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!
