We’re not coming to GENCon this year

From Matt Sanders (head of conventions) and Grant Howitt (head of words)

We made a tough decision this week. We’re not bringing any staff from the UK to GenCon 2025. Crossing the border into the US simply isn’t safe for us at the moment, and it doesn’t appear to be getting safer. 

Like a lot of international business stuff around conventions, manufacturing, shipping, etc, these decisions are made months in advance. We’re months into preparing for GenCon, and we need to act now so we’re not facing the chance (and the costs) of huge last minute disruption.

Thanks to our friends in the US, we’ll still have a presence at the show. Maura, who oversaw our games schedule last year, has set up her own convention business and will be selling our games from her stall. She’ll have all our new stuff: the fancy redesigns of the one-pagers, plenty of Heart for sale, including the new GM screens and the new adventure and everything. Go say hello and buy something off her.

What we won’t have is our events schedule of multi-table games, or the cool VIP stadium box games we were planning on this year, or our yearly whiskey and pizza party. We can’t get the people who run that on site, and so we need to pull back on it. It also means we won’t have signings, or panels, or all our business to business meetings. 

It’s hard to believe it has come to this, but it has.

(We had a great idea for the one-page games multi-table, too. It was all of them played at once.)

We aren’t the first to make this decision; we suspect we won’t be the last, either; the political climate is only getting worse. While the odds of most of us encountering resistance at border control are low, we don’t want to risk running the biggest convention of the year without the members of staff we need because they’ve been detained, deported, or otherwise penalised for their beliefs or who they are.

Obviously we’re upset about this, and we’re angry at the situation that makes this the best course of action. We want to come to GenCon. We want to be part of what we believe is one of the best conventions in the world, and what represents a huge outpouring of enthusiasm for play. 

This is a huge decision, and a seismic shift, and upsetting for everyone involved. Four things you can do about it to help us out:

– If you’re at GenCon 2025, have a look for the Rowan, Rook and Decard stall and go say hi to Maura and the team. And buy something, why don’t you?

– If you’re American, give your elected representatives a bell and tell them that these protectionist policies are affecting you and the people you care about. (But: gods, there’s more important things to yell at your Congressperson about right now than some limeys not showing up to flog books about wizards.)

– Take a look at rrdgames.com/support for more tangible ways to support us than going to a convention.

Go be nice to each other,

– Grant, Matt and everyone else at RRD Towers