Going to Spiel Essen 2010

As I just wrote at the Forge, I’ve decided to take a booth at Spiel Essen for Arkenstone and other interested indie rpg designers. The booth reservation deadline is next week, and I’ll likely go for the smallest booth size to keep the expenses down. Forge games (of which I’ll have a good selection available, I imagine) are a destination shopping thing for the core of the audience, after all, so the size of the booth shouldn’t have a big effect here.

Advertisement

About the pdf version of the World of Near

People have been asking about this, so I might as well inform everybody at once.

The boardgame conference in Oulu

I’ve been busy, obviously – editing and laying out a genealogy of my paternal family line, mostly, but also some other stuff, such as participating in an interesting boardgame conference in Oulu this last weekend. Some notes follow – this might interest any and all Finnish game design and development people out there.

Finnish Roleplayer Magazine retrospective

Today the editor of the Finnish Roleplayer Magazine (Roolipelaaja-lehti) Juhana Pettersson declared that the magazine will end publication, effective immediately. The cited reason was chronic unprofitability – despite the best imaginable attempts, a Finnish-language roleplaying magazine of high production values could not be sustained without incurring constant losses in the operation. Apparently the guys at Riimuahjo (the company behind the mag) consider the hobbyist base in Finland sufficient for a magazine of the kind they made, but for some reason or other not enough people were dedicated enough to subscribe to the magazine.

I think that a couple of words are certainly in order here.

Back From Gencon

I stepped off the plane yesterday. Got a flu of some sort on the return trip, will probably wait for it to clear up before continuing towards the north. Let’s have some notes and impressions on the trip, meanwhile.

Starting to sell World of Near

Today I updated our English website a bit. You can now order the new book there, for instance. I probably should do some more updating as well this weekend, before leaving for Gencon – for instance, I still don’t have a proper resources section in the Solar System / TSoY pages.

Ropecon and new Finnish rpg products

Ropecon is the large annual rpg convention here in Finland, with some 3000-4000 visitors each year. I missed it last year due to Gencon scheduling, but this time around I again managed to participate.

Ropecon is the traditional time for Finnish rpg publication, and people usually hold publication lectures for their new products there. Around the beginning of the decade we used to get one new product per year from one or other rpg enthusiast, ranging from garage-creations to mainstream bookstore publications. This year we have something like 6-10 different products published here in Finland, depending on whether I count stuff published outside Ropecon as well; perhaps it’s the indie ethos or some such, but we’re clearly getting more rpg products than we used to.

Finally finished!

I haven’t been blogging this summer, as I’ve been writing my new TSoY book. It’s the largest book I’ve ever written (though not the largest I’ve designed), although I did have some help in the form of prior art by Clinton and Josh and other TSoY enthusiasts who allowed me to use their work. Very, very much work, I haven’t pushed this hard since -05.

I deliberated on the name of the book for quite a while, and ultimately ended up calling it The World of Near. The issue here was that I didn’t want to use the same name Clinton had used for his own book, but I wanted to make it clear that this was a TSoY sourcebook. “TSoY” is still on the cover as a sort of brand logo, but the actual name of the book is different. I never cared much about the rpg (and textbook) industry practice of publishing new editions of the same book even where the creators, intent and structure of the work were completely reworked.

Solar System in PDF

It’s amazing how long it can take to fiddle and tiddle a simple pdf file together and put it up for sale. I must have spent something like 2-3 whole workdays doing it, but now Solar System is available in PDF. It’ll be interesting seeing whether it was worth my while to do this – not that it wasn’t interesting to try to create a screen-optimized layout again after quite a while, but I do have other things I should be doing, too.