was meant to be my informal review of Rangers of Shadow Deep after my first game of it with Josh O'Conner, who set it up for us to try in his basement. I think I never finished this post because I was not very impressed with the game but I knew Josh was, and we hadn't been gaming together long enough for me to be sure my candor about the game wouldn't hurt his feelings and sour a budding gaming friendship. I consider Josh more than a gaming friend these days, and so I'll go ahead and post this with some very short notes fleshing out the bullet points I had left as a reminder for myself back in 2019 (at least the one's I can still decipher the ...
2 comments
Read more

Candid Photos From "Conan the Barbarian" (1982)

This post is barely gaming adjacent, but the Conan stories have informed much of my fantasy gaming since my first forays into the hobby. I've seen the John Milius adaptation more times than any other movie (probably over 50 times, though most of those viewings were on VHS or HBO as a teenager). The 1982 Conan  film was the first R rated movie I saw in a movie theater (age 12). The first convention game I ever played in was one in which I played the barbarian himself. The first convention game I ever ran as game master was an adaptation of Howard's "Beyond the Black River." For good or ill, I've spent a lot of time in that fantasy world. When I stumbled on an online trove of about 400 candid photos from various sets of Conan the Barbarian shot by somebody on the crew, it was oddly visceral for me. It generated a warm feeling getting to see these actors and sets from new angles, both in character and out, in situ and behind the scenes. Seeing Sandahl Bergman, Ge...
1 comment
Read more

Lost Art of D&D No. 2: Games Workshop's Holmes Basic (1977)

After Games Workshop attained the license to print a co-branded edition of TSR's 1977 Dungeons & Dragons basic rules book, they set about putting their own stamp on it, designing a new cover and replacing a number of the illustrations they deemed too crudely drawn for their U.K. market.  The cover art was by John Blanche at the very start of his career as a fantasy illustrator. Blanche went on to be a mainstay at Games Workshop, producing countless illustrations for them. His fannish enthusiasm for the material--as an artist as well as a lifelong gamer--has deservedly made him a favorite over the decades. I first encountered Blanche's work in the David Day compendium, A Tolkien Bestiary (1978), to which he contributed five illustrations that sit comfortably alongside the book's chief illustrator, Ian Miller. I have a special fondness for this book, having coveted it as a child during my incipient Middle Earth fixation. My parent's procured an out-of-print copy of t...
4 comments
Read more

Scrum Con IV: In Your Face!

The Second Saturday Scrum Club rejoined the fray on April 8, organizing and hosting Scrum Con IV in Silver Spring, Maryland. Although we ran a surprisingly successful virtual convention in 2021 that took advantage of its online format to invite all sorts of participants we couldn't have otherwise (Dirk the Dice of Grognard Files  in the UK ran a game, and I interviewed wargame/RPG historian Jon Peterson via livestream ), Scrum Con IV marked our return to an in-person format. Because  Scrum Con 2020 ducked right under the pandemic lockdown on the last weekend of February that year, we were anxious to see if anybody would remember us. Turns out any fears were misplaced...because Scrum Con sold out again this year! In fact, every in-person convention we've organized has sold out, but this year's Scrum Con IV was almost 70% sold out of its 225 badges in the very first week, a pace that frankly caught us off-guard. About a week before the show, we had sold enough badges that...
5 comments
Read more

Chainmail: Battle of Emridy Meadows

In my imagination, Chainmail has always been that shadowy precursor to Dungeons & Dragons that I was both intrigued by yet leery of. I loved the idea of a game involving mass battles in a fantasy setting akin to those depicted in the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , but I also had a sense that Chainmail , released in 1971 a mere year after I was born, was likely a clunky wargame that would be too frustrating to bother mastering. It also didn't help that my first inkling of its existence was around 1980 or so when I could never dream of amassing the miniature armies needed to play out these massive conflicts. No, back then I was pretty sure Chainmail was the province of grizzled old grognards who had started wargaming before I was even born. Even after my gaming rebirth decades later in 2016, I was fine with letting the dim past remain so, and was more than content during my first couple of years back in the hobby exploring rules of a more recent vintage and managea...
9 comments
Read more