Dragonmeet 2022

This year Dragonmeet was bigger than the previous year and definitely felt a lot bigger with a lot more people present. This meant, paradoxically, that it felt like less happened as simply looking at the stalls and talking to people took a long time. There has been a bit of a discussion on the convention’s Discord about expanding out to a two-day event and maybe a larger venue. I can see the logic as it is starting to get to the point where you need to be pretty disciplined to get everything done that you want to do. Primarily though I do like catching up with people and maybe it’s just a bit weird that there is only one major London roleplaying convention at the moment.

I didn’t really get to see much from the seminars or the podcast area which seems to be just getting bigger every year.

Trading

There were two trade halls this year with the space that was formerly given over to the boardgaming as well as smaller stalls now being used exclusively by traders and the boardgaming library and space occupying the open game space of previous years.

The usual companies were there: Pelgrane, Modiphius, RRD, Cubicle 7 and Chaosium. However the real finds were in the indie distros of which there were maybe as many as three times as many as there were last time.

Soulmuppet seemed to have a lot of desirable things as well as physical copies of Gangs of Titan. Melsonian Arts Council had pre-Kickstarter versions of the Big Squirm and nice tote bags. Iglootree had masses of hard to find zines. Lost Pages were there as normal. Others included beyond cataclysm, Peregrine Coast Press who had physical copies of The Electrum Archive.

There were also several tables of creators who had banded together and had a huge variety of things from various creators. I have a full list of everything I picked up.

I think it is safe to say that if you wanted a comprehensive view of the contemporary indie scene you had it here.

Gaming

I actually ended up doing less than I planned due to the socialising but the planned games were all signed up in advance which seems a bit rough. As a result the games on demand were also absolutely rammed. There was a lot of gaming going on but I suspect that the demand was even greater. This probably needs a bit more work from the organisers but I recognise that it is a tough situation and one that is hard due to the space limits of the venue.

COVID

There were no real rules about COVID this year. No need to prove vaccination or a negative test. It was pretty much pre-COVID. Some areas like corridors around the seminar rooms and popular sections of the trade hall were rammed but elsewhere you could choose want distance you wanted to keep from people.