NASAGA 2026 Schedule: Part 1

October is upon us, and that means it’s time to start talking about the NASAGA 2026 Schedule. This post will cover the Wednesday and Thursday schedules, with next week’s talking about Friday and Saturday. The below are subject to change: the best place for the most up-to-date information is the NASAGA conference website.

Wednesday

• 9:00am - 4:00pm: Pre-conference workshop: Applied Tabletop Role-Playing Game Facilitation Lab

• 4:30pm - 6:00pm: Newcomer Orientation

  Brand new to NASAGA? No problem. We’re happy to welcome you and give you some pointers.

• 6:00pm - 8:00pm: Welcome Reception

  Snacks provided! Come catch up with old friends and meet new ones.

• 8:00pm - 10:30pm: Game Night

Come play a game brought by NASAGAns, and feel free to bring a favorite of your own!

Thursday

• 8:00am - 9:00am: Breakfast and Networking

Breakfast is included in your registration. Fuel up for the day!

• 9:00am - 10:30am: Keynote

  RIT’s Trent Hergenrader will speak on “The Other Side of the Table: Games and Critical Empathy.” Face-to-face gameplay fosters a unique physical presence and intimacy that digital platforms cannot fully replicate. Games also bring together people from different backgrounds, beliefs, and ideologies. Games present a moment where people place politics to one side to enjoy a shared experience, and provide avenues for players to critically examine their own beliefs about the world, and debate the beliefs of others.

• 11:00am - 12:30pm - Breakout Session 1

Our first breakout session! Pick one that best meets your interests.

• Kobolds Ate My Nervousness: Flexible Thinking Through Kobolds Ate My Baby - Dr. Maryanne Cullinan. Flexible thinking is key to successfully navigating life, but folks often feel they must do everything correctly, leading to frustration and decision paralysis. What's a lowly kobold/busy person to do? We will use the TTRPG Kobolds Ate My Baby to frame discussion about iteration, flexibility and the role of humor. Eat babies, die hilariously and learn about flexibility beyond the table using this silly game with serious things to teach us. All Hail King Torg!

• The Dream Game for Transformational Leadership - Mia Cellucci. Leaders today are taxed with increasingly complex situations that bog down thinking and create overload, limiting innovation and experimentation. The Dream Game for Leaders is an interactive game designed to foster creativity and innovation. Working with images and scenarios, players circumvent linear, analytical thinking by experiencing new perspectives and experimenting with new ways of thinking. There is no way to “win”; instead, players co-create an experience, building the intuitive intelligence and resilience needed for transformational leadership.

• 12:30pm - 1:30pm: Lunch on your own

The conference organizers will provide some suggestions.

• 1:30pm - 3:00pm: Breakout Session 2

  • Building Connection and Mastery: Tabletop Roleplaying Games for Children and Patients - Timothy Kreider. A psychiatrist and parent will describe lessons learned from running tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) for a variety of player groups, including 8-year-old children, student doctors, and young adults in psychiatric treatment. Techniques will be presented for making TTRPGs accessible to diverse players, adapting TTRPGs to short game sessions (e.g., 1 hour), promoting learning and reflection to capitalize on the educational and therapeutic potential of TTRPGs, and fostering mastery in new players and new dungeon masters.

  • EscapeIF: Using Storytelling and Found Objects for Low-Resource Escape Games - Scott Nicholson. Tired of hauling piles of boxes and locks for escape games? EscapeIF is a low-resource, open-source system originally developed for rural classrooms. Using just a script, chalkboard, and found objects, it combines concepts of escape rooms with interactive fiction. In this session, you’ll play an EscapeIF game and learn to write your own scripts. Come away with a versatile storytelling tool that requires minimal preparation and works in any setting!

• 3:15pm - 4:00pm: Rapid Fire Breakout Sessions 1

  • "Plastic Pals": AI Assistants for Educational RPGs - Raymond A. Kimball. Educational role-playing games can feel daunting for students with minimal public speaking or research skills. The combination of inhabiting an identity and researching its positions can turn off some students from participating at all. This presentation will showcase a set of AI assistants designed to replicate the function of supporting staffs for delegates in a constitutional convention simulation. It will highlight what the AI assistants can and cannot do in support of student work.

  • Playing Through Uncertainty: Game Mechanics for a BANI World - Anna Heinrich. For years, facilitators and leaders described modern work as VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Increasingly, the BANI framework—brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible—feels closer to the lived experience of learners, teams, and organizations. In this interactive session, participants will engage in facilitated play, reflect on how game mechanics create experiences of uncertainty and adaptation, and collaboratively build a practitioner-generated collection of games and mechanics that support adaptive capacity, collaboration, and sense-making in learning environments.

• 4:00pm - 5:30pm: Breakout Session 3

  • Gaming to Enhance Trans Empathy - Jasper Wojtach. Trans identity is being used as a political wedge, from panics in athletics to our existence in the public sphere. Straight presentation of facts only goes so far; to truly develop deeper connections, we need empathy. We need play. This session will zoom in on examples from ttrpg spaces and lead games to help us all think in deeper and more fulfilling ways about our (and others’) experience of gender.

  • CTRL+ALT+CONNECT: Rehumanizing Learning Through Play - Nakia Avery. Participants will enter a fast-paced interactive experience where teams solve real-world leadership, communication, and inclusion challenges through collaborative gameplay. Using role cards, mini escape-room activities, storytelling, and problem-solving missions, attendees will explore how play restores human connection in increasingly digital environments. This session blends laughter, reflection, strategy, and teamwork while modeling practical approaches participants can immediately apply in schools, organizations, and community spaces.

• 6:00pm - 10:30pm Dinner on own and Game Night