Matt Kugel A D&D session includes a digital screen March 29 at SomerCon at the Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville.
After Dungeons & Dragons turned 50 last year, the D&D podcast “Dimension 20” made history by selling out a live January game session at Madison Square Garden, the 19,500-seat arena in New York City. In a sign of still-growing interest in the phenomenon, a group of gamers in the Camberville area sold out an event of their own.
At 120 seats, SomerCon was more modest. But held at the Aeronaut Brewery on March 29, it was also Somerville’s first convention dedicated to tabletop role-playing games.
The central feature of the convention was its gaming sessions. Some were for D&D, the most well-known tabletop role-playing game, but seven other games were featured prominently.
Tabletop game experience can vary greatly, but in each players assume the role of a character, often one they’ve created themself, and improvise interactions to shape a story collaboratively. Dice are commonly rolled to give encounters a chance element – determining how much damage an attack does, for instance. Miniature figurines are used often, giving players a sense of scale and direction as they move through a map of imaginary worlds. Almost all games require pen and paper, which players use to take notes as their story unfolds.
Matt Kugel Drew Norum is a self-taught leatherworker selling his crafts – and giving customers the roll of a 20-sided die for a chance at a free ring – at SomerCon on March 29.
Con attendees had lots to do outside of the planned sessions. There was a library of smaller games to play, a character-drawing artist, a paint-your-own miniatures station and local vendors selling fantasy-themed wares. Small groups discussed topics from tabletop role-playing games for children to building a business as a game master, the person who hosts and referees a session for players. (For D&D, there’s a trademarked term: dungeon master.)
No stranger to either concept is Allan Knowles, one of the two organizers of SomerCon and a professional dungeon master who founded the Somerville company Danger Wizard in 2020. Danger Wizard offers a slew of D&D services – private game sessions two or three times a week, sometimes for a birthday or other celebration, and coaching sessions to help other game masters plan and develop play. The bread and butter of the brand, though, is its kids programming.
Matt Kugel A SomerCon attendee chats with a friend while painting at the miniature painting station March 29 at Aeronaut in Somerville.
Danger Wizard runs nine after-school programs a week and a camp for kids aged 8-16 during school breaks. “Even though I wasn’t initially planning on it being a more kid-focused type of company, that’s just where I found my niche, where I found the demand in my community,” Knowles said.
Although Danger Wizard started as a side hustle, Knowles had planned to quit his full-time job at an accounting firm in August 2023 to focus on the business. “Then I got lucky, and I got laid off in May,” he said. It was the push he needed. “Within eight days, I was working at the after-school programs. A month later, I started running my first Danger Wizard D&D summer programs.”
It’s ballooned. Knowles has a pool of about a dozen dungeon masters he contracts to help run games, four of whom recently joined the team officially. A friend from college helps incorporate tech elements and audio into games, and his wife is the company’s chief financial officer (though her official title is wizard of coin).
“One of those few cities”
Matt Kugel Allan Knowles, co-organizer of a D&D convention, shows off a favorite minature he’s painted from his collection of hundreds in his Somerille home April 8.
There are plenty of resources online to learn the ropes of D&D and other tabletop role-playing games. But for Knowles, these games are about connecting with others through a shared, tangible experience that can be properly felt only off a screen and in real life. In Somerville, especially, there’s a growing number of people who agree.
“I’m a full-time professional dungeon master, and I could only do that the way I do it, in person, in very certain cities – and Somerville is one of those few cities,” Knowles said. “I always joke around: You throw a rock in Somerville you’re gonna hit a nerd.”
One such self-identified nerd is Caroline Sheridan. She’s the other co-organizer of SomerCon and the owner of Side Quest Books & Games, a fantasy shop in Somerville’s Bow Market. Side Quest is more than a traditional retail space. It hosts three to seven events a week including book clubs, private game sessions and meet-and-greets for people looking to get a gaming group together on their own.
Sheridan and Knowles are frequent collaborators. They’ve held events such as “D&D 101” and created an online gathering place on the Discord messaging app for members of the Boston tabletop role-playing community; participation hit 1,000 members in February. Both have organized events with multiple game sessions running at once. SomerCon was the first time they packed so many elements together.
Side Quest Books & Games
Matt Kugel Caroline Sheridan, left, with a customer in her Side Quest Books & Games shop in Somerville on April 4.
Side Quest started as a traveling pop-up shop. It ran for about a year, throughout which Sheridan had an ever-growing cohort of regulars. “It was great because it was market research and figuring out if there was a product/market fit while I was sort of building this community,” she said. Eventually, she had built enough of a community that she felt ready for the next step. She set up a two-month brick-and-mortar space in Union Square’s Bow Market, which led to a larger leased storefront opening last August. Side Quest raised more than $13,000 in crowdfunding toward opening the permanent location.
Maggie Mahoney was one of those backers. A longtime writer, fan of role-playing games and regular customer, they met Sheridan when Side Quest Books & Games was a pop-up and was particularly interest in its stock of independent role-playing games, some of which can be hard to find. Often, independent game designers don’t have the startup capital to make printing their games worth it, so they upload copies online. “A lot of what we hear is like: ‘Oh my gosh. I’ve only ever seen that in PDF form,’” Sheridan said.
Mahoney went back to the shop more and more. Before they knew it, they weren’t just a customer, but were one of those designers, too. Mahoney’s created more than a dozen games since starting around a year ago. Their two-player journaling game “Just Passing Through” has a print edition stocked at Side Quest.
“She made me feel like I was a valuable and relevant community member who was worthy of being sold at the store alongside … award-winning designers who had been working in the field for 15 years,” Mahoney said of Sheridan. “A lot of what she does is basically be this hype person for the community.”
Pandemonium Books & Games
Marc Levy Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge has been in business more than 30 years.
Side Quest isn’t the only books and games shop in the area. Tabletop role-players have frequented Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge throughout its 30-plus years of operation. It runs programming similar to Side Quest, but on a larger scale, averaging about three events a day. The two-floored game shop hosts board and card game events too, on top of the book- and role-play-related programming the shops share.
Pandemonium is intentional about welcoming seasoned and fresh-faced gamers alike. Every Sunday it hosts D&D for beginners. On the flip side, there’s one group of D&D players who have been playing an ongoing game in the shop every Wednesday for the past two years, shop event manager Tristan Patino said.
Pandemonium has a large selection of independently designed role playing games too. “We don’t want it to just be D&D. We want people to be exposed to indie RPGs. A lot of people on staff are huge indie RPG fans,” Patino said.
Hyperlocal games stocked
Matt Kugel Game play is underway at SomerCon, held March 29 at Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville.
Pandemonium may have Side Quest beat in terms of scope, but Sheridan said her stock of hyperlocal game designers – including five or six in the Camberville area – makes Side Quest something special. “I have dozens of games where I work directly with the designer. I don’t go through any distributor. I don’t go through any warehouse. I will message them on Instagram and be like, ‘Hey, can you just mail me 16 more copies of your game?’” Sheridan said.
One of her local designers is Mahoney, who, at SomerCon, was part of a panel showing attendees how to make their own games – with an emphasis on a sense of connectedness as well as technical aspects, friendlier than a lot of existing resources that assume knowledge of game design. Panel participants approached it thinking “Here are direct, simple tools. You could get started making a game today if you wanted to,” she said.
For Mahoney, “Games are a way to interact with the world. The world is very scary and upsetting right now, and therefore, when we make games, we are engaging with the world in a way that makes us feel a little bit more empowered.”
The SomerCon team said they were assessing what might be tweaked to bring it back bigger and better next year. With one con under their belt, there’ll be a lot less to roll the dice on.