Alex Kammer
speaker
95 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Alex Kammer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
No, I appreciate that. This is a great time of year for a wellness check on Mr. Camera, so I appreciate that. Yes, I am the director of GamelCon, an annual tabletop convention that we run here in Madison, Wisconsin, that has now become the largest majority RPG convention in the world, which is insane. I can't believe it. But that's where we are.
In addition, we have a publishing company that's been around for a little bit, but we're moving it forward more aggressively and making real strides and making bigger products and more interesting things. So we just launched our new website last week. So yeah, I do a lot of freelance design work.
In fact, I just got my author copies of The End of Everything, my book that Alan Patrick and I wrote and I'm just so freaking proud of and delighted that it's ending up in people's hands right now. I'm super excited about that. So yeah, I have toes in various parts of the hobby. Fantastic. It's great to have you again.
Yeah.
I appreciate it. I hope it is. I think it's going to be really fun. It's been fun so far, and I can't wait to actually have 2025 when we get players seated at tables playing our content. I'm really looking forward to that.
They will be in 2025. What you'll see is if you're walking through the lobby of GamelCon this year, you'll see a Gamel publishing booth. And that's what I'll be propped up for most of the time. And I'll be passing out. You referenced, you saw on our site, a primer. We have printed copies that we'll be passing out, full color, little digest sized.
shopping tote bags for the dealer hall that hopefully people will find useful. And so I can talk about the Organized Play program, which I'm super excited about because we've had a long relationship with Adventures League. Sean, actually, that's how I met you, gosh, 10 years ago or something when we first got into writing such a core figure in getting that program off the ground.
and you know we could talk about adventures league to the extent you know we're interested as we swear it is now i suppose where it was and uh sort of why i'm doing this but uh i think we're in a really uh good position after running so much organized play and of not only just uh adventures league and dungeon dragons but other other rule sets that um
I think we've got a pretty good sense of what really works, what players are interested in, and how we can make ours really fun and can do some things that a program like Adventurous League can't do for size reasons and corporate reasons or whatever those reasons are that we can do that others can't. So I'm really excited about that.
Well, so I guess the first big why is it aligns completely with our core ethos for GameholeCon, and that is to celebrate this awesome hobby and bring as many people into it as possible to make it accessible and fun. And organized play has been awesome for that, right? I mean, just think of all the iterations that you mentioned.
So many of us got into public play, playing with strangers through organized play. And so the very concept that you could sit down at a table with a sheet and not know anyone else around the table and play D&D is amazing. And so that's sort of as a threshold matter, that's why, because I love it. I've written a ton for organized play over the years.
It's been super important to my development as a freelance author, to my development as being a DM, quite frankly. I've run so much, so many games for Pathfinder and for PFS and then through Adventures League and down the line. So it's important to me personally. But why now specifically?
Because Adventures League is, I think it's an understatement to say they're at a crossroads as what they really are and what they're going to do. You see for years, the last three or four years, really the main creators of content for the Adventures League have been Gamehole Con, and Baldwin Games.
We're the two premier partners that have sections of the Forgotten Realms in which we can write adventures. And so we've created content that we've run at various conventions, Gangwell Con, and then Dave, of course, is doing things at lots of places like Gen Con and Origins and so on. And that's been great.
But it's kind of an interesting concept when you step back from it and say, wait a minute, we're writing content for a company to promote their product and we don't even get to sell it the way we want to sell it. We don't get to do exactly what we want to do with it. We have to get approval for basically writing our own content that we're running at our own show.
that we then have to share if we sell anything half 50 cents on the dollar with the parent company who has nothing to do with the creation of that product in the first place. So there's that. And because there's really not much support from the company right now, I think they have other bigger things that they're obviously working on. And you guys have commented on this over the...
past year about what's happened with the size of the D&D team. They just don't have the bandwidth to really do a lot with organized play. And I have now seen our organized play hall, which has been the largest eventually call in the world, decline over the last several years in size, just because we're losing DMs, we're losing player interest. Despite our best efforts, I think our content's great.
I think we have really... We operate the Adventure League Hall at a loss, quite frankly. I think it's just such an important thing. I want that to be a resource for attendees to come and sit down and play, and you don't have to have a big group to play with. That's why, I guess in broad strokes, and because so many friends in the hobby now that are interested in helping with this,
And so we're going forward full steam and can really do a very, I don't, I just, you know, the sort of adjectives that are common in the marketplace, like bespoke or whatever, you know, that's what we're going to do.
We can do really fun things that we couldn't do for Adventures League in terms of the kind of stuff that players get and the kind of opportunities they'll have because we don't have a Wizard of the Coast or anyone else to answer to. We can just do it on our own.
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