Dear CONvergence Friends,

In the advertisement for next year’s convention, we featured characters from Baldur’s Gate 3 in a way that has rightly been criticized by members of our community. The characters depicted were overwhelmingly white, a lack of representation that is reflected in the source material and has been widely criticized, which our entire team missed. Moreover, the one character coded as BIPOC was shown in a cage, which exacerbated the harm.

This art will be pulled from further marketing materials, has been removed from the guide that is on the website, and a new version of the souvenir guide .pdf will be uploaded to the website once we have the replacement art ready. This will be accompanied by a copy of this letter so that our archive will retain the reason for the changed art for future reference as we work to do better.

Our Creative Services and Publications teams have started the process of putting together a more robust sensitivity review system. Even when our artists are working on properties they aren’t familiar with, or when we are putting together publications on a tight deadline, we will have a system in place to keep our individual privilege from affecting the entire community in this way. We have an existing process for written copy, and it has been a huge oversight not to do the same for our visual media.

To our community, especially our BIPOC attendees, we offer our profound apologies. This was entirely unacceptable, especially in a year dedicated to inclusion. Our heartfelt thanks go out to the members of our community who brought this to our attention. Your patience in pointing out our errors is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
The CONvergence 2024 Board of Directors

• Will Cunningham (Activities)
• Charmaine Parnell (External Relations And Communications)
• CJ Mantel (Systems)
• Eric Knight (Facilities)
• Luis Beltran (Hospitality)
• Tim Wick (Productions)
• Courtney Azar (Administration)

Editor’s node: This has delayed updating the branding of some of our web properties for 2025, but look for those updates soon!