In September 2023, Strega Wolf van den Berg got a message inviting them and any other interested bogfolk to attend Breakout Con as VIP guests. We would receive weekend passes to the con and even a hotel stipend, and in exchange, we would run some games and maybe speak on some panels.
The reason was, of course, Lichoma—the bog’s initial RPG offering that had earned over 600% funding on Kickstarter earlier in the year. The card-based, aggressively political game attracted the attention of Gary, the con’s RPG director, who had gotten in touch with us.
Ultimately, Strega (creative lead, artist, and graphic designer), Michael Mars (mechanics designer), and I (writer of the introductory adventure, “Pieces of Eden,” based on the concept by writer Tessa Winters) would attend. Joining us was James MacDonald, a close friend of mine and business partner of the Bog in our still-under-development LARP / escape room / nerd bar, the Slumbering Dragon.
As of today exactly, I’ve been on an unintended year-long hiatus from blogging. To ease back in, I’ve decided to do something different from any previous post: a writeup about my experience at the con. This isn’t a “review” of Breakout Con itself, since I didn’t see most of what it had to offer. It’s a purely subjective memoir of how I spent my time there.
Travel
JP and I flew into Toronto International together, arriving around the same time as Strega, at gates 3 and 1 respectively. Our attempts to locate each other so Michael could pick us up were thwarted by one simple fact that no one at the airport told us when we asked directions: to get between terminals, you have to take a train. We spent the better part of an hour wandering pointlessly back and forth, futilely seeking the Starbucks where Strega was waiting after their eight-plus-hour trans-Atlantic flight.
Consider yourself warned.
Breakout Con
Arrival
After a night’s rest 38 stories above the streets of Toronto, we set out for the convention center. We had picked lodging about a block from con, but our carefully laid plans were thwarted by the pedestrian’s natural predator, road construction. One annoying and meandering detour—and some sore arms—later, we deposited two boxes of product at check-in.
Invited guests are able to bring up to three products to sell at the Breakout Con shop, so Michael had driven up a carload of meat boxes from Maryland (and we spent much of our downtime all weekend assembling many, many more). On Friday, the shop broke out a box and put the contents on full display as folks arrived at the con. They let us set our own price and kept 10% of sales in compensation. In the end, we sold nine copies, which was pretty close to our target for the weekend.
At the RPG desk, we checked in and received our welcome packets (including a hand-written note from Gary) and received a free set of Misty Mountain dice and a book of our choosing. I’ve never been a guest at a con before, but I thought this was a very nice and welcoming gesture.
Attendance
Speaking of other cons—I only have experience with Dragon*Con and Gen Con, which are absolutely massive events boasting thousands upon thousands of nerds. Breakout Con, though Canada’s largest tabletop gaming convention, is much smaller in comparison. Whereas D*Con sprawls across multiple hotels, Breakout Con took up about a floor of a single venue. Attendance at any given time was probably in the hundreds.
This was a welcome change for me. Instead of trying to squeeze past a crush of people in the exhibitors hall, there was plenty of elbow room and always a comfy spot to sit and take a break. The downstairs lobby was a bit more crowded—the center was hosting the annual gathering of Ontario Regional Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Toronto Comic Con was also happening nearby—but again, it was never difficult to navigate or to get a seat at the hotel restaurant or café.
Gaming
By appearances, Breakout Con is largely a board-gaming event both in terms of exhibitor offering and attendee expectation. I suspect that we were invited in part to try to help grow the RPG contingent, and I hope that segment continues to expand in the future.
In exchange for my access to the con itself, I was asked to run three sessions of Lichoma. For the adventures, I picked Unsalted Funeral; All Along, the Watchtower; and Gristle & Tim. Breakout Con mandates the use of X cards and open tables for all sessions, and it welcomes a variety of other safety tools, all of which were appropriate for a game that could get as heavy (and potentially attract some unrepentant edgelords) as Lichoma may.
The first session was scheduled for Friday evening, and no one attended. People were, after all, just getting off work and getting on the road, so the con’s population was still pretty sparse. I was fine with that; we were all exhausted and ready to rest after our various travels and getting oriented in a new place.
Saturday’s session was a barely mitigated disaster.
Lichoma deals with some heavy shit. It’s about body politics and exploitation of labor. It’s about playing strange characters in a bad situation, making the most of scarce resources and doing whatever’s necessary just to survive in a verge-of-collapse society. When registering the sessions, I was very careful to fill in the content warnings fields, and my caveats included violence against people, potential harm to animals, nonexplicit sexual content, and foul language.
Now imagine the unadulterated, asshole-clenching horror I felt when, sitting down to play All Along, the Watchtower—which features a character named Major Fuck, two pairs of legs joined at the hips with faces in their crotches, and totalitarian executions of political dissidents—were two grown men and their mid-teens children.
Going back and looking at the online event listing, all my sessions were labeled 18+, but the content warnings are not to be seen. If either were present on the in-person signup sheets, I don’t recall them, or they weren’t prominently displayed—though at the time, I was focused on checking the number of attendees, so take my recollection with a large shaker of salt.
The greater fault lies in the adult Watchtower players, neither of whom were at all familiar with Lichoma; they’d signed up because they recognized the title of the “Hendrix” song. (It’s a Bob Dylan song, goddamn, SMH.) For any parents reading this, I humbly suggest that you at the very least google the title of the game you’re signing up for before you bring your adolescent son or daughter to a session. Doing so may save you some wasted time and the GM a not-insignificant amount of anxiety in the moment.
As the situation played out, I was able to sanitize the adventure on the fly by changing details and fudging roll results, resulting in a succession of generic-feeling missions with no real point or meaning. We made it about an hour and fifteen minutes through the three-hour session, at which point I asked if anyone wanted to break to stretch their legs, use the bathroom, get a drink of water—and it was all I could do from collapsing in relief when they all politely said they’d had enough.
They departed, and I packed my bag and vacated the gaming hall. After that experience, I wanted nothing more for Sunday than a repeat of Friday—nobody shows up, leaving me free to tuck my tail between my legs and flee the country.
Luckily, I was wrong. My two Gristle & Tim players were more aware and more open to what they were getting into. We rolled through the full adventure in a couple hours, and both of them enjoyed the system and the experience, saying that it was a nice introductory tour of the game.
Also luckily, after my game concluded, I was able to catch the tail end of Michael and Strega’s session of HyperMall: Unlimited Violence as GMed by the creator, JD Clement. Based on what I saw there and on the product page, it has a lot of the attitude of Lichoma along with some Burnout Reaper vibes and a dose of the cheekier bits of Human Occupied Landfill. I’m quite looking forward to seeing more of it.
Panels
I’ll be honest: I only went to one panel (The Wonderful World of Indie RPGs). It was one of only two that interested me, and the other—on indie publishing—started just before my Saturday session.
That being said, I’ve never gone to cons for the love of official events. I was on a panel at Gen Con in ’22, and that was the only one I attended. In my trips to D*Con, I never once bought a pass or attended an event. I go to cons to socialize, to people watch—and, of course, for the…
LOOT LOOT LOOT
Initially, I was worried I’d overpacked my suitcase with cold-weather gear, which would severely limit the gifts and goodies my inner goblin could haul back to the states. I was luckily wrong on both counts—I needed every layer I could muster in the 35–45F daytime weather, and I was still able to squeeze my suitcase shut and embark without checking it.
While browsing the exhibitors hall, I got the chance to finally meet Seb Pines (half of Good Luck Press), whose book Dwelling I’ve reviewed and whom I interviewed for the inaugural episode of my podcast. Seb had also sent me a digital copy of Curios: Albrecht Manor, which regrettably got buried on a hard drive several laptop crashes ago—so I grabbed a copy of that along with the sequel, Jasper Park.
I also had the good fortune of stopping by Shouting Crow’s booth, where I got to meet and talk with Justin Vandermeer and buy Hedge Witch, Fallow Ground, and This Frog Is Ruining My Dungeon Crawl—and they threw in a beta copy of Psychic Undead Moose Rideres! Between the two of them, Shouting Crow and Goodluck had the best pound-for-pound RPG offerings I saw at the con.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Bookwyrm Games, who had an array of delicious-sounding teas and a huge variety of handsome dice and colorful little adoptable familiars, some of which (tea and familiars) I picked up as souvenirs for friends back home. That’s one of my favorite things about shopping at cons: finding neat stuff that would normally slip under my radar in the infinite noise that is online storefronts and social media.
If you’re interested in hearing more about my picks from the con, I’m (very slowly) doing a Twitter thread as I’m able to read and review the current gaming content that I brought home:
But the real treasure was the friends I made along the way.
Toronto
I honestly didn’t see much of Toronto, but what I saw, I enjoyed. The people were generally friendly, and the streets and the buildings and the public transit were all clean. And I caught more than a few clouds of some really dank weed smoke on the street.
But, oh man, the food. From restaurants like Three Brewers to the food carts selling street meat to the Korean barbecue place in the mall, everything was delicious and pretty well priced. I probably ate enough poutine to last me until my next trip to Canada, whenever that might be (but that’s not to say I wouldn’t go face-first into a great big plate of it right damned now if one were in front of me).
My one commandment for any nerd, of any stripe, visiting Toronto is this: go to Storm Crow Manor. The restaurant features various themed rooms, and we were seated in the sci-fi/dystopia/cyberpunk area, which was decorated with ragged posters, neon lights, and “exposed” piping on the walls and ceiling. (Beyond it, through a door, I caught a glimpse of the Black Lodge room from Twin Peaks.)
Besides a standard menu of themed entrees and drinks, there’s also a randomized menu. Our table rolled d20s for random shots, and then rolled more of them for our Dungeon Meals: a worksheet menu where you choose your entrée (burger, poutine, or pasta) then roll a few times for the toppings. (We shared one of each with an extra poutine. Because Canada.) It might seem like a dining experience solely for the adventurous, but every single one was delicious. Especially if you’re going to a con in Toronto, Storm Crow is an absolute must-visit spot.
And this is really inconsequential to anything else, but at the age of 38, I finally got to see my first snowfall. I’d seen snow on the ground once before, on a vacation to North Carolina when I was a child, but my trip to the con finally gave this Florida man, born and raised, a chance to get snowed on (and I did it while sipping a delicious chai latte from the hotel café).
Departure
No matter how hard you hope and pray, you will not be able to smuggle a bottle of HP sauce past security in your carry on. Learn from my mistake.
Thumbs Up
I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Breakout Con and its little segment of Toronto. The con staff were friendly and helpful, as was every other person I interacted with. With a singular exception, the trip was full of positive experiences (and even that one probably isn’t as bad as I’m remembering it).
In terms of price tags, it was actually overall less costly than my trip to Indianapolis in ’22. Between driving to Sanford and flying direct to Toronto, the travel time was about the same, and I spent less of it in airports or a narrow metal tube being flung across the sky.
Would I go again? I’d definitely consider it. I probably wouldn’t go just for the sake of going, short of winning the lottery and finding myself with more money than I know what to do with. But if you’re in the area or are just down to travel, and you’re looking for a mellow and easygoing con atmosphere, Breakout gets my wholehearted recommendation.
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