FauxCon

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Fauxcon is a parody of a role-playing convention. Purportedly run as a regional convention in Victoria, Fauxcon is primarily intended to make fun of the conventions of roleplaying conventions as they exist amongst the Role-playing conventions of Victoria, Australia. It serves a secondary purpose of allowing for blurbs intended to be humorous on their own, or to provide political comment.

[edit] History

The initial inspiration to create Fauxcon was provided by Wes Prosser, who began the project by writing sample fake blurbs to see whether he could get them submitted to an existing real convention. He undertook this project while at Arcanacon in 2000, and shared the idea with a few other attendees, who started providing their own ideas.

While discussing one of the parody blurbs, an uninvolved Arcanacon attendee eavesdropped and took the discussion as being about a real blurb. It was realised that it would be possible to create a fake convention with fake blurbs and pass it off as being real, at least for a while.

At the Arcanacon prizegiving, Wes made an announcement about Fauxcon 3, which was to run the following March at Moe. Judging by the reactions of the crowd at prizegiving, and the offers to submit games made at the postcon party, the project was definitely viable, and work was begun on making a fake history and website.

The initial website was created with as long and awkward a URL as possible, but this was found to be not very condusive to getting people to find the site, so a domain was registered and set up (fauxcon.org). Using ideas initially conceived at Arcanacon, the details of FauxCon II, allegedly run in 2000 were set up and put on the site, and a booklet was created for Fauxcon III, to be run "Friday Apr 1 to Sunday Mar 29, 2001"

Booklets were available at UniCon 2000, and there was some puzzlement about the strange blurbs and odd convention rules, but not much actual disbelief that it might be a fake convention. By the time that Arcanacon 2001 rolled around (in January), commemorative FauxCon II t-shirts had also been made, adding a certain amount of veracity to the existence of the convention.

As far as any of the Fauxcon organisers know, no one actually went to the Senior Citizen's Center at Moe to take part in the convention. However, as there had been such a positive response to the convention booklets from both unwitting and aware and amused congoers, the parody was deemed a success and further plans were laid.