From Tabletop to Fandom: Organizing a Meetup

Dear Readers,

I was going to write you a triumphant post today. The plan was to walk you through everything that goes into building a large-scale, themed fan meetup from scratch — venue logistics, food, programming, all of it — using the Dungeon Crawler Carl meetup I've been planning as the case study. I had the outline sitting right here. Venue selection. Budgeting for a room big enough to hold a genuinely large crowd of crawlers. Structuring activities so people who show up alone find their way into a group within ten minutes instead of standing near the snack table looking at their phone.

I'm still going to write that post. It's just not the post I expected to be writing, because the meetup isn't happening — not mine, anyway — and I think the honest version of this story is more useful to you than the triumphant one would have been.

WHAT I ACTUALLY SET OUT TO DO

The idea was straightforward enough on paper: a large, themed meetup for fans of the Dungeon Crawler Carl novels, held at a venue big enough to hold a real crowd, with food, because you cannot ask people to spend an entire day in a room together without feeding them and expect it to go well. Themed, obviously, because half the fun of a gathering like this is the costumes, the in-jokes, the sense that everyone in the room has read the same increasingly unhinged series of books and is delighted to be surrounded by people who get it. This is exactly the kind of event I talked about wanting to cover in this space — the gap between running a game at your own table and building something bigger around a shared universe, the logistics nobody writes about because it's not glamorous the way worldbuilding or villain design is. Venue contracts are not glamorous. They are, however, the actual job.

I want to be clear that the idea itself was good. I still think it's good. A themed meetup for a fandom this size and this enthusiastic is exactly the kind of thing that should exist, and the appetite for it is obviously real, which you'll see in a second is precisely the problem.

WHERE IT ACTUALLY FELL APART

Here's the part I didn't expect to be writing about, and the part I think is actually more useful than a clean success story would have been: the plan didn't fail because nobody wanted it. It failed because event planning at this scale is not a solo hobby project, and I treated it like one for longer than I should have.

Booking a venue, coordinating food, building a schedule of activities, promoting the thing to an audience big enough to fill a room — that's not one job. It's five or six jobs stapled together, and every one of them depends on someone actually responding when you reach out. I sent updates. I asked for input on decisions that needed more than one person's judgment. And a lot of the time, what I got back was silence, or a response three weeks after the decision window had already closed. Not out of anyone's malice — that's an important distinction — just the ordinary way that volunteer coordination quietly dies when everyone involved has a job, a life, and fifteen other things pulling at their attention, and nobody's specifically on the hook for showing up.

I kept going for a while on the assumption that momentum would eventually carry it, the way it sometimes does on a smaller project. It didn't. A meetup at this scale needed a small team who'd actually committed to specific pieces of it — someone who owns the venue relationship, someone who owns food, someone who owns promotion — checking in on a real schedule, not a loose group of well-meaning people who'll get to it eventually. I had the first part. I never quite got the second part, and eventually the planning stalled out far enough behind where it needed to be that continuing to push it toward the date I'd originally had in mind stopped making sense.

AND THEN SOMEONE ELSE JUST DID IT

While all of this was quietly stalling, someone else in the community put together their own Dungeon Crawler Carl meetup, and it's happening on October 17th. I want to be completely honest about my first reaction, because I think pretending otherwise would make this post less useful: there was a real pang of "wait, that was supposed to be my thing" before the better part of my brain caught up and pointed out the obvious, which is that this is exactly what should happen when a fandom wants something and one attempt at providing it doesn't come together. Someone else saw the same gap I saw, and they got theirs across the finish line. That's not a loss. That's the system working the way it's supposed to.

I'll be going, for what it's worth, and I'd encourage any of you who are into the series to look it up rather than wait around for me to eventually get my own version off the ground. A themed gathering of crawlers happening at all is the actual goal here. Whose name is on the flyer was never really the point, even though it took me a minute of grumbling to fully believe that about myself.

WHAT I'D ACTUALLY DO DIFFERENTLY

If I run something like this again — and I probably will, because the itch to build this kind of thing doesn't go away just because the first attempt didn't land — here's what I'm taking with me.

Recruit the team before you recruit the crowd. I built the pitch and started reaching out to the fandom before I had committed co-organizers with specific, named jobs. That's backwards. The audience for something like this is rarely the bottleneck; the people willing to do unglamorous logistics work on a deadline are the actual scarce resource, and you need to lock those people down, with real clarity on what they're each responsible for, before you announce anything publicly.

Set a real cadence and hold people to it, kindly but firmly. "Let me know your thoughts whenever" is an invitation for a project to die quietly. A weekly check-in with an actual deadline attached to it, even an informal one, does more to keep momentum alive than any amount of enthusiasm at the outset. I didn't set that cadence early enough, and by the time I noticed things had gone quiet, the gap was already too large to close gracefully.

Scope the first attempt smaller than the ambition wants it to be. Part of what made this hard to sustain was that I was aiming for something genuinely large right out of the gate — a big venue, a big crowd, real catering — before I'd proven out the smaller version of the same idea with a team that had actually worked together before. A first event that's deliberately modest, run by a team that gets to feel a real win together, is a much better foundation for something bigger the next time around than a big swing that stalls halfway through.

And, maybe most importantly: treat someone else picking up the same idea as information, not a defeat. If I'd known from the start that success meant "a themed Dungeon Crawler Carl meetup exists and crawlers get to go to it," rather than "I personally deliver a themed Dungeon Crawler Carl meetup," I think I would have felt a lot less discouraged watching my own version stall, and a lot more genuinely glad to see October 17th on the calendar.

WHY I'M STILL WRITING THIS POST

I said at the top I'd still write you the post I originally promised, just not the one I expected, and I think that's actually the more honest use of this space. A lot of what gets written about running big fan events is written after the fact, by the person whose event actually happened, and it tends to make the whole thing sound cleaner and more inevitable than it ever is in the moment. The unglamorous truth is that most ambitious community projects fail quietly somewhere in the coordination phase, not because the idea was bad, and that failure mode is worth naming plainly instead of only ever hearing about the version that worked.

So: go to the meetup on October 17th (At Mall of America in Minneapolis, MN, meeting by the Orange Streak roller coaster ride) if you're a crawler in range of it. Find the people running it and tell them thank you, because getting something like this across the finish line is genuinely harder than it looks from the outside — I can say that with some authority now. And if you're sitting on your own version of this kind of idea, whatever fandom it's for, get your team locked in before you get the crowd excited. I promise you it matters more than it sounds like it should.

Until next time, Dear Readers...