Beware the reddish fog at ShireCon

FALLS VILLAGE — Thom Wilson stood in the Center on Main on Saturday morning, Sept. 22, and surveyed the scene with satisfaction.

There were four or five long tables filled with participants in role-playing and board games, and it was Wilson’s first attempt at a gaming convention.

Wilson, a Falls Village resident, graduate of Housatonic Valley Regional High School and who works at Hamilton Books, said there are not a lot of opportunities for role-playing game enthusiasts in northwest Connecticut.

So he decided to host an event, through his company, Throwigames. He called it ShireCon, and there were two sessions, one starting at 9 a.m. and the second after lunch at 1 p.m.

The games involve predesigned characters. Wilson explained that the four-hour time slots were not long enough to allow players to create their own characters from scratch, as happens at ongoing gaming events.

ShireCon was deliberately low-key. Apart from one young man dressed as a wizard, nobody was in costume. 

Nor were there panel discussions, visits from celebrities, video or multimedia games, or any of the flashy stuff that happens at the big conventions.

However, there were people like Tim Callahan, who was running a table playing a game he created.

He explained the layout to the players: A vista of a smoking crater surrounded by mangled trees and imbued with a reddish fog.

One man, whose character was a monkey, said, “I’m going to go 10 feet and put on my large sack.”

A second man said, “I’ve got to see how this ends, so I’m going to put on my holographic skin.”

It was a bit cryptic for the casual observer, but the players clearly understood what this meant and there was furious activity.

Everybody seemed to be having fun.

John Cannamarata was one of the vendors, selling games under the name “Hyperborea.” 

He described them as “not high fantasy, but weird fantasy.”

He was excited about the convention.

“A lot of people find it hard to get a group together.”

Wilson said that participants came from as far afield as Maine, New York City and New Jersey.