Tales from Gencon UK

I had a wonderful time at GenCon UK 2008, played loads of games and made some great new friends. This is a brief report of what went on, what I learnt and what I'm going to do about it.

The Lethal Rings of Obyrworld

The RPGA (Roleplaying Games Association) people did a really good job booking in players for all of the games and it looked like I had two fully booked games. Unfortunately for the first game I only had three pre-booked players turn up. Many thanks to Erno, Mark and Magnus for showing up! I drafted in Fish and Byrn, who were old hands at Icar and who hadn't played the scenario. Being the raving idiot I am, I left the character sheets at home, so I ran and drove to get them. God only know what Fish and Byrn told them while I was away.

Once settled, the players got on very well. I was concerned that the combat would slow due to explaining the rules and although it did, I don't think anyone really noticed. Rather than constricting, I gave the players the usual level of freedom and they used it well. Deviant wheels were used sparingly and there were some skill rolls too. Lots of laughs and smiles all round too. I left the table with that joyous adrenaline high.

Unfortunately, I had to cancel the second session because only 2 of the 5 booked people turned up. A big disappointment as I had some great feedback from the guys after the first slot. I nearly ran a random game on Sunday but was just too knackered.

I am glad that I collated some advice on running a Con game over at theRPGsite. A lot of the points people raised were very helpful to make sure I was completely ready and that I could run the best game that I could. Some of the tips were particularly useful about getting the players to customise their characters a bit (without the chore bits) and getting them to introduce themselves. I think it was notably missing in some of the games I played.

How other people play

It became immediately obvious that I needed to see what other people do when they GM. I got in a game of Spycraft and D;D (3e) to see how other GMs ran their games as well as watching a few games purely as a third person. I can't draw too many parallels as the Con game is only ever a snapshot of the game as a whole but it certainly felt that there was a disconnect between combat and description. Roleplaying was something generally (with exceptions, naturally) kept outside of the combat, which leant more towards a wargame (especially in AD;D). I was satisfied that you could play Icar like that, so it was a good affirmation.

A fellow called Will who played in the Spycraft game said he had downloaded Icar but couldn't be arsed to print it out. Had it been in a book form, he'd have paid for it. However, playing from laptop is not ideal and printing is a pain. This is something I've felt for a while now and it was nice to have someone repeat it back to me. I shall be persuing a print option for those without snacky Laser printers. This leads me nicely on to...

Inspirational seminar from Mongoose Publishing

A founder of Mongoose Publishing who's name I can't for the life of me remember (Matthew Sprange?) gave a fascinating talk on ways to start an RPG company. He outlined all the pitfalls, the costs, the woes and how things work in the industry. It was great. He had numbers, facts and figures (although no marketing information due to the lack of industry wide data) and gave real examples of things that do and do not work. He definitely came from within the hobby and I got the feeling that he wanted to help people who wanted to do what he did. At the same time, he was trying to sell the Flaming Cobra brand, a way for independent publishers to get their books out there. The money side was particularly interesting and I will certainly not be giving up my day job!

A few interesting points came out of the talk. Firstly, as I suspected, Lulu is very expensive and other POD services might be worth a look. Secondly a full colour book is rare because the cost. I had my suspicions about that, seeing the lovely Elements sitting in my hand was heart warming but I did worry about how much each book would cost. The POD book will have to be black and white on the inside, making it much more affordable - even through a simple POD service.

The last thing that became obvious was one of amalgamation and reshaping the books. I do wonder how many people download just the Elements and wonder where the damn setting is. I only kept the PDFs separate because bandwidth was a pain. Most people are now on a reasonable bandwidth, so I think I will be pulling a load of the books into a single one, rationalising some of the graphics, reducing the font size and then uploading that to whichever POD service I want to use. For the forseeable at least, Icar will remain a free PDF download. I game the Mongoose fellow an Icar moocard and asked for feedback. I doubt he'll have the time but I had to try!

Meeting up with old friends

Si Crocker played Icar back when it was still learning to fly. Being a couple of years older than us, Si was part of the inspiration of the close combat system. His descriptions of fights (the one where he cut his thumb in particular) often involved flying headbutts, kicks, punches, glass, bosh, claret flooding etc. Subliminally, perhaps, I tried to make the close combat system feel like one of Si's descrtions. Si, in progress of taking over the world is currently doing some great work over at the Games club network.

I also caught up with Angus Abranson from Cubicle 7. A fellow I knew way back in the days of running Icar at the Finchley Games Club and at Leisure Games. Angus and the peeps over at Cubicle 7 are doing a great job bringing the Dr Who RPG out (when it's good and ready) and keeping my second favourite RPG in print: SLA Industries.

Many thanks to all the people who played and said nice things. If you want to discuss this or anything else, please do go over to the forums!