Last year, we were almost victims of our own success, as we managed to fill our event space for a good part of the festival. To help deal with this, to keep the festival growing, and to generally improve the event, we will be making several significant changes this year in how the festival is organized and run.

The first change, and probably the most significant, is that the Draconis Festival has been incorporated as a non-profit entity. This gives us a formal, legal status and allows us to separate the Festival’s finances from our own, personal finances. This will give the Festival more financial transparency, allow us to seek more external funding, and allow us to offer you more flexibility in making payments.

Our second big change this year is that we will be leaving the Warhorn platform and moving over to Tabletop Events. It is a much more comprehensive platform and will allow us to manage many more aspects of the festival in one place, including festival registration, game submission by GMs, scheduling, game registration, merchandise, payments, dealers and panels.

Our third change isn’t new because we tested it during our last online edition. We are abandoning the fixed four-hour time slots we have used in the past, and moving to a more flexible schedule where games can start on every hour, and they can have a duration of 1, 2, 3, or 4 hours.

Our fourth big change for this year concerns the arrangement of tables and locations of festival services, so that we can include more game tables. Our snack bar, merchandise table, and garage sale will be moved to the small room behind the double doors in the back, next to the dealers room (which will remain in the same place as last year). The live-action games will occur in the student cafeteria on the third floor. The reception desk and game registration will be moved into the corridor that enters our main gaming space.

Finally, in addition to the four big changes, there are a few minor changes we’re making to improve your festival experience. For example, we’ll be accepting electronic payments by credit card or debit card. This means you won’t necessarily need to carry around cash for the festival (although we will certainly continue to accept cash). Another example is that we will have more and better signage on site. This will be in the form of banners and posters installed in the game area and elsewhere in the CEGEP. We will also be offering our sponsors the opportunity to purchase promotional signage in the festival space.

We hope you will like these further changes, and we will see you in October!