We’re All Mad Here

You may find it hard to believe, but there’s no convention dedicated to tabletop roleplaying gaming, or even tabletop gaming in general, in Chicago. There’s C2E2, but as you can guess from its full name—the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo—it treats TTRPGs as an afterthought. There was AdeptiCon, the wargaming and miniature painting convention held until recently in suburban Schaumburg, Ill., but it pulled up stakes this year and re-pitched itself in Milwaukee.

Maybe it’s because Gen Con, the 800-pound gorilla of game conventions, is held in Indianapolis, a moderately easy drive from Chicago. Maybe it has more to do with the cost of event space in a city that attracts such powerhouse conventions as the annual Chicago Auto Show and Chicago Flower & Garden Show. Chicago is rightly hailed as one of the friendliest cities in America, but when it comes to game conventions, there’s evidently something deeply inhospitable about it.

Lacking a true hometown con, I’ve adopted Gamehole Con in Madison, Wis., as my backyard con. Not only is it a convenient 2½-hour drive away, if you’ve ever gone, you know how it hits the sweet spot of offering a wealth of play opportunities and industry VIP encounters while remaining easily navigable and never overwhelming. I’ve attended regularly since 2019 (minus a couple of years of plague), making 2025 my fifth year in attendance. But this year’s con was special in another way: It was my first as a guest of the convention. Thanks so much to Executive Director Alex Kammer for presenting me with this opportunity and to Andrew Hitchcock and Sean Riley for hooking me up with signing table space after I landed on the waitlist for a table in Authors’ and Artists’ Alley.

I finally got to meet Lou Anders, who’s written glowingly of my books and has a gobsmacking number of wild stories from his years writing for television, and Spencer Campbell, an indie game designer and fellow Chicagoan. I enjoyed chats with Joe Raso of Ghostfire Gaming; Chris Lindsey, formerly of Wizards of the Coast and now with Goodman Games; and Monica Valentinelli, whom I’d met but never gotten to talk extensively with before. I learned, to my astonishment, that David “Zeb” Cook—lead designer of second edition AD&D and creator of the Planescape setting—was an enthusiast of The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. I participated in panels with Ben Riggs, Charles E. Gannon, Alan Patrick, Bryan C.P. Steele and Kenneth Hite, and reconnected with Will Hindmarch of Chicago’s Level Eater series of RPG fundraisers for locally produced public media. I watched Anthony Joyce-Rivera, Alan Tucker, Ethan Yen, Andrew Bishkinskyi, Taylor Navarro and others play Blood on the Clocktower (they had one last seat open, but I declined—I always get killed way too soon in social deduction games). And I ran four, count ’em, four full-length game sessions, each one using a different RPG system. Whew!

Chimera Hobby Shop of Fond du Lac, Wis., handled consignment sales of Making Enemies, allowing me to answer the question “Is anyone selling your books here?” with “Yes!” for the first time in my convention-going history as an author. Bob Moses, owner of Chimera, went above and beyond helping me market Making Enemies, and while I hope to have a table of my own next year (more on that in a moment), if I don’t, I’d work with him again in a heartbeat.

The End of a Streak

Those are the highlights of the last four days. The No. 1 lowlight: For the first time since I started attending game conventions, I came home with a touch of the con crud.

This year, I ran an experiment. I’d read a report of a study that found that the nasal spray azelastine, also sold under the brand name Astepro, reduced the risk of COVID-19 infection by two-thirds. As readers of this newsletter are aware, I’m a bit of a gadfly when it comes to COVID-19 mitigation at game conventions, and I’ve tried to raise awareness of the extent to which stale air is replaced by outside air—or not­—in convention spaces, using an Aranet4 portable carbon dioxide detector to evaluate the quality of ventilation. In the past, ventilation in the Alliant Energy Center Exposition Hall, where Gamehole Con is held, has been pretty good, with the exception of a central atrium and the rooms surrounding it. Also, before I left, wastewater virus counts were quite low in both Chicago and Madison, having fallen back to previous low summer levels after a late-August (in Chicago), early-September (in Madison) spike. I therefore decided to see whether, under certain favorable conditions, a return to pre-pandemic normalcy might be feasible. In a break from my previous pandemic practice, I’d only put on a respirator mask this year if my Aranet4 showed a CO₂ concentration of 1,500 ppm or more or I found myself in an overcrowded location. The rest of the time, I’d rely on the power of azelastine.

Well, of course, the joke’s on me: A well-known aspect of pre-pandemic normalcy was the common cold, which my rigorous practice of masking to prevent COVID-19 shielded me from these past several years. A cold won’t take years off my life, thank goodness, but it’s still a minor nuisance that will reduce productivity in my household for a couple of days.

I might also note that Gamehole Con grew this year; boy howdy, did it grow. There were numbered tables for scheduled games in every available space, including hallways and the former open-play area at the front of the vendor hall. GHC even burst the seams of the Exposition Hall, with gaming tables and panels in the adjacent New Holland building and the Marriott hotel (formerly the Sheraton) across John Nolen Drive from the AEC. The CO₂ readings I took in the Marriott were pretty grim: in the 1,800-to-2,000 ppm range. The New Holland building had decent ventilation, but the acoustics were brutal, and the Saturday morning sun glared through the east-facing windows. Also, there was an unmistakable aroma of livestock on the way in. I can’t recommend it as a gaming location.

As for the Exposition Hall, I noticed that the HVAC systems seemed to be struggling with this year’s larger crowd. My own CO₂ readings never went into the red, but they spent a lot more time in the yellow than they have in the past, and they stayed there later into the evening. If wastewater numbers hadn’t been so low at the time, I’d have felt the need for much more caution, azelastine or no azelastine. In fact, heading into late fall and winter, I still have to say that your best bet for protecting yourself is an N95 or KF94 respirator mask. (I don’t recommend KN95s because so many of the ones being sold online at the height of the pandemic were knockoffs, and I can’t imagine that the situation is any better now.)

On the other hand, at past conventions, vendor hall CO₂ levels have always been at their worst on Saturday afternoons. That wasn’t the case at GHC this year. From 3:15 PM Friday until the hall closed at 6, I watched the number on my Aranet4 climb steadily upward, from around 900 ppm to above 1,200 ppm, and I was concerned about what that might mean for Saturday. But Saturday afternoon’s levels mostly stayed between 1,000 and 1,100 ppm, a range that generally doesn’t bother me unless community infection rates are high. So hooray for that.

Upcoming Appearances

Nov. 21–23, I’ll be at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia, where I’m scheduled to sign and sell books from 12 noon to 3 PM on Friday. Owing to a miscommunication, there may or may not be a second signing on Saturday. If you see me scheduled to sign from 12 to 3 on Sunday, that session is going to be canceled: My train out of town leaves during that time.

Feb. 5–8, I’ll have a signing table at Capricon 46, a science fiction/fantasy convention in Chicago. It’s a smaller event, and a not-for-profit one, so every new attendee gives it a boost.

NEW! March 19–22, I’ve been invited to appear as an industry guest at Gamestorm in Portland, Ore. Back when Amazon shared sales by media market with authors, The Monsters Know What They’re Doing and Live to Tell the Tale always sold disproportionately well in Seattle and Portland, so I’ve long wanted to make a convention appearance in the Pacific Northwest, and this year the pieces finally fell into place. I look forward to meeting my Cascadian readers!

Oh, Incidentally …

For me, this year’s Gamehole Con was mainly about publicizing the release of Making Enemies, so that’s where my focus has been. However, last week I finally received long-awaited news, which I’m pleased to share with you: The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, Revised Edition for 2025, is scheduled for release July 21, 2026.

With the release of the 2025 Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, a lot of the tactical suggestions in The Monsters Know What They’re Doing no longer apply, and a number of brand-new monsters have been introduced. This revised edition contains updated advice for running updated monsters and new advice for running new monsters, along with useful sidebar content from MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing dealing with such topics as dealing with darkness, combining monsters and running hyper-intelligent enemies. I’ve also added a special tip or two for each monster, regarding modifications, terrain requirements, pairings with other monsters, and the wacky emergent stuff that can happen because of rules interactions, loopholes and unforeseen consequences.

Here are a couple of sample tips for the colossus, a divine supergolem:

Modifications: How can we take this Construct and give it a suite of interesting abilities more in line with its hands-on ability contour? For starters, let’s reskin Radiant Ray and imagine instead that the colossus picks up a Large or smaller object and throws it. We can still call it a ranged attack—normal range 100 feet, long range 300 feet—or we can require the target to succeed on a DC 26 Dexterity saving throw to avoid the damage, using the kraken’s Fling action as a model. Either way, keep the amount of damage dealt the same, but change the type to Bludgeoning, and have both the object thrown and the target(s) it impacts take the damage. Also keep the Prone rider; it’s fun to visualize.

Next, since the colossus is chiefly focused on what’s immediately around it, we can change Divine Beam to Divine Emanation. If a 300-foot-long, 10-foot-wide linear area of effect can be expected to pass through twenty-five targets, a comparable circular or spherical area of effect would have a 30-foot radius. Therefore, let’s make the area of effect a 30-foot emanation originating from the colossus. Since it’s a magical effect, however, we should base the save DC on the colossus’s Wisdom, which means reducing it to 16. I don’t think this reduction is a great problem for the colossus, since it still deals half damage on a successful save, and it’s a lot of damage to begin with. We’ll change the saving throw ability to Wisdom as well: You can’t dodge an aura.

What are things a titanic statue should be able to do with its body besides punch things? The Stomp legendary action already extends the Slam attack to include stepping on foes, so we can skip that. It should definitely be able to grab things, though, shouldn’t it? Let’s add a Seize attack with the same reach and to-hit bonus as Slam, dealing less damage on a hit (say, 2d10 + 10 Bludgeoning) but also imposing the Grappled (escape DC 20) and Restrained conditions, and dealing the damage again automatically at the start of each of the colossus’s turns as long as the target remains Grappled by it. (A side effect of this ability is that a Grappled character won’t be able to get out of range of the colossus’s Divine Emanation.) Also, let’s have our reskinned ranged attack allow the colossus to throw one Grappled creature instead of an object.

Finally, let’s give it one more legendary action and make it impressive—something the colossus can use only once between turns. The Earthquake spell offers inspiration, but instead of making it a spell, let’s have the colossus achieve the effect by stamping its foot:

Earth-Shaking Step. Dexterity Saving Throw: DC 26, each creature on a solid surface in a 60-foot Emanation originating from the colossus. Failure: The creature has the Prone condition, and its Concentration is broken. Failure or Success: The ground in the area is Difficult Terrain until the start of the colossus’s next turn. The colossus can’t take this action again until the start of its next turn.

Shenanigans: In case you’re looking for a way for devotees of one deity (or an archdevil or demon lord) to torment devotees of another deity, neither Hallow nor Forbiddance can keep out a Construct.

The July 2026 release date of The Monsters Know Revised means that it will be available in time for Gen Con, which means I’ll be at Gen Con, promoting and selling it along with Making Enemies and How to Defend Your Lair. Fifth edition D&D fans who are still partial to the 2014 rules and core books, don’t worry: The original The Monsters Know What They’re Doing will also remain available for a while, concurrently with The Monsters Know Revised.

In addition to Gen Con, I’m tentatively planning 2026 appearances in support of The Monsters Know Revised at PAX West in Seattle, the Printer’s Row Literary Festival in Chicago, Gamehole Con and PAX Unplugged.

I hope you’re excited. I am.

In The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, the essential tactics guide for Dungeon Masters, and its sequel, MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing, I reverse-engineered hundreds of fifth edition D&D monsters to help DMs prepare battle plans for combat encounters before their game sessions. Now, in Making Enemies: Monster Design Inspiration for Tabletop Roleplaying Games, I explore everything that goes into creating monsters from the ground up: size, number, and level of challenge; monster habitats; monster motivations; monsters as metaphors; monsters and magic; the monstrous anatomy possessed by real-world organisms; and how to customize monsters for your own tabletop roleplaying game adventuring party to confront. No longer limited to one game system, Making Enemies shows you how to build out your creations not just for D&D 5E but also for Pathfinder 2E, Shadowdark, the Cypher System, and Call of Cthulhu 7E. Including interviews with some of the most brilliant names in RPG and creature design, Making Enemies will give you the tools to surprise and delight your players—and terrify their characters—again and again.

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