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I'm back in Seattle after Origins, a week-long game festival in Columbus, Ohio that represents the mid-way point of what I lovingly refer to as "convention season," which is another way of saying "the summer". By the time a dripping wet fall rears its sad face for the onset of Seattle's sunless, surreal autumnwinterspring, I always look back and wonder "where the hell did summer go? How did I miss the 4th of July? Where was I during the entire month of August?
In the sweltering, sweaty American Midwest is where, and Origins is just the tip of the iceburg this year. Coming up in rapid succession I've got a brief trip with the family and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bbcaddict to Whistler, a trip to Denver for my first ever World Con (I'm on some panels!), then off to Gen Con Indy (the mothership of gaming cons) and THEN I'm going to Gen Con UK to be a featured guest. That's all by the end of next month, so while I get a nice little break here I feel like I've been through the ringer with only more ahead.
Don't get me wrong. I'm looking forward to all of that (especially the UK part!), but it is grueling.
I love Origins because it is not as frantic as Gen Con and I get a chance to actually _talk_ to some of the folks in the fairly tightly knit professional game publisher community. Green Ronin's art director and co-owner Hal Mangold is always good for some fun chats, and this year Ed Greenwood proved a true delight on numerous occasions.
Thanks for picking up several volumes of Planet Stories, Ed, and for being such a crazy, perverted lunatic.
I also had a chance to reconnect (even if briefly) with my old RPGA buddies Rick Brill and Joe Cirillo and company. I really miss gaming with those guys.
So Origins is great for catching up with old friends. Unfortunately, one reason it is so easy to do so is that business at Origins is really slow, and from our perspective it's been getting slower year by year.
I hear that some gaming companies did well at the show, particularly family style board game companies like Loony Labs and "built for Origins" quirky boardgame companies like Rio Grande. For us, the financial picture at the show is getting worse and worse, even while the retail and direct sales business for Paizo is getting better and better.
It's gotten to a point that all of the "big" gaming companies (Wizards of the Coast, Wiz Kids, Upper Deck, Fantasy Flight) have already given up on the show, and suddenly we're one of the "big guys" still there. It costs a huge ton of money to get the booth and product to the show, not to mention to staff the show with six full-time employees (covering their meals and hotel and flights, of course) for a whole week (during which almost none of those employees' duties back at the office get done), and the sales just art not there, and have not really been there for the last five or so years.
I can see why a lot of these other companies no longer attend the show, and despite my personal fondness for the convention (and the fact that I've attended 14 of the last 15 years) as a business matter I find it very difficult to justify as an expense.
To add insult to injury, daily sales at Paizo.com (travel, food, freight budget = 0) exceeded direct sales at the convention on both Saturday and Sunday.
The world changes beneath our feet.
I managed to polish off two novels on the trip, Robert E. Howard's SWORD WOMAN and the Centaur Time-Lost Series edition of Arthur D. Howden Smith's GREY MAIDEN. Sadly, this edition lacks at least five of the stories in a 1929 hardcover edition, which I have subsequently ordered.
Still listening to Megadeth. Still wish I had more time to read.
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As a side note, GenConOZ is on this weekend. Australia's gaming conventions are very different to the US model. That the US model is being used for the convention has frustrated many friends of mine already, but it will be interesting to hear the reports back from it.
Unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity to attend, but put forward my support by sending a Freeform up there to be played.
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What do you see as the key differences between the "US model" and the Australian model?
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Most Australian conventions are small in comparison to the US monsters. Perhaps because the RPG conventions over here are seperate to any computer game events (which are rare), and are run by small organizations supported by local businesses.
The focus is more on the RPGs, and many of the events supplied by writers are Systemless games (unsupported by any popular system) and Freeforms (similar to LARPing, just without the need for as much GM interaction).
To this end the websites focus on showing you the games first, then letting your figure out when to play them, as opposed to looking at time slots and seeing what there is to do there.
There is a lot more focus on the 'blurb' for the game, so much so that writers see their blurbs as important as writing their games.
Checkout www.arcanacon.org as an example, it's the one of the largest RP Cons in the country. The other one is http://pheno.ozgamer.net/, the two of them being the best examples of Australian Gaming.
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Alternatively, the easier answer to your question is "money". It's just not in the Australian market.
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From your posting I'm guessing that the internet market is making buying at conventions unappealing. So many people I know only buy rare, older suppliments or indy games at Cons these days. It's so easy to get cheap mainstream RPGs elsewhere, gamers are more interested in the harder to get stuff (one of my friends would kill for the Top Secret rules and suppliments).
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Didn't realise you were hitting my neck of the woods for GenCon UK. If you have time pre-or-post Con and are anywhere near London please drop me a line as it'd be good to meet up. Email - angus @ cubicle7.co.uk
We're still in two minds whether we'll be at GenCon UK this year, and if we are there it's unlikely I'll be manning the stall although I might pop down for a few hours on the Saturday to have a look around. We will be in Indy again though.
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A few of us are sticking around a few days after the con, and I think we're currently planning three nights in London. I'll post the schedule here once I know for sure what is going on. It would be cool to get together!
I'll definitely be at Indy.
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How was Sword Woman? I've been on the fence about that one.
I always enjoyed Origins over GenCon. It's disappointing that it continues to be in decline.
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I really enjoyed the first three stories in Sword Woman, the ones actually dealing with the titular character, Dark Agnes. She is, predictably, the Howard hero model morphed into the form of a woman, but it works.
It's pretty funny how in every story some nimrod, after seeing her kick ass in a fight, goes "St. Denis! You're a WOMAN!"
Good fun.
The last two stories are fragments and thus are more frustrating than worthwhile.
It's a quick read, and worth it.
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Are you also planning a trip to the Book Fair in Frankfurt/Germany in October? It also can be conveniently combined with a trip to "Das Spiel" in Essen (which is one of THE biggest gaming conventions in the world)...
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A couple folks for Paizo will be going to Essen, but I will not be among that delegation. Perhaps next year!
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Enjoy your stay in Denver (that's where I live), although you'll be here during the heat, you should try to get out of the city for at least a day. It's a shame you couldn't come back for the last weekend and stay for TactiCon. It's our local game convention.
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| temmogen |
| 2008-07-07 11:17 (UTC) |
| Re: Welcome |
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Ooopppsss...
TatiCon is the last weekend in August. (My head was typing faster than my fingers.)
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| (Anonymous) |
| 2008-07-22 23:54 (UTC) |
| Singing Citadel |
Very kind of you re Elric story. It's in various Elric collections, too, usually pretty cheap to find. It's also in the new illustrated edition del Rey are putting out -- third volume as I recall, though it could be in volume two, out next week. I must have written the story specially for de Camp. He loved Howard and really was anxious to spreqad the word when Conan had yet to become well known and his Krishna stories and fantasies like The Compleat Enchanter are still wonderfully fresh and humorous light reading of the best quality --but the poor bastard couldn't write sword and sorcery to save his life. I'll read pretty much by him, but not his S&S.
All best,
Mike Moorcock
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| (Anonymous) |
| 2008-07-22 23:57 (UTC) |
| Re: Singing Citadel |
Sorry for hasty typing... that should say I'll read pretty much ANYTHING by him...
MM
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