When the iPad hit a little over a year ago, there was a flurry of posts in RPG circles about tablet gaming. Since then we haven’t seen a lot of talk about them – I’m not sure if folks grew bored with the topic, or if they’ve now become so common place that they’re not worth commenting on any more.

I suspect it could be the latter. At my game table we have three iPads (two first generation, one second) and an Android tablet. For my last two sessions I ran Paizo’s Crypt of the Everflame for Pathfinder almost entirely off the iPad, using the PDF of the module and the iTunes Remote app to control music playlists on my Mac. I wasn’t entirely digital – I still used index cards to track initiative (old habits diehard) and looked up a few rules in the Pathfinder core book and the Bestiary, but I was just as likely to look up something in the Pathfinder SRD.

MEPACon Spring 2011 is being held Friday, April 8 through Sunday, April 10. It's the 10th anniversary of the convention, and they're going to be having a special reception Friday night. As always I'm looking forward to the convention, but this time around I'm taking my own advice and only running two RPGs.

Given that this is the spring convention, I've decided to give The Day After Ragnarok a rest and instead run a Savage Worlds: Fantasy game. I've been itching to run something powered by the Fantasy Companionrules, and this is my chance. I'm also going to be running the Dragon Age RPG, which might, just might be a fantasy genre game my gaming group would like. We'll see how it goes. Rounding out my set of games is Pandemic, an excellent board game by Z-Man Games.

You can register for these events at the MEPACON site on Warhorn. Here are the event pages for the three days of the con:

• Friday, April 8, 2011
• Saturday, April 9, 2011
• Sunday, April 10, 2011

Another MEPACon has come and gone, taking with it two weeks of frantic game preparation and 12 hours of actual play. The convention was held in Clarks Summit, near Scranton Pa. on November 12-14 and looked to have the typical attendance of 100 gamers playing a mix of board games, organized play, and one-shot RPGs. I ran three events, all of which had 5 to 7 players.

When some co-workers and I decided to try our hand at a lunch-time role-playing campaign, I knew that game prep was going to be critical to making it work. But not the sort of game prep I normally did; this was all about the physical game prep.

We're playing The Day After Ragnarok using the Savage Worlds rules, and thanks to Ken Hite's numerous adventure generation tables, the scenarios practically write themselves. No, the part the essential part of making this campaign work was making sure I knew where my towel was.

Dice. Initiative cards. A battle map. Miniatures. I have all of this stuff in my game room ... but we're not playing there. We're in an under-ventilated, odd-smelling basement conference room whose only virtues are privacy, a table, and a dry erase board.