Gen Con 2026 - A Brief Appetizer

I'm working on a full Gen Con report, and that'll come tomorrow. (I think.)

Still, I did want to mention something that happened this year at Gen Con that was something now.

Tornadoes.

Yes, that wonderful scourge of the Midwest and the Plains decided to pay Indianapolis a visit on Saturday. There were thunderstorms, yes, but we've seen t-storms at Gen Con before. I mean, it's Summer out here, and t-storms are pretty much what you get in a Midwestern Summer.

But tornadoes actually happening on Gen Con weekend? Well, that's new.

As you can see, people weren't exactly that concerned, but the Block Party scheduled to happen when storms rolled in was cancelled. And for good reason.

From WTHR on 8/1/2026.

Oh, and in a massive case of irony, the rain was invited into the Indianapolis Convention Center.

From WISH-TV.

According to Convention officials, the thunderstorms damaged the pipes that drain the roof, and, well, this was the result.

Where it was raining was where people play card games such as Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon. My brother-in-law was laughing about it later, because while a lot of people scattered, some people just stayed around, playing their games.

The rain inside the Convention Center spawned jokes in social media, such as the Gen Con "Body Odor" detectors went off due to people not showering and, uh, they got a shower after all.

Since this was Saturday, I wasn't affected, and neither was my brother-in-law. The place he was in at the time was central to the building and not close to any outside doors or windows, and when he looked at the radar track of the tornado he saw it was southeast of the Convention Center and was tracking away from Downtown Indy, so he figured they were going to be fine.

The storm --and its aftermath-- is what likely lead to a heavier than usual Sunday crowd in the Exhibit Hall. I'll mention that more tomorrow.

#Blaugust2026

Meme Monday: Gen Con 2026 Memes

I'm not going to miss a Meme Monday, as I'm too tired to put together a full report until later in the week, so here's some Gen Con memes for this year's Gen Con.

I feel for ya, buddy.
From Instagram.

Ah, Jake and Elwood Blues. The Blues Brothers.
From Instagram.

If you're hip to it, yeah. From Imgflip.

Yeah, been there. I've seen this live.
From Facebook.

You can't not have Gen Con without some
Murder Hobos around. From Tumblr.
(Wait, is Tumblr still a thing?)

Surrrre. Whatever you say.
From @lukemckay via Facebook.

#Blaugust2026

On The Road Again, 2026 Version

By the time you read this, I'll already be on the road up to Indianapolis for Gen Con 2026.

This year, I didn't quite trust my almost 30 year old Honda Accord to make the trip* so I decided to get a rental this time around.

Why a rental? Because my wife is working today, and she kind of needs her car for work. (She doesn't like driving my old Accord, so why make it hard on her?) At least I got a "free upgrade" to a Camry hybrid, so gas won't be much of a factor for the trip.

Still, I'll be here for the day:

From the Indianapolis Star's coverage of Gen Con.

I'll likely provide a report on Tuesday or Wednesday, although work might get in the way of that.

Happy gaming!

*The car has reached the point where I think I'm no longer going to do any major repairs and just keep it running as long as it can before it dies. I could be talked out of that, given how expensive even used cars are right now, but that's my current state. I've also been told numerous times by people that if I were selling the car it would go really quickly as it's in overall great shape for a Fifth Gen Accord, and even for a 4-cylinder car it is really peppy and fun to drive. 

#Blaugust2026

What If We're Wrong?

The Classic Plus hype train is going bonkers right about now. 

WillE is but one of the creators that's really on board with Classic Plus, but I keep wondering if we're misreading the tea leaves.

Here's the biggest clue that we might get Classic Plus, which was leaked back in 2025 and got a lot more scrutiny once more in 2026:

From Reddit and Icy Veins and all over.

Here's the thing. This looks interesting on the face of it, but until the collaboration between WotC and Blizzard was announced (it was leaked last week), nobody had a clue that D&D and WoW were going to join forces in the first of a series of crossovers. 

Here's what the alternate cover looks like, complete
with a book sleeve. (Alliance is on the back cover.)
From Reddit.

And oh look, that D&D World of Warcraft splatbook is coming out on November 17, 2026, which closely aligns with that Project Camelot release date up there as well.

So.

Was this what Project Camelot was all along? 

Hell if I know, but it wouldn't shock me if we were all wrong and it wasn't Classic Plus but a tabletop version of WoW that we got instead. I mean, it wouldn't be so bad from my perspective as a tabletop gamer, but I'm sure that it wouldn't go over well with others in the online community.

I guess we'll find out.

And for the record, I think I like the "regular" splatbook's look over the fancy version:

From ENWorld.

From ENWorld.

Why is it called ENWorld, you might ask?
When D&D 3.0 was getting ready to be released,
a guy named Eric Noah created a website to keep track
of all of the info of the upcoming version. Hence "EN"
refers to Eric Noah and World is, well, you get the idea.

#Blaugust2026

I Didn't Have THIS on my Bingo Card for This Fall

For everybody in the MMO community who is thinking there's a Classic Plus coming soon, I bet the announcement yesterday was a bit of a letdown...

Yes, it was a Gen Con release that World of Warcraft is coming to D&D 5.5 (aka D&D 2024), along with other classic settings: Greyhawk and Dark Sun. Greyhawk is the OG AD&D setting before Forgotten Realms kind of muscled in and took over.* Dark Sun is, well, "Grimdark D&D" in a nutshell.

I'd put the Dark Sun trailer here too, but it's definitely a bit on the gory side. And it's age restricted. So instead, I'll just put the link here to the entire D&D Vision Keynote:

One more thing (tm)... There's also this little announcement at the end of the Keynote...

From Instagram, but really all over and likely
originally from Wizards of the Coast.

Yeah, I think that Gen Con 2026 started off with a bang.

*One could be forgiven if the Dragonlance fans are standing around, saying "Hey, what about us?"

When You're Not Sure If It's Real or Not

You know, the saying about how the hero lives long enough to become the villain is pretty accurate in its own way, but I wonder about a corollary that if you live long enough you see movies about the creation of the original movie.

Or in this case, about Sylvester Stallone getting the original Rocky movie made.

It feels somewhat surreal seeing this trailer, because I've seen "remakes" and "resets" that were basically comedies masquerading as a movie or television show reboot but were there to poke fun at the original piece. 21 Jump Street comes to mind, where the original television show was on FOX back in the 80s as one of the few shows that actually survived a few seasons and was anything but a buddy cop comedy, which the 2012 "remake" was. Starsky and Hutch is another, where the 2004 film made fun of the (admittedly not that great) 1970s television cop show. 

So when I saw the trailer for "I Play Rocky" in my YouTube feed in between amateur radio and gamer videos, I figured someone was going to spend the entire movie mocking Sylvester Stallone. After all, he is the guy whose acting prowess was once described by Dennis Miller as "having the range of a Daisy Air Rifle". 

I was quite shocked that this was a serious take on the story behind the original Rocky movie.

I'm not here to throw shade on the attempt, but I'd bet money that Sly was behind this film, and I have to wonder whether anything --ANYTHING-- was mentioned about his acting career prior to Rocky coming out. There's Death Race 2000 and Capone, for two examples, as well as bit parts in other films. Yes, that includes at least one adult film. You can even check Snopes, which confirmed the accuracy of the oft-repeated story about Stallone acting in a film they can't show clips of on regular television.

Still, who knows? There's a lot of other celebrities who got the biopic treatment, so I guess it was Sly's time. And it's not like Stallone will have been the first celebrity to have their biopic conveniently ignore certain parts of their lives.

Hmm... I wonder if they got Bill Conti to write the soundtrack for this movie too, or whether they'd only refer to the iconic bars of Gonna Fly Now in the same way that John Williams' themes are used in later movies (such as Superman). 

Meme Monday: Just a Regular Guy Memes

If there's one thing that I prefer out of my SF&F, it's the concept of the "regular guy" going out and doing things. 

Not this Guy, but hey, it works.

Doesn't have to be a world-ending threat, and to be honest I prefer it if it's not. Maybe it's because I've been all "Tolkien-ed" and "Marvel-ed" out about world threats.*

But just being a regular person in a game going from zero to kind of something, I can work with that. And these memes are a celebration of that belief.

This is Plumbing the Death Star Episode 512.
They had me at that title. From Plumbing the Death Star.

At least regular ol' folks in MMOs can
be polite. From EBaum's World.

Sometimes, however, the DM doesn't really
give you what you want. From Pinterest.

And sometimes you just want to plant a garden,
not save the world. From Pinterest.

Well, crap. From Pinterest.

Then again, I guess I found myself. From Reddit.

*Admittedly, most of my D&D and MERP campaigns in my seminal early years had nothing to do with world-ending threats. Even the 20+ year campaign, which was ostensibly about a world-ending threat, never got close to that level because it took us so long to actually, you know, level up our characters.

EtA: Forgot to reattach the "*" at the end when I was adding the memes. Corrected.