Tracon Report 2

I think I'm going to be big in Finland.

I thought that I'd sell maybe 20 boxes at Ropecon. That's 1000€ in hand from one product in one place.

I would have sold that many at Tracon, the one with almost no role-players present, if I had them ready.

I'm thinking this thing is about to explode. What's going to be amusing if it does become big in Finland is that I expect a backlash - same as happens with anything popular - so I await the complaining about the goddamn foreigner who is bringing Finnish gaming back to the stone ages. ;)

Funny moment of the day: Oscar Garza (White Wolf) was a guest of honor at the con and was talking a lot about EVE Online during various presentations. Apparently he wanted to meet me, and so had his assigned handler for the convention talk to my "handler" Eero to set up the introduction. The joke here being that I didn't have a handler, Eero's just the guy that arranged for me to be at the con and share his sales space.

Have your people set something up with my people indeed.

For two days, my table adorned with a big banner featuring the cover art was on full display in a convention where the average attendee looked to be underage, and nobody suffered outrage or moral collapse.

What may cause outrage is that I was teamed up with Arkkikivi, who say they carry the larges selection of indie/Forge/storygames (whichever label works for you) on Earth, and there I was with the biggest collection of Old School material in Scandinavia - and most of it has not yet arrived.

For the record, the others on the panel yesterday with me: Matthijs Holter, Eero Tuovinen, Miska Fredman and Ville Vuorela.

I'm tired. Night night.

Tracon Report 1

Cool day in Tampere, as I teamed up with the Arkkikivi people to come on up to the con. They displayed what they called the largest selection of indie RPGs in the world, and I had a wide variety of OSR products, although the full shipment from the States has yet to arrive.

I did a Game Designer panel with a few Finnish designers and one Norwegian guy (not wanting to name names because I'm low on time and can't spell any of their names by memory :P)

It's a soft sales convention, as I had been warned about, since these days it's 95% anime kids.

Still, there was some interest in my stuff. Death Frost Doom was my biggest seller of the day, and while I did sell far more of my stuff than anyone else's at my table, and a decent amount of people were well amazed by the box (I brought it along as a teaser, release will be at Ropecon) and said they'll buy it, none of that actually got the interested people to my table.

What brought the people there and made them realize that "Old School Is Here" was the cover of The Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom. That, with its bright blue cover, Poag artwork, and such a evocative title, got people's attention and gave them the right idea about the whole table.

An interesting thing to consider for all of us not wanting to ape old TSR graphic design...

After the convention, 10 of us went out to eat at this nice pizzeria and then we hung out on the patio of a bar, split up into two groups to play games.

The group I was in...

We played Maid.