I had a ticket to Oslo and then onward to Helsinki way back in 2020 for Solmukohta, and was preparing to fly out from Thailand¹ when everything was cancelled. In recompense, they gave everyone a free ticket to Ropecon. So I went, to see what all the fuss was about. And I get it now, I really do, although as usual I have some caveats.

Ropecon is a yearly Finnish role-playing convention run in Finnish and English, and is the largest non-commercial event of its kind in Europe. It had more than 7,100 attendees in 2023, which is kind of astounding for a volunteer-led effort. And credit where credit is due: I didn’t see any of the usual struggles amateur organizations get into when they try and organize complex events, no mislabeled rooms or organizers frantically running through the halls or noisy cock ups about registrations. I’ve seen more chaos at conventions with 200 people attending.

I had done no research or preparation, so when I arrived I discovered it was basically GenCon for Finns. There’s a bunch of RPG games being run by volunteers, a smaller set of larps doing the same, a bunch of board games and sets of workshops and talks and featured guests and a vendor hall with an art alley. Granted, there’s a lot fewer events — only about 675 events, compared to more than 20,000 at GenCon — but you might expect to be doing about the same kinds of things at both.

I’m not quite sure that’s right. You can kind of tell what I’m getting at from those numbers. GenCon has 30 times the number of events that Ropecon has, but it’s only got about 7 times the attendees. That’s a huge discrepancy. There’s a lot of people at Ropecon who aren’t playing games, or at least not playing publicly announced games. I ran into a lot of friends who told me they’ve never bothered actually registering for any events, they just wander around and see what’s happening, sometimes ducking into the talks if they look interesting, sometimes meeting friends, sometimes just soaking up the ambiance.

That might be why the event registration system is so bad. To start with, you can’t just register online. You need to physically go to the event hall and get a code from a booth before you can sign up online. I can imagine reasons for that² but in practical terms it means if you’re arriving late on Friday you’re locked out of any events that night.³ Worse, event registration happens on a rolling basis; the RPG games are assigned on a lottery system, so if you want to play an 10pm game you need to sign up between 6pm and 8pm and only at 8pm will you know if you got in.⁴ So you’re constantly having to go back to your phone to sign up for the next rounds, and you never have any real lead time to plan your day around. And the signup for the larps was worse, since most of them were first-come, first-served so you needed to be on your phone manically clicking to sign up as soon as tickets became available.⁵

My only other real issue with Ropecon is the support for English. It doesn’t bother me in the least that a bilingual convention would prioritize Finnish over English, or even have Finnish-only events.⁶ But the majority of the events are categorized as “Finnish-only”⁷ And beyond that, it’s things like the opening and closing ceremonies being entirely in Finnish,⁸ the weird categorizations of some program items,⁹ and the clunky nature of the online schedule that really made it kind of a pain to navigate as someone who simply doesn’t speak Finnish.

So at its heart I think it’s a great thing for the Finnish role-playing community, although a work in progress for the broader European role-playing community. That’s fine. I managed to get into a space opera RPG on Sunday that featured a home-brewed setting similar to Warhammer 40K¹⁰ and a home-brewed rule system and had a great time playing a corporate scion who gets trapped on a pleasure yacht and has to figure out what a mysterious derelict ship was doing orbiting a pulsar in the middle of nowhere. It was a great game. You can’t ask for more out of a con than that.

Ropecon was held in Helsinki out by the Pasila train station, which is attached to the Mall of Tripla, and the Mall of Tripla is kind of insane. The Finns are kind of notable for their fondness of shopping malls — bitter cold and deep snows will certainly drive up the value of contiguous indoor spaces with reliable transportation links — and the Mall of Tripla is an interesting one.

To start with, it’s huge. It’s the largest mall in Northern Europe.¹¹ And that’s without considering the 400-room hotel and 1,000-person apartment blocks which are contiguous with it. My hotel was a solid 20-minute walk from the Ropecon convention center, and at least half of that was walking through the mall to get from one side of the railroad tracks to the other.

Those tracks, incidentally, are because Pasila is supposed to turn into the main train station for Helsinki at some point.¹² So the mall is also contiguous with the train station and it’s scaled with that in mind. I arrived there direct from the airport¹³ at 11:30pm and had the utterly surreal experience of walking past the obviously open Hesburger and 24-hour convenience store before walking into the equally obviously closed mall section which was nonetheless open to the public, not least of which because there doesn’t seem to be any way to shut off the mall from the rest of the complex, by design.

I never stopped boggling over the size of it. The mall covers at least five stories, and the rather extreme slant of the terrain it’s built on means you can exit at street level on floor three on the southern side, floor two on the western side, and floor one on the northern side. There’s 63 restaurants and cafés inside ranging from pricey upmarket sit down places to your standard fast food options including two different Subways. It didn’t feature anything like a roller coaster or a ski slope; it was a little more sedate than that, although the space felt more varied and interesting than the usual mall architecture.

At best, though, that’s damning with faint praise. It’s still unmistakably a mall, no matter how nice the restaurants are.¹⁴ And malls tend to creep people out. For me it’s because they masquerade as public spaces while being private ones. What I want is shops that happen to be scattered around the city where I’m going about my day-to-day life, the bodegas and local bakeries and shoe repair shops wedged in between the chain fast food joints and the clothing megabrands. I want a space with panhandlers and people walking their dogs — I mean, I don’t want that, which is why they get chased out of the mall — but I want a space where that’s not prohibited. You can’t ride your bike in the Mall of Tripla, and if you ride it outside you’ll notice there aren’t many restaurants at all. They’re all in the mall.

But the more I travel, the more acutely aware I am that we need to radically rethink our approach to cities. There’s a huge housing crunch pretty much everywhere, and we’re still in the middle of this centuries-long migration from rural to urban living. At the same time, we need to find ways to reduce our burden on the Earth, and that probably means channeling our population away from inefficient land use like suburbs towards cities and skyscrapers.

Paolo Soleri¹⁵ coined the term “arcology” as a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology” to refer to a human habitat that melds the needs of the environment with the needs of the humans living there. It’s been picked up by cyberpunk writers to describe these massive, densely-populated skyscrapers which provide everything for their residents. I may not particularly like the Mall of Tripla, but I don’t completely hate it. And if nothing else, it represents another small step towards the sort of densely populated urban lifestyle which actually is someplace most of us would be happy to live.

For the rest of my time in Finland I caught the train to Savonlinna, in the heart of the Saimaa lake region. It’s known for, well, the lake and also a lovely 15^th century castle.¹⁶ I was there for the lake. Lake Saimaa has a lot of islands — more than 13,000 — and covers a lot of ground. There’s really no way to see it except by getting on it so I booked a tour of the lake running from Savonlinna to Heinävesi which took eight hours: six hours of sailing and then a two hour bus ride back to the start.¹⁷ The boat was pretty small, 25 passengers and two crew members, with barely enough space for everyone to sit on the upper deck and watch the scenery. And there was a lot of it. Six hours worth, in fact.

I wouldn’t recommend it for small children. Sullen teenagers would probably be okay; we always had cell phone reception. For most others — including the 24 middle-aged Finns I was sharing the voyage with — it was a soothing, meditative trip through a maze of pine-covered islands with the occasional summer home or sauna emerging from the landscape before disappearing around the bend.

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned during the cruise is that the stereotype about Finns is true: in six hours not a one of them said a single word to me. Nor to each other for the most part, unless they had arrived together, and even then it was brief and hushed. Mostly everyone just sat quietly and watched the islands go by. As an introvert, I deeply appreciated the silence.¹⁸

Finland is the first of the Nordic countries I ever visited, way back in 2016 for my first Solmukohta.¹⁹ That’s rather amusing, because it’s the least representative of the Nordic countries as a whole. It’s not the best place to start; you have to unlearn a few things before you can properly sort out the distinctions. But I’ll admit I’m starting to be a bit fond of Finland. It’s a little more austere and direct than the other Nordic countries. I appreciate that.

But it’s time to move on. I returned to Helsinki earlier today and caught the ferry. It’s only a two-hour ride to Tallinn. I’ll be in Estonia for a day, then head on to Riga for a while. I’ve never been in Latvia and it’s the last of the Baltic States I’ve never been to. I’m kind of excited. Here’s to new horizons.

Next: Tallinn to Riga
Prev: Edinburgh (EDI) to Helsinki (HEL)

Footnotes

¹ Not really; I think everyone could read the writing on the wall.

² To prevent fraud?

³ Someone later told me the assumption of the Ropecon organizers is that everyone arrives at 5pm on Friday when the doors open so this simply isn’t an issue.

⁴ This leads to dumb things like where I was signed up for a larp which started at 7pm, but I really wanted to sign up for an tabletop game at 10pm. Only I would only know if I got in after the larp started, and I didn’t want to take up a space if I was going to have to leave early, so I dropped out of the larp and ended up not getting a spot in the tabletop game anyway.

⁵ I have a huge number of problems with GenCon’s ticketing system, but at least all this happens long before the con opens, so you have time to make alternate plans.

⁶ Finns will happily tell you everyone there speaks English, and it’s largely true, but there’s some stark gradients of fluency. I was in a game where one of the players was trying to ask a question about the stone walls surrounding the lake inhabited by talking beavers — fantasy worlds, amirite? — and when they gave up and switched to Finnish there was a rapid-fire discussion of about a minute before whatever the critical point was had been resolved. I have friends who can larp in a non-native language and I have friends who can’t. It takes a huge amount of practice beyond proficiency before you’re just as comfortable in one as the other.

⁷ More than half — about 375 of the 675 listed events — are Finnish-only. About 200 are English or Finnish and the rest are English-only.

⁸ I attended the closing ceremony and it was backed by a slide show so I really don’t know that providing context in both English and Finnish on the slides would have been a big stretch, even if the speaker wasn’t going to be speaking English.

⁹ The communal jigsaw puzzle was listed as Finnish-only, which I assume was a mistake, but the thing I’m really baffled by was the Finnish-only tag for the dance lessons. It’s dancing. If there were ever a con event where I’d think your language would be irrelevant, I’d have thought that would be it.

¹⁰ All of human space was controlled by an Imperium and there were demons and orcs running around.

¹¹ Measured by leasable retail space, anyway

¹² The current train station is far more centrally located but is also ridiculously small and crowded while still managing to be a royal pain-in-the-neck to get from any given track to any other one. And expansion is out of the question.

The plan seems to be to stop most of the trains at Pasila and convert lots of the current trackwork to running shuttles downtown. It’s about a five minute ride.

¹³ Okay, I missed my stop and rode to the main train station, narrowly missed the first train going back in the other direction, then finally caught one before getting there.

¹⁴ A friend pointed out Bierhaus Berlin, a genuinely great bar I had overlooked in one of the corners that had a great selection of microbrews, although Finnish beer prices did their best to put a damper on my enthusiasm.

¹⁵ Of Arcosanti fame

¹⁶ St. Olaf’s Castle, built following Ivan the Great’s conquest of Novograd to deter Russian aggression. Plus ça change.

¹⁷ The cruise runs on Tuesdays, with the reverse route on Wednesdays. The reverse route starts with the bus ride.

¹⁸ This even extended to the occasions when we passed another boat. On virtually every waterway I’ve been on people smile and wave enthusiastically at each other. Here passers-by would at most solemnly raise a single hand toward you not higher than shoulder height. Although I delighted the most in those who would turn towards you and watch you go without raising their hand or revealing a single emotion, two ships of people stoically watching each other glide by.

¹⁹ And of course the convention was spent entirely on the ferry between Stockholm and Helsinki. The same ferry line I booked out of Helsinki this time, in fact.