Hello PrairieCon family!
I’m going to get right to it. The organizing committee has come to the difficult decision to cancel this year’s PrairieCon. We agree: it sucks.
But June is so far away, you say. We agree, it is far away, but the work of organizing the Con starts July after the last one, and really gets rolling in February. Right now, we should be recruiting GMs and volunteers. We should be working with local businesses and corporate partners on prize support, vendor space, and sponsorship. We should be marvelling at the new registration system. We haven’t been able to do a lot of this, and we won’t be able to do this until the need for physical distancing has passed.
We wanted to make this decision sooner rather than later. We know some of you arrange your vacation time to let you attend, and we want to give you as much notice as possible to use your vacation for other things. We didn’t want people agreeing to run games, only to cancel two weeks before and frustrate our GMs who put a lot of time and creativity into what they do. From my perspective as President of this motley crew, I didn’t want the members of the organizing committee putting in all the hours that they do to organize an event that might not run, especially when these people might have a variety of other commitments including caring for family.
Now, for many of us, PrairieCon is our social community. Going without it for a year means we don’t get the chance to catch up with people we only see at the Con. We won’t get to see how much some of the wee PrairieConners have grown since last year. We might go crazy cooped up in our homes without the social outlet of gaming. So I’d like to encourage you to find ways to still stay connected. There are a variety of platforms online that let people video-conference, and I know you all have the creativity and problem-solving capacity to find ways to make this work. I mean, we’re gamers; it’s what we do!
I would like to take this time to thank our regular GMs, regular volunteers, and regular sponsors. I have no doubt that all of you were ready to sign up for this year. Believe me, we will be thinking of you for next year! And the organizing committee is already thinking of some way for our community to celebrate as soon as the need to socially distance from each other is gone. It won’t be a full three-day event with all the bells and whistles, but it will bring the family back together, whenever we can do that safely.
Stay healthy, everyone. Take care of each other and yourselves. We look forward to reuniting as soon as possible! It might be 2020, but no one saw this coming!
Alex, President of the PrairieCon Committee