Posts Tagged ‘con report’

Hoosier Daddy? GenCon 2009 Indianapolis Con Report

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I got back from GenCon two weeks ago, and I still haven’t read everything I got, or digested everything I heard, or placed everything I saw, there. It’s not just that it’s too big for one columnist — I realized that some time ago — even the part of it that’s small enough for one columnist to cover is getting too big: there were more stories, more developments in RPG design and marketing, and more great games at this show than I could take in. So I’ve spent some of the last two weeks following up on GenCon news that I didn’t quite get my head around at the show.

But the most important piece of GenCon news is just this — there was a GenCon! With GenCon LLC (the company that owns and runs the show) in bankruptcy last year, a lot of folks wondered if there would be a show at all. Then a hostile buyout surfaced, and we wondered who would run the show, if show there was to be run. But GenCon LLC shot those rapids and bobbed to the surface, unsinkable and back in business in time for the show. And business was — well, not necessarily booming, but way better than anyone would have hoped to predict in these times of economic foofaraw. Attendance was almost 28,000, not very much less (2 or 3 percent down) than last year. Some of that might be the economy, and some of it might just be the difference between Big Yu-Gi-Oh Year and Normal Yu-Gi-Oh Year. The dealers almost all reported great sales and good crowds; the games I heard about were packed; the streets of Indianapolis held even more fat guys than usual. And it wasn’t business as usual for GenCon, either — they unrolled a new registration system and a GenCon app for the iPhone. Both had their bugs and flaws (the registration system kept gamers lined up for two hours in some cases), but both are symptomatic not of a desperate, play-it-safe GenCon barely out of the weeds, but of a GenCon intending to grow and evolve into the next decade and beyond. This is a good sign beyond the telling of it.

Three For Flinching

The continued existence of GenCon established, there are three perhaps bigger stories yet that broached at the show, at least as relates to the craft and future of RPG design. Firstly, Catalyst Game Labs took the bold step of releasing their new transhuman SF-horror game Eclipse Phase under the Creative Commons license (non-commercial, share-alike). This means not only can you download it for free (from, say, here), you can also chop out stuff you don’t like, put in your own house rules or weird setting variants (Eclipse Phase: 10,000 B.C. as the fall of the ancient astronauts! Eclipse Phase with biological hive-mind vampires! Eclipse Phase with the OGL Traveller engine!) and post it on your own website (for free, of course) without getting a nasty email. While The Shadow of Yesterday did Creative Commons first, and the CC non-commercial restriction is less open than the OGL, Catalyst is still the first major RPG company to allow gamers to mashup and remix their intellectual property as well as their rules. (Which I should point out are also available at DriveThruRPG for $15, if “free” is too little for you to pay.) This would seem to be one way to connect with one’s fans — from a position of trust and fun. Almost like an RPG.

And along those same lines comes another course in “How To Build An RPG, 21st Century Version,” as Paizo’s years-long gamble with Pathfinder has paid off massively well. For those who weren’t paying attention, Paizo’s developers announced their “D&D 3.5, Only Better” RPG back in March of 2008 and opened up the whole alpha version of the Pathfinder ruleset for free download. 25,000 people did so. Last GenCon, the results of 25,000 pieces of persnickety feedback (sight unseen, I would estimate that 24,500 of them at one point or other mentioned attacks of opportunity) and six months of backbreaking work by Jason Bulmahn and others became the beta version of Pathfinder — which Paizo sold out of in nine hours, despite giving the whole thing away again for free, simultaneously, in PDF form. For another six to eight months, Paizo ran a ginormous Web-based playtest of the beta version on their forums, which finally resulted in the actual 576-page RPG Pathfinder — which sold out its entire print run in pre-orders. In a week. And I am reliably informed that said print run would have been very respectable even last century, which means it was epochal for this one. At the show, the Paizo booth was slammed; lines around the booth eight times like a proverbial Midgard Conga Line of gamers. Pathfinder was the unmistakable Hot Buzz Thing of the show. “If you offer to let them help build it, they will come.” The kicker? The Pathfinder PDF is $10. D&D is building a brand. Pathfinder is building a religion.

The third big thing surfacing at the show was the word of a Third Edition for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, visible under glass at the Fantasy Flight Games booth. (Booths. Boothoplex. FFG had something like five or eight booths — which is to say, almost enough room to set up a game of Arkham Horror with all the expansions.) This edition promises specialized dice (like Descent or Memoir ‘44), heroic power cards (like D&D 4e inexplicably didn’t come with), a “plot stress” mechanic straight outta FATE, “character stance” mechanics straight outta the Indie Narrativist Playbook, and other attempts to build a 21st century RPG like a boardgame — which is to say, with interesting physical components and a larger sense of kinesthetic play. I can’t speak to the actual rules, although I suspect we’re in for the edition war to end all edition wars when the $100 boxed set drops (with an echoing crash, if it’s like most FFG boxes) this fall.

Also in the future (2010), Wizards of the Coast plans to revamp the Dark Sun setting for 4e. So that will be fun.

The Future Scares Me! What About Two Weeks Ago?

All that excitement aside, GenCon also saw more normal RPGs appear to more normal sorts of reactions. White Wolf introduced Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Hero Games sold loads of CDs of the Hero 6th Edition rules (the actual books being trapped behind the Bamboo Curtain), and Crafty Games debuted FantasyCraft, which does for fantasy about two-thirds of what SpyCraft did for modern adventure, but give it time. Mongoose repped Earthdawn 3e; Margaret Weis Productions had hard copies of a Supernatural RPG almost as pretty as Dean Winchester his own self; Studio 2 had the long-awaited (and simply glorious) upgrade of Weird War II into a Savage Worlds setting book.

There was Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor redressed for 4e, GURPS Vorkosigan (a POD of the PDF, but nice enough looking), Mysteries of the Hollow Earth (for Hollow Earth Expedition), and Rogue Trader (for the WH40K RPG). Arc Dream flooded the zone with three new Wild Talents campaign setting books: the weird-Victorian Kerberos Club by Benjamin Baugh, This Favored Land (basically GODLIKE in the Civil War), and Grim War (a taut contemporary setting featuring mutants and mages by Greg Stolze and, ahem, Kenneth Hite). Alderac dropped its delightful Compendium of GM Tables, the Ultimate Toolbox, while Green Ronin did fine with Mecha & Manga and Warriors & Warlocks and True20 Freeport: The Lost Ampersand. Rogue Games had Colonial Gothic Revised and Foundation Transmissions (a bunch of fine meta-setting stuff) for Thousand Suns. Pelgrane Press (an owner of IPR, and thus a sponsor of this column) had adventure compilations for Mutant City Blues (Hard Helix), Esoterrorists (The Esoterror Fact Book), and Trail of Cthulhu (Arkham Detective Tales), as well as a new book of magic rules for Trail of Cthulhu (Rough Magicks, by, ahem, Kenneth Hite again).

I might as well finish this section by mentioning that Atomic Overmind and Hero Games both had my new Hero 6e version of The Day After Ragnarok (the first supplement for Hero 6e, I’ll note smugly here), and Atomic Overmind and Adventure Retail both had my new introductory goof Cthulhu 101, and that Adventure Retail had my new children’s book from Atlas Games, The Antarctic Express. Honest, that’s all the plugs. I think.

ENnie, Meet Indy. And Indie. And Diana.

You will all no doubt be gratified to know that I picked precisely one Gold ENnie: Best Rules for D&D 4e. In nothing else did I and the ENnie judges see eye to eye, although worthy winners emerged in the silver categories (Mouse Guard for Interior Art, Production Values, and Product of the Year; Don’t Lose Your Mind for Writing; Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies for Setting) and for all I know in the categories I didn’t know enough to vote in. My podcaster buddies seemed very happy to see All Games Considered win Best Podcast, for example, and the D&D 4e Monster Manual is certainly a deserving candidate for Best Monster or Adversary Book for all that I didn’t know any of its competitors. WotC was the big winner (six golds, three silvers), but Paizo (four golds, two silvers) and FFG (two golds, one silver) kept it respectable.

The Indie RPG Awards were announced by ninjas at night in a snowstorm, apparently, as nobody could find anything about them at the show. But they have appeared online, and I can gladly endorse the voters’ choices for Indie Game of the Year (Mouse Guard), Supplement of the Year (Don’t Lose Your Mind), and Most Innovative (Sweet Agatha), among others. Sweet Agatha didn’t quite get the Diana Jones Award this year, which was announced by Matt Forbeck in a loud, happy bar full of free drinks. (That alone is why this is the best award in gaming.) That signal honor went to the very worthy card game Dominion, although all the nominees were powerfully strong this year: D&D 4e, the Jeepform movement, and Mouse Guard were also also-rans.

How Was GenCon Like Columbus? You Had To Go Looking For The Indies

Rather than one big happy “Indie Alley,” the various indie designers spread all across the waist of the dealer’s hall. There was the Forge, featuring Ron Edwards’ new full-on version of Trollbabe and a beta of his new game S/Lay W/Me (which I believe may be the single finest Northwest Smith RPG imaginable), along with Tony Pace and Nathan Leeson’s Venus 2141 and Tony Dowler’s new ashcan of Renaissance cinematic philosophy-fightin’, Principia. Emily Care Boss’ first-contact SF RPG Sign In Stranger headed up the “Pirate Jenny” booth of female game designers, also featuring Julia Bond Ellingboe’s wonderful Tale of the Fisherman’s Wife, Danielle Lewon’s Kagematsu, and Kat & Michael Miller’s Serial Homicide Unit. Luke Crane had a new supplement for Burning Empires (Bloodstained Stars) and Jared Sorensen had his first Parsley “parser-emulator” game, Action Castle (“get to the point. i see no point.”), in Luke’s booth. Or that’s where he was when I saw him. In their own booth, the Design Matters krewe had Gregor Hutton’s ashcan of AD 316 (3:16 in Roman times), Epidiah Ravachol’s Time & Temp, Joe McDonald’s road-movie RPG Ribbon Drive, and Nathan Paoletta’s new-to-me vampire game Annalise. And the IPR booth boasted Jeremy Keller’s medieval RPG Chronica Feudalis, Bill White’s Inuit-ish wonderment Gangakagok, and Paul Tevis’ exercise in wild amnesiac chargen-as-narrativism, A Penny For My Thoughts.

And Those Thoughts Are …

I haven’t even mentioned the wedding I attended, but I don’t think any RPGs debuted there. I can’t swear to the White Wolf party. And just like GenCon itself, we end with a party, and we’re out of time.

If you still haven’t had enough of me on GenCon, though, you can listen to my two appearances on Ryan Macklin’s podcast This Just In … From GenCon! — the Saturday 11 a.m. episode, and the Monday 1 a.m. wrap-up. Enjoy!

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Nibbled To Death By Mice: Origins 2009 Con Report

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

This weekend is Independence Day, which used to be the weekend I’d spend in Columbus, Ohio, at the Origins Game Fair. But this year, it was last weekend, if that makes anything clearer.

There are two big stories out of Origins this year: First, my game Trail of Cthulhu was beaten for the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game by Luke Crane’s Mouse Guard RPG. Second, so was Dungeons & Dragons 4e. Now, I play 4e (when my DM can manage to schedule a game for a quorum of us) and enjoy it very much, and I absolutely believe observers like Joseph “Goodman Games” Goodman who say that 4e is showing strength not only in the mass market (its new corebooks reliably make, for instance, the Wall Street Journal best-seller lists) but in the hobby channel. But for it to lose Best RPG to a (brilliant, beautiful) game about talking mice is not business as usual.

Possible explanations include, in no particular order: 1) Since every attendee at Origins could vote for any award, the card-floppers and lead-pushers and chit-flippers voted against D&D for the same reason that I (had I not lost my ballot between bars) would probably have voted against Magic: Version Whatever for Best CCG: sheer cussedness. That said, Magic won for Best CCG this year, so obviously that explanation only goes so far. 2) Same set-up as #1, but the voters were seduced by a beautiful cover full of cute li’l mice. Seems shallow, although there are (Origins-Award-winning) publishers who claim to believe it. Of their own products, even. 3) My columns are amazingly powerful, and my love for Mouse Guard (strategically unveiled right before Origins) hoist me (and 4e) with my own petard. Let’s just say that the science on this question is not settled. 4) Mouse Guard had huge buzz, because it’s an awesome game with a better network of mavens and connectors in today’s wired con-attendee community. Possible, but — beating D&D? Really? 5) It was just the best game up for the award, so of course it won. This has the advantage of being true, but not of explaining very many other Origins Awards.

Really, the best possible news out of this contretemps is that there were three nominees (two were withdrawn after the nomination process as ineligible) that all could be said to deserve the Origins Award that year, and that I and Wizards of the Coast just got caught in a perfect storm of design excellence.

Don’t worry about me too much, though: I did win an Origins Award, for Best Non-Fiction Product, for Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales. Other, non Hite-related results can be seen here: Wizards wound up winning three all around, and my minis friends were generally pretty stoked about the quality of those awards, too. The “deck building as game” card game Dominion won the Spiel des Jahres and the Origins Award, so that’s hard to argue; Pandemic was an SdJ nominee, and won for Best Boardgame. In short, a really good run for the Origins Awards.

Not such a great run for the Origins convention: it was smaller and bereft of some major players in the dealer’s hall: Wizards, White Wolf, Paizo, Games Workshop, AEG, Green Ronin, and Fantasy Flight all skipped the show (though Wizards and, I believe, Paizo, ran some events), which can’t be where the organizers wanted to be even in these times of global economic brouhaha. It’s still considerably bigger than a regional con, and the game rooms were still pretty full, so there’s a foundation to build on — but there’s some load-bearing beams that could use a look-see first, methinks. That said, the new GAMA Executive Director has run a juvenile detention system and a Gulf War POW camp, which is pretty much the minimum requirement for running a game convention as I understand it.

So what was at the show that was any good? The games, of course. For my money, the single best new game at the show was Darren Watts and Jason Walters’ Lucha Libre Hero, which is even better than it sounds. Other standouts were Mike Fiegel and Jerry Grayson’s Hellas (literally a “space Odyssey”), Z-Man’s remake of Eric Goldberg’s “choose your own adventure boardgame” Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Gareth Hanrahan’s Hammer’s Slammers mod for Traveller. So there was good games to be bought, and even more good gaming to be had, at Origins on Not Independence Day.

Just stay away from the mice.

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Is Paris Gaming? Salon du Jeu de Société 2009 Con Report

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Toward the end of April, I was fortunate enough to be a guest at the Salon du Jeu de Société in Montreuil, on the eastern lip of Paris. (Only its URL indicated its connection with GenCon France.) I attended through the benevolence of the French RPG publisher 7eme Circle, who translated and published my game Trail of Cthulhu in French, as Cthulhu. (My fellow guest was Jérôme Huguenin, that game’s startlingly gifted illustrator — he also illustrated 7eme Cercle’s new hotness, Kuro Tensei, which looks all apocalyptic and J-horrific.) I speak essentially no French, save that which accretes after a year of grade-school instruction, a decade of French horror films, and a lifelong fondness for good food. So of course I did two interviews there.

So what was the convention like? It was mostly a boardgame show held in one giant dealer’s hall. (I was informed there is a more RPG-focused convention in September. My calendar is open …) Asmodee, the main sponsor, used to publish RPGs but now mostly produces boardgames — plus ca change. Gaming happened primarily at company demo booths, but there were a dozen or so RPG tables set up in one section under the benevolent gaze of Grog. French gamers (based on my random sampling from the thousand or so attendees) are pretty much just like American gamers, although they smoke more — the only barrier was linguistic. The ’satiably curious can see photos of the festivities at the Sci-Fi Universe site, or watch a riveting video shot at the event.

French games, from what I could tell within my Anglophone box, are primarily concerned with world and feel (consider Nephilim, In Nomine, and Qin, to name three French games with English-language versions), which may be part of the reason why they are (as a rule) far prettier than American ones. Given the relative sizes of the Anglophone and Francophone RPG markets, I haven’t the faintest idea how French publishers (very much including mine) support such gorgeous art and production quality. France also has an “indie” scene, if Johan Scipion’s Sombre is any guide — a stripped-down horror game with a number of similarly minimalist sub-games in planning or complete, among them Cthulhu DDR (“No Nazis, No Stasis” says designer Thierry Salaün).

I shan’t mention every game I saw there, but I will single out the upcoming 7eme Cercle game Devastra, which takes the long overdue step of “game-ifying” the legendary history of India, and Jean-Philippe Jaworski’s extraordinarily recondite game Te Deum pour un Massacre, a game about noble machinations surrounding the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, and the French Wars of Religion generally. (It has five supplements, I think.) Both are extraordinarily beautiful. Both assume a level of comfort with history and pseudo-history that American games mostly don’t.

Which leads me as if by predetermined column outline to the book Jouer avec l’Histoire, or Playing Games With History, which debuted at the show. Edited by Olivier Caïra and Jérôme Larré, this anthology presents essays by game designers and critics discussing the intersection of RPGs with history. Ranging from designer’s notes to “does making Nazis into orcs trivialize the Holocaust?” the book is probably years ahead of the state of the art in English-language RPG criticism. I say “probably,” because it’s not impossible to imagine someone putting together a similarly thoughtful, wide-ranging anthology for American games. (An arguable exception is Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan’s “… Person” series from MIT Press, but that takes a primarily narratological approach.) Caïra is a leading ludological scholar in France, having published a broad sociological study of RPGs, Jeux de Role, with the prestigious CNRS (the equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the U.S.). He is also very generous with his champagne, which has no bearing on my appreciation of his scholarship.

Which, as I may have pointed out, I can’t actually read. But the typography is very nice.

Which is French gaming in a nutshell. Next, the State of American Gaming, such as it is, and such as I can suss it out.

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Vegas Nerves: GAMA Trade Show Con Report 2009

Monday, April 20th, 2009

According to the Game Manufacturer’s Association (GAMA to its friends), which surely ought to know, attendance at the GAMA Trade Show was down 20% from last year. It seemed lower than that — perhaps 150 or fewer store accounts. Admittedly, they were the Pareto-optimal stores; any publisher here was talking to the best-run (only a good store will go to GTS without a free HeroClix Galactus as bait) and best-capitalized (only a store with a deep cash reserve can afford to send buyer staff to Las Vegas for three days) of their potential customers. Even in its 20% (or 30%) lower configuration, this may have been a gathering of 80% (or 90%) of hobby-chain sales.

Sadly, they had many fewer publishers in Vegas to sell them things — publisher attendance was more drastically down than usual. Fantasy Flight Games, Paizo Publishing, AEG, and Avalanche Press were only four of the big names missing from the show floor; White Wolf appeared only in the guise of its distributor, Wizards of the Coast brought its Book Expo cottage rather than its normal imperial palace, and Games Workshop had, if recollection serves me, a single banner and a card table. Your humble correspondent was the only representative of IPR at the show, which led to any number of amusing misapprehensions from retailers.

Was it merely the effect of the Current Economic Unpleasantness (Global Edition) or a new round of the Recurrent Economic Unpleasantness (Hobby Games Edition)? Hard to say — there were some new publishers there in fine fettle, such as boardgame supernova Bucephalus Games (23 games in 11 months!) and Bastion Studio, which had the first bubblings of what may well be the New Heat, namely Exillis, a skirmish miniatures game played with neat winged monster minis, an elegant map board — and an iPhone. Yes, the iPhone becomes your ruler, your rule-book, your dice, and your minis inventory all in one. While this specific game — fantasy monsters battling it out in medieval Europe — may not be the Next Big Thing, something very much like it very much will be. And only 150 retailers, at most, got to see it.

Your humble correspondent will be reporting next from medieval Europe — specifically from the Salon du Jeu de Société, aka GenCon France — next weekend. And then, from the Dark Ages known as the State of the Gaming Industry.

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San Ramon Holiday: DunDraCon Con Report 2009

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Every year at this time, I flee Chicago in February for the sun and safety of the Bay Area, which responds by dumping nine inches of rain on me all weekend. Fortunately, I spend much of that weekend indoors at DunDraCon, one of the oldest continuing roleplaying game conventions in existence. And it is continuing; attendance was right at 1400, a little bit down from last year, unsurprising given the current economic degringolade.

And it is a roleplaying game convention; at DunDraCon, the RPG is king and all others must follow in its train. (That said, boardgaming boomed this weekend as it seems to be doing all over.) Anchored by the booth of Oakland’s amazing Endgame store (part-owners of IPR and thus proud sponsors of this very column), the dealer’s room still draws a few manufacturers: local boy Chaosium, former local Hero Games, plus Goodman Games, Troll Lord, and Flying Buffalo. Robin Laws’ Mutant City Blues RPG (short form: CSI: Gotham City) debuted here and sold out immediately, as it well deserved to (and since it is published by Pelgrane Press, likewise an IPR-owning company, that is all you will hear of it in these pixels despite its wonderful premise, deft rules, and gorgeous layout); the other standout debut at the show was probably Urban Fantasy Hero by the redoubtable Steve “Writes” Long.

The truly great thing about DunDraCon, even more than the intermittent sunlight and the commendable RPG focus, is its dedicated seminar track. The con reliably packs a room for discussions of such things as alignment, real-life weapon wound trauma, and city design, all for the purposes of bettering your RPG experience — it’s far more like an SF convention than a game con in that respect. Those conventions, and DDC, prove that a market for such discussions can be built; the reason that a game convention might want to turn its attendees into interested, intelligent consumers of their hobby can be left as an exercise for the reader. Or perhaps as the topic for a seminar somewhere.

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Go Ahead, London: Dragonmeet 2008 Con Report

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Perhaps the top story from Dragonmeet 2008, which blossomed like the proverbial agave Saturday, is that its charity auction raised over £2850. From a convention with around 600 attendees. Admittedly, some of them were Irish, but that’s still a jaw-dropping amount. Happily, I found out about it in time to contribute an item or two, but all honor goes to con organizer Angus Abranson and to the attendees for their uncommon generosity.

Said attendees played a fairly dramatic swath of games — from giant Settlers of Catan to Monsters And Other Childish Things to Traveller – in the one-day event, which took place in an anonymous-looking British Moderne sort of public building in Kensington. They also swarmed the dealer’s room, keeping everyone hopping all day. I barely got to tour the hall myself, but I did note the revived edition of Oliver Johnson and Dave Morris’ much-beloved 1980s classic Dragon Warriors, published by James Wallis’ new Magnum Opus Press under Mongoose’s Flaming Cobra imprint. Which also, I should add, recently published the expanded and revised version of James’ own impossibly wonderful Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen RPG. In other British gaming news inexplicably not connected with James Wallis, Cubicle 7 was there with the new edition of Tuckey, Rhymer, & Nunn’s Victoriana, and the Collective Endeavour indie flash-mob detonated with a bang at the show, featuring a who’s who of top British indie game talent, from Joe “Contenders” Prince to Gregor “3:16” Hutton. I picked up one or two nice review copies from them, the Britishest of which is probably Neil Gow’s “Sharpe’s RPG,” Duty and Honour. Watch this space, in other words.

I attended Dragonmeet as a special guest, along with my Trail of Cthulhu co-conspirator Robin Laws and other luminaries such as John Wick and James “Him Again” Wallis. Our panels were flatteringly well attended, and suitably redacted recordings of them may turn up on the Web in near future. When we weren’t pontificating panelists, Robin and I were aw-shucks autographers at the Pelgrane Press stand; our Trail of Cthulhu scenario book Shadows Over Filmland (a dozen scenarios riffing on the great horror films of the 1930s) dropped at the show in a Special Preview Edition. And with that oh-so un-British plug gratuitously inserted, I bid you farewell from Britain. For now.

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