Building The Ultimate Convention GM Go-Bag

I have a problem: if left to my own devices, I will pack the biggest, heaviest bag of stuff to lug around to conventions. This always ends in disaster because my high school marching band days are farther and farther behind me and just because I used to lug around a sousaphone back in the day doesn't mean I want to lug around a 50lb duffle bag filled with all my fancy doodads and gewgaws. I mean, I do, but my withering agèd form would prefer that I do not. Given that these days I often pay my way to conventions by running games, if I can't lug around my laptop, second screen, thick wooden GM screen, binder, and at least five different RPG books that I just brought just in case my laptop died and I needed to reference things, what am I to do?

Enter: Man Alone's ultimate solo RPG arsenal video.

I had seen this video recently and it got me thinking - sure, Man Alone is talking about building a great kit to keep at your desk or wherever it is you play your solo TTRPGs, but surely you could extrapolate this out to be a portable kit, right? And with truly very few tweaks, you could make sure you had everything you'd need to run games for yourself OR for other people. A kit for every occasion, or darn near at least.

After watching through the video again and chewing on what kinds of tools are necessary for most games, my thought process was thus:

• The notebooks, fancy mechanical pencil and notebook holder are spot on, can't go wrong there.

• Most solo games require dice, a standard American deck of 52 playing cards, a tarot deck, a Jenga tumbling block tower, or some combination thereof to play in addition to somewhere to record notes/story.
  
  
• Most multiplayer RPGs need you to have a book, your standard array of dice, a tarot deck, character sheets, or some combination thereof. Character sheets are easy enough to fold up and stow pretty much anywhere, or can be dumbed down onto notecards or even done on phones for most games so I'm not too worried there.
  
  
• Being on the go means that chargers are super important, as are some kind of headphones in case you're just waiting around.
  
  
• I always forget business cards, and sometimes I need to pretend like I know what I'm doing so I should find some way to bring those along.
  
  
• The bag needs to be small and light - under 5lbs when full if at all possible. Cross-body is preferable since I often dress fancy at cons and tiny backpacks can look a little silly. I'm allowed to be vain, okay?
  
  
• Needs to be extremely obvious that it is mine - I've learned my lessons from lugging around my ancient ThinkGeek Bag of Holding.

And so, after poking around what I had at my house and making a quick trip onto the internet to pick up a few missing pieces, I ended up with this:

I really went round and round on what bag to choose. I really wanted something cross-body, and I REALLY wanted to stay away from the TACTICOOL æsthetic, but in the end you just can't beat the efficiency of these military style bags. The fact that it came in neon purple really sold me on it though - despite being a color I like, it is so eye-blisteringly bright that it should be very hard to lose and almost impossible that anyone else is rocking around with one. And down the line if I ever feel like it just doesn't have enough space, I can always grab another MOLLE compatible bag and bolt it onto the outside.

While I appreciated Man Alone's suggestion of the nice fancy notebook case, I'm about to change jobs and needed to cut costs where I could so I ended up with something off-brand but just as effective! You may also notice something there I did not plan for originally - a small e-reader. This was something a relative got for free that they had pawned off on me because I'm "young" and "tech-y" and has basically sat around collecting dust, but it's absolutely something that can both go on the internet when needed AND download PDFs of any games I'm planning on running, which means that solves the issue of small bag, big books. In addition to holding two Field Notes journals, the mechanical pencil and the e-reader, the notebook case also fits a tiny metal briefcase with my business cards in it. 

The Horror On The Orient Express deck of playing cards was a purchase at my very first GenCon, and the Strange Beast Tarot by Shing Yin Khor was a very cool purchase at this year's SPX, so they were obvious includes. One of those power banks actually has a solar panel on the side of it to recharge with, so that's for sure getting clipped on the outside of the bag, meaning the other bank (plus another one I had laying around) along with the charge cables can all cram into a pocket together. 

The dragonscale scroll case was a little bit of a concession here and one I might seek to replace later - I really liked the little box carrier that Man Alone had in his video, but with it really only being able to hold one set of dice, I wanted to grab something I could put multiple sets in in case I need to lend some dice out to other players, or feel like playing a particularly Fireball-happy Wizard and feel the need to carry around 10 extra d6. My dream item would be something I could use to have all my dice and decks of cards in the same object, but I just couldn't find anything that fit into this small bag. Perhaps something to tackle in the future.

And so, this is what it looks like with everything crammed in there. As you can see, there's still plenty of room in there if I wanted to pack in a game with its own bespoke deck of cards like Oh Captain, My Captain or For The Queen or even something bigger like Illimat. And what's even cooler is I've still got plenty of room! There's a whole secret back pocket (which uh...came with a handgun sleeve, because this is technically like a thing you bring your gun and ammo to a gun range in I guess) plus a side pocket that haven't been used yet, pictured below. As long as I only ever buy very thin objects like zines (or like...pack a tote bag in this bag for purchases) I shouldn't really need anything else.

What you MAY have noticed, having made it this far, is that one thing I called out as being sometimes necessary for solo RPGs is missing - the Legally Distinct Jenga Tower! I actually ordered a "World's Smallest" brand one that was 2.5" tall and would have been perfect, but it got lost in the mail and they're not issuing me a refund so...y'know. Maybe if I find one in the wild. Thankfully there's a thread on Chris Bissette's Wretched and Alone Jam about using a dice roller to simulate a similar probability curve to pulling blocks so I guess I'll just have to settle for now.

So. Is this the ABSOLUTE MOST MINIMAL setup? No. I think the absolute most minimal version of this would be using your smartphone for literally everything and bringing around a charger for it. But, do I think this is the most minimal while also giving you options to actually host games for people and have a little bit of comfort while you do it? Pretty much. Do I think this is the most cost effective setup? That's...that's a real hard maybe, and that mostly depends on how much stuff you already have at your house. If I had to estimate the actual value of all this stuff, like if you went out and bought EVERYTHING new at full price? This is probably around $300-400 worth of stuff, which is ridiculous to spend all at once. For reference, the stuff in the following picture is what I actually went out of my way to buy specifically for this kit which in total is under $100, and even then you can cut that down to under $50 by having your own backpack and not buying an absurdly overpriced German mechanical pencil and a functionally lifetime supply of pencil lead and erasers. 

I think for someone who's been in the hobby for a while should have no issue basically throwing this whole kit together with things they have in their own house, and I encourage you to do so unless you're an absolute freak like myself who feels the need to optimize your kit for efficiency to prevent you from overburdening yourself because you cannot trust yourself not to go Full Packrat.

Just as Man Alone inspired me, I hope this inspires you to go make your own compact convention kit. I'd love to see pictures if you do put one together!

Stay weird out there.

-Adam

The Who, The What, and the Whydrobe

 Hi!

My name is Adam Seats, but if you're here you probably already knew that! And no, I haven't learned a way to make a better opening post on a blog since the days of Xanga and Myspace, thanks for asking.

I am a firm believer in the One True Path of "Shut The Fuck Up Unless What You Have To Say Is Important Or Interesting." For quite some time, what I've had to say has been neither! Recently, however, starting just about the time we all got locked in our homes to defend against the plague, I began doing D&D adventure writing for more than just hobby reasons, and in 2022 the project I worked on with my friend Jake won an ENnie. I went out to GenCon, fumbled through an acceptance speech, lost my shit from Matthew Lillard giving me a high-five, and most importantly, had my eyes opened to the wide world of TTRPGs beyond the confines of Dungeons and/or Dragons, which had made up my life almost exclusively to that point. In fact I would say aside from a very brief stint with Rolemaster 1e with the local grognards at my FLGS, D&D 3.5 and 5e were probably the only TTRPGs I played for the better part of a decade. That was my life - reading the Order of the Stick webcomic, chatting on the forums on that site, doing CharOp, and then...then it was GenCon 2022, and I suddenly had my eyes opened to what things could be.

Writing One Night Strahd with Jake was probably one of the most important things I've done in my life, and I say that even knowing that truly One Night Strahd was Jake's baby - I just gave the baby some clothes and made sure it didn't walk into traffic. I learned so much about the art of CREATING a game through that project, and when I saw what the world could be beyond the confines of D&D, I set out to learn what I could. I have not stopped learning. Sometimes I return to the old wisdoms, to see what yet remains to be mined from the depths of old D&D modules. More often lately I have turned my eyes to the OSR/NSR crowd, and most recently (at time of writing this) to the wretched and (a)lonely lands of solo RPGs. Every time I discover a new community of players and how they approach gaming I am fascinated to see how these little ecosystems grow and how new thoughts form - and I'm just as interested in the internet archaeology of discovering old communities that I missed by being locked to the Giant in the Playground forums and seeing how they've influenced gaming in the modern day.

And so that brings us back to my One True Path: I don't want to talk about things unless they are important or interesting because a LOT has been said about games by people who are much smarter and more talented than myself - and that's not negative self-talk, I mean that seriously: there are some brilliant game designers out there right now that I truly admire. But a thing that I think is both important AND interesting that I don't see explored is how you get people like I used to be - people who just get stuck playing one game system for their whole life unless something shocks them out of it. People who decide that the one system they learn is their silver bullet, the one they'll use to tell every kind of story, people with no curiosity or drive to explore beyond what they know. 

Personally, I find that kind of approach to games boring now - I feel that there is something to be learned from every game, even if it's just the ability to do critical analysis about why you do or don't like something. But more than that, I am fascinated by the interconnections between games - why one person thought one mechanic might be better than another, or how two people use the same set of design principles in vastly different ways. I don't think there is one system that can do everything. And so, for want of a silver bullet, I continue to learn - and I hope you'll come on this journey with me.