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.

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.