Phenomenon is a roleplaying convention over the long weekend offering a wide range of exciting, creative, imaginative, and fun roleplaying games for your enjoyment. Pheno aims to extend the roleplaying community in Canberra – to provide a place where you can relax, chat, make new friends, play games both familiar and unfamiliar, and otherwise do stuff you wouldn't normally do on a weekend.

Phenomenon has a focus on games written by local designers (Canberra and all over Australia).

Sometimes, these games will use a familiar system like Dungeons and Dragons, World of Darkness, PbtA, or Fate. Sometimes, these games will present a less well-known or indie published system. Sometimes, these games have custom systems written specially just for that one game. And sometimes, these games have almost no system at all.

Many of these games are prepared specifically for Phenomenon and are not published elsewhere. This can mean that our games can be very different to those at other conventions.

What's a roleplaying game (RPG)?

Do you remember playing 'Let's pretend' when you were a younger? Same thing, only with more rules. Have you ever watched a movie or TV show, or read a book, where you wanted to be a person in that setting? Or one of the main characters? Did you ever want to show them how it would be done properly? That's roleplaying.

In most RPGs:

• You have an invented persona, your character, who participates in a fictitious world via your interactions with the other players in the game.
• One player makes up the world and arbitrates any challenges the world may throw at your character, or conflicts between your character and other characters. We tend to call this heroic soul a GM (short for game moderator or mistress or master or Morph).
• There is no winner. You play to invent/tell a shared story and to have a good time with your friends. When everyone has a good time, everyone wins.

Although RPGs have no winners and losers, most Pheno games are judged competitively. The GMs (who mostly, have written their own games) are looking for the players that best depict their characters and that entertain them – and the players you're with – the best. They will give trophies or certificates to these players at The Prizegiving on the last day.

But that's only one aspect to playing in games at a convention like Pheno. If you have fun, if you meet new people, if you laugh, you cry, you swap toasts with your (fictitious) new arch-enemy, then you're doing it right.